Genogram

The Skywalker & Palpatine Bloodlines

Two families sit on this chart, and for three generations they keep colliding. On one side, Shmi Skywalker, enslaved on Tatooine, bears a son with no father she can name. On the other, the Naboo aristocrat Cosinga Palpatine raises a son, Sheev, who will kill him. Anakin Skywalker (born 41 years before the Battle of Yavin, dead in the year 4) is the hinge between them: prodigy, husband, Sith apprentice, and the man whose two children are separated at birth to be kept alive. Read downward and the tree is not a lineage so much as a repeating fracture — a boy taken from his mother, then a boy taken from his mother, then a boy sent away by his.

The Skywalker side branches twice. Shmi's freedom is bought by the moisture farmer Cliegg Lars, widower of Aika and father of Owen, which makes Owen and Beru Whitesun Lars the aunt and uncle who raise Luke in silence about his parentage. Anakin's secret marriage to Padmé Amidala, Queen then Senator of Naboo (46 to 19 BBY), is hidden even from her own family — her parents Ruwee and Jobal Naberrie, her sister Sola, Sola's husband Darred Janren, and their daughters Ryoo and Pooja. Padmé dies bearing twins in 19 BBY. Luke goes to the Lars homestead; Leia goes to Bail and Breha Organa of Alderaan, and takes their name instead of her father's.

The Palpatine line runs colder. Sheev murders Cosinga, then engineers Anakin's fall; the Sith Eternal's cloning program later yields the strandcast Dathan, discarded for being born without the Force. Dathan and Miramir hide their daughter on Jakku and die protecting her location, which is how Rey grows up believing her parents were nobody. Meanwhile Leia marries Han Solo; their son Ben is groomed by Sidious from childhood, sent to Luke for training, and lost. Ben kills his father and nearly kills his uncle, and returns to the light only when Leia reaches him at the cost of her life. The bloodlines meet in the Force dyad of Ben and Rey — Palpatine's granddaughter, who buries Luke's and Leia's lightsabers at the Lars homestead, their spirits looking on, and calls herself Skywalker.

The tree combines the family story George Lucas built across the original films of 1977 to 1983 and the prequels of 1999 to 2005 with additions made for and after the sequel trilogy, including Ben Solo, Rey's parentage and the strandcast Dathan and Miramir. Some details here — Cosinga Palpatine, Darred Janren and Pooja's later Senate career — come from Legends material rather than current canon. It endures as a genogram because so many of its turns are family secrets kept for protective reasons that detonate later. R2-D2 serves the father, the son and the daughter without forgetting a thing, while C-3PO, built by nine-year-old Anakin and later memory-wiped, is the family's instrument of forgetting.

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