#leida mothma

Leida Mothma & Franz Kafka's unsent letter to his father.

it’s the way mon, from the beginning, has chosen the rebellion over her family. it’s the way she sacrificed her daughter’s future for the future of the galaxy. it’s the way she would have done almost anything to protect leida, to stop her from being trapped in an unhappy marriage as a child just as she was, but not quite anything, because the rebellion has to come first. it’s the way that she’s both selfish and torturously selfless, and at every moment the guilt of it is tearing her apart. it’s the way that she watched as perrin literally gave leida away, to a marriage that she herself arranged, watched how close the knife came to leida’s throat, knowing that she may never again be able to protect leida at all.

She tries to protect Leida from those traditions, but her daughter walks right into them. The contrast between Leida crying over Stekan not wanting to hold her hand and Leida telling Mon "I wish you were drunk" is like a slap to the face.

Leida sees the flaws and imperfections but she does not understand what she is getting herself into. She's going through with this because this is what she thinks she wants, but she's never been given another choice. To her, this is both a connection to the home she barely knows and a way to rebel against the mother she despises. She balks when Mon offers her a way out, because of course her own mother tries to stop her happiness.

Mon is watching her daughter go down the same path that she did, and she is unable to stop it. She meant it earlier when she said, "I am so, so sorry". She is sorry for more than just Leida's first fight with Stekan. She is sorry for all of this, for making her daughter a political tool and allowing her into an arranged marriage.

It's a sad parallel when Mon reveals that her mother was drunk when she got married and then Mon downs multiple shots after Leida is married. She has to cope with not only the reality of her fourteen year-old daughter being married, but also that her childhood friend is about to be murdered, and she cannot stop it. She is a powerful Senator, but in this house she is powerless. She understands why her mother was drunk on that day because she too sees no other escape, and so continues the cycle as Mon takes a page from her mother's book and Leida, so keen to be anything but her mother, steps into the same role that her mother was forced into.

It's clear that generations of trauma have impacted the Mothma family. Left unresolved, this spills over into the younger generations, and of course no one talks about it, or to each other. Mon's mother being drunk was likely because she was horrified that her daughter was going through the same thing she did. And now Mon is in the same place.