The funny thing is that you don't even need psychic powers as an explanation here. Memory isn't perfect. It's clouded and influenced by the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and full of contradictions and interpretation. Leia could be telling the absolute truth as far as she knows, yet be mistaken about the facts. That's nothing special, that's how humans work.

You guys frightened him off... lol

Sat down and read the last third of the Rogue One book in a store, if i'm buying a Star wars book its gonna be Thrawn gosh darn it.

The book does a lot to expand upon the characters in a really great way. I actually think the deaths of all the characters hit harder in the book because their final thoughts and actions are just so tragic.

Tired of arguing about what fictional space wizard monks can and cannot do? Here, spend 13 minutes blowing your **** mind:

It's a pretty **** insightful look at Giacchino's composition of the Rogue One score and how it relates to the other Star Wars films. I loved his Speed Racer score, thought the Incredibles was really, really good - but ****, this proves the guy is a freakin' genus.

Also, you knew this was coming:

I assume the honest trailer is made from scenes that are actually in the movie?

Yes, but they also make fun of Jin vs the Tie Fighter and Jin in the Tunnel of Lights and so on.

17 hours ago, Ahrimon said:

I always just assumed that when Leia was talking about her mother she was remembering her adopted mother.

Since other people seem to take the novelizations as strong evidence, here's some stuff from the RotJ novelization:

"The Organa family was high-born and politically quite powerful in that system. Leia became a princess by virtue of lineage - no-one knew she'd been adopted, of course. But it was a title without real power, since Alderaan had long been a democracy. Even so, the family continued to be politically powerful, and Leia, following in her foster father's path, became a senator as well. That's not all she became, of course - she became the leader of her cell in the Alliance against the corrupt Empire. And because she had diplomatic immunity, she was a vital link for getting information to the Rebel cause.
That's what she was doing when her path crossed yours - for her foster parents had always told her to contact me on Tatooine, if her troubles became desperate."

...

The question took her totally by surprise. She'd always felt so close to her adoptive parents, it was as if they were her real parents. She almost never thought of her real mother - that was like a dream.
Yet now Luke's question made her start. Flashes from her infancy assaulted her - distorted images of running ... a beautifal woman ... hiding in a trunk. The fragments threatened to overwhelm her with emotion.
"Yes," she said, pausing to regain her composure. "Just a little bit. She died when I was very young."

...

"Leia, I've found something else out. It's not going to be easy for you to hear it, but you have to. You have to know before I leave here because I might not make it back. And if I don't make it, you're the only hope for the Alliance."
She looked away, she shook her head, she wouldn't look at him. It was terribly disturbing, what Luke was saying, though she couldn't imagine why. It was nonsense, of course; that was why. To call her the only hope for the Alliance if he should die - why, it was absurd. Absurd to think of Luke dying, and to think of her being the only hope.
Both thoughts were out of the question. She moved away from him, to deny his word; at least to give them distance, to let her breathe. Flashes of her mother came again, in this breathing space. Parting embraces, flesh torn from flesh ...
"Don't talk that way, Luke. You have to survive. I do what I can - we all do - but I'm of no importance. Without you ... I can do nothing. It's you, Luke. I've seen it. You have a power I don't understand ... and could never have."

Luke asks her about her real mother, even emphasizes the distinction.

26 minutes ago, MaxKilljoy said:

Since other people seem to take the novelizations are strong evidence, here's some stuff from the RotJ novelization:

She almost never thought of her real mother - that was like a dream.
Yet now Luke's question made her start. Flashes from her infancy assaulted her - distorted images of running ... a beautiful woman ... hiding in a trunk.

Is that book still canon? Because the section quoted above is in direct conflict with the canon seen on-screen near the end of RotS. She was raised by the (royal) Organa family on Alderaan. She would never have needed to hide in a trunk, and the "beautiful woman" could not have been her mother, who died moments after giving birth.

