The Psychological Disorder Behind Every SITH Lord (Star Wars)

[00:00:00]What if I told you that every single liveaction Star Wars Sith Lord could be diagnosed with a real psychological disorder? That's this video. Five Sith Lords, five real diagnosis, straight out of the DSM5. One diagnosis per character, and the evidence has to come directly from each of the nine movies, nothing else. That rule is going to be a problem for one of them, and you'll see why [music] really soon. One last thing before we start. These are fictional characters. Millions of real people live with the conditions I'm about to name and never hurt anyone. These are all Hollywood dramatized cases.

[00:00:30]Now, let's start with the man who recruited everyone on this list and still outlived almost all of them. Darth Cidius, antisocial personality disorder.

[00:00:37]ASPD in plain terms includes a lifelong pattern of violating other people and feeling nothing about it. The DSM5 lists many specific behaviors, and it only takes three to qualify. Deceitfulness is the first one Cidius clears, and the manual defines it as repeated lying, conning people for personal gain, and in its exact words, the use [music] of aliases. Palpatine pretended to be two different people for the entire prequel trilogy. He was able to live as both the gentle senator and the Sith Lord ordering the invasion of his own home planet. The con keeps growing until he manufactured a galactic war and secretly commands both armies in it. The line goes all the way down to his core. Watch the scene where Mace Wu comes to arrest him. He kills three Jedi masters in under a minute, then loses the duel to Mace Wu, and suddenly he's a frail old man on the windowsill, croaking that he's too weak. Then Anakin picks a side and Palpatines's weakness simply vanishes. The helplessness was literally a performance inside a performance.

[00:01:29][music] And once the act drops, what's underneath as his second qualifier, no remorse. In episode 6, he electrocutes a young man slowly while narrating it like a hobby. And in episode 9, he quite literally refills his own body with his granddaughter's life. Add the aggression and the lawbreaking, and he clears at least four behaviors when he only needs three to be diagnosed. One final note on Palpatines's diagnosis. The manual also wants evidence of serious behavior problems before age 15. And the film show nothing of this man before middle age, so that box stays open. Other than that, I'd say Darth Cyius seems to be an almost textbook case of ASPD. So, who does a man like that hire? Someone he can steer. And nobody is easier to steer than a man who is completely certain he's the most important person in the galaxy. Count Dooku. Narcissistic personality disorder. Now, new apprentice, new diagnosis. Narcissistic personality disorder is an inflated sense of your own importance, fantasies of unlimited power, a constant need for admiration, a habit of using people, and very little empathy underneath. The manual asks for five of nine traits, and Dooku collects several of them. It starts with the name. In a galaxy full of senators and knights, he's introduced by an aristocratic title, Count. Then comes the most revealing five minutes he gets. He tells Obi-Wan the actual truth that a Sith Lord named Darth Cidius controls the Republic. Just listen to how arrogant that is. He hands the Jedi the real plan out loud because he's certain nobody will believe it. And in the same conversation, he brings up Qui-Gon Jinn unprompted, reminding Obi-Wan that the great man was once his student. And I think that name is the engine of his entire [music] fall. When Qui-Gon died, Dooku couldn't accept that his own training had failed. So, the failure had to belong to the whole Jedi order instead. For a narcissist, the blame always lands on the institution, [music] never on the self. And by the end of that movie, he's standing in front of Yoda, the teacher who trained him, announcing he has become more powerful than any Jedi. Every follower he recruits as a prop, and episode 3 opens with him kidnapping his own boss as stage theater. Even the missing empathy shows up wearing perfect table manners. Standing over two men he plans to kill. He asks for their weapons like a butler collecting coats. Now notice the difference between him and his master because it separates the two disorders. Cidius plays humble for years and needs no audience. Dooku cannot stop performing for one. A perfect example of this is the formal [music] bow before his last duel in the line twice the pride double the fall spoken by the proudest man in the room. Narcissism needs witnesses which is exactly why his death lands. Palpatine looks at Anakin holding two blades at Dooku's throat and says kill him now. Christopher Lee plays a man whose brain has no slot for the idea that he was replaceable. Wide eyes in silence, the face of someone receiving impossible information. Then his replacement was 22 years old and had been groomed since the age of 9. But the job nearly burned him alive on the first day. And what came out of the fire needed a brand new identity. Darth Vader, borderline personality disorder.

[00:04:13]BPD includes a desperate fear of being abandoned, relationships that swing between love and hate, an unstable sense of identity, and explosive anger. Most people argue this diagnosis from Anakin's side of the story. But watch what happens when we argue it from the suit as well. First, the origin. Anakin ignores months of nightmares about his mother and reaches her too late. His response to slaughtering an entire Tuscan camp, woman and children included. So when he starts receiving new nightmares about Padme in episode 3, he already knows what happens when he ignores a dream. So he hands his life to Cidius in a desperate effort to prevent Padme's death. Then he loses her anyway along with his body and name. Now watch what crawls out of the fire because the first thing the new man does is kill the old one. Obi-Wan tells Luke that Vader is more machine now than man. And although I don't think that's actually accurate, he has some kind of a point.

[00:04:58]The mask is just a hiding place, and the man underneath is what he's hiding from.

