STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH dir: George Lucas (2005)
Even after she recognizes that, yes, he killed the younglings and he just choked her into unconsciousness, Padme still says, “There’s good in him.” This is also the woman who, when she was already a Senator of the Galactic Republic, heard Anakin confess to killing men, women, and children in his rage, said “ To be angry is to be human.”, then married him like a week later. When he gets angry about her asking him to speak to Palpatine (” Don’t ask me to do that! Make a motion in the senate, where that kind of a request belongs!”), she immediately drops her own concerns and goals, asking him, “What is it? Don’t do this. Don’t shut me out. Let me help you. Hold me. Like you did by the lake on Naboo. So long ago, when there was nothing but our love. No politics, no plotting, no war.” Out of context, as an isolated moment, it’s a romantic embrace between two people who just want a moment to themselves. In context, it’s Padme dropping an incredibly important subject because Anakin gets mad and she’s saying, “Hold me. Like you did on Naboo.” to calm him down, get his thoughts away from the thing that makes him angry. It’s not that Padme doesn’t have the ability to shut Anakin down, because we see her do that in the Rush Clovis arc or when she prioritizes her work over doing what he wants to do. But as Padme loses more and more of her world, as the Republic crumbles, she crumbles with it, until she’s desperate to hang on to something, which means looking past the monstrous things that Anakin does because she loves him so much. Without something greater for her to stand on, I’m not sure how long it would take her before her moral consciousness caught up to her. If it was just her and Anakin, it would certainly take a lot longer. And with the children there, it’s hard to say. It’s pretty clear that the Anakin of canon never connected with the baby Padme was carrying (pretty much every single time she brings the baby up, he either doesn’t respond or changes the subject) and even if he had, he’s really not in ANY KIND OF PLACE to be caring for children. He just murdered a bunch of innocent children, he SHOULD NEVER GET TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR KIDS EVER AGAIN. But does Padme prioritize them over Anakin? Does she try to juggle both? When he lashes out and scares the children, does she put her foot down and say, “CUT THAT SHIT OUT.”? Or does she say, “Daddy’s just under a lot of stress, there’s still good in him.”? Does she try to diffuse the situation by asking him to hold her, instead of forcing him to deal with his mood swings? She couldn’t live for her children, she still saw good in Anakin after he choked her while she was pregnant, could she put their welfare over his? Or would she be forever caught between the two, trying to smooth thing over, nothing else for her to stand on, because the galaxy is on fire and they have to hide from Sidious? I personally like to think that she would. Once the babies were born and they were real, living, breathing little people, she would have them to bolster herself and have a reason to get up again and keep fighting, eventually realizing that she cannot juggle them and Anakin, who is unhinged and should not be around children (or any vulnerable people) until he legitimately gets his shit together. (Or, honestly, I’m not sure he can come back from murdering children, no matter how genuinely sorry he might or might not be. No amount of getting his shit together can fix what he did. It was a Moral Event Horizon for a reason. This comes from a place of legitimate love and adoration for Anakin, a place of sympathy for why he made the choices he did. But also a place of “the whole point was to have a line that could not be crossed back over from” and that means something.) It would break Padme’s heart to do so, it would take her awhile because she’s just so ground down by the loss of the war and the loss of this person she loves so much, but I think she just needed some time and breathing room. The one-two punch really hit her hard, when she’d spent so long desperately, desperately believing that her love could save Anakin. She just never got that time because the loss of him and her entire galaxy was too much at once.
thewillowbends replied:
Technically, the Moral Event Horizon was in AotC. This was just the bigger, uglier collapse of the star, which just left a void that sucks everything in and destroys it. Still salty about her death, though. The least because we never got to see her come to terms with the consequences of her own complicity.
Yeah, agreed. I would have really enjoyed the potential for a story about Padme coming to terms with her involvement and complicity in everything that happened, especially the myriad of warning signs that only she knew about and ignored–she knew what happened with the Sand People children, she knew about his dreams that were like the ones of his mother, but she just let it go when he didn’t want to talk about it. And I would have enjoyed it a lot because one thing I can never quite wrap my head around is Padme’s reaction/lack of reaction to Anakin murdering the Tusken children. I get pieces of it–they’re on a planet where she knows the rules are different, the Republic’s laws don’t reach out here, she knows that after TPM. She knows that he’s reacting out of grief, she can feel how hurt he is and desperate he is for comfort. I get that she’s deeply compassionate for this person that she’s getting swept up into a romantic whirlwind with. But how can she justify that he murdered children and not be alarmed by this? It wasn’t a Jedi thing, where he’s stopping criminals with lethal force, because he specifically differentiates it from killing the ones that tortured his mother–the women and children too. What’s her mindset when she hears that he murdered innocent children that gets her to the reaction of, “To be angry is human.”? I feel like a story set post-ROTS, where she has to come to terms with that she still sees good in him, but also has to recognize that this didn’t come from nowhere, that this has always been part of him, could have been REALLY FASCINATING. I get that George probably wanted her story wrapped up at the end of ROTS, rather than having a messy loose end, but I really wish it was something that could have been dealt with in another story because, honestly, Padme deserves a story about her and her involvement in the epic, central events of Star Wars.
