we get his feelings and thoughts on his bio dad, but what feelings does he have about his bio mom? what did the larses tell him of her?
clicks acryllics how do i start with this. opinion change pending because it's a part of star wars i haven't engaged with much on a meta level but let's give it the old college try.
i don't think he knows anything at all about his mother. i don't think the lars family know much about her, having only met her the once, and i don't think obi-wan is telling him anything about her either. i doubt that owen would allow it when his whole schtick is keeping luke ignorant for his own sake. which is not a bad tactic, let me be clear, when your opponent can read minds. the less luke literally knows, the safer he is. see how quickly leia is put in danger when luke simply has that fact sitting in his brain. i think he's going to hear about anakin simply because he lives on tatooine, and because his grandmother was around on the lars farm for a time ( canonically ), so they have to feed him false information. but any questions about his mother can be turned away with empty phrases and the fact that they didn't really know her. they're not her family in the same way they're anakin's family via shmi. bail and breha knew padme in a way that owen and beru never did. they can't and won't provide luke with the same information the other two could provide leia ( and bail and padme working together means leia having information on padme, especially as a fellow senator, makes perfect sense and wouldn't raise as many red flags as a random farmer from tatooine being obsessed with a nabooian politician ).
luke also doesn't seem to want for a mother figure the way he does for a father. i'm not on board with the reading that owen was abusive, but i do think that he was discouraging. again, he has good reason to be -- he really does have luke's safety as his number one priority. what luke sees, however, is a person who seems to disagree with him on principle. being an impulsive teenager, that doesn't sit well with him. beru, on the other hand, reads as supportive, or at the very least, not discouraging. she speaks to owen on his behalf, is inquisitive but not demanding, and doesn't push back against luke the way owen does. beru is more a mother to luke than owen is a father.
i do want to step back for a moment and address the meta reason for this, which is that george lucas did not really care much. i could say that the sweeping arthurian romance of the prequels works to rectify this, but honestly, he simply did not give a fuck about whoever luke's mother was when he was writing the ot. if there is evidence to the contrary, i'd love to see it, but reading the archives and early interviews, i haven't seen anything that would suggest there was more going on than simple neglect. padme was not necessary for the story because the children had already been born; she was a vague conduit by which vader had reproduced, beautiful and kind but sad. and that's not abnormal for mothers in media.
i guess i don't go out of my way to rectify this because i like to sit with this idea. i don't want to handwave it and say, no, luke definitely knew everything about padme and she was really important to him. i think maybe when he was younger he did ask about her, but his guardians had nothing to give him. they made up nonsense about anakin and made no effort to find out more about padme for luke's sake because it would have put him in more danger, and also because... she just didn't matter. and that's a tragedy to me, that luke simply has no real connection with his mother until post-canon. i'm happy to explore that there, and i have my cw au in which i think he and padme have a very important relationship. i just like... don't want to sweep this neglect under the rug because it feels more rewarding to me as a writer to explore it.
i'll also make a note here that like. y'know. not telling luke shit about his mother goes a long way towards dehumanising his father. how much easier is it to make him hate vader when he spawned from the personification of evil coughing on a flower, instead of having to explain that anakin was a person who loved his wife so much he went against the ( frankly shitty! ) jedi code to be with her. then they'd have to tell luke that he should never have existed and he's the result of a crime against the order, and that would make the jedi look really unappealing to their last hope. padme must be buried forever for the dead-anakin-unsaveable-vader narrative to hold up.