[00:05:02]That's all without mentioning that the explosive anger shows up daily. In episode 4, he chokes one of his admirals across a conference table for mocking his faith in the force. In episode 5, he executes another admiral over a video call for a navigational error. And when one of his captains personally apologizes for losing the Falcon, Vader kills him without hesitation. [music] Minor professional failures answered with strangulation at people who can't even fight back. Then Vader learns he has a son and the entire Imperial war machine turns into a private search party. In episode 5, he spends the whole film hunting Luke, cuts off his hands in a duel, and then in the same scene offers him the entire galaxy. By episode 6, the buried identity is leaking. Luke tells his father he can feel the conflict inside him. Vader answers saying there is no conflict. Then one scene later, the denial dies as Anakin Skywalker finally comes back. That ending settles it. His son is on the floor screaming under the emperor's lightning, begging his father for help.

[00:05:55]And the persona that survived 20 years cannot survive watching that. Vader throws his master down the shaft, takes the lightning himself, and spends his last minutes asking for one thing, to look at Luke with his own two eyes. He dies with the mask off. The fear of loss built Vader, and the love underneath it is what finally broke him open. And Anakin Skywalker wasn't Cidius's first attempt at building a living weapon out of a person. Before Vader, before Dooku, there was a first draft, a Sith Lord who barely said any words at all because he simply didn't need to. Darth Maul, antisocial personality disorder. Here's where the movie's only rule breaks a bit. Across all nine films, Darth Maul gets three lines and roughly 6 minutes of screen time. Let's be honest about him. He's basically a double-bladed lightsaber that happens to have a body attached. So, can 6 minutes carry a diagnosis? Well, let's watch what the 6 minutes actually contain. His first fight is an ambush. He leaps off a speeder onto Qui-Gon in the open desert unprovoked. Then comes the final duel in the shot that does most of the work for his diagnosis. The laser gates cycle shut and trap the fighters apart.

[00:06:55]Qui-Gon kneels and meditates while on the other side, Maul paces back and forth along the barrier, eyes locked on the man he's about to kill like a big cat during feeding time. When the gates open, he takes on two Jedi at once with visible enjoyment [music] on narrow catwalks over a bottomless shaft, treating the drop as homefield advantage. And when Qui-Gon falls, watch the face. Zero remorse or anything similar. Translate that into the manual's language, and you get unprovoked aggression, constant deception, recklessness with everyone's safety, including his own, and no [music] remorse. That's four qualifying behaviors when he only needs three, which lands him on the same diagnosis as his master. It's the same antisocial personality disorder, just flipped.

[00:07:32]Cidius qualifies through the lying and treats violence as a rare tool. Maul qualifies through the violence, and the lying is simply the world he was built [music] into. The hair checklist tells the same story with the master scoring on the charm items and the apprentice on the aggression items. One is all mask, the other is all [music] blade. The childhood evidence box stays open here for the same reason it did before since the films never show either man before the age of 18. Maul was a young man radicalized into somebody else's war, worshiping an order he never truly [music] belonged to. Hold that thought because decades later, the saga hands us that exact profile again in a mask he chose for himself. And this one isn't even technically a Sith. Kylo Ren, borderline personality disorder. Time for the technicality because Kylo Ren is not actually a Sith. No film ever calls him one. He never takes a Darth title, and episode 9 confirms the gap. He stands in the real Sith throne room, offered the crown by the last surviving Sith, [music] and that's the closest he ever becomes to being one. He's in this video anyway for two reasons that are both on screen. Episode 9 reveals that Palpatine was [music] the voice in his head his whole life. And the movie plays that reveal in Snoke's voice and Invaders, same recruiter as everyone else here one generation later. And Kylo [music] Ren spends three films doing a Sith impression built from his dead grandfather's relics. The impression is where the diagnosis lives because yes, BPD repeats. Ben Solo copied his grandfather so completely that he replicated the disorder. His story starts with being sent away. Kylo's parents shipped him across the galaxy to an uncle and the memory he can't stop replaying is that same uncle standing over his bed with a lit lightsaber.

[00:09:01]Every caretaker in his life has in his accounting thrown him away. So he builds a replacement self out of a dead man's image. A new name and voice [music] and mask that he wears indoors for no practical reason. The film's keep score of which name is speaking and the borrowed identity is fragile enough that ordinary bad news cracks it. Two separate times, a report he doesn't like sends his lightsaber into his own consoles. Then the mask stops working.

[00:09:23]Snoke ends the costume with one sentence. You're just a child in a mask.

[00:09:27][music] And Kylo smashes the helmet in an elevator. What's left underneath fully comes out in the throne room. He tells Ry, "You're nothing but not to me." And then he says, "Please." He insults her and begs her not to leave him in the same breath. The fear of abandonment and the devaluation. Sharing one line of dialogue. Nothing in all nine movies demonstrates BPD that obviously. By the next film, the helmet is back, welded together with the cracks dyed red. Now, the counter-argument since I know the comments will raise it.

[00:09:52]You can't argue narcissism here pointing at the fragile ego and the grandiosity.

[00:09:56][music] In the truest oneline description of him, a confused young man radicalized by the image of a violent idol fits either label. I score it borderline because the grandiosity is a costume he keeps taking off and the instability underneath is the only constant he [music] has. So, five dark lords with only three different diagnoses between them. If you'd score any of these differently, the comment section is wide open. By the way, I only made this video because my Discord specifically voted for it. If you haven't already, you should join. It will be the first link in the description and comment section. Please consider subscribing and thank you for watching.