Star Wars: 12 Stupid Decisions From The Prequels That Actively Ruin The Originals

5. Leia Has No Way To Remember Her Mother

Return Of The Jedi is so full of retcons that if it were made today it'd be a X-Men: Days Of Future Past-style reboot. It already had to deal with the Vader twist rendering much of the first film null and void, and when the decision was made to tie up all other loose plot threads in the third film (rather than progressing to a new trilogy), Leia became Luke's sister and thus even more explanation was needed.

So on top of Obi-Wan explaining his now-major lies in A New Hope, suddenly the Princess is adopted, and everyone's well aware of that fact. Luke brings up her "real mother" casually and Leia's noticeably uncagey about revealing she died when she "was very young" and that she was "very beautiful, kind, but sad". It just about makes sense, although thinking about it, it's clearly a patch-job.

But Lucas just couldn't leave the confusion there; all that stuff about remembering her is made moot by Revenge Of The Sith, where Padmé dies mere seconds after Leia's birth - how could her daughter remember her?

Least insightfully of all, Luke is actually born first out of the two (because on marketing it goes Luke and Leia, not Leia and Luke), meaning she didn't even get a few extra minutes to make a deep, Force-infused connection.