Not so much that, as how Luke reacted to it.
Ben…
Ben… Why didn’t you tell me?
You could tell that Luke had accepted it as true, which allowed the audience to believe it as well.
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oh yes, true – that definitely helps sell it. if Luke could feel it was true, then we had to.
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This raises an i teresting question. How did Darth Vader know Luke was his son? Did the Emperor tell him? If this is a plot point I’ve forgotten it.
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Darth Vader: What is thy bidding, my master?
Emperor: There is a great disturbance in the Force.
Darth Vader: I have felt it.
Emperor: We have a new enemy, the young Rebel who destroyed the Death Star. I have no doubt this boy is the offspring of Anakin Skywalker.
Darth Vader: How is that possible?
Emperor: Search your feelings, Lord Vader. You will know it to be true. He could destroy us.
Darth Vader: He’s just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him.
Emperor: The Force is strong with him. The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.
Darth Vader: If he could be turned, he will become a powerful ally.
Emperor: Yes. He would be a great asset. Can it be done?
Darth Vader: He will join us or die, my master.
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Yeah. I knew it was something like that.
But how did he know?
There was a disturbance in the force. Also, the Sith pairs are always all about the plan A and the plan B.
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…I’m pretty sure that Luke got famous pretty quickly from that shot. A kid, the right age to have been born when Padme was dying, strong in the Force, who keeps company with Anakin’s former master (Obi-Wan), with the last name Skywalker, and who (if they did a basic background check) was raised on Anakin’s home planet of Tattooine by Anakin’s stepbrother?
Nope, no relation to Anakin Skywalker at all.
Edit to add: Oh, and wielding Anakin’s lightsaber.
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Yeah, I’d say wielding Anakin’s saber had to pretty much seal the deal for Vader. His former master wouldn’t give that blade to just anyone.
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All in all, having to be told so something like that makes Darth seem quite weak with the Force.
I remeber when I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I would have been 8, I was not too shocked by Darth telling Luke he was his father, but I was very shocked to find out there was an Emperor. Up to that point I had assumed Darth in charge. “So what is Darth?” I wondered. “A messenger-boy?” “An enforcer?”
Honestly, I still think the Emperor should not have been created. I geuss it gave Darth someone to discuss matters with.
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Come on, he even gets the page image for it.
He’s The Dragon.
Edit to add:
Or maybe The Heavy is a better fit (page image for that one, too).
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Episode IV should’ve provided the answer of Vader’s position in the Empire. They talked about the Emperor before blowing up Alderaan, and Vader was tempered by Tarkin. Even to my not-quite-8 yro mind, that made Vader a high ranking officer, like a senior general, not the actual person in charge. More shocking to me was Han getting frozen in the carbonite. Violent and sadistic. The big reveal felt more like “well, of course” than “no way, can’t be.” Luke considered the light saber to be a thing of legend when Obi-Wan gave it to him. He also knew the Jedi were no more. Made sense once those two pieces were repeatedly thrown in your face in the first half of Empire.
Tl;dr - I’ve regularly spoiled movies for myself while watching them for the first time. 
️
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I think this version is canonical:
It’s not too bad, I’d say.
As for the name, Vader means father in Dutch if you happen to be thinking about that language. But then it’s close to other things too, for instance a root meaning to go, like in space invader. And that people should have naturally concluded he was some character’s father, instead of say the Unholy Father of some evil priesthood the way he acts, seems like a bold claim to me.
Lucas has claimed his name is actually from “dark water”, and although it seems he has said otherwise, I think there’s a very good chance he was not going to be a father at first. He’s not in the original Starkiller scripts, and he’s not even really in the first movie, where Luke’s father is announced long dead. I would believe Obi-wan’s lying was invented later to make for a great twist.
P.S. If you watch the prequels, it turns out Obi-wan was making everything up. I trained under Yoda, never had a droid, your dad wanted you to have this lightsaber. Turns out he was just a crazy old man after all! That is too bad, but that’s what the prequels get you. 
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He did. Just as all the other younglings did!
Never owned a droid. C-3P0 belonged to Anakin; R2-D2 belonged to Padme.
Okay, yeah, that was BS.
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Which Dutch-speaking people tend to do. It was my mum who told us. As for the “bold claim”… compared to some other stuff we’ve discussed as a family about films, this isn’t terribly out there. My mum is a mystery fan who must figure out whodunnit before the reveal, and hates it when films like horror movies cheat with deus ex machinas.
Our idea of a spoiler is, “Damn, I thought it was the other guy.”
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“You will go to the Dagobah system. There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.”
Pretty sneaky complete elision of Qui-gon Jinn’s role in his training, though, wasn’t it?
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This isn’t something the Jedi would talk about, but everyone called him Qui-gon Jinn and Tonic behind his back.
Master Jules Windu would even say it to his face.
He was everyone’s favorite drunk uncle. But behind closed doors, he would lay into Obi Wan when he was truly pissed. It really wasn’t something Obi Wan wanted to talk about and part of the reason they let he be “Master Obi Wan” after QG got Mauled. It was something of a pity promotion.
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well, i always just figured it was because Qui-gon died before Obi-wan’s training was complete, so Yoda took over. Yoda was his “last master.”
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Obi-wan was granted the rank of Knight after defeating Darth Maul. His training was already complete, or he wouldn’t have been allowed to take Anakin on as a Padawan.
I just thought that he was talking about who taught him the very basics, like Luke was about to be taught.
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Yeah. I mean, if Lucas knew anything about any prequel details in 1979, he’d have had Obi-wan say “there, you will learn from Yoda, one of the Jedi Masters who instructed me.” But what the hell, not every retcon can be perfectly elegant.
Hey, while we’re talking about these guys, was it ever established that Obi-wan Kenobi and Qui-gon Jinn originated from the same planet or culture? The similarity of the structure of their names is striking.
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