Just another voice to back up this ^.
While the PT isn’t as great as the rest of the saga, a lot of us here do consider it canon and part of the full Star Wars story. So even though it’s understandable that some want to ignore it, please at least don’t make any changes that contradict it!
The PT did it first.
Examples?
Examples of what the Prequels changed from the Original Trilogy? You can find those on many other threads.
I’m sure there are very legitimate explanations for them.
Explanations made after the fact to try and cover up the bad writing
Oh come on, Ady! You know as well as I do that having someone die in childbirth 20 years after writing that her daughter remembers her is poetic and rhymes or something.
In Chapter 19 of Star Wars: Bloodline (a CANON novel), in a voice recording Bail Organa addresses Princess Leia “not expressing much interest in knowing who her birth parents were.”
This means that in that scene in ROTJ, Leia WAS, in fact, talking about Padme, because Luke clarifies that he is talking about Leia’s REAL mother and the recording of Bail obviously is from before Episode IV, which means Leia would have had some form of conversation about the adoption with him FAR before this scene happened.
Explanations made after the fact to try and cover up the bad writing
The point is they shouldn’t HAVE to try to explain it on a novel decades later. Why not just write the new movie to line up with the movie you made years before?
It’s easy to explain how Leia remembers Padme, without any outside material. It’s because she has the Force. Plain and simple.