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@theneutralmime

I think my personal view on Padme is that she was introduced as a really interesting character who then sort-of got swallowed by the romance and Anakin's story taking more and more precedence over her own development. Lucas said a few times that TPM is, in many ways, Padme's story more than anybody else's. Which is cool, but it means that when she sort-of disappears into being nothing more than a catalyst for Anakin's fall and Luke/Leia's incubator, it feels a little strange and jarring. The Padme of ROTS no longer feels like the interesting character we had in TPM. Even in AOTC, most of her interesting character development scenes (like meeting her family, her speech about the war, even just the extended arrival on Naboo where she talks about how she set aside her dreams of a family to continue a career of service) got cut in favor of (presumably) focusing more on the romance and how that affects Anakin.

Padme is someone who got introduced in TPM as a person who wanted to avoid violence as much as possible, she tends to play things safe because she believes it's the better political choice to make, but by the end of the movie she's learned that sometimes she just has to trust her instincts and do what she believes is right (this is the whole point of her being on Tatooine with Qui-Gon and seeing him insist on continuing with the podrace idea and the way this works out for him leading to Padme then choosing to approach the Gungans for aid in taking her planet back by force, a plan NOBODY ELSE believes in but her). So they take Padme on this journey where she becomes someone who trust herself and her instincts above anyone else, but who also deeply cares about doing the right thing to help the most people which is why she's in politics at all.

When we get to AOTC, she's continued that into her senator years and apparently only gotten even more reckless with age. But when her feelings for Anakin come into conflict with what she knows to be her duty, she has to make a choice. Does she "follow her instincts" and do what she wants, or does she continue to make that sacrifice because it's the right thing to do? And in the end, she makes the selfish choice.

My problem with what happens in AOTC is two fold. For one, I don't think it does NEARLY enough to convince me about why Padme likes Anakin enough to throw away her morals for him. The overall journey Padme is taking in this film I think is fine, but I don't think the chemistry between them works and I think the romance has aged like milk, which leaves me just kind-of wondering why Padme would risk SO MUCH for... a dude who can't even be considerate enough to respect her boundaries and who she believes makes jokes about fascism and dictatorships (or more accurately, who she has to CONVINCE HERSELF would make jokes about fascism and dictatorship so that she doesn't have to come up against the much more uncomfortable truth that it's not a joke to him at all). Anakin is creepy, insensitive, and sometimes almost unkind to Padme all throughout AOTC, when I THINK he's intended to come off as awkward but charming, enough to make Padme feel sort-of "young again" (I know she's only 24 in this movie, but she hasn't allowed herself to really ACT young for probably about 10 years) in a way that sweeps her off her feet a little. The romance doesn't work, it just doesn't, and I think a LOT of people would agree with me that it doesn't work even if we might not all agree on why that is. The editing isn't good, the dialogue is clunky, the chemistry is practically nonexistent. So when Padme makes her big declaration about how she loves him so much and then marries him, I find it hard to believe, and that is a problem for the rest of the narrative of the Prequel Trilogy.

The other problem I have with AOTC is that Padme is told to us to be a very MORAL person, someone who believes very deeply in doing the right thing and gets righteously upset at people being mistreated. She's someone who ends up seeing Jar Jar more kindly than almost anyone else and is capable of extending that experience with him to the rest of his people enough that she goes to make a deal with them that allows the Gungans better representation and treatment. She gets upset when she realizes slavery still exists on Tatooine and always treats Anakin and Shmi very kindly. She is incredibly upset by the possibility that her people on Naboo could be suffering and dying at the hands of the Trade Federation, enough that she ultimately decides to leave the Senate behind and find her own solution. She barely is willing to leave Coruscant in AOTC for her own protection because she doesn't want to leave before the big vote about whether they're going to go to war against the Separatists or not. And so I have a hard time reconciling that person with the person in AOTC who hears Anakin advocate for a dictatorship and chooses to laugh it off, or the person who hears Anakin say he murdered an entire village of Tuskens and not only chooses to COMFORT HIM about it, but basically CONDONES what he's done by saying it's only human, and then MARRIES HIM. The moral Padme who cares deeply about people seems incongruous with the one who falls in love with and marries Anakin. Fewer people might agree with me on this one since it requires being critical of Anakin, but I think there'd still be a solid group of people who'd agree that this just doesn't seem to match up.

