Anakin: This mission is boring.
Obi-Wan: This isn’t a mission. I said I was going to the store.
Anakin: Then why did you invite me?
Obi-Wan: I specifically said “don’t come with me” and you said “fuck you, Master, I do what I want!” and followed me here.
SO GUESS I’M GOING TO BE CRYING ALL THROUGH VADER’S BITCHY REVENGE FANTASY STILL INCLUDES OBI-WAN TELLING HIM HE LOVED HIM
FIRST: GOOD, SHARE MY PAIN
SECOND: We’re crying because of exactly that–Anakin is still obsessed with Obi-Wan. This comic is set relatively soon (within a few years) after the events of Revenge of the Sith, but it’s part of a bigger pattern. Listening to the behind the scenes talk about the latest Rebels episodes, Dave Filoni re-confirms that Obi-Wan is the #1 person he wants to find and kill, to destroy that last link to his past.
We see in previous issues of this very comic that the kyber crystal Vader was corrupting shows him a vision of how it’s still possible for him to go back, to find Obi-Wan and beg for forgiveness/death from him.
But here we’re seeing the other half of how Anakin feels about Obi-Wan–the obsession and the anger and the hate, that he keeps fusing into himself, down to his very bones. That his base of operations is his castle on Mustafar, looking over the very spot that Obi-Wan fought him and he lost. He’s still there all the way to Rogue One, which is ~18-19 years after all of this.
We see in A New Hope that Vader still recognizes Obi-Wan’s presence pretty much instantly and immediately rushes off to find him.
This is just part of the bigger picture: That Anakin Skywalker is obsessed with Obi-Wan Kenobi the entire goddamned time. He’s not the only one, of course, Anakin is still obsessed with Padme, still uses her memory to torture himself, he becomes obsessed with Luke and tries to corrupt Luke to the dark side, but absolutely Obi-Wan is part of the small group of people that Anakin was never able to let go of, that he used to torment himself, used to stoke the fires of his rage and hate, because underneath that was still love.
The whole point is that Vader’s trying to hurt himself here, because the dark side feeds on pain, because it hurts more to hear Obi-Wan yell that he loved him, to dig into the wounds of Anakin Skywalker’s love for him and twist that into hate. Because it hurts more when you love and hate someone at the same time.
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