
Happy May the 4th! I used to have a joke about this line, about someone who’s background made them respond in an odd way:
They say: “May the Force be with you.”
Respondent: “And also with you.”
And then, it gets used in an episode of Season 2 of The Mandalorian, so there that goes…
Elsewhere around the Internet, someone posted a question on a popular site. Which, yes, can be dangerous, but still, it’s an interesting thought experiment:
“What if Anakin never met Padme? Without that attachment, would he have still turned to the dark side?”

So far, some answers have ranged between “he stays a nobody on Tatooine” and “he still becomes Vader (even though now he’s just small fry…)” which seems a pretty reasonable range of possibilities.
There’s another way to look at an undiscovered Anakin alternative timeline, which may be unpopular…
Remember the final scene in The Last Jedi, when we have someone start using the Force without being part of the whole Jedi-Industrial-Complex? Yes, it’s a movie everyone hated, but stay with me here…
So: Anakin never meets Padme, et al., and doesn’t get taken off Tatooine. He’s stuck there like the last two Disney+ shows were, never getting off-world, but with so high a midi-chlorian count that he’s very likely going to go off like a forgotten World War II bomb.
Which comes when he’s an adult and Palpatine tries to January 6th the Galactic Republic. Now, whether having Anakin there makes a difference or not in the planning of the putsch can be argued, but let’s assume that Darth Maul isn’t cut in two and somehow Jar-Jar plays the useful idiot in the Senate (as opposed to being just an idiot elsewise), and we get the Empire established.
So, we have someone with a lot of power who’s grown up a slave, who watches as a bad situation gets worse around him, which builds up his well-established anger…
But this time, all he has as reference is his background, being one of the littlest of the little people. He doesn’t have any experience being a Padawan, able to roll into bars like a state trooper out in the woods like he did in Attack of the Clones. He’s got nothing to frame what’s happening around him other than being a pawn in a bigger game…
Okay, less of a pawn in a bigger game than he was in the films, granted. Maybe not even a checker.
But, he’s got abilities, and he feels he needs to use them. Anakin gets riled, and decides he wants to smash things (again, anger issues), and he leads his own rebellion. One that starts small, maybe just Mos Eisley, where he puts down all the bosses we got introduced to in The Book of Boba Fett and then promptly forgot, and decides that no one will ever be put down and made unimportant again.
And when he wins, the Mos Esiley Collective becomes an inspiration for the rest of the planet. Maybe Anakin takes a direct hand, or he finds good lieutenants to work on his behalf. Hells, he made C-3PO, so maybe he builds a few right-hand representatives to work on behalf of the people.
At which point, he succeeds, and then declares the People’s Republic of Tatooine.
And soon after, the worlds of the galaxy who might have problems with both the Empire (ruthless efficiency at the expense of everyone) and the Republic (not going back to that mess again, thank you) decide that this, the third way to go forward, is worth looking into. We get collectivist candidates rising up as followers of Anakinism, either with the help of advisors from Tatooine or on their own, and soon collectives and syndicates spring up and join together, making the wars to come a three-way battle with a lot of hard choices for who to side with and root for.
Making for a MUCH better story…
Hey, you want to build a Star Wars holiday that close to May Day, especially with the fight for unions being what it is at this moment, what did you expect…?