Miramir was a human female who made her living as a junk trader during the time of the New Republic Era. She was the wife of Dathan, who was a cloned being, specifically an artificial Strand-Cast, and considered the "son" of Darth Sidious, the infamous Dark Lord of the Sith and Galactic Emperor. Miramir and Dathan had a Force-sensitive child, a daughter called Rey, who was born in the year 15 ABY. Despite Dathan's lack of connection to the Force, Rey possessed Force-sensitive abilities due to her father's genetic link to the Palpatine bloodline.
Although her family was related to the Dark Lord of the Sith, Miramir and Dathan opted to live in anonymity as junk traders on the desert planet of Jakku. They successfully concealed Rey from Sidious, who intended to use her as a vessel for his spirit, by abandoning her on Jakku in the care of Unkar Plutt. Subsequently, Miramir and her husband were captured and killed by Ochi, a Sith assassin dispatched by the Emperor to retrieve his granddaughter.
During the rise of the New Republic, Miramir entered into marriage with Dathan, who was a cloned "son"—a genetic strandcast—of Galactic Emperor Darth Sidious. The relationship between his clone and Miramir was unexpected by the Emperor, but he sought to continue his bloodline the natural way through it, after genetic experimentation on his template failed to produce a suitable host for his essence. When their daughter, Rey, was born in 15 ABY, she inherited her grandfather's connection to [the Force](/article/the_force], an ability absent in her father.
After Rey's birth on her mother's homeworld, Miramir and Dathan quickly departed, seeking refuge on Jakku. For six years, they lived a life of obscurity, struggling to make ends meet as junk traders and moisture farmers.
The Emperor's intention was to transfer his spirit into his granddaughter's body, abandoning the unstable cloned body that could not contain his power in the dark side of the Force. However, Rey's parents foiled his scheme by going into hiding with their daughter. Determined to reclaim his granddaughter and "punish" her parents for what he perceived as a betrayal, Sidious dispatched his loyal follower, the assassin Ochi, to find them. They chose to settle on Jakku, opting for a life of obscurity on a desert planet to ensure their daughter's safety.
Life was challenging for Rey's family on Jakku, with her mother and father struggling to survive as junk traders. Their efforts to conceal Rey were nearly undone as Ochi closed in on their location. In a desperate move, they left Jakku aboard Ochi's ship, the Bestoon Legacy, entrusting their daughter to Unkar Plutt and compensating him with Dathan's songsteel Sith amulet. Miramir embraced her daughter for the last time, her face partially hidden by a blue shawl. Miramir also took some Aki-Aki beads that were in Plutts possession in hopes of using them to trick Ochi in case he caught them. Rey watched as the Bestoon Legacy departed from Jakku. Knowing her parents were onboard the transport, she tried to free herself from Plutt's grasp while screaming for her parents to not leave her behind.
Subsequently, Miramir and Dathan were apprehended and taken as prisoners by Ochi. During the interrogation, where Ochi pressed them for their daughter's whereabouts, Miramir attempted to mislead Ochi by claiming Rey was not on Jakku and had simply vanished. However, her lie was unacceptable to Sidious's follower. Following his master's orders, he used his dagger to fatally stab Dathan and then Miramir, resulting in their death. As she had predicted, Ochi was tricked by the Aki-Aki beads and traveled to the planet Pasaana. Ochi's subsequent demise on Pasaana ensured Rey remained hidden from her grandfather and the Sith Eternal cult that supported him.
Lando Calrissian and R2-D2 discovered the bodies of Rey's parents, stuffed inside a crate and adrift in space. They recovered the bodies and transported them to the frozen world of Neftali, where they were buried with the assistance of Luke Skywalker and Komat. Because she died holding the Aki-Aki beads she'd obtained from Plutt, Miramir successfully led Ochi to the incorrect conclusion that they had left Rey on Pasaana, leading him to go there in search of her. Upon landing there Ochi began seeing hallucinations of Miramir and Dathan, and his search for Rey on the world was short lived, soon sinking in the world's quicksand shortly after leaving his ship where he remained until his death.
