I’ve been in a portrait mood so here’s some Padme Amidala.
Why they gave her a headband instead of a flower crown is beyond me.
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PadMay 2021 – Day 2: How should Padmé be remembered?
(rocks up a week late with a chai latte) Played fast and loose with the word “should” here and ended up thinking a lot about Imperial propaganda.
Summary: Imperial Supreme Commander Darth Vader is sent to investigate accusations of a university lecturer spreading treasonous Rebel propaganda. A class on the life and work of Naboo’s former Queen Amidala brings back painful memories.
As far as punishments go, it would appear on the face of it that Darth Vader had lucked out. Being sent to assist the ISB might be painfully boring but at least it wasn’t painful. It seemed almost incongruous to the Emperor’s rage at his apprentice, once again, letting the Rebels slip through his fingers.
Vader knew better. Pain, he was used to. Pain, he could tolerate. Wasting his skills and time on pointless political suppression, investigating academics for spreading Rebel lies irked him immensely. The Emperor’s way of reminding him that he was replaceable, disposable.
And to rub salt in his wounds, he was commanded to investigate the faculty at the University of Theed. To be mere clicks away from his beloved’s final resting place was a pointed twist of the knife.
The quicker he got it over with, the quicker he could get back to hunting down the Rebels, so the Sith pushed all thoughts of her out of his mind.
Or at least, that was his intention. Begrudgingly, he followed the ISB Agent into the lecture hall. The Agent was to lead the interrogation, Vader was there to provide leverage.
The class had already started. Fifty pairs of eyes turned on them and the lecturer stopped abruptly.
“Can I help you?” she asked, a strong voice despite the fear spiking through her blood at the sight of Vader.
The Agent gave her shark-tooth smile. “Agent Elliot, ISB. We’ll just be sitting in your lecture today. Making sure everything is up the standards of our great Emperor.”
The way he cocked his head towards Vader made it clear it was not a request.
The lecturer stiffened. “What does education have to do with security?” she asked.
“Sedition,” said the Agent, “is a crime.”
She gave them a flat look. “Fine. Take a seat. Be sure to let us know when the truth runs up against the Emperor’s delicate sensibilities,” she snarked.
Vader felt a brief bit of surprise at her insolence and then almost amused. He really did not like Agent Elliot. There was something about the steel in her eye that made him wonder if all the Naboo were just like that.
They stood at the back of the hall, Elliot pointedly taking notes on his datapad, and Vader glowering, and the lecturer got back to her class.
“Okay hopefully you’ve all read chapters five, nine and ten on the Invasion of Naboo and the Clone Wars.”
There was some half-hearted murmuring across the room. The lecturer rolled her eyes.
“Come on guys. Fine. Does anyone in this room not know who Queen Amidala was?”
There was a smattering of laughter and snorts of disbelief.
Darth Vader didn’t hear the lecturer’s reply because what was left of his body went numb and a distant ringing filled up his ears. He stood frozen as the lecturer set up a holoprojector and suddenly it was her. Her face, lit up and larger than life before his eyes. Her voice breaking through the ringing in his ears and bouncing around his skull.
“Like so many of the people that we tell ourselves we're here to serve, Teckla lives in a district that rarely has electricity and running water as a result of the war.”
Vader could feel his heart stop in his chest. His mind went completely blank. He watched, as if from a very far distance, as the holoprojector floated up off the desk, crumpled up like a piece of flimsi, and then shattered into dust.
Stillness fell over the room as all the students and the lecturer stared at the spot where the holoprojector had sat seconds prior.
The lecturer seemed to recover first, giving herself a little shake and pointedly not looking at Vader.
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got printed copies of this speech on flimsi,” she handed out sheets for students to pass around while they started to whisper to each other, furtive glances in Vader’s direction.“So everyone take a couple of minutes to read the speech and take some notes.”
The students followed their instructions as the lecturer awkwardly scooped up the remains of her holoprojector and deposited them into a bin.
“Okay,” she said at last, “what does this speech tell us about the Clone Wars?”
A handful of students raised their hands, the lecturer pointed to a bothan girl, one of the few non-humans in the class.
“The war was causing lots of suffering and the Senate weren’t doing a good job stopping it. This is why the Emperor had to take over, to ensure peace.”
The lecturer glanced over at where Agent Elliot was standing and didn’t try to hide the roll of her eyes.
“I suppose it could be interpreted that way. Senator Amidala spoke out against corruption in the Senate many times.”
“She didn’t support the war,” said another student, a human boy, “doesn’t that make her a Separatist?”
“And she signed the bill asking the Emperor to hand power back to the Senate. Isn’t that treason?” added his friend.
Another disdainful eye roll in the ISB Agent’s direction as the lecturer trotted out the party line through gritted teeth.
“Senator Amidala was a close, personal friend of the Emperor. The Emperor supports democracy and free speech, but order had to be restored after the war. Senator Amidala was a great leader and surely would have supported the Empire had she lived long enough to see the excellent things it has achieved.”
“Professor?” another student put up her hand. “I was going to do my paper on Senator Amidala and the days around the rise of the Empire but there’s hardly any sources? Should I pick another topic? Do you know how she died?”
