thoughts on evil or dead parents in the original star wars trilogy

[cimorene]

The original Star Wars trilogy has more parental issues than Tim Burton's Willy Wonka, the most recent (Jason Isaacs) film of Peter Pan, and the back catolog of Parenting magazine put together.

I mean, leaving aside the most staggeringly obvious killing his father or being killed by his father/replacing his father/apparent utter non-existence of the concept of mothers in the trilogy, look at the protagonists.

1. Beru and Lars, whom Luke calls Aunt and Uncle but who are obviously his adoptive parents, die during A New Hope. This is never touched on again, except in his saying he has nothing to go back for. (Obi-Wan, positioned as his, what, spiritual Jedi "grandfather", seems to consider the death a non-event to be overcome as quickly as possible simply because he "couldn't do anything anyway".)

2. Leia's adoptive parents are presumably killed early on when her planet is vaporized, but this is never even mentioned unless you accept the retcon that the "mother" Leia remembers in RotJ is in fact Bail Organa's wife. She also is not seen to show any particular grief about this outside of the actual blowing-up scene.

3. Han is even more orphaned, because any connections outside of Chewbacca (and various references to old acquaintances and friends such as Lando) are utterly invisible for him. He is in fact presented as somewhat allergic to connections, which does seem to fit the street kid/ runaway profile.

Basically the only connection between the Protagonist Generation and the previous generation in this movie is through Vader, and the entire narrative is about dealing with it as symbolic of overthrowing the established social order.

Comments

[rian_aphasia]

I know at least a little of it is touched on in the books, but I only even found out about them a few years ago, and it feels kind of funky having to go to another source for this kind of basic info.

[laughingrat]

Ha! Yes, awesome observations!

[jennaria]

I can handwave a little on the grounds that the entire events of A New Hope cover, what, 24 hours? 48 at the outside? So if you presume that Luke and Leia share the reaction of 'initial shock - shove it down, no time to cope with this now', and just grieved at a time we don't see...but yeah, you pretty much need to make that presumption.

Also, Obi-Wan has Issues. Prequel triology merely made this more obvious.

[cimorene]

But... the other two movies...

[jennaria]

Um. Between ANH and ESB, they did their grieving?

...how long is it supposed to be between the two movies, anyway?

[stranger]

It seemed to me just after Empire Strikes Back (and still seems, if I squint hard enough) that Darth Vader was obviously Luke's *mother*, since Anakin was his father and nobody ever saw Vader in the flesh. Given the complete lack of mothers (and women in general) in the SW universe, obviously the gender-and-pronoun set was so badly mis-aligned with English that everything simply translated as default-male instead of allowing for female concepts. This worked out really well in Leia's characterization, but the background has to be re-read pretty hard to avoid concluding that the Empire *and* the Rebels are going to be gone within a generation.

[cimorene]

That would also explain why Leia was more in need of being hidden as a bb - because obviously, Vader would rather have a girl!

On the other hand, it doesn't explain why Leia gets to be explicitly female when nobody else does.

[stranger]

Or why there's an "aunt" to designate Beru. Luke could perfectly well have been an uncle's adopted son. Possibly the whole Beru-Lars sequence is a collective illusion.

Leia, being a main character, is special enough to be described unmistakably in whatever source (the journal of the Whills...?) is assumed, although admittedly this theory is more crack than whole. But fun.