Of course the Lucas fanboys that have been prolifically posting here are simply going to invent stuff and say that she was playing hide-and-seek and that the woman was one of her nannies (or some Force connection that she had while still a fetus that allowed her to see through someone else's eyes) so as to explain away the contradictions.

16 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Is that book still canon? Because the section quoted above is in direct conflict with the canon seen on-screen near the end of RotS. She was raised by the (royal) Organa family on Alderaan. She would never have needed to hide in a trunk, and the "beautiful woman" could not have been her mother, who died moments after giving birth.

Of course the Lucas fanboys that have been prolifically posting here are simply going to invent stuff and say that she was playing hide-and-seek and that the woman was one of her nannies (or some Force connection that she had while still a fetus that allowed her to see through someone else's eyes) so as to explain away the contradictions.

No, it is Legends now.

Thanks, Stark. Though I'm kind of surprised that the novelizations of the pre-TFA movies are now Legends, since it doesn't seem that Disney is planning to have new episode 1-6 novelizations written. Or am I wrong on that?

5 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Thanks, Stark. Though I'm kind of surprised that the novelizations of the pre-TFA movies are now Legends, since it doesn't seem that Disney is planning to have new episode 1-6 novelizations written. Or am I wrong on that?

I'm pretty sure that's the case - I think it's only the films going forward (including Episode 7 and Rogue One) that will have canon novelizations, with stuff during the OT era being filled in through comics.

I remember that prior to Revenge of the Sith coming out Rick McCallum - the producer - said that some fans might see some contradictions in events in Ep III with the original trilogy. He was pretty obviously talking about Leia's memory of her mom. I think it's a contradiction. Star Wars has a lot of contradictions. Some can be fun to explain away or come up with reasons why it isn't a contradiction. But they are none-the-less things that draw attention as to being inconsistent without an explanation being offered. Lucas did take some effort to make things consistent enough to work as he wanted it to but there always seemed to be some new concept, plot point, or whaterver that caught his attention that was more important than making things obviously consistent (and no doubt some things just escaped his notice).

Once Lucas established that Leia was a Skywalker then that opens up an avenue of explanation. She could have just constructed the memory of her real mother as Stan Fresh mentioned. Or she could have instinctively used the Force as a child to look back in time to see her mother. Or a combination of the two. "The Force Did It" is a classic fall back explanation that can be stretched too far but I don't think so in this case. Leia also said that she somehow "always" knew Luke was her brother, so it seems like Lucas was trying to retcon his own story a bit.

I also don't think that the current novelizations are strictly speaking, canon. I think there are some small inconsistencies between The Force Awakens novelization and the movie. The book is written months and months before the movie comes out when the movie is still being edited and refined.

I don't think future film makers are beholden to "canon" novelizations the same way they are to previous films.

1 minute ago, Jedi Ronin said:

Leia also said that she somehow "always" knew Luke was her brother, so it seems like Lucas was trying to retcon his own story a bit.

I guess that she conveniently forgot this when she kissed her brother full on the lips in ESB. Retcon something and break something else. Par for the course in Star Wars (and Star Trek).

5 minutes ago, Jedi Ronin said:

I also don't think that the current novelizations are strictly speaking, canon. I think there are some small inconsistencies between The Force Awakens novelization and the movie. The book is written months and months before the movie comes out when the movie is still being edited and refined.

I don't think future film makers are beholden to "canon" novelizations the same way they are to previous films.

No, they are - they usually come out around the movies, sometimes later for the print versions. February 16, 2016 for Episode 7 and December 20, 2016 for Rogue One. Stuff like that which is directly story from the films Disney keeps canon.

6 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

I guess that she conveniently forgot this when she kissed her brother full on the lips in ESB. Retcon something and break something else. Par for the course in Star Wars (and Star Trek).

Yes, making it awkward at least. Just because she had an inkling of something doesn't really mean she believes it or acts on it. I've always had the impression that when she kissed Luke it was more to rile up Han than it was to show affection for Luke. But it does make for an odd twist to the love triangle they'd sorta established in Ep IV.

