#owen lars

It’s really no wonder Owen and Beru aged so much between ROTS and ANH. They were raising a Skywalker.

shmi had a habit of looking out to the stars, and pondering on whether anakin was safe. whether she made the right choice in letting him go, what their life would have been like if he hadn't left with the jedi, and were a part of her newfound family. things she continues to loop back on for 10 years. i mean, this should be expected. imagine being enslaved, with your 9 year old son, and his only option of a better future and freedom, is to be taken from you, and trained to be a guardian of the galaxy? with no update or word. she expresses not even knowing if he were alive.

owen lars met her grief/longing with gentleness and patience, offering comfort in the image of anakin as something greater than absence. the imagery that he is likely a hero, alive, safeguarding the galaxy. he told her that anakin's existence out there made him feel safer. that anakin being out there, makes the galaxy a better place. even setting aside their enslavement, he insisted, anakin had been destined for something larger than tatooine– a calling, and to never blame herself. this and cliegg's comfort, helped in keeping shmi from carrying what would could have been a much heavier weight.

I saw these two 2022 Owen cards on the Topps Star Wars Card Trader app and knew immediately that I had to sacrifice whatever it takes to get ahold of them, which I did!

Ben Kenobi had been drunk when he'd told Owen the truth about Anakin Skywalker, that he hadn't died defending their Order's temple but had led the charge in killing them all.

Owen surprised himself with how easily he'd believed it. Part of it was because Kenobi was the sort of drunk that made one distressingly honest. The other part of it was because Owen had never really known Anakin Skywalker outside of their mother's stories of clever Ani, mischievous Ani, too kind and brave for his own good Ani.

Said Ani had done the smartest thing an ex-slave could do and moved as far away from Tatooine as he could at the tender age of nine and hadn't returned for a decade (Owen had to commend him for the balls for that one) and left almost as soon as he'd arrived.

That left a decade for Anakin to change from the boy his mother had loved and mourned into the quiet, intense, and honestly quite awkward young man he'd known for only a few days, and thirteen years to become a monster.

Owen had done his best to come to terms with the night's revelations when memories of his brother and those tragic few days unlocked another. Lost in the haze of his parents' deaths had come reports of an entire tribe of Sandfolk found slaughtered, from the oldest greybeard to the youngest child, their bodies covered with odd burn marks.

He'd known one of the men who'd found the massacre, a gruff man who was no fan of Sand People. That man had blubbered about "the babies" the same way Kenobi had sobbed about the Jedi's foundling children.

A chill cut through him, one that had nothing to do with the Tatooine's nocturnal winds, and everything to do with the idea that Anakin had been a monster for longer than Ben, Ani's "other brother," had ever suspected, and that killing him had been a public service.