Anakin Skywalker vs Count Dooku or Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Darth Maul - Which rivalry is more interesting?

Rohirrim wrote:Obi-Wan vs Maul is a far more interesting narrative, with much more meaningful milestones and emotional significance. 

Maul took Obi-Wan's Master from him and was in turn robbed of his destiny as heir to the Sith. Their character arcs showcase how they dealt with their respective losses. Maul focused on getting revenge and rebuild his power. He ended up killing another person Obi-Wan loved, but then paid the price and lost his own family. Eventually, Obi-Wan moved on, but Maul was still stuck in the past and thirsty for revenge. This is beautifully conveyed in their final confrontation.

A bit of an exaggeration here, but the foundation of Anakin vs Dooku is little more than warrior pride and a lost arm. It can't possibly compare.

The Dragon Of The West wrote:Anakin vs Dooku.

Nerdist: You’ve always come across as a very happy, joyful guy, but you’re playing characters where there’s no joy there at all. How do you prepare to go into the booth and just deliver these lines of “I’m going to kill everybody!” Is that taxing at all?

Sam Witwer: [LAUGHS] The whole intention me and Dave Filoni talked over and he and George talked over — really, what we were striving to do, and maybe we didn’t articulate this clearly at the time, but it’s a clearer sense than “This is what we’re trying to do”: Darth Maul is insane, right? It’s this cost of having been hurt badly. We had an inkling that’s what we were doing. But once we started getting into it, we realized exactly what we were doing. We wanted to show you what is happening to Darth Vader under the mask. What are his private moments like? What is that guy hiding from you? What is he filtering from the people that deal with him? What he’s filtering, what all of these bad guys in Star Wars are dealing with, is madness and despair and anger. There’s a lot of sadness in there. We were really going for that. They all encouraged me to go as dark as I possibly could, to bring some psychological complexity to that condition. Then, going forward, we had that subtext and the undercurrent for the character as he started becoming the quiet Sith Lord that we’ve known from Phantom Menace.

But there’s always an understanding that that madness is kind of with them all, all those bad guys. George talks a lot about, “What is this whole Star Wars thing about? What is at the center of Star Wars?” It’s simply this: you have the Jedi, or the good guys, whatever you want to call them. They’re about, “Hey, what can I do for other people? What can I do to make a positive impression in this world? It’s not about me. What can I do to benefit everyone else, because this is all bigger than me?” That’s such a really good guy take on Star Wars. The bad guy take is, “I want things. Give me things. I want things for myself.” That’s the most important thing. In fact, that’s the only thing, after a while, that these people to see. Take that classic scene from the original Star Wars where Obi-Wan says to Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Metaphorically, Obi-Wan is saying, “Hey, man: as a martyr, I’ll be far more effective than I possibly could be as a human being. In fact, I have fulfilled my role. I have passed on some knowledge and wisdom to the younger generation. I have served the greater good. I will serve even greater good if you end me right now. I dare you.”

Now, Vader cannot conceive of that. That doesn’t exist to him. For the bad guys of Star Wars, once you die, that’s it. There’s nothing more to it. You can’t accumulate any more stuff if you’re dead. You can’t take it with you. These guys just become ridiculously obsessed with holding onto absolutely everything they have. This also means when they get injured or hurt or when horrible things happen, they still hold onto it. Even more jealously they hold onto these things, because the ultimate consequence for not holding on is that if they pass on or die, they’ve got nothing. They’re these very short-sighted people, these horribly grotesquely self-obsessed people that are these Star Wars villains. From a mythological standpoint, in terms of the discussion of what is evil, I think it’s fascinating that evil is becoming so self-obsessed that you really, actually do become insane.

That’s really what we were endeavouring with the Darth Maul character: to give you another flavor of that, to help inform the Darth Vader or Emperor character, or all these characters that people have been in love with over 30 years. It’s our opportunity to give you another facet of that, in this case to give you the pure, unadulterated, “Here’s the Dark Side of the Force. It sucks. It’s not leather suits and cool laser swords. It’s madness and despair and sadness.” It’s all those things. I just went off on a complete geek rant for you.

Source -- LET’S GO TO THE MAUL WITH THE CLONE WARS’ SAM WITWER

Dave Filoni: The Sith are consumed with never wanting to die. It's a completely physical thing to them. There is no afterlife for them. Everything exists in the now, they have to stay alive. They fear death more than anyone. Evil is usually more great than you are, that's what makes them so twisted and evil, so Vader holds on to life at the edge of the lava flow, because he such condemned for Obi-Wan, such an anger for what has happened in his life. And that same type of focused hatred is what sustains Maul. The difference with Maul is that he goes into a state where he doesn't even remember who he is or what he is, he becomes very animalistic. He regresses into a mental state because of the shock of you know, being cut in half and what happened to him after he fell down the shaft is so great that he cannot hold onto it, his consciousness becomes almost unconsciousness and becomes instead a rabid animal.

