Why Did Ancient Sith Lords Hate Palpatine And Darth Vader?

Because some older Sith did not think they were Sith at all. The clearest statement comes from Darth Momin, who decried the modern Sith for failing the dark side by fixating on destroying the Jedi. In his view the obsession had made Palpatine and Vader resemble the enemy they hated, ruling the galaxy through a technocratic bureaucracy rather than conquering it openly, with even their Sith identities kept secret.

Momin is the one who says it out loud#

Darth Momin was a humanoid male Sith Lord, a dark side scholar and a sculptor. His artwork got him imprisoned as a young man by people who found it disturbing and repulsive, largely because of the materials he used. The Sith Lady Darth Shaa freed him, claimed him as her apprentice and trained him in the dark side.

He killed her. Not out of ambition in the normal Sith sense, but on principle. Momin felt he was second to none and that calling anyone Master was anathema to the dark side. Then he went off to explore its lore alone.

Left to himself, he designed things. The Fermata Cage, capable of holding a being in stasis outside of time. A superweapon that could destroy an entire city. But his deepest desire was stranger than any of it: he wanted to freeze people in time at the exact moment of their terror. That was the piece he was working on when the Jedi intervened, he lost control of the energy he was wielding, and his physical body was destroyed. His consciousness survived inside his mask.

He is not a fringe figure invented to make a point. Charles Soule created him for the Star Wars: Lando comic in 2015 and gave him the full run in Darth Vader issues 21 to 25. This is current canon.

How the mask ended up in Vader's hands#

The route is worth following, because it is Sidious who puts these two in a room together.

Momin's mask sat in the Archive of Forbidden Artifacts, the Jedi Temple's Bogan Collection, among the Saber of Darth Krall, scrolls, various lightsabers and relics of the Sorcerers of Tund. Darth Sidious recovered it from the vault. He learned Momin's story from the mask itself, then handed it to his apprentice as a gift for the journey to Mustafar, where Vader wanted to build his personal stronghold.

On Mustafar the mask possessed an Imperial officer and started designing a fortress. Vader killed the host, examined the mask, and let it take a Mustafarian instead so Momin could have a body again.

What followed was a working relationship built entirely on utility. Momin designed fortress after fortress that could tune the energies of the Mustafar dark side locus and open a door to the dark side itself. Each one was wrecked by the planet's conditions. Vader burned through hosts as they failed, running the mask through a stormtrooper, an Imperial officer, a lava flea and a construction worker. The ninth design held.

Then Momin took his chance. While Vader was distracted by a Mustafarian invasion, he opened the door himself and used it to resurrect his own body.

The argument, and the wall#

Vader came back, used the fortress to obliterate the attackers, and Momin confronted him.

This is the moment the whole question turns on. When Momin's spirit had restored his body and duelled Vader, he decried the modern Sith by claiming they had failed the dark side to focus on destroying the Jedi.

That is the charge in full. Not that Palpatine and Vader were weak, or unsuccessful, or badly trained. That they had let their enemies define them. A Sith who orders his entire existence around annihilating the Jedi Order is still, in a sense, taking his instructions from the Jedi. He is reactive. He is not conquering through the dark side, he is settling a grudge.

The rest of the indictment follows from it. Rather than proudly conquering and enslaving through the dark side, Palpatine and Vader built and ruled the Galactic Empire as a technocratic bureaucracy that looked uncomfortably like the Republic it replaced, with even their Sith identities hidden from everyone. The Emperor was a politician who won an election and never told the galaxy what he was.

Vader's answer was not a counter-argument. He used the Force to ram Momin with a stone slab, crushing him against the wall and killing him.

Vader's side of it#

Vader did have a coherent philosophy of his own. He saw the dark side as strength, drew his power from hatred and from pain, and believed he embodied it. Palpatine, for his part, achieved something no Sith in a thousand years had managed.

And the disdain ran both ways. Momin's extremist views led to both Jedi and Sith holocron chroniclers neglecting him entirely. The Sith establishment wrote him out. He was not a respected elder statesman making a case, he was a lunatic who killed his own master and murdered a city for art.

There is also a wider pattern behind him. The dark side resonates through objects tied to strong dark side presences, and Momin's mask was a textbook case, corrupting nearby beings and turning them into mindless killers. Whatever Momin was arguing for, the thing arguing was not stable.

The afterlife of the grudge#

Momin did not stay dead in any useful sense. His death at Vader's hands created a Force nexus in the cave beneath Fortress Vader, and the visions it produced haunted visitors for years. Between 3 and 4 ABY, the Knights of Ren went there to steal the Screaming Key for Qi'ra's Crimson Dawn and were met by an apparition of Momin's severed head, its mask eyes glowing, until one of them shot it and it collapsed into ash.

The mask itself turned up again aboard Sidious's private yacht, the Imperialis, where it corrupted two infiltrators during a heist and forced the rest of the crew to abandon and destroy the ship. Lando Calrissian was there for that one.

Luke Skywalker eventually wrote about Momin in The Secrets of the Jedi, noting how the strange shape of Fortress Vader was based on the ancient Sith Lord's designs. The Empire's most infamous building was drawn by a Sith who thought the Empire was a betrayal of everything the Sith stood for.