After Darth Vader’s shocking revelation at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the original Star Wars trilogy had room for one more Skywalker familial twist in Return of the Jedi. In that film, it’s revealed Luke and Leia are twin siblings, meaning Leia had the potential to become a Jedi like her brother. On Endor, Luke told Leia that she would learn how to wield the Force in time, but when the sequel trilogy picked up 30 in-universe years later, Leia is not a Jedi Master. She is once again leading a rebellious military force, trying to put a stop to the threat of the First Order. The sequels demonstrated Leia’s Force abilities (most famously, her space flight in The Last Jedi) at times, but it was clear she had chosen a different path. The Rise of Skywalker sheds more light on this, featuring a flashback of a younger Luke training his sister.
During this scene, Luke explains to Rey why Leia abandoned her training. She had sensed that her son Ben Solo would die at the end of her Jedi path. It was a vague though understandable reason, but now Lucasfilm has shed additional light on the matter, fleshing out what exactly Leia saw in her twisted vision of the future.
In the new canon novel Star Wars: Legacy, Leia accompanies Rey to the planet Tython, where they search for a way to heal the kyber crystal that powers the Skywalker family lightsaber. Tython, home to an ancient Jedi temple, has a strong connection to the Force, meaning Rey and Leia both have visions throughout the book’s story. In Leia’s case, she has a recurring dream where she is on the bridge of the Raddus, leading the Resistance in another battle against the First Order. The first time we read about it, Leia engages in a conflict with General Hux and uses the Force to throw a TIE fighter into the bridge of Hux’s Star Destroyer. Each time the dream reappears, details change. Eventually, Leia is tearing the Star Destroyer apart with her mind while an excited young Ben Solo asks his mother if she is going to teach him how to do that.
The dream is most likely related to the vision Leia had on Ajan Kloss that caused her to leave her training. When she stepped away from the Jedi path, she told Luke, “if I stay here with you and become a Jedi, everyone I care about will be destroyed.” Obviously, that includes her unborn son (Leia was already with child at the time of her training). When combining the information presented in Legacy and the brief scene in The Rise of Skywalker, the takeaway is that Leia became afraid of who she might become if she continued her training, fully realizing her powers in ways she never thought possible. When discussing the dream with Luke late in Legacy, she bemoans that it was about “just another family going to war,” suggesting she felt that if she trained Ben, he would succumb to the horrors of war, fighting in her name as a powerful Jedi.
After that, Leia felt it would be better if she went back to the New Republic and helped the fledgling government establish and maintain a new peace following the Galactic Civil War. Star Wars canon hasn’t shied away from the fact that things in the New Republic era did not exactly go smoothly, with Imperial remnants emerging out of the shadows in an attempt to re-establish the old order. Leia, who was always a fierce and determined leader in government and military spaces, thought she might be able to quell any threats. In a way, it’s reminiscent of Poe and Rey’s argument at the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker, where Poe is frustrated because Rey stays on Ajan Kloss to train (“for what?!”) instead of fighting the First Order. It’s not an exact 1:1 comparison because the galaxy wasn’t at war when Leia was training, but it illustrates how complex these situations can be when someone is torn between two obligations. There’s never an easy answer.
For his part, Luke was supportive of Leia’s decision to leave. He tells her, “You chose Han. You chose happiness. There’s nothing wrong with that.” Dedicating oneself to the path of the Jedi can be a lonely road, eschewing family attachments to study the ways of the Force. Luke understood what Han and Ben meant to Leia (much like he would later understand what Din Djarin meant to Grogu) and didn’t force Leia to stick with something when her heart wasn’t fully in it. Unfortunately, Leia might have made the wrong choices seeing how things ultimately turned out.
Leia’s decision to leave the Jedi was motivated by her desire to avoid an unspeakable tragedy, but the real upsetting twist is that her life ended in tragedy anyway. Stepping away from her training to dedicate herself to the New Republic didn’t put an end to any horrors. Ben became corrupted by Snoke, destroyed Luke’s temple, and became Kylo Ren. As a result, Luke went into exile, ashamed of his failure, and the events of the sequel trilogy played out as we saw. By the time The Rise of Skywalker rolls around, Leia has lost nearly everyone she cared about. Han, Luke, and her friend Holdo are all dead and her son is the Supreme Leader of the First Order. Putting an end to her training didn’t solve anything.
What’s interesting is that in Legacy, Luke presents an alternate future if Leia had remained a Jedi. Luke and Leia would have become teachers to Ben, helping him harness his own Force abilities. This might have kept Ben on the path of the light, especially if his loving mother was always by his side. However, in this scenario, it is Rey who is turned by the First Order and is “unleashed” as a powerful weapon against the Resistance. Luke’s point is that Leia can’t save everyone no matter how hard she tries. Regardless of what path she chose, the galaxy would have found itself at war again because that is the nature of things. Rather than torment herself with dreams and visions of what could have been, Luke stresses the importance of remaining focused on the here and now, being there for Rey because that’s what she needs in this reality they’re living in.
The recurring dream Leia has feels like a twisted “what if?” imagining the worst-case scenario if she realized her potential as a Jedi. One particularly notable detail is the uneasiness Leia feels after a young Ben asks if he’ll be able to tear a ship apart with his mind one day, almost as if he’s intrigued by the death and destruction he could cause with the Force. Leia was always a beacon of light and likely would have been able to resist the temptation of the dark side, but it’s understandable why she left the Jedi path after experiencing this vision. It’s worth wondering if the dark vision was caused by the revived Palpatine, hoping to remove Leia the Jedi from the equation. That would make Ben Solo more susceptible to the dark side, which is of course what happened.
Leia wasn’t able to avoid another war or keep her family intact, but she kept fighting for her loved ones until the very end. She uses her last moments to reach out to her son one last time, desperate to bring him back to the light. It works and Ben Solo returns — lending further credence to the notion that Ben, even when he dedicated himself to the dark side, had a soft spot in his heart for Leia above all. Saving Ben is what turns the tide in the war, as he aids Rey to defeat Palpatine and put an end to the Final Order before it ever truly emerges. By the end of the sequel trilogy, Leia is one with the Force along with her brother, watching Rey carry on their legacy. After all Leia had been through, it’s the most optimistic ending she could have hoped for.
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