Well, a space rat ate half his brain and is currently living in his head. I'd call that a plausible justification for a lapse in memory. What caught my attention was his repeating the exact same phrase, like it was a conditioned response (see also: "good soldiers follow orders".)
Threepio also had a block that prevented him from divulging much of anything about Leia, hence him feigning ignorance when Luke asked who she was.
Is that established anywhere in canon or is it an assumption?
It's basically implied by the movie anyway. I mean one of the first things he says in the movie is "There will be no escape for the Princess this time!", then later on when look is asking who the hologram is of, suddenly it's "I'm afraid I'm not quite sure Sir . . . ".
I guess I must have assumed that 3PO's behavior in the film was an artifact of his discarded earlier characterization.
One possibility is that it could be an older dialect, similar to how Old or Middle English is a bit off from modern English.
With as many languages as C3PO knows, he doesn't necessarily *need* to have the language explicitly programmed. It's possible he could just figure it out based on similar languages. A specific block would be the only way to prevent that. Remember, he didn't exactly know the Ewok language ("primitive dialect"), and he thought the Falcon also had a peculiar dialect, so the skills may be there.
bsky.app
This stood out to me before repeated the same words, though I only recalled it when I rewatched the latter confrontation the second time. The show initially, including the first uttering by the droid, intended to depict At Attin as a boring no-place nobody knows or cares about. The moment it was revealed to be a legend, all that changed. So it wasn't just that the droid said the same thing, but in the new context (even retroactively rewatching the first phrase recontextualised*), this started to sound like the droid carries a lot of secrets instead. I kind of appreciate how “can't say I remember no At Attin” seems to successfully reinforce both meanings. It's not which theory is more likely or possible, is that SM-33 is telling you far less than you think he is.
Then you make the message encrypted and impossible to break without a cipher. It's a made up story after all, and you can do whatever you choose. The storyteller's here chose to make this whole subplot as needlessly complicated as possible, but didn't actually think any of it though because they just wanted to do a funny bit where Threepio looses his memory with zero consequences (and still managed to miss the obvious opportunity to reset his memory before the end RotS.) The language thing is far from the only asinine element in this whole thing; don't even get me started on the dagger's "One-Eyed Willy's Doubloon" functionality.
Read it for yourself; that's not a dialect, it's sentence fragments interrupted by a clear case of "the cat jumped on the keyboard". The words "Republic" and "Great Work" show up several times, but they also show up as incomplete fragments before tailing off into alphabet soup. A clear sign that whatever pre-written copy that they started with, has been hopelessly chopped up and scrambled with a lot of random copy/pasting. Which is fine. It just means they didn't really intend for anyone to get any meaning out if it.
Another nice touch is SM-33's coming back and immediately repeating "Aye!" like a creepy weirdo. Gives one the impression that he's a sylop short of full sabacc, and prone to repeating himself. It allows for either interpretation to at least seem valid at this point.
And that. Also in-universe. Jod now doesn't know if SM-33 just wink-wink told me the children were indeed from At Attin or not, but the droid said it in a way that should have reinforced the idea in his head. But we, the audience are still not sure the droid knows.
I was so sure TROS was his first memory reset that I was even sad until it was undone, and didn't realize until a rewatch of ROTS that Bail had his memory wiped there back then.
Yeah, I can't think of any way this one works.
