The Rule of Two is the law of the Sith in Star Wars: there are only ever two of them at a time, a master who holds the power and an apprentice who wants it. Anakin Skywalker is the Jedi who becomes that apprentice. The Jedi believed he was the Chosen One, born to bring balance to the Force; fear of losing his wife turned him to the dark side and made him Darth Vader, servant of Darth Sidious, the Emperor. More than twenty years later he kills his master to save his son.
This covers the films, the animated series The Clone Wars and the rest of today's canon (the stories counted since 2014), and says where Star Wars Legends, the older novels and comics now kept outside canon, tells it differently. Vader has more covers on the Star Wars shelf than anyone else, and Anakin is on it once.
What the Force is
The Force is an energy field made by all living things, and it binds the galaxy together. Those who are sensitive to it can move objects without touching them, sense danger before it arrives, sway weak minds and react faster than an ordinary person can.
It has two sides. The light side draws on calm, compassion and selflessness. The dark side draws on fear, anger and hatred, and gives power faster, at a cost to whoever uses it.
The prequel films add midi-chlorians: microscopic life forms living inside every cell, through which the Force speaks. A high count marks a strong potential. The blood test Qui-Gon Jinn takes from the boy Anakin on Tatooine reads over twenty thousand per cell, higher than even Yoda's.
Jedi vs Sith
The Jedi Order serves the Republic as keepers of the peace. Its members are taken in as young children, use the Force for knowledge and defence, and give up attachment: no possessions, no marriage, no clinging to people they might lose. Attachment breeds fear of loss, and fear is the road to the dark side.
The Sith are the dark side's order. They treat passion as strength, take the title Darth and want power for its own sake. Their lightsabers burn red. In today's canon that is because a Sith corrupts a kyber crystal, pouring pain and hatred into it until it bleeds red. In Legends the red came from crystals made artificially.
The real difference is what each does with fear. The Jedi teach you to let it go. The Sith teach you to use it, and Sidious uses Anakin's.
The Rule of Two
Yoda states the rule at the end of The Phantom Menace: always two, a master and an apprentice. The Jedi have just cut one of them down, Darth Maul, and do not know whether he was the master or the apprentice. (Maul survives in The Clone Wars, cut in half but alive.)
The rule belongs to Darth Bane, whose tomb stands on the Sith world Moraband, where his spirit appears to Yoda in The Clone Wars. Legends tells the full story. About a thousand years before the films, the Sith were a crowd of dark lords fighting among themselves, and they were wiped out at the battle of Ruusan by a thought bomb that Bane tricked their leader into setting off. Bane survived and rebuilt the order around two: two cannot split into factions, and each master must pass everything on to an apprentice strong enough to kill them one day.
That is the trap built into the rule. The apprentice is meant to overthrow the master, and Revenge of the Sith strongly implies that Sidious killed his own master, Darth Plagueis, in his sleep. In practice the masters cheat. In The Clone Wars, Count Dooku, Sidious's second apprentice, trains the assassin Asajj Ventress as an apprentice of his own, and Sidious, convinced she is being groomed to overthrow him, orders Dooku to kill her; when Maul returns with his brother Savage Opress, Sidious kills Savage himself.
Anakin before the fall
Anakin grows up a slave on Tatooine with his mother, Shmi, who says he had no father. Qui-Gon frees him by winning a bet on a podrace but cannot free Shmi too. After Maul kills Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan Kenobi takes the boy as his apprentice.
In Attack of the Clones the attachments pile up. Anakin dreams that his mother is in pain, finds her dying in a Tusken Raider camp and kills the whole tribe in revenge. He marries Padmé Amidala, the senator he was sent to guard, in secret, against the Jedi rule. He loses his right arm to Dooku.
The Clone Wars fills the years between: General Skywalker of the 501st Legion, his Padawan Ahsoka Tano, and the slow damage of a war. When the Council expels Ahsoka over a bombing she did not commit, then asks her back once she is cleared, she walks away from the Order, and Anakin's faith in it goes with her.
The fall, step by step
Revenge of the Sith runs the fall in a few days. Anakin dreams that Padmé, now pregnant, will die in childbirth. Chancellor Palpatine, his friend and mentor, makes him his representative on the Jedi Council; the Council gives Anakin the seat but refuses him the rank of Master, and asks him to spy on Palpatine. Palpatine then tells him the tale of Darth Plagueis, a Sith Lord who could use the Force to keep the ones he loved from dying.
When Palpatine admits he is Sidious, Anakin reports him to Mace Windu, then follows. Windu has Sidious beaten; Anakin, wanting the power to save Padmé, cuts off Windu's hand, and Sidious hurls Windu from the window with Force lightning. Anakin kneels and takes the name Darth Vader.
Order 66 follows: the clone troopers turn on their Jedi generals across the galaxy, and Vader leads the 501st into the Jedi Temple. On the volcanic world Mustafar he kills the Separatist leaders and, believing Padmé has betrayed him, chokes her with the Force: the Iron Grip. Obi-Wan fights him, takes his legs and his left arm, and leaves him burning on the bank of a lava river.
Padmé dies after giving birth to twins, Luke and Leia. Sidious seals Vader into the black armour and mask that keep him alive, then tells him that he killed his wife himself. The Fall puts Anakin and Vader on one back.
Vader, Luke and the Chosen One
For more than twenty years Vader is the Emperor's enforcer, the Dark Lord of the Sith. In The Empire Strikes Back he tells Luke he is his father and asks him to help destroy the Emperor and rule together: the Rule of Two at work, an apprentice recruiting an apprentice of his own.
In Return of the Jedi Luke gives himself up, sure there is still good in his father. The Emperor tortures Luke with Force lightning while Vader watches, until Vader lifts his master and throws him down a shaft inside the second Death Star. The lightning that runs through Vader's own suit kills him. He dies as Anakin, asks Luke to take off his mask, and later appears beside Yoda and Obi-Wan as a spirit.
Was that the balance the prophecy promised? With both Sith gone, many read it that way. The sequel trilogy complicates it: in The Rise of Skywalker Palpatine is back, and Rey ends him, hearing Anakin's voice among the Jedi of the past. Legends had its own return, the Emperor reborn in cloned bodies, in comics set after Return of the Jedi.
On the back of a tee
Vader runs right across the Star Wars shelf, from Dark Side to Dark Shogun and Thrash Lord, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: Vader is a black silhouette with a hard outline, helmet and cape, readable from across a room before you see a single detail.
Read next: The Mandalorian creed, clone troopers and stormtroopers explained (the soldiers who carried out Order 66) and Xenomorph, Predator, T-800 and RoboCop explained.
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