husborth answered:
“does darth vader get paid” is my favorite debate of all time. all answers are incredibly funny. see:
- not paid. area loser isn’t in a unionized position
- palpatine pays him in stocks but vader doesn’t know what those are and is frankly too embarrassed to ask
- palpatine pays vader but vader doesn’t know how bank accounts or direct deposit works and is frankly too embarrassed to ask
- vader gets paid in sith artifacts so if he does well on a mission he is rewarded with a bully stick (bones of long dead sith master that vader can stare at in evil reverie or whatever)
- vader gets paid but it’s minimum wage
- vader gets paid but it’s minimum wage and he has to pay all of his own medical bills so he’s an enormous amount of debt
- vader doesn’t get paid but palpatine always says “you’re working on the spirit of getting paid”
all answers can be incredibly funny. but as for what vader would buy if he cared enough about other people to pay them for things instead of just, like, taking whatever caught his eye, i think it’s probably broken machines that are specifically deemed unfixable. scrap metal. he has an uncomfortable fixation on broken robots for a man who is on many levels a broken robot. he just likes having rooms of his emo castle floor-to-ceiling stacked with scrap metal and busted transmissions and rusted droids so he can just stand there and stare at it as a frustrating metaphor for his own life. it’s important to me that he never purchases anything that might even be remotely useful to him or bring him any kind of pleasure. he just has to wander in his self-made dimension of the complete absence of any kind of joy forever. the most pathetic dude ever made.
personally i err on the side of believing that he’s not paid, but because he’s kind of insane, he acquires a lot of really weird trinkets like busted pocket watches or mud-stained bracelets or someone’s wallet and it’s all very ???? until you realize he’s just robbing the corpses of people he killed. they’re not even trophies, so to speak, he just collects them because the only time he’s actually close to anyone is when he’s killing them, and that’s kind of his only social life. he doesn’t get out much