Despite largely forgetting her past, Rey remained on Jakku for years, clinging to the hope of reuniting with her mother and father. During that time, she had nightmares of Miramir and Dathan abandoning her when she was a child. That memory resurfaced several times, once when she visited Takodana, the second shortly after her escape from the Supremacy, and the third during her Jedi training on Ajan Kloss. Following the third occurrence, however, she remembered another forgotten moment from her childhood, in which she found herself in the warm embrace of a woman that she knew to be her mother.
Kylo Ren, the First Order warlord, captured Rey on Takodana and learned about the scavenger's parents through the Force-bond that linked their minds. Based on what he saw of them through a Force vision, Ren concluded that Rey was sired by insignificant junk traders. The desperate conditions of their lives also convinced Ren that they abandoned their daughter, selling Rey for drinking money, and that they were dead and buried in a pauper's grave in the desert of Jakku.
Sidious remembered Rey's mother as the wife of his clone, a "useless creature" he despised for its lack of Force abilities. He revealed to Ren the secret of Rey's lineage as his granddaughter. However, this revelation did not alter Ren's perception of Rey's parents; he continued to view them as insignificant. Nevertheless, he attempted to sway Rey to the dark side by informing her that Sidious, her grandfather, had ordered her parents' execution. Ren's actions triggered the resurfacing of forgotten memories from Rey's childhood, including her last encounter with her parents. Despite possessing qualities of a Jedi, Rey struggled to resist the allure of the dark side. The knowledge that her mother and father were killed on her grandfather's orders caused Rey to develop a desire to avenge them. Ultimately, though, the memory of her parents kept Rey entrenched in the light side of the Force. During the Battle of Exegol, Rey succeeded in destroying her grandfather, preventing the rebirth of the Sith.
Miramir was a young human female characterized by her blonde hair, brown eyes, and fair skin. Like her husband, she deeply loved Rey and was prepared to face death to protect her daughter from Darth Sidious. She chose to live in obscurity to ensure Rey's safety and endured the resulting hardships, living day-to-day on the edge of desperation. With Ochi pursuing her, she made the agonizing decision to leave her daughter behind, but not before embracing her one last time and urging Rey to be brave.
The act of giving her daughter away, even for her safety, brought Rey's mother to tears as they embraced for the final time, both reluctant to let go. She remained defiant in her final moments, refusing to disclose her daughter's location to the Emperor's hunter, even when her life and her husband's were at stake. Despite being dismissed as unimportant and weak by Ren and Sidious, Rey remembered Miramir as someone who was strong enough to keep her daughter safe from her grandfather.
Miramir's initial appearance, though unseen, was in the novelization of the 2015 film Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens. Within the novel, during the sequence illustrating Rey's Force vision on Takodana, she overhears a voice declaring, "Stay here. I'll come back for you," and "I'll come back, sweetheart, I promise." The junior novelization for the subsequent film Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi would incorporate a scene during the events of the film where Rey has a dream of that same voice uttering the same lines once again. Miramir would go on to be depicted in live action in a flashback sequence in the 2019 film Star Wars: Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker, where she was portrayed by Jodie Comer. Her identity was finally revealed in the 2022 novel Shadow of the Sith by Adam Christopher.
Shadow of the Sith confirmed that the words Rey had heard in the vision in The Force Awakens novelization were actually part of her last meeting with Miramir, taking place during the sequence where Dathan and Miramir bid farewell to her. The Rise of Skywalker also sees Kylo Ren claim Mirarmir and Dathan sold Rey off to keep her safe, but Shadow of the Sith instead revealed that she and her husband paid to keep Rey safe. Christopher named the character after Miramar, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand. According to the author, he wanted a fantasy name to go with Miramir's homeworld Hyperkarn, which is mysterious and has a twilight forest. The author typed in the name and switched around some of the letters, and thought the name Miramir had a magical quality, almost Elven. According to the author, Miramir is pronounced "Mirr - Ah - Meer." Christopher has stated he is emotionally moved by her and Dathan's brief appearances in The Rise of Skywalker every time he watches the film.