Star Wars Just Doubled Down On The Weird Creation Of Its Most Iconic Weapon
The moment when Vader went red has a new point of view.
When did Darth Vader go red? Even though the official Star Wars toys in 2005 for Revenge of the Sith depicted Anakin Skywalker with a red lightsaber, the truth is, the moment the former Jedi switched to a Sith blade as Darth Vader, happened off-screen. And now, with a new entry into the Star Wars canon, the moment when Vader first gets a red lightsaber has been given a new canon wrinkle.
On Entertainment Weekly, a just-published excerpt from the book Star Wars: Master of Evil, by Adam Christopher, revisits the moment where Vader goes red and provides a slightly different context than a similar moment, first depicted in 2017.
First of all, why are lightsabers red? And why is it a big deal? Well, the idea that Sith lightsabers use stolen Jedi crystals is a fairly new Star Wars canon development. Hardcore fans will tell you that the reason a saber turns red is because the Kyber crystal “bleeds” when someone does something particularly Sithy with that lightsaber. That said, the first onscreen canon instance of lightsaber bleeding happened just last year in 2024’s The Acolyte, and the canonical establishment of this idea was a post-Force Awakens YA novel called Ahsoka, which, in 2016, revealed the new rule of Kyber crystal bleeding. It was then shown visually in 2017 in the Darth Vader Marvel Comic miniseries by Charles Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli.
That said, Star Wars has been around a lot longer than 2016, and before the crystal bleeding rule became canon, there were a ton of other assumptions about red lightsabers. Thanks to lore from older books and comics, and the Knights of the Old Republic video games, the general consensus on red sabers in the days of yore (pre-2016!) was that the Sith used synthetic crystals. In fact, in 2017, fans on all sorts of message boards were kind of scandalized by the crystals bleeding thing, simply because it hadn’t been that long since a red saber didn’t always denote Sith affiliation.
Star Wars comics from 1999, featuring heroic Jedi characters with red lightsabers.
The 1999 ongoing Star Wars Dark Horse comic book series featuring Ki-Adi-Mundi depicted several good Jedi who rocked red sabers, and the official action figure for Jedi Council member Adi Gallia contained a red lightsaber. In short, red sabers, for more than half of the life of Star Wars, didn’t always mean evil. Sometimes a red lightsaber was just red.
But in terms of current “real” Star Wars canon, in 2017, when Vader took the lightsaber crystal from fallen Jedi Kirak Infil’a and bled it red, that became the established way to get a red lightsaber. And the new Master of Evil book excerpt retells this moment on Mustafar in prose, having previously been depicted in issue #5 of the 2017 Darth Vader comic book series.
So, what’s different? Well, as James Whitbrook expertly points out over on io9, Master of Evil doesn’t contradict anything from the 2017 Vader comic, but it does indicate that Vader was able to bleed his stolen Jedi crystal with a bit of doubt in his evil heart. In the comic version, Vader says, “This is all there is.” But in the new Master of Evil novel version, in the same crucial moment, Vader says, “This is all there is?” As Whitbrook observes, this isn’t a contradiction at all, but rather, a slightly more fun version of Star Wars canon debate, because it “invites discussion and interpretation from multiple sources and perspectives — playing up that mythopoetic, historical aspect of the series that has made it endure as a modern cultural myth.”
When did Anakin go red?
Whitbrook makes a smart point. So often, when a new Star Wars book or comic comes out, pundits and experts rush to figure out what new detail has been revealed or changed. While the lightsaber bleeding thing still might seem like a relatively fresh cut to some fans, for others, it's gospel. By placing a bit of doubt, or at least, curiosity within Vader’s psyche, Master of Evil takes a plot point from 2017, and turns it into a moment of reflection.
The creation of Darth Vader’s lightsaber, perhaps the most iconic weapon in all of Star Wars, is a big deal. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be told from just one perspective. Star Wars has mythic roots, and it's natural that retellings of various aspects of Star Wars will continue to pop up, over and over again. The latest version of the forging of this red saber doesn’t contradict the previous version, but it’s also not the same. And, as fans can probably already sense, this likely won’t be the last time we see this version of this story told, from a certain point of view.
