No one’s really afraid of Darth Vader.
Even though he’s the bad guy, the antagonist, dressed in all black. He’s even part human, part machine, which should make him scary or creepy. He has powers which allow him to manipulate objects from great distances without touching them. Such a power should be frightening.
Afraid to harm others, he is not, though he doesn’t often kill. He prefers, it seems, to torture those who get in his path. (Once, he set out to torture his own daughter.)
Though he possesses talent with a light saber, he doesn’t strike fear in the audience, only in other fictional characters within his fictional realm.
This is an odd dynamic for an antagonist. Compared to other, equally infamous, antagonists in fiction, such as Moriarty, or Sauron, or Voldemort, or Thanos, or Count Dracula, he, Darth Vader, is not so repulsive. Each of those other antagonists in fiction mentioned above have something about them which turns the audience away from them.
A repellent feature.
Darth Vader makes you feel sorry for him. You sympathize with him. When you discover Vader’s head is scarred, it might seem a bit off-putting, but by then you’ve also realized the sound of his breathing apparatus is not so much a terrifying sound as it is the sound of someone struggling to stay alive. He’s essentially a man who takes his CPAP with him everywhere, while he’s awake. Because of this he gains your pity. By the second movie when it is revealed that he is Luke Skywalker’s father, his pity factor skyrockets. You might feel bad for Luke too, because he has a weirdo cyborg father, though not to the degree that you feel sorry for Vader. He suddenly seems a desperate old man in a mask, trying impotently to regain a relationship with a son he never raised.
What’s worse for him is that when he makes the attempt to regain the relationship with his son—he’s rejected. He’s not only rejected, but soundly rejected. A face can’t be more contorted than Luke’s was at the moment he discovered the dark secret of his past. Luke wanted to go back in time to any point at which he didn’t know familial facts. Any point.
And yet, in following films, after that second offering from George Lucas, Luke gets on the pity wagon too. He tries to sway his father back his way, back to the “Light Side”. If there was a piece of dialog missing from the franchise, it was, “Oh Vader, you poor scarred thing, let me help you.” And Luke could have given the line. Any number of characters could have delivered the line.
In the end, it’s the audience who gives it.
Xenosthesia.com 