Today, we look at how Leia’s childhood memories of her mom turned out to not make any sense in the end.
In Abandoned an’ Forsaked, we examine stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically “overturned” by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent) with a retcon (retcon stands for “retroactive continuity,” but we’re specifically talking about retcons that contradict earlier stories).
In Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker finds out that his close friend, Leia Organa, is actually his sister. He talks to her about her birth mother:
Luke: Leia, do you remember your mother, your real mother?
Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.
Luke: What do you remember?
Leia: Just images really, feelings.
Luke: Tell me.
Leia: She was, very beautiful, kind, but sad. Why are you asking me this?
Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.
He then lets her know that she is is his sister (they talk about it more later).
However, in Revenge of the Sith, Leia’s birth mother, Padme, died soon after giving birth to Leia and Luke, dying after she lost “the will to live.”
So yeah, that’s a big retcon right there. The interesting thing is that even if you want to say that Leia was speaking about her adopted mother, that doesn’t make any sense, either, as her mother DIDN’T die when Leia was very young. She died when Leia’s home planet blew up. Amusingly, character designer Iain McCaig designed Breha Organa so that she would look like Padme, so that she could say that Leia knew Padme’s smile because she knew her mother’s smile. That’s…something!
If anyone else has a suggestion for Abandoned an’ Forsaked, drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com!
Leia thought she was talking about birth mother, since she was about a couple minutes away from finding out the truth.
Hey, if you want more clicks with the Obi-Wan series a couple of days away, why don’t we talk about the cunning plan to hide Vader’s son on his home planet, under his real name?
“I’ll take the girl because I’m Jimmy Smits.”
I keep being bedazzled by the lazy handling of the prequels’ plots. I mean, you had these cornerstone facts:
– Leia knew she was adopted and had lived, shortly, with her real mother
– Vader was OK in having his son raised on Tatooine by his uncle (possibly to overthrow the Emperor, later) and did not know about Leia
– Yoda trained Kenobi
– Threepio had no relation with Kenobi or Skywalkers whatsoever.
– Jedi were considered a legend, and Obi Wan and Anakin were probably military officers (generals) secretly affiliated to the creed, like templars.
This has been carved in every SW fan for twenty years: all you had to do was join these dots and fill the blanks in whatever way you liked, but no, they screwed up most of the above in the first 20 minutes of Ep. I, and trashed the remainder along the way, needing to shoehorn everything back with lame excuses.
I legit don’t get what that means in this context.
You can do loads of these articles on the prequals alone
Oh true, I try to parse them out because of that very reason, but yeah, they’re definitely a big font of these.