i know you've written about leia's wife braids, but have you ever written about the significance of padme's hairstyles? or do leia's styles mimic her mother's, maybe on purpose, maybe not?
Oh absolutely Leia’s hairstyles mimic her mother’s—Breha taught her all about traditional Alderaanian braids, the practical art of plaiting them as much as the subtleties of meaning. Leia remembers those lessons, long after the songs and rituals and histories of her planet have faded from her memory. Even when she is older than her mother will ever be, she can shut her eyes and be there again, sitting in front of her mother’s gilt mirror as Breha ran the comb through her hair in long, sure strokes. (Only Breha could do that—Leia has been brought to tears, trying to unknot the long length of her hair, and every stylist she’s ever had struggled with some unspeakable tangle, but Breha never did, never would. Leia’s mother was magic.)
Breha would tell Leia stories, her voice rising and falling with the stroke of the brush. Stories of Queen Osama, who had once dragged her people into war with a badly-placed curl, and the great Lady of Kinsul, whose braids had been so fine that a gungan queen had fallen in love with her. And Breha would say, I teach you this, as my mother taught me, and as her mother taught her, in an unbroken line stretching back through the blood of Alderaan’s queens, to time before memory. When we plait our braids, we weave and re-weave all the history of our mothers, and our people.
(After the Death Star, Leia used to dream that Alderaan’s dead queens came in the night and ran their pale hands over her braids, making sure she had not forgotten, had not cheated with strings or sprays or any pins not carved from the wood of he kapok tree. Then the dead would kiss her, and tuck their stories in her hair. You must carry them for us now, they would say.
Leia Organa does not remember a time when her head was not heavy.)
