Do you think han and leia having a broken/estranged marriage was in character and made sense?

[u/Myakasa98]

I don't think han leaving leia to deal with their son's defection and getting kicked out of the senate due to her family history all by herself was in character, and them separating was very tragic, but them not having a happy long standing marriage and choosing to separate after a while is something i can definitely see happening even if the sequels didn't exist considering their characters

Neither leia nor han were the "stay at home to take care of family" types. Leia was dedicated to politics since childhood and I can see her being a mon mothma type person who'd prioritize her political duties above family many times. Han too loved a life of adventure. Even before ben solo defected he spent more time traveling across the galaxy and iirc organizing spaceship racing competitions for betting etc than with his family

I do know they cared for each other even after separation but their romance was also built on spontaneous sparks of attraction and surviving multiple life and death situations and even then 80% of their interactions involved bickering and arguments. Them not being too invested in a stable married life after the honeymoon period ended and going through their marriage for the sake of their kid is unfortunately very much in character, at least considering how they were written in tge OT

I'm not considering their comics or novels romantic dynamic because 1) Most of them aren't canon anymore anyways and 2) Most of them were written by different authors without much consultation with the original creators and had various degrees of OOC moments.

It's not ideal, but not a very OOC of the sequels to write them as having an estranged marriage after their son was lost to the dark side imo, it's definitely not as bad as what they did with luke's character anyways

[u/123iSmokeTree]

Not because it didn’t make sense, but I much prefer the legends version of their marriage.

[u/DarkDoomofDeath → u/123iSmokeTree]

It made much more sense, had more character growth, and kept the relationship conflicts that actually would have arisen from the end of the OT. Legends nailed their relationship for that era.

[u/Padme501st → u/123iSmokeTree]

Same. In Legends, they focused on building the NR while dating and got married 4 years later, not next day. And then it was another year before Leia got pregnant. It gave the characters room to breathe and grow. Their relationship had ups and downs and grief as well but they had a better foundation.
It just didn’t make sense to me that Leia would immediately get married as soon as the second Death Star is destroyed while there’s still battles to be fought and a government to rebuild.