Kind of rambling here. But related to that post I reblogged earlier, there really is something to be said about Star Wars’s constant fetishism of the idea of The Father, both in Lucas text, supplemental canon, and fanon…
Obviously there’s the whole thing in A New Hope where Luke’s arc and future is defined by two (at that point) metaphorical Fathers, the Good Father in Obi-Wan and the Bad Father in Vader. That’s as explicit as it gets, this idea that a boy’s coming of age must be defined by a patriarch to Guide Their Path in some way, and the patriarch must fit into the idea of the nuclear father (hence why Owen, only referred to as an uncle, is completely discounted in the conversation)
And then there’s the fact that almost every major sw spinoff of the past twenty years has been focused on patriarch-child relationships: Obi-Wan and Anakin with Ahsoka in TCW, Kanan with Ezra in Rebels, Din Djarin with Grogu (this one is most egregious imo, because it was originally written for Din to be a sort of temporary foster-father attempting to return Grogu to the Jedi, who had a more communal child-raising tradition for younglings, before it was abruptly rewritten into fitting the mold of nuclear fatherhood) in the Mandalorian, Hunter with Omega in TBB, Sol with Osha in The Acolyte, Anakin with Ahsoka again in the Ahsoka show, Maul with Devon in Shadow Lord, and even Andor, which originally seemed to buck this trend, made Luther and Kleya’s relationship explicitly paternal in season 2. There’s this constant focus on centering some approximation of fatherhood to the exclusion of all other character dynamics, an obsession with an older man training/raising a child into adulthood that almost all modern canon shares
And then there’s the way this has taken root in the fandom, where an incredibly common take is that the reason Anakin committed multiple genocides and became a fascist is that he didn’t have a proper father figure. If only Qui-Gon had lived, he could have taught Anakin the Necessary Male Lessons that could have saved him! The fandom writes essays on the Paternal Relationship That Never Was between Qui-Gon and Anakin, and ignores Shmi’s impact on Anakin almost entirely. No Order 66 AUs focus almost unilaterally on Anakin raising/training Luke and Leia, with Padmé in the background at best; Sequels rewrites will discuss at length how Han and/or Luke’s relationship(s) with Kylo should have developed with nary a mention of Leia; Kanan’s scenes with Ezra and Sabine are continuously analyzed and reanalyzed while Hera’s scenes with them are largely ignored, and so on.
Hell, going back to the texts of the movies, there’s a persistent thing where maternal characters who were originally significant are retroactively killed off. See Padmé’s retconned death in childbirth, Shmi’s abrupt fridging, and Leia’s bizarre death-as-redemption-for-her-son in TROS. The women are taken out of the picture so we can better focus on the Father as the most important figure in any character’s life. It’s everywhere!
