George Lucas was never happy about this character, if nothing else, because he felt fans would confuse him with Anakin Skywalker. In order to honor her father, and somehow try to show that the name can be overcome, she names her third child Anakin, after her murderous cyborg father. In one of the crazier comics, Leia has her womb touched by the cloned Emperor Palpatine while she’s pregnant-another reason to ax the EU-and is worried about how it may affect her son and make him dark in the future. However, the Solos also had another child, and George Lucas kind of wished they hadn’t. In fact, it is for this reason that many fans really like the idea of Rey and Ben secretly being brother and sister-it would fulfill the fan wish for Han and Leia to have had twins. Two of them are twins named Jacen and Jaina, which some fans wished had been replicated at least in some form in the new movies. In the Star Wars expanded universe, Han and Leia get married and have three kids. 9 Anakin Solo’s Entire Existence Was A Sore Point For George Lucas Unfortunately, no one would have believed that Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, or Carrie Fisher were in their thirties. People simply wouldn’t have been able to suspend their disbelief. For this reason, an incredible amount of EU story lines already had to be scrapped.
The truth is that what the fans wanted was something fairly shortly after Return of the Jedi-as close as could be plausibly done-and a story that had a young Han, Luke, and Leia simply could not work.
Most of these books were written back when the three were still in their prime and were quite popular as depictions of the characters go, but it’s hard to imagine how you could change a lot of the stories enough to make up for such an age gap.
One of the biggest reasons that Disney had to go ahead and just throw out the baby with the bathwater is that a huge wealth of the EU stories involved the “big three” (Han, Luke, and Leia), and the actors were advancing in years. Photo credit: Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures