If you ask most people who Anakin Skywalker “hated,” they’ll probably say Obi-Wan, maybe Mace Windu, maybe even the Jedi Council as a whole. But if we really look at his story and the way he talks about certain people, there’s someone else who clearly sits at the very top of that list.
So who was the one person Anakin absolutely couldn’t forgive?
The Day Anakin Decided the Lars “Failed” Shmi
In Attack of the Clones, we only get the broad strokes. Shmi is taken by Tusken Raiders, Cliegg Lars goes after her with a rescue party, most of them die and he loses his leg, and they eventually give up. By the time Anakin arrives, everyone at the homestead has already decided Shmi is gone. On screen, it plays as tragedy. In Legends, it turns into something much uglier inside Anakin’s head.
The Rise and Fall of Darth Vader shows that even at that first dinner table, Anakin is already split between gratitude and anger. Windham writes that Anakin:
“hadn’t had much time to develop an opinion about Cliegg Lars. Initially, he had felt some sense of gratitude to the man who’d helped liberate his mother from Watto. But because Cliegg had taken his wife to live in this desolate area where Tuskens roamed, Anakin couldn’t help feeling a bitter anger. If only you hadn’t brought her here!”
So from the start, he sees two truths at once: Cliegg freed Shmi… and Cliegg is the one who moved her into danger.
Then Shmi dies in his arms, and that tension snaps. When Anakin brings her body back, the novel spells out what he’s thinking. He rides in with her wrapped in a blanket, and everyone comes out to meet him—Cliegg, Owen, Beru, Padmé, C-3PO—watching in silence as he lifts her from the bike and carries her toward the entrance. He doesn’t say a word to any of them.
Windham writes that, in that moment, Anakin revises his judgment of these people. Earlier he’d thought of the Lars family as “good people.” Now, carrying his dead mother, he thinks:
“Anakin was in no mood to talk, and he had reconsidered his assessment that the Lars family was made up of ‘good people.’ What’s the advantage of being good if you’re weak?”
He fixes a hard stare on Cliegg Lars, and the book makes it clear what’s going through his mind—basically: Maybe you’re wishing you hadn’t given up on her so soon. Then he turns that glare on Owen and Beru and thinks they were never really prepared to take care of things.
So from his point of view, this isn’t just “my mother died.” It’s “my mother died because the people who were supposed to protect her were too weak, too quick to quit, and then sat in safety while she suffered.” That’s the seed of the hatred we’re talking about. He doesn’t scream at them, he doesn’t attack them, but inside he’s writing them off as failures—and he never really lets that go. Later, when he’s Darth Vader watching their execution over a holofeed, that same judgment is still there: they’re “weak,” and now, in his mind, it’s time for them to pay for it.
When Vader Finally Makes the Lars “Pay”
Years later, The Rise and Fall of Darth Vader comes back to the Lars homestead at the moment that lines up with A New Hope. Vader is aboard the Death Star when an officer patches him through to a squad on Tatooine. The hologram shows two sandtroopers standing behind a kneeling couple outside a moisture farm. Vader asks for their names. The answer is Owen and Beru Lars.
Windham doesn’t play that as a random Imperial contact report. The narration immediately ties it back to Tatooine and that grave outside the homestead:
“Owen and Beru, Vader recalled. The resolution of their holograms was clear enough that he could make out their worn, weathered features. Neither of them appeared to be comfortable having blaster rifles aimed at their backs. Remembering how they’d looked on the day Anakin Skywalker had met them, Vader thought, The years have not been kind. It’s time for them to pay for their repeated weaknesses.”
From there, he doesn’t just say “kill them” and cut the line. He answers the trooper’s question with deliberate wording:
“‘Your orders, sir?’ said the sandtrooper.
‘Tell Mr. and Mrs. Lars that they seem to have trouble keeping protocol droids on their property.’
Not certain if he had heard correctly, the sandtrooper said, ‘Sir?’
‘Then you may extend to them every courtesy that you showed the Jawas before you continue your search. Establish checkpoints to detain any droids entering Mos Espa or Mos Eisley spaceports. And one more thing.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Do not stop transmitting until I break the connection.’”
So he links them to “repeated weaknesses,” invokes what the troopers did to the Jawas (we’ve already seen the burned sandcrawler and bodies), and then makes sure the transmission stays live. Vader doesn’t just sign their death warrant; he chooses the method, ties it back to his old judgment of the family, and watches.
Put next to that earlier moment at Shmi’s grave, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. As far as Anakin/Vader is concerned, the Lars failed his mother and then failed again with the droids. When he finally has total power and total distance, he cashes that in. This isn’t some anonymous farmer getting caught in an Imperial sweep. It’s the same family he wrote off as “good but weak” on Tatooine, finally “paying” for it the way he thinks they should.