i have a very very specific interpretation of padme & what exactly her problem was and i think her exact situation with her family (very vaguelly defined in canon) is actually massive help with her character. she is pretty much the only major star wars character with living parents (ignoring the sequels here) and in the prequels, you can say shes also the only one who is in her precarious, high-responsibility position seemingly entirely by choice. id say this is why shes judged more harshly but that'd be unfair, it's actually because shes a woman. anyway, not the point of this post. she has a loving family and fond memories of her childhood but she's not close with them anymore. she even had to change her last name to distance herself in order to protect them because of how high-risk her job is. and ofc, as a child queen she had to be autonomous bc the realistic issue with child rulers would be that you are essentially electing their parents, not them. she essentially had to end her childhood to fill that role. and then as a senator, she lived on coruscant and didn't seem to have much time to spend with them. this isn't necessarily dramatic because even in real life many people arent close with their (perfectly healthy & loving) families. but the reason it feels important for padme is because she IS also shown to be very attached to the idea of having a family so its not hard to assume she'd feel some type of way about the absence of it in her life. in rots, her desire for a family is essentially driving her to every decision people find questionable
and speaking of rots, another thing about padme that i dont think gets discussed much is her social isolation. its not just that she had to abandon her family life for her career, most of her handmaidens also moved on with their lives after her terms as queen ended. as a senator, most of the people we see her interacting with are her coworkers and her staff and during the war, a bunch of them also died while she simultaneously got busier & her job got less satisfying. and thats the kind of headspace in which she finds herself pregnant. i think her joy about having the baby absolutely matters, people take it as kind of self evident that a woman would be excited to be a mother but when the pattern for padme is that she was consistently cutting off connections she craved in favour of her career and now there's something that genuinely could kill her career yet she barely even cares, thats important.
my own interpretation of her is that similarly to anakin, she's very attached to the idea of someone that won't leave but while his fears center around death bc that was the thing taking people from his life, padme is scared of having to deprive herself of the love she actually wants and needs in life (as all human beings do). i think on some degree having a secret romance absolutely suits her because despite being inconvenient in many ways, its safe bc no outside pressure or judgement can make her make that cut simply because nobody knows this private indulgence exists. not only could she have had an open relationship if she wanted to (unlike anakin who was supposed to study the celibacy gifset), in the novelisation shes the one convincing anakin that he needs to stay a jedi after hes impulsively declaring he will quit so they can have that baby in peace & her argument is that its what hes meant to do. which, true, i think he'd lose his mind living an unambitious lifestyle but its not the point, the point is that padme is the one being cautious and her argument abt the jedi being his life purpose is completely incompatible with her dreams of raising a family with him in naboo. ignoring that because i dont think stover thought abt padme that much, even in the movie the thing she says to anakin on mustafar is that hes going down a road she cant follow. essentially once again putting her in a position where she has to cut someone out, except now shes also stuck because she already followed him a long way out and she already understands that without that relationship something crucial is missing in her life (plus now career went up in flames too). this is also why i dislike the girlboss take on padme bc i feel like the girlboss agenda is something she genuinely did inflict on herself by building a career around a persona but that persona ended up just costing her genuine life happiness. being a girlboss isnt and never will be sustainable and when you deprive yourself of personal relationships you will just end up weirder about the rare ones that somehow sneak under the radar
like the point is, for me, that i dont think padme was some manic pixie dreamgirl. she was someone who sold her childhood and most of her life in pursuit of ambition which the culture she grew in encouraged & as it often happens, self-sacrifice and self-denial didn't make her happy. she's tragic not just because of the circumstances of events that resulted in her death but because a lot of her turmoil was self inflicted. but even that wasn't really her fault, it was the fault of the system which removes the people like tpm anakin from regard or decisionmaking completely while demanding even people like padme essentially tear themselves apart just to have a shot at changing things. its not just that political power is inaccessible, its that it protects itself and the status quo so strongly that even the people who legally have access and the means have to repeatedly make massive sacrifices just to get anywhere. and then in the end, it wasnt even worth it. padme's belief that love is the key wasn't naivety, it was the lesson she learned during the course of her tragedy
just chiming in again with the fact that in the books, padme self isolates from her remaining handmaidens because she doesn't want them finding out about anakin, intentionally destroying the only support system she has outside of anakin so she can keep him. by the time order 66 comes around, the sunk cost fallacy has wormed its way deeply into her mind. of course she refuses to believe obi-wan until it's too late; of course she begs anakin to run away with her. it's hard to admit someone you love has hurt you - it's even harder to admit that you blew up your own life for the wrong person. our brains are fundamentally wired to resist admitting we made mistakes - so just as anakin scrambles to justify his massacre and betrayal, padme scrambles to justify her prioritization of anakin over her friends, duties, and morality. both of them jump headfirst into denial of reality because neither of them are willing to face the cognitive dissonance of admitting they fucked up.
