“No. I am your father.”
Audiences across the world collectively gasped when Darth Vader revealed to his nemesis Jedi in training Luke Skywalker that he was, at one point, Anakin Skywalker, his father. George Lucas went to great measures to make sure that the reveal was one of the best ones in history, even having the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, record a secondary red herring voice-over saying, “Obi Wan was your father.”
If it weren’t for the blaster fire and lightsaber battles, one might look at the backwards family history of the Skywalker clan as a soap opera. Heros kissing, only to find out later that they were brother and sister (which oddly didn’t make seem to set either aback once they remembered their incestuous lip lock), uncles and aunts murdered yielding very little emotional response while Luke goes into a mild depression when a strange hermit he just met seemed to evaporate after being killed by a man who would turn out to be his sire – it all seemed to be a little too strange.
Nobody cared, though. It was Star Wars. It was too epic for nitpicking.
Here’s a family tree that shows how clans were built a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Below it is a smaller one in case the first one is too complicated.
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(Via: Chart Geek and Flickr)