Talking About 'Star Wars': Why does Leia not mention her family and friends, as well as her home, have been destroyed in the films?

One of the most annoying trends that I've noticed while perusing social media sites such as Facebook and Quora, particularly the latter, is that franchise fans want to be spoon-fed every detail of a character arc instead of using their imaginations, as we dinosaurs from the prehistoric days before the Internet did when we watched a film. I don't know if it's because they don't understand the limitations of the medium, or if it's because the "I want every detail explained to me" crowd wants to find "plot holes" and inconsistencies. 

Yesterday, for instance, I saw this question on Quora:

Why does Leia not mention her family and friends, as well as her home, have been destroyed in the films?

I wasn't going to write an answer, but I found myself so annoyed by the question that I ended up spending a good hour or so coming up with a rebuttal. Here is what I said:

Why should Leia be constantly talking about the destruction of Alderaan and the deaths of her family (especially her parents), not just throughout Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, but also throughout the other films, including The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi?

First, unless you only join Star Wars while it’s in progress - say, when Luke Skywalker suddenly opens Cell 2187 and Princess Leia stares, half annoyed, half perplexed, at him and says “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” - you already know that:

1. The Death Star destroyed Alderaan and killed the Princess’s adopted family
2. Princess Leia is sad and angry about it
3. Princess Leia hopes to avenge Alderaan’s destruction by getting the stolen Death Star plans to the Rebel base

Second, the story of Star Wars is about Luke Skywalker’s “hero’s journey.” Leia’s story, as well as Han, Chewie’s, Obi-Wan’s, and the droids’ tales, are there to support Luke’s story. A New Hope is not “the Story of Princess Leia,” although her travails are the catalyst for Luke’s adventures.

See this poster? See who the central figure is? Clue: It’s not Leia. She’s in the poster art, yes, but she’s not the film’s protagonist. And Carrie Fisher is third-billed. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

Third, when you are making a movie, every second of screen time counts. There’s no time for unnecessary exposition or characters’ navel-gazing. If you watch the movie carefully. you realize that Leia is upset that her home planet was blown up by the Empire, and that Tarkin blew it up not just to demonstrate the Death Star’s power, but also to break her spirit. Because there are tiny time-jumps in the film, a savvy viewer can infer that Leia grieved for Alderaan and her family between the scene where we see the planet being destroyed and her “rescue” from the detention center by Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca the Wookiee.

I mean, seriously. What do you want George Lucas to do? Have Leia mope throughout the rest of Act Two and her scenes in Act Three of A New Hope?

The film does depict Leia as being a bit somber when she first boards the Millennium Falcon, but Lucas’s main goal as a storyteller is to show her as a wartime leader and not just a typical damsel-in-distress.

As she tells Commander Willard when he attempts to bring up the topic of Alderaan’s destruction:

We have no time for sorrows, Commander. You must use the information in this R-2 unit to help plan the attack- it's our only hope.

In the next two films, the needs of the plot do not require Leia to be “name-dropping’ Alderaan or the deaths of her adoptive family. In The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Leia is far too busy either fighting Imperial stormtroopers and evading the Empire’s fleet that, once again, there’s no time for sorrows.

That’s not to say that Alderaan’s loss does not weigh heavily on Leia’s soul. Indeed, there are a couple of scenes in the Sequel Trilogy, particularly in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, where all of the losses Leia has suffered since the events in A New Hope inform her motivations and actions.

This, by the way, is exactly why franchise movies often need novelizations, especially when it comes to Star Wars. Books often do a better job than films at depicting emotional context because they can delve into the characters’ internal selves (their emotions, their thoughts, their reflections on their actions). Movies, after all, are mostly visual stories that work best when the audience uses its imagination to fill in the gaps that are part and parcel of the medium.