Sam Witwer: Exactly, the fun of doing all the crazy stuff was kind of showing for the first time the raw, unadulterated- this is what the Dark Side is. It’s not cool lightsaber fights, jumping around and having awesome costumes. Well it is... But it’s also madness and despair and agony, so we're like "Let’s just give them [the audience] the Dark Side without anything- without anyone- without a guy strong enough in the moment to hide all this underneath"

Source -- Star Wars Celebration Clone Wars Season Five Premiere

Sam Witwer: ... In a weird way, it's not a coincidence that Savage has to go underground into a fiery cave to get his brother back, and that was George Lucas's way of saying "Maul, in a mythological sense, was killed and went to hell, and if we're going to get him, we have to get him back from hell" in a weird way [...] And the psychological impact of what had happened to him had to be huge, so we really talked about what that meant, what the torture this guy had been going through, and where we landed and where I landed was about what we wanted to show you in these episodes when we first met Maul with these spider legs... Is we wanted to show you the madness of Darth Vader, we wanted to show you the madness of the Emperor, the madness of Count Dooku's private moments, all these Dark Side characters, we wanted to show you that the Dark Side is a pretty miserable place, and these people are very powerful and it's that power that allows them to keep this madness from you and not let it spew out all over the place, but Darth Maul, has lost it, he's lost his control. So you're seeing what's happening underneath the mask of Darth Vader, you're seeing what's happening in the Emperor in his private moments; you're seeing all of that as Maul is skittering around in that cave. [...] And those legs being not just an extension of the Dark Side of the Force where pieces of garbage start to stick to him as he greedily gathered what he could around himself to protect himself and what was created these legs out of garbage over the next 10 years as they grow out from him, it's also an extension of his anguish and his fear and all those things...

Source -- Episode CCIX: Sam Witwer Talks Darth Maul

DarthAnt66 wrote:Dooku flicked through the security monitors until he found the ballroom.

"Ah," he said. Something in his face seemed to freeze, and die. "I see you brought your protege."

"Understand you, I do not," Yoda said.

"You didn't mention bringing young Skywalker," Dooku said, pointing to the holomonitor. "And Obi-Wan, too. That changes the odds considerably. There's your Wonder Boy now, fighting the assassin droids I have standing sentry duty at the front door." His hand was wonderfully steady now. "Your new favorite son."

ILS wrote:They're both pretty interesting. Although the idea of Maul and Kenobi's persisting rivalry was completely wasted on Filoni and whoever else was responsible. Not only was it poorly executed but he ripped off Old Wounds - not only the story, but the idea of a quick Samurai chess match type of duel, which Aaron (the OW writer) was quoted as using as one of the core concepts. It's up there with TFA in how sorely it lacks originality except to make matters worse it was also boring as fuck to look at.

I would blame this on the TCW creative team holding restraint over the dark themes where you have to listen/read their behind the scenes videos and interviews to know what's going on. TCW's target audience are mainly kids as far as the creative team is, Dave has even alluded that he wouldn't allow TCW be go as grim as RotS movie, which had some dark moments. 

BoD wrote:

I would blame this on the TCW creative team holding restraint over the dark themes where you have to listen/read their behind the scenes videos and interviews to know what's going on. TCW's target audience are mainly kids as far as the creative team is, Dave has even alluded that he wouldn't allow TCW be go as grim as RotS movie, which had some dark moments. 

Not sure about this.

BoD wrote:@CuckedCurry You liked Ventress vs Anakin but didn't mention Ventress vs Kenobi's love-hate-bit-of-sarcasm-mixed-with-flirting rivalry?

BoD wrote:@CuckedCurry You liked Ventress vs Anakin but didn't mention Ventress vs Kenobi's love-hate-bit-of-sarcasm-mixed-with-flirting rivalry?

DarthAnt66 wrote:Dooku flicked through the security monitors until he found the ballroom.

"Ah," he said. Something in his face seemed to freeze, and die. "I see you brought your protege."

"Understand you, I do not," Yoda said.

"You didn't mention bringing young Skywalker," Dooku said, pointing to the holomonitor. "And Obi-Wan, too. That changes the odds considerably. There's your Wonder Boy now, fighting the assassin droids I have standing sentry duty at the front door." His hand was wonderfully steady now. "Your new favorite son."

BoD wrote:@LOTL Interesting. You'd say Yoda had a much closer relationship with Dooku than Mace?