Genuine curiosity broke through the lecturer’s stony façade but as she opened her mouth to answer, she yelped and jumped back as her entire desk broke in half.
She stared at the desk. She stared at the rows of students gaping in shock. She stared at Vader.
Her eyes narrowed minutely at the Sith and then, apparently throwing all caution and good sense to the wind, she continued her answer.
“It’s a matter of some… contention,” she started slowly. “Senator Amidala was last seen at her home on Coruscant several hours after the formation of the Empire. She took her personal ship, and left Coruscant. There’s no further sources on where she was or what happened to her.”
The lecture hall felt very cold all of a sudden. Despite the ominous feeling in her gut, the lecturer continued.
“Official Imperial sources reported her death as an act of terrorism by a Jedi. They claim she died a martyr for the Empire.”
“And you don’t think that’s true?” asked a student. It was a fair question. The disbelief was clear in her tone.
The lecturer glanced over again to Vader and the Agent. She shrugged.
“Without any evidence to the contrary, it might as well be true. I think her actions as Queen and as Senator tell us exactly what Amidala would have thought of the Empire.” She ignored the twitch of the Agent’s brow at her tone, and pointed to a student. “Yes, Ilya.”
The class continued, moving on to discuss the boring, political, parts of the Clone Wars which Vader, for one, had no desire to relive.
None of it was new to him anyway, so he allowed himself to zone out the class, gingerly picking through the whirlwind of his thoughts.
Her. Somehow of all the days, of all the classes, they were discussing her.
He briefly mused on whether it was the Force, or his own cursed bad luck. Or, more cynically, if this was engineered by his Master, as part of his punishment.
They remembered her, quoted her speeches and still respected her as a leader, as Queen and as Senator. And yet they knew nothing about her.
They didn’t know that her laughter was musical when she was happy, and a graceless snigger when he made a particularly lewd joke. They didn’t know how the air in a room seemed to change when she walked into it, like all the atoms had ceased moving. Or how it changed again, when she spoke, always uncompromising and direct, like static electricity crackled between her sentences. They didn’t know all the good she could have done. Would have done.
He had robbed the galaxy of her blinding, beautiful presence. She was the only good thing left and he killed her and it was all his fault.
A blaring alarm shook him out of his reverie as students started to pack up their bags and awkwardly file out the door past him, shooting him apprehensive glances as they went.
The girl from before, who had asked… who had asked about that, was loitering behind to approach her teacher.
“Um,” she started, “so what should I do my paper on? So many of the books in the library have been taken out by the new censorship laws, it’s so hard to find good sources.”
The lecturer flashed her student a smile. “It just so happens that the Senator Amidala’s father used to work at this university, he’s an old friend and he dropped off some of the Senator’s old memoirs.”
She went to her bag and pulled out a datapad. “It’s all been copied to the holonet, and,” she rolled her eyes in Vader’s direction, once again demonstrating a remarkable lack of fear for her life, “edited to remove anything that could be interpreted as anti-Imperial. There’s lots of good anecdotes from her time as Senator, and a fair few political essays.”
They started to talk further about the student’s paper but Vader wasn’t listening, his legs moving before he was fully conscious of it, coming to a stop in front of the lecturer and snatching the datapad from her hand. She gave him an unimpressed glare and he was suddenly overcome with a need to explain himself.
“The ISB will need to review this,” he said stiffly, “for evidence.” He abruptly turned on his heel and walked out the room, nearly running over Agent Elliot in the corridor.
“Other than her having an attitude problem, there’s not much to go on here, she’s not distributing illegal material as far as we can see,” said the Agent. “What’s that?” He asked, pointing to the datapad in Vader’s hand.
“Nothing that concerns you,” replied Vader, and stalked away in a flurry of black fabric and disdain.
It wasn’t until he was back in his chambers aboard the Executor that he dared take out the datapad again, too often surrounded by nosy Imperial officials and gossipy stormtroopers.
He flicked it to a random page and at the first line he read, let out a snort of amusement, the sound odd and distorted through his vocoder.
“In a democracy, citizens have a duty to stand up against tyranny. In order to benefit from the rights and freedoms that democracy brings, citizens have an obligation to be vigilant against the rise of authoritarianism.”
This, thought Vader, was definitely not Imperial approved material. Distantly, he wondered if he should report it, this incendiary material was on the holonet, anyone could read it.
People would know what she thought. More would remember her as a traitor.
He preferred to imagine that he could have convinced her, that she would have come to see that the Empire was necessary. But. He quietly knew the truth. She was stalwart in her beliefs and a hell of a lot more stubborn than he was.
She would have been proud to be labelled a traitor by this Empire. She would hate to be remembered as a martyr for it.
She always did have the last word, Vader thought dryly, resolving to conveniently forget about the memoirs being on the holonet, and settled onto a chair to read every word she had written.
Water imagery and symbolism in relation to Padmé Amidala
The last image of Padmé Amidala in ROTS is her funeral. The immediate comparison is to Ophelia from Hamlet, especially with the flowers and water funeral.
While Padmé didn't go mad, her heart was very much broken due to the actions of others. Her death symbolizes the end of the Republic and the watery casket her innocence. The Republic has drowned alongside Padmé.
