User:Yaahg D'sow/Leias mum

The Polis Massa Paradox
"She was... very beautiful. Kind, but sad." &mdash; Leia Organa ...this line in Return of the Jedi gave me the impression, that while Luke Skywalker had been brought to Tatooine to live with his Uncle, Leia was allowed to stay with her mother until her death, which seemed to have occured early in Leia's childhood. When Revenge of the Sith came out, it seemed like Padme died shortly after giving birth to the twins on Polis Massa, which really gave me headaches because it seemed to be such a blatant flaw in the script.

Explainations?!
As I wasn't the only one in the audience going "WTF?!", speculations arose that Leia might have referred to her foster mother - Queen Breha. Others argued that Leia was force-sensitive and unknowingly used the Force to retrieve an image of her mother from the past. The first version has been stamped wrong on starwars.com, stating that Leia Naberrie Skywalker Organa Solo remembers Padmé. The second version sounds kinda like "Uhh...it's magic!" to me.

My take on it
The end of Revenge of the Sith can be seen as a "what became of...". We see Luke being delivered to Tatooine, Leia arriving on Alderaan and we also see Darth Vader walking up to Palpatine and Moff Tarkin on a Star Destroyer in the vicinity of a Geonosian Battle Station. The fact that Vader was already able to walk on his new mechanical legs and and that the Death Star is already in a recognizable state of construction means that at least some time has passed between the last spoken scene and the images before the credits. My own earliest memories are from when I was 2 years old. In my case it's the image of a yelling nurse in a hospital and some other scenes from my stay there, which was the first time I was away from home for a longer time. Given the powerful emotions between daughter and her (dying) mother it would make sense, that Leia was able to remember her face, if at least some time has passed between Leia's birth and Padmé's death. It's a threadbare excuse as well, but it's the only explaination, that makes sense to me.