10 Biggest Star Wars Retcons

7. Leia's Memory Of Her Mother

Star Wars Revenge of the Sith Padme Death
Disney

The prequels retroactively caused several problems with the original trilogy, with certain bits of information - like the fact that R2-D2 can fly, as seen in Attack of the Clones - working against the events of Lucas' first three movies.

One of the more confusing of these revolves around Princess Leia's connection to her mother, Padmé Amidala. In Return of the Jedi, Leia tells Luke that she remembers her real mother, proceeding to describe her as "beautiful", and "kind, but sad", implying that she'd spent at least a little bit of time with her.

However, in Revenge of the Sith, Padmé dies immediately after giving birth - so how could Leia have spent any time with her at all?

Though plenty of explanations for this have been bandied about over the years (such as Leia's Force ability allowing her to "sense" Padmé), the fact of the matter is that George Lucas didn't know Leia's mother was going to die in childbirth while writing Return of the Jedi, making Padmé's untimely end a retcon of Leia's memories.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!