Rewatching ep 1 with my son.
God, Everyone just forgets about Shmi. Padme is rich, and doesn't take action, the Jedi could send a courriour, and don't, Anakin waits a decade...
Palpatine could buy her, and then use that to drive a wedge between Anakin and the Jedi...
But everyone just forgets the virgin Shmi.
As for Padme, sure, she could probably have arranged for it
If we accept book canon, she did. She sent her handmaiden to free slaves and look for Shmi but couldn't find her. Shmi also got involved with some liberation movements and her old home had some evidence that she was likely already free. So while no one could find her, they knew she probably wasn't a slave which was at least "good enough".
As for Anakin, I'm confident that you're completely right that the Jedi were interested in tackling slavery at a deeper level. I'm sure he believed that if he put in the work and helped the Jedi that they would be able to eliminate slavery.
I think Anakin dreamed of the day he could return to Tatooine not just to free his mother, but to free ALL of Tatooine. He was going off to train and become a big hero, so he'd want to return as a big hero.
Not necessarily, could be that the reason Padme's people couldn't find her is because Lars already bought and freed her at that point.
They show up at Watto's looking for her, maybe they were trying to be discreet and didn't exactly go up to watto and say "hey, do you still own that Skywalker lady?" And instead just sort of poked around in his shop for a bit and checked at her old home and didn't find her. Maybe they asked around a bit a neighbor said that watto sold her off to some weirdo out in the desert who married her and set her free, but didn't exactly have the name or address to point them in the right direction to find her because they only had second or third hand knowledge themselves.
Maybe they did ask Watto, and he decided that Lars was a good enough customer that he didn't want to scare him off by handing out his contact info to some rando asking after his wife.
Maybe they got a straight answer and figured that she's free and married somewhere is good enough, and they didn't put more effort into finding her, though that does leave the question of why that info didn't make it's way to Padme, and even if she didn't immediately tell Anakin because obi wan told her not to, you'd think she'd probably tell him when he went off in search of her.
It still feels like an easy way to allow someone to get hooks into one of your most promising, if troubled, Jedi.
If his mom is a slave, anyone can buy her, and use her as a weapon against Anakin. If instead the Jedi has bought and moved her/released her, preferably on some other planet, it would be an easy way to protect him without entrapping him.
Aside from the Jedi and Padme's entourage on Tatooine, how many people would even know that Anakin had been a slave, let alone be able to connect the dots to figure out his mom belongs to some junk shop owner in the ass end of nowhere? If anything, moving her around would draw more attention to her. How many times can some Jedi show up at Watto's before someone starts thinking something's up? Or if the Jedi drop off some random lady from Tatooine on a new planet somewhere, that's probably going to raise some questions, most people don't exactly hire the Jedi as a moving service because they want a change of scenery, and since Shmi is kind of a nobody and not some diplomat or something, that would probably make people wonder about why she's getting a Jedi escort.
Any random person Anakin runs into probably assumes he was raised from basically infancy by the order, with no real attachments to his family, just like any other Jedi. Sure, he's not exactly shy about talking about his childhood as a slave, but that's not exactly a common topic of conversation for most people and it mostly tends to come up with someone he's built/building some degree of trust with, so not someone who's going to go try to get leverage on him.
Watto would also probably clue in that something was up that the Jedi were interested enough in Shmi that they came back for her, and ask for like 10x the normal going rate for her, and probably buy a few more slaves to replace her, again, further propping up the slaving industry.
Not that I give Lucas that much credit but I imagine that Palpatine ensures that Shmi is never freed in order to isolate Anakin / trigger the women and children incident
We the audience know that Anakin is important, but Padme doesn't. From her perspective, Anakin is just some kid she met once and then who went off with the Jedi. She's got more important things to sorry about (like the entire planet of Naboo even though she herself is barely a teenager, for some reason).
As for why the Jedi don't, I kinda like the other detailed answer but also I think they may have just screwed up because the influence of the dark side was making them make bad decisions.
Damn, I should call my mom.
It's indeed tragic but also pretty realistic. How often do we just forget people we have met once despite them being in a really bad situation?
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@lemmy.world
Discussion for all things Star Wars. Movies, books, games, TV shows and more are welcome.
Keep it civil. Don’t insult other community members in posts or comments, and don’t make posts designed to insult other community members or parts of the fandom with different opinions.
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As far as the Jedi go, they have a thing against attachments and from their perspective they already have enough of an uphill battle to basically get Anakin to let go of the fact that he has a mom somewhere out there, without the possibility of her being free and maybe actually showing up at the temple wanting to see him or something.
Not gonna go into how fucked the jedi's philosophy is about that, that tauntaun has been beaten to death elsewhere on the Internet.
Sure, the Jedi aren't exactly big fans of slavery, but putting aside the attachment to Anakin, she's just one slave out of how many millions? Billions? Trillions? In the galaxy. Sure they can go around buying and freeing slaves whenever they come across them, but ultimately that just creates a market for slaves if slavers know Jedi will just buy up their whole inventory at every chance they get. That's the kind of thing that needs to be tackled at a deeper level.
As for Padme, sure, she could probably have arranged for it, but I think it's pretty likely Obi-Wan took her aside at some point and said "look, it sucks, but we really can't have Shmi getting in contact with Anakin, it'll fuck up his training and he needs to do the whole 'chosen one' thing, so it's really for the best if she stays there on Tatooine" Whether that's actually the case or not, that's probably what the council believed, and obi wan would go along with it. And if Padme hears that coming from, honestly, probably any Jedi, they are, after all, supposed to be sort of paragons of peace and justice and all of that, but especially from obi wan, a Jedi she personally knows and trusts, why should she question that?
Probably also some logistical and political hurdles in the way. Most of Padme's wealth is probably in Republic credits, which watto wasn't too keen to take as payment. I'm sure some sort of currency exchange or other trade could have been figured out, but imagine the scandal if word got out and someone put the spin on it that she was laundering money to purchase slaves? That's quite a potential minefield to navigate.
As for Anakin himself, he was still a Padawan, a fairly senior one who could be trusted with at least some solo missions by the point he finally went back to find his mother, but still a Padawan, so I'd imagine he didn't exactly have leeway to just head off to the outer rim to get his mom whenever he wanted. I'm honestly not even sure if even most full-fledged knights would have that sort of freedom to just head off on something like that at their discretion. I don't know how much personal time Jedi actually got, but I'd imagine most of them probably have pretty full schedules handed down to them from the council.
As for palpatine, your guess is as good as mine. For all we know things went off exactly as he planned, and maybe he sent Anakin the visions of his mother being in danger and engineered for her to be taken by the tuskens to nudge him further towards the dark side. (Total speculation on my part, wouldn't be surprised if that was the case though)
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