This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and tangentially some of the EU novels.

Karen send me a link to this post by Rachel Paige at Hello Giggles, “77 Questions about The Force Awakens.” I had a fun time thinking about these but one of them jumped out at me.

37. Why didn’t Leia train in the Force, just like Luke?

There’s three reasons for this which can be explained by or inferred from the Expanded Universe novels and one I thought of just recently. Maybe in future movies we will get a canonical explanation, but this is what I’ve got so far:

4. Leia is just too damn busy. In the novels, Leia is a politician and a bureaucrat with an active career running the Republic. In TFA she’s a General (When I saw the words “General Leia Organa” in the opening crawl, I almost died of happiness) but that would still be an incredibly demanding career. She’s also a wife and a mother. Training to be a Jedi is just one more thing on her to do list for her to feel guilty about not getting around to.

3. It brings up bad memories. It takes Leia years to come to terms with the fact that Darth Vader is her biological father. Her career as a leader (whether in politics or the military) is what her adopted family groomed her for and what she is good at. Becoming a Jedi would feel a lot like choosing Vader over her loving parents who were not Sith Lords.

2. That’s Luke’s thing. This is conjecture, but Leia is a bit of a “type A” personality. She’s a perfectionist and what’s the point in taking on Jedi Training when Luke is already the best there is?

1. This is the saddest one and something that struck me in a moment of fridge horror. Jedi are immortal. Whey they die, their bodies merge with The Force and they become “Force ghosts” forever. That’s an awfully long time to live without Han Solo.