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What if Luke was raised on Alderaan and Leia was raised on Tatooine? That’s one of the questions posed in “Star Wars Conversation Cards” – I’m giving my answer today, and I’d love to hear yours. Punch it!
Note: The YouTube version of the show will appear below at 9:00am Eastern Time (USA).
Raw Episode Transcript:
Hey, Rebel Rouser, I’m Allen Voivod, and this is Star Wars 7 by 7, your daily dose to Star Wars joy. Thank you so much for joining me for it. Right off the bat, I’m just going to say I want to hear what you think about what we’re going to talk about today. A while back this year, Insight Editions came out with this thing, Star Wars conversation cards. It’s written by Kelly Knox. We had her on the podcast here to talk about it. We tried a couple of them out. It was very cool, and I thought, well, let’s try some more of them out. We’re going to try one out. I asked my wife, some of you who’ve listened to the podcast for a while know her as Brainstormer Lani, to pick me a number between one and 125 because that’s how many cards there are in the deck. She picked number seven. Yeah, surprise, surprise. Number seven happens to be this one. What if Leia had been raised on Tatooine and Luke was raised on Alderaan? What if they had been raised together?
Now, the fun little booklet that comes with the conversation card kit does do a little bit of expansion on that. It goes on to say that Bail Organa volunteered to adopt Padme’s baby daughter. If he had chosen her son instead, the Galaxy’s fate would have turned out very differently. Luke would have lived on the Moisture Farm, or excuse me, Leia would have lived on the Moisture Farm with Owen and Beru Lars, and Luke would have been a young prince. What else might be different?
For me, I came up with three things about each of the scenarios about Luke on Alderaan, Leia on Tatooine, and if they had been raised together… For one thing, I think that Prince Luke, Skywalker, what a crazy thing to think about. I feel like without the strong hand of someone, I guess it would have been Owen on Tatooine—and probably would have been Breha Organa on Alderaan, that he might have become a little pompous as a young man. He could have been a little bit full of himself, and he definitely would have needed the guidance of strong parents to keep him on track if he had been in a royal scenario. I think Breha and Bail would have given him that structure, so I definitely think that’s a good thing.
I think that he would have been more of a people pleaser than he necessarily was as we saw him in the opening scenes of A New Hope. He didn’t necessarily seem to be all that concerned about being a people pleaser for Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen, but I think he would have been more so with Bail and Breha. For a third thing, I’m not entirely sure Luke would have discovered Bail’s rebellious activities. There’s a novel by Claudia Gray, Leia: Princess of Alderaan that details how it was that Leia discovered Bail was involved with helping build the rebel alliance. Now, I can see how Luke would train to be a senator and would probably not really enjoy it all that much and go through all the Alderaanian customs and whatnot, but I don’t see him really digging into details enough to wonder what’s going on with dad and why is he doing things that don’t seem to make sense and would not have ultimately discovered that he was in the rebellion.
Meanwhile, I think Leia, if raised on Tatooine, would probably have become a bit of a gearhead, quite honestly. I think she would have eventually become a pilot as well. I feel like she has had some flight training, but we don’t see her flying anything in the original trilogy. She doesn’t really do it in the sequel trilogy either. I’ve tried to think about other storytelling that I’ve read with her. I don’t really remember a heck of a lot. I might be conflating her with Mon Mothma, who has definitely not had any pilot training whatsoever. But yeah, I definitely think she would have learned to be a pilot if she had been raised on Tatooine. I think she also would have been just as strong-willed, and that would have led her to clash a lot more with Uncle Owen than she necessarily clashed even with Breha Organa. That seems to be the person with whom she had more clashes as opposed to Bail. I think she would have been very loving and appreciative of Aunt Beru as well. Aunt Beru probably would have been a role model. Certainly, the Aunt Beru that we met in a new Hope was an older Aunt Beru, one who had slowed down by comparison. But the Aunt Beru that we met in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series in live-action, for example, was definitely an active fighter. Then in the comics, there are depictions of Aunt Beru also being very well equipped to take care of herself and to take care of Owen and Luke and the family. I feel like Beru would have been a model for her in that regard.
I also think Leia probably would have been looking up at the stars the way Luke was, but perhaps a little more determined to get off the world by comparison. Yet, and yet, I also think that Leia probably would have been looking around her, at the circumstances around her moisture farm neighbors and trying to make things better for them. She would have been a little more community/civic-minded, if you will, and trying to help out those farmers around her.
As far as whether Luke and Leia would get involved with the rebellion, I feel like Bail might have brought Luke into the idea of a rebellion, certainly before Luke ever figured out that Bail was a part of it, and that ultimately, when the Death Star blows up Alderaan, that hopefully Luke would not have been on Alderaan at the time, but certainly would have seen his parents be martyred for the rebellious cause and would have definitely taken up the mantle on his own.
Meanwhile, I can see a galaxy where Leia might have been too distracted, so to speak, to consider the broader idea of the rebellion because the whole stuff of the Galactic Empire, it didn’t really touch Tatooine until suddenly that rebel blockade showed up above Tatooine. But it seems like she probably would have put a lot of energy into what was happening on Tatooine itself. And it would have taken a rebellion arriving for her to consider getting involved the same way that Luke did. But I think it probably would have been less of a draw comparatively speaking for her, especially if all throughout her growing up, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were constantly pooh-poohing stuff, and there wasn’t any mention of Obi-Wan Kenobi. There was just the crazy wizard hermit and like, stay away from that guy.
None of this actually considers the idea of their Force powers. Neither of them, strangely enough, when you sit and think about it, it is weird that up until 19 years old, when we meet them in the original trilogy, neither of them have connected with any Force powers. It takes Obi-Wan Kenobi to just start opening the door in Luke’s mind before something happens with that. But there’s no indication that he had any inkling of the Force prior to his meeting with Obi-Wan Kenobi. More or less, it’s the same thing with Leia. So I think that if they had been raised together, I think they might have discovered their Force abilities on their own and a lot sooner than they ever did in what is the actual canon storytelling.
But that’s enough for me. I think I’ve answered the question pretty well in-depth, and I would love to hear from you. Again, the question is, what if Leia had been raised on Tatooine and Luke was raised on Alderaan? What if they had been raised together? Let me know what you think would have been different and what might have ended up turning out the same. So if you’re catching this on YouTube, hey, comments are right there. Please leave a comment. Let me know what you think. I would love to hear from you. I would love to chat with you about it. And if you’re catching this in an audio version in your favorite podcast app, then head over to the blog post for this show’s episode at sw7x7. Come and drop a comment on the blog post there. I would love to talk with you there about it.
And that is going to do it for this episode of the show. It just remains for me to say thank you so much for joining me for it, as always, and may the Force be with you wherever in the world you may be.