This is not going to be a blog about how Leia resembles more her father than her mother physically since there's already an interesting blog about it here, nor a blog about how Leia's temper is a lot like her father, cause there is a brilliant blog about it here, with very interesting comments in both of them.

This blog is about Leia, her reaction when finding out the truth about her family, and how she deals with it all...

We don't see much of her reaction on ROTJ, but from what we see... she doesn't have a problem with Luke's being Darth Vader's son, Luke's a great guy no matter who his father is, and I'm sure she likes the idea of having a brother (after having her planet blown up and all that...), but putting both facts together make her Vader's daughter... and though she won't be giving it too much thought till after blowing up the Second Death Star, it's not something she's going to like.

When we first meet Leia she's the princess of Alderaan, an Imperial senator and a Rebel against the Empire. We'll have to wait for a while till we get some more information about Leia's former encounters with Vader pre-ANH (if the EU is going to cover it at all), but she clearly hates him as the crushing hand of the Emperor. Besides, the guy with the deep voice, the mechanical breathing and the dark suit doesn't look like someone you'd like to have as your next door neighbour... let alone your father... After being tortured for information and see her planet blown up she escapes with her brother and future husband, though that she doesn't know at the time, and end up blowing up the first Death Star...

Next time we see her, she's attacked by her father in the Rebel base where she's hiding with her brother and future husband, flees the base and is pursued by her father, then get captured and her boyfriend is tortured and frozen in carbonite by her father... that also cuts her brother's hand...

And in ROTJ, she finds out that the guy that represents all evil done to the galaxy (along with the Emperor) is her father... That doesn't sound like an easy thing to deal with, but if you brother insists than your father has redeemed himself by killing the Emperor and starts talking about Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader as two parts of the same person, one good and one bad... Wouldn't you raise an eyebrow at that and simply decide to ignore it and refuse to accept it? That's what Leia did...

Till we start on the EU, and Anakin Skywalker decides to ask his daughter to forgive him and to accept her heritage, where she came from and what's within her... On Truce At Bakura we see Leia refusing to forgive her father, refusing to accept that he wasn't always a monster and that not everything on her father's side of the family had to be dark and dangerous. She doesn't want to be trained as a Jedi by her brother because she fears what she may become... She fears that the darkness in Anakin Skywalker's legacy will overcome any good that could be in that same legacy...

On Tatooine Ghost we see her walking the path of acceptance of her legacy, she starts understanding that evil can come from good, that her father didn't come out of the womb with the dark helmet and the mechanical breathing... She starts seeing her father as a kid, through the eyes of her grandmother, and she finally decides to accept the Skywalker legacy, to stop hating her father, and to try and understand what can turn a good person into a mindless monster... She stops refusing to have kids or training herself in the Jedi arts...

And that leads us to where she fully embraces her legacy as the daughter of Vader. Do you really think the same Leia that in Truce at Bakura hated her father would have accepted the Mal'ary'ush title the Noghri gave her in the Thrawn trilogy? Even with her life at risk, she would have never tolerated anyone to call her "the Lady Vader"... But after learning more about her father, she had finally accepted that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were part of her heritage, part of what she was, and a lesson she'd better learn from if she didn't want history to repeat itself.

The last step on embracing fully her heritage was naming her younger son after his father... little Anakin Solo.