The tragedy of the Skywalker women
The people glad about Ben Solo’s death seem to have never once considered - or simply do not care about - the family tragedies of Shmi Skywalker, Padme Amidala and Leia Organa, and how desperately these women hoped and wished for their families to survive and be happy.
Shmi Skywalker was separated from her son and abandoned to a life of slavery by the Jedi, who - choking on hubris and arrogance - couldn’t perceive the importance of the woman the Force itself chose to mother The Chosen One. Her love stabilised and nurtured him; without her influence he grew increasingly vulnerable to his own worst tendencies and the machinations of Palpatine. Shmi gave Anakin to the Jedi with a mother’s hope that he would live a better life than the one she could offer him. She never saw him again, and died a violent death.
Padme’s dream of political justice in the galaxy was destroyed by Palpatine’s machinations. She lost her husband to the Dark Side and Palpatine, too. She died giving birth to her son and daughter, who she so wanted to raise with Anakin on Naboo. Everything she fought for and loved was ripped away from her. She died heartbroken and in the agony of childbirth, her life-force siphoned by Palpatine to keep Darth Vader alive.
Leia lost Padme, Anakin and Luke the moment she was born. Her adoptive parents, Bail and Breha Organa, and her planet were murdered when she was a teenager. Her own father tortured her. As an adult she made her own family, only for Palpatine to steal that joy from her by corrupting her son while he was still in her womb.
Palpatine invaded Leia’s body and manipulated Ben against his family just as he did Anakin. Padme and Leia witnessed their families be torn apart by the same evil. After Ben fell to the Dark Side, Leia wanted him back. She wanted him to come home to the light and LIVE. No mother wants her child to die tragically young at thirty years old after a lifetime of having the devil in their head. Ben Solo’s death means that there is no hope or justice or promise of life enduring for the Skywalkers.
But that promise existed once. There was a time of joy and belonging and renewal. A united family was born out of the tragedy of the old, determined to make a better world and live with happiness.
We thought The Powers That Be tore apart that happy ending in order to say something important about the cycles of war and trauma and evil and the need for universal balance. Instead, it was torn apart for… what? In the end, every one of Skywalker women were denied the family and lasting happiness they sought to create. The death of Ben Solo, after he has realised the error of his ways and COME HOME, erases everything that Padme and Leia (and Shmi and Luke and Han and Anakin and Rey) fought for and wanted. His contrived and senseless death renders their sacrifices in vain and condemns every generation of the Skywalker family to lives of meaningless suffering and heartbreak. To justify Ben’s death because ‘he deserved it’ is to trample upon Shmi and Padme and Leia’s hopes and dreams. It dismisses everything they symbolize as as characters - their revolutionary work, their incandescent strength, and their transformational love - as less important to the outcome of the story than an audience member’s desire to revel in death and revenge.
It is a statement that women’s emotional lives, and the stories we create about them, don’t matter. It’s hateful and cruel.
As for Rey: she wanted Ben, and she lost him. No other in the world was her equal in spirit and love and potential. No wonder she takes the Skywalker name in the end. To be a woman and a Skywalker is to lose those you love the most, and have men write your story as if you’re an inspiration.
The Jedi invited this curse on the family when they took Anakin from Shmi. The Skywalkers have been bound to that festering cosmic trauma ever since. We thought it would be healed, but it’s still there. It will haunt the Skywalker name forever.
Palpatine wanted to destroy them, and he did. Shmi, Padme, and Leia, and all the rest of the Skywalkers: they never escaped the curse upon their family. They strove and suffered and lost. And now they’re all gone.
I don’t know who made these wonderful family pictures. If you do, please let me know so I can credit them.