Oh, it's made very obvious at the time in ESB, both by how she was doing it and by what she said immediately before she did it, that she was deliberately trying to rile Han.

7 minutes ago, StarkJunior said:

No, they are - they usually come out around the movies, sometimes later for the print versions. February 16, 2016 for Episode 7 and December 20, 2016 for Rogue One. Stuff like that which is directly story from the films Disney keeps canon.

They come out around the same time as the movies but they are finished before the movie is finished. It's my understanding that the novels based on movies are not as canon as the movies themselves. But I could be mistaken.

Unless things have changed since Disney took over, the movies have always had a higher degree of canon than anything else, including even the novelizations of said movies.

11 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Unless things have changed since Disney took over, the movies have always had a higher degree of canon than anything else, including even the novelizations of said movies.

They pretty much leveled all the fields of canon - if it's got the canon mark on it, it's just as canon. Thus, why we see someone like Saw Gerrera's backstory expanded on in Rebels, and how the Thrawn we see in Rebels is the same one who developed the knowledge and data the First Order used when they were building in the Unknown Regions, and how we see Chopper and the Ghost and mention of Hera in Rogue One.

Though, the idea is that you don't need all the other stuff to have a grasp of the films, but everything else is just as canon.

The video games are an exception - like multiplayer game modes and SWTOR aren't canon - but you bet the forthcoming single-player campaign in Battlefront II will be a canon story. Heck, even Star Wars: Uprising was canon.

17 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Oh, it's made very obvious at the time in ESB, both by how she was doing it and by what she said immediately before she did it, that she was deliberately trying to rile Han.

And it very much worked. The evil look he gave Luke, while Chewie was making kissey noises in the background is just priceless.

35 minutes ago, StarkJunior said:

They pretty much leveled all the fields of canon - if it's got the canon mark on it, it's just as canon. Thus, why we see someone like Saw Gerrera's backstory expanded on in Rebels, and how the Thrawn we see in Rebels is the same one who developed the knowledge and data the First Order used when they were building in the Unknown Regions, and how we see Chopper and the Ghost and mention of Hera in Rogue One.

Though, the idea is that you don't need all the other stuff to have a grasp of the films, but everything else is just as canon.

The video games are an exception - like multiplayer game modes and SWTOR aren't canon - but you bet the forthcoming single-player campaign in Battlefront II will be a canon story. Heck, even Star Wars: Uprising was canon.

In order to achieve the concurrent release dates, novelizations and comics adaptations, by necessity, are usually written using earlier drafts of the script. As such, there is often an expected degree of discrepancy between the finished products.

In some cases, the authors of novelizations will also add descriptive fluff to get some of the story across, or bits of business here and there not found in the script or movie. (In the novelization of the first Spider-Man movie, Peter David - who's written for the character in comics - included a bit with MJ finding Harry watching Interview With the Vampire and she comments that she saw it once, "...but the little girl freaked me out." Years earlier, when working on the novelization for Return of the Swamp Thing, he was working from a very light script with storylines that made no sense to converge, so he added the narrative device of a mysterious hotel that the characters and storylines all passed through to ultimately tie them together. And, maybe my favorite, in his Batman Forever novelization, he ended the flashback to young Bruce falling into the future Batcave and encountering the terrifying bat with, "And at that moment, Bruce danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.")

While novelizations can be fun and enjoyable in their own right, and can add to the experience*, I've always - regardless of the franchise - held the source film/show as "more accurate."

(*The aforementioned Peter David's original ST:TNG novel, Strike Zone, added layers to Wesley Crusher's character that allowed me to like the character I'd always referred to as "Space Brat" a little better.)

There are new novelizations of A New Hope. I think a three book series of young adult novels? The princess, the scoundrel, and the farmboy?

On 01/23/2017 at 8:55 PM, 2P51 said:

Because it would sell a **** ton less movie tickets.

Someone knows Disney...