Oh What Can It Mean?

Master Clearing drops a clue that Luke is Anakin's son, mentions Leia, maybe somehow Obi-Wan gets a visual and draws them? Yoda and Ara see them, see Leia's resemblance to Padme.

Ara's already been thinking about Force-sensitive adults who weren't found on Search. Ara was found by an AgriCorps Jedi who was only there for farming stuff. Someone asked her what she'd do if her life had been different, Ara says that she'd be a dead infant or toddler because of negative superstitions about Force users in the part of Sphinx where she was born. If she survived, she'd have spent her life hiding her powers and trying to get passage off-worlder to visit the Temple. She thinks that there should be some kind of correspondence course, or series of seminars, or something for those people. Maybe the AgriCorps could take them and help them with their Force abilities.

Either Master Clearing mentions Shmi's death and Anakin's slaughter of the Tuskens and more of Anakin's path to becoming Vader, or it's Ara's previous dealings with slavers and having Force-sensitive adults on the brain, but she realizes that Shmi being alive and safe and free could literally save the galaxy, and also what the fuck was Qui-Gon thinking, leaving the Force-powerful, attached, angry nine-year-old initiate's mother in slavery on Tatooine? (She learns later that he tried, but surely he could have followed up. Then she figures that she should have thought of Anakin's mother as soon as she started thinking about helping Force-sensitive adults who fell through the cracks.)

Whether with complete or incomplete information, Ara and the Jedi who help her (Obi-Wan, Yoda, Si, Windu might have seen shatterpoints of the Tusken massacre or of the ROTS ending on Mustafar) go to Tatooine and offer Shmi her freedom no matter what, but that she could be with and maybe save from the Dark Side her son by moving to an AgriCorps mission in the Chommel Sector (of which Naboo is a part).

Anakin learns of this and as hoped, he decides to join the AgriCorps around time of the events of Faithful Friends. He gets to be near his mom and close (on a cosmic scale) to Padme, and he can experience attachment safely in the Corps. LNF has a crush on Anakin and goes with him. He'll find out about Padme later, but that's a problem for another day. Who knows, maybe they'll be a triad.

Anakin leaving the Temple and Coruscant and Palpatine's influence doesn't save the galaxy all on its own, but it does cause Palpatine to try to turn Obi-Wan instead, and he doesn't fall for it and his support system is there for him.

Ara knew more about Anakin than she wanted to know partly because he was friends with Obi-Wan and sometimes Obi-Wan talked about him, but also because Anakin and LNF were best friends and Palpatine told Anakin who told LNF that LNF *deserved* a relationship with his "mother" despite the non-consensual nature of his conception, giving him up for adoption as an embryo, and not acknowledging any relation to him, LNF still bothered Ara in the Archives and elsewhere at least once a week, so she learned more about their lives than the zero she wanted to know, and her desperation to get LNF out of her line of sight (and ideally off-planet) and inadvertently helps end the Sith, or at least Sidious's lineage. I didn't read the Dooku side-story because my Dooku leaves the Order and lives on Serenno, but he doesn't go Dark Side.