Cad Bane is a mirror to Anakin Skywalker and Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld proves it

Cad Bane wasn’t born evil. He was shaped by fear, rejection, and survival, just like Anakin. This feature draws direct parallels between Bane and Anakin Skywalker as two children devoured by the Clone Wars, both taught by legendary mentors and both consumed by power, fear, and abandonment.

However, while Anakin’s downfall shook the galaxy, Bane’s fall was silent, buried under reputation and myth. Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld finally tells his side of the tragedy, showing how the galaxy failed more than one boy it promised to protect. But only one of them got a redemption arc.

The cowboy and the chosen one were chasing the same ghost

There’s a moment in Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld when Colby, long before he ever becomes Cad Bane, gets a few credits in his hand and buys sweets with his friend Niro. It’s the kind of decision that wouldn’t matter to most, but here, it’s everything.

Just like young Anakin gifting a necklace to Padmé, it’s a gesture soaked in hope, in innocence, in the fleeting belief that maybe they’re more than what the galaxy says they are. That maybe they belong.

Both Bane and Anakin began as children on the margins, swept up by war and given purpose by figures who were larger than life. The Jedi promised Anakin freedom and destiny. The bounty hunter underworld promised Bane survival and status. Neither path gave them the thing they truly craved. Safety. Love. Family.

When Anakin dreams of his mother’s death, it’s the same ghost that haunts Bane in the alleys of Duro. Loss. That persistent ache of not being enough, of being too late, of being powerless. The ghost is the same, even if the galaxy calls one a fallen hero and the other a criminal.

What Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld finally does is place Bane back in that moment. Not as a villain, but as a boy who thought he could outrun grief.

Legends trained them, but no one saved them

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld peels back the myth of Cad Bane and finally shows us the kid behind the gunslinger. Colby wasn't hardened by nature. He was taught to be hard. Raised in the shadows of a corrupt world, he took his cues from those who thrived in it.

Jango Fett wasn’t just a mentor. He was the blueprint. The bounty hunter code didn’t leave room for trust, affection, or mistakes. It taught Bane how to win, how to shoot, and how to walk into a room and own it. But it never taught him how to heal.

Anakin had Obi-Wan Kenobi. A legend, yes. A brother, maybe. But not the father figure he needed. Obi-Wan was bound by rules, by tradition, and by a Council that never fully accepted the boy they had feared since day one. Jango offered Bane tools for survival. Obi-Wan offered Anakin ideals. Neither offered what mattered most: rescue.

Both boys were extraordinary. Both were trained by the best. But neither was saved when it counted. And so they grew into the sharpest weapons in the galaxy, forged in silence, fire, and a hunger that no title or bounty could satisfy.

Power made them feel safe, but fear wrote their story

When Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld drops us into the alleys of Duro, we’re not watching a criminal rise. We’re watching a kid break. Colby makes one choice, then another, then another, until the space between who he is and who he needs to be vanishes. Every punch he throws, every lie he tells, and every shot he fires is a layer of armor. Not for ambition. For protection.

Anakin’s turn to the dark side wasn’t about glory. It was about fear. Fear of losing Padmé. Fear of being helpless again. From Mustafar to the Jedi Temple, every brutal act was driven by a desire to stop the pain before it started. He didn’t want to rule. He wanted to prevent another Shmi, another loss, another powerlessness.

Bane and Anakin didn’t wake up one day and choose violence. They clung to it. They wrapped themselves in it. Because in a galaxy that punished vulnerability, fear was the only constant, and control was the only relief. They weren’t seduced by power. They were drowning, and power was the closest thing to air.

Redemption is a privilege only Anakin received

There’s no moment in Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld where Cad Bane reaches for forgiveness. No grand scene where someone offers him a second chance. Because no one ever expected him to be anything but a killer. The tragedy is not that he refused redemption. It’s that it was never on the table.

Anakin Skywalker, even after becoming Darth Vader, was given one. Luke looked at the wreckage of a galaxy and still believed his father could be saved. That belief is what gave Anakin the space to return, to break through the mask, and to die as a Jedi. But who would have looked at Bane and seen Colby?

By the time Boba Fett faces him in Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, Bane is already the legend. The menace. The bounty hunter. But Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld reminds us that this reputation was built over a wound that never closed. Redemption isn’t just a decision. It’s an opportunity. And Bane never got one. His path ends as it began: alone, with no one to believe he could be anything else.

Two boys lost in war, but only one got to return

In the end, Anakin Skywalker got a funeral. He got music, fire, and a son who believed in his light. Cad Bane got a blaster to the chest and silence. No legacy. No redemption. No one to say he mattered.

But Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld changes that. It doesn’t rewrite Bane’s ending. It rewinds the story, showing how it began. It lets us see the child behind the monster. A boy who ran the alleys of Duro, who wanted sweets, who believed—just for a moment—that he could be something else. That maybe someone would choose him.

The Clone Wars devoured them both. The Jedi Order turned its back on one. The bounty hunter code hardened the other. They were shaped by the same galaxy and wounded by the same war, and yet only one was offered a way back.

If Anakin was a tragedy told in opera and fire, Bane was one buried in dust. But Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld lets us brush the dust away. It reminds us that even the coldest gunslinger started as a kid with a name.

Not every tragedy gets a funeral

It’s easy to see Anakin Skywalker as the galaxy’s fallen angel because his fall was loud. Public. Mythic. But Cad Bane? Bane was the boy the galaxy didn’t even notice until it was too late. He didn’t fall from grace. He crawled away from innocence.

Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld gives us something the films never did: a lens to understand how darkness grows in silence, in the cracks of systems that fail the most vulnerable. And once you see that, it becomes harder to call Bane a villain. He’s not the absence of good. He’s the product of its neglect.

That’s the power of stories like this one. They widen the frame. They show us that for every Skywalker born with prophecy in his blood, there’s a Colby lost in the shadows.

Maybe that’s what Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld wants us to question. What makes one life worth saving and another disposable? Why does one broken boy get remembered in songs, and the other forgotten in dirt?

Maybe it’s not about who they became. Maybe it’s about who we choose to see.