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He Didn't Hold With Your Father's Ideals

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 (Edited)

Here's an idea I had to reconcile Owen and Beru's statements about Luke's father with Kenobi's statements about Luke's father. What if Owen and Beru were referring to someone whom they thought was Luke's father but actually wasn't? My idea is that Owen had a brother, let's call him Grant Lars, who had starry-eyed idealism in stark contrast with his more down-to-earth brother. Grant was the one who served as a navigator on a spice freighter, the person Luke as referring to when he said so in response to Kenobi's talk about the Clone Wars.

So Grant was piloting a spice freighter when his ship was called into service as part of an auxiliary arm of the Republic Navy, similar to how the US Navy assigned merchant marine ships to serve as materiel and troop transports in World War Two. It is this incident that prompted Owen to say to Grant that he should have "stayed here and not gotten involved."

In keeping with my other recent thread "Anakin the Nameless", perhaps on one these cargo runs the young Force-sensitive sneaks on-board to evade Hutt cartel assassins. And then it is through Grant that Anakin meets up with Kenobi and a diplomat from the Organa family who will eventually be his wife. This also seems like a good opportunity to set up a love triangle between Anakin, Ms. Organa, and Grant Lars.

Just some wild speculation on my part, let me know what you all think!

Note: I just now realized after posting this that Grant Lars has the same initials as everybody's favorite ruiner of the Original Trilogy. Make of that what you will.

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I really do like the idea but I don't see how it works given the fact that Luke's last name is Skywalker.

The blue elephant in the room.

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 (Edited)

In my head canon it goes like this: Anakin was born with no last name, on the spice mining world of Kessel. He fled an abusive father to make a living in the underground racing circuits of various Outer Rim worlds. On several different occasions, Anakin would land on a world, adopt a racing name appended to his first name ("Anakin Sunrider", "Anakin Starkiller", "Anakin Farlander", etc.), blast the local competition out of the water, and then the local crime lord would try to pay Anakin to throw a match, but Anakin's honor got in the way of that so he would win the match anyway...this would cause the crime lord to send assassins after Anakin, who would hop another freighter, go to another Outer Rim planet, and repeat the whole thing all over again with a different racing name. One of Anakin's many racing names was "Skywalker", and it is of course the one that gets passed down to Luke.

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But why would Luke Skywalker be more interested in talking about a step-father who was named Lars? That's the problem I see...

The blue elephant in the room.

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 (Edited)

Perhaps Owen never told Luke that he (Owen) had a brother named Grant. Luke grew up thinking his father, Anakin Skywalker, was a navigator on a spice freighter. I'm kind of grasping at straws here but maybe Owen told Luke that his brother "Anakin Lars" changed his name to Skywalker after he left Tattooine because he wanted to put the life of a moisture farmer behind him.