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.
“We’ll use the force!”
That IS how the Force works. What I’m referring to are “Force visions,” aka An ability to see into the past and the future.
I can use the force to look into the past too! Watch!
[smoke swirls about]
I see…
…in the darkness…
…shadows moving…
…to reveal…
…
…[smoke dissipates]
…Lucas making it all up as he goes along! And not even paying attention to what he did in the previous movie!
[is given lightsaber]
VOICE: YOU ARE NOW JEDI
I don’t think he forgot about that scene, I just think he kinda sorta wrote himself into a corner. Padme would have to die somewhere in the prequel trilogy regardless. It is bad story telling to have a principle character survive a chapter, but to never be shown again in the rest of the story.
You could argue the twins would need to be older to remember her, but that creates an issue of Vader knowing that Padme survives and may be with their child somewhere. He had no idea he had a daughter until he read Luke’s mind.
This tie in isn’t in the prequel trilogy, but is actually in The Empire Strikes Back. First, Vader learns he has a son and is obsessively tying to track him down, mainly to recruit him to overthrow Palpatine. Palpatine wants Luke to get rid of Vader, but that’s a whole different thread. The point is Vader and Palpatine have no idea of Luke until Death Star 1 is destroyed. This means the twins would need to be hidden before Vader had any idea they existed/survived.
While training with Yoda, Luke learns that “through the force many things you will see…the future, the past, good friends long gone”. Later in the movie Luke calls out to Leia from Bespin and she receives his “force message” and his exact location without realizing she is using the force herself. So we know Leia is force capable (Luke confirms this to her in ROTJ as well) so it is entirely possible that Leia can remember “images” of her real mother being “beautiful, but sad”.