So by the time those two things come together, that interesting journey of this person who wanted to avoid violence as much as possible but had to learn to follow her instincts if she wanted to get anything done starting to give in to selfish desires because she's sacrificed most of her life to serving her people kind-of... disappears. Because I don't understand why she even HAS desires for Anakin, selfish or otherwise, and loving Anakin by the end of AOTC requires her to be so immoral that it feels out of character for her. I don't think the romance INHERENTLY ruined Padme's character at all, but I do think it was mishandled and ended up causing some unfortunate implications about her with the contradictions that exist due to it being a badly written romance.

I like that Padme is, in some ways, almost equally as selfish as Anakin is. She's giving up her morals to marry him just like she is, her job makes this relationship just as forbidden as his does (more so almost, since the Jedi clearly KNOW about the relationship to some degree and don't do anything to actually break them up until Clovis happens and Obi-Wan feels the need to step in a little more and even with THAT they clearly are still aware of the relationship having continued and don't do anything about it, while Padme believes that if the Queen found out about her pregnancy in ROTS that she wouldn't be allowed to serve on the Senate). I like the idea of Padme paralleling Anakin in this, that she starts off such a moral person and that it isn't Anakin himself who causes her to start veering towards selfishness, but the invasion of Naboo and the corruption of the Senate leaving her feeling like she has no choice but to do what SHE believes to be right. And she IS right in that instance, but the implication we get in AOTC is that she's kind-of gotten... worse since then. She follows her instincts no matter what and it leads her to reckless places, up to and including a marriage to a Jedi that is forbidden to her. I even like that Padme is SO selfishly invested in this relationship that she's willing to lie to Obi-Wan to protect Anakin from committing a genocide and then begging him to run away with her so he can escape justice rather than facing the possibility that this is WHO HE IS and she's just been able to ignore it up until now.

I actually like that and think that that's interesting as a character, this... devolution that she has throughout the trilogy in parallel to Anakin and the Senate themselves. She's an immensely flawed person and her connections to the other narratives about how good things go bad can't be a coincidence.

But what sucks is that, over time, Padme has kind-of ended up getting interpreted as this person who was above those kinds of flaws, who wasn't selfish, who WOULD put her duty over her desires. People see Padme as this person who did everything RIGHT and just ended up an unfortunate tragic victim of it like the Jedi when that just... isn't true. And I think it's a reaction to how contradictory Padme's actions (especially in AOTC) seem to be to her character from TPM to just defend her as being RIGHT to be in a relationship with the person she loved despite the reasons for it being forbidden, as being RIGHT to defend Anakin against Obi-Wan's accusations in ROTS, as being RIGHT to prioritize Anakin's comfort instead of condemning what he did to the Tuskens in AOTC. But it misses that Padme isn't just the catalyst for Anakin's choices, she's not just this perfect thing he couldn't live without, she's someone who ENABLED those choices by being selfish herself. She's ALSO someone who started off with such good intentions, such lofty ideals, and was brought low by greed and selfishness and an unwillingness to be mindful about herself and her own desires. Padme might not have ultimately caused a genocide as a result of her selfishness, but it doesn't mean she WASN'T selfish in her choices and that her selfishness helped lead Anakin down a bad path just as much as Palpatine's machinations did. Anakin's choices are obviously still his own and not Padme's FAULT, but I find it frustrating when people try to exonerate Padme of all responsibility for what ultimately happened and pretend like she never did anything wrong in this story, that her love was pure and selfless and free of any attachment.

So on paper, I LIKE Padme's arc and I find it fascinating and the romance is necessary for that arc, but I do think the romance part of it was mishandled badly to the point that it makes Padme feel contradictory and incomplete and underdeveloped. Like if I'm supposed to believe Padme is willing to set aside jokes about dictatorship and the massacre of an entire village of Tuskens when I've been repeatedly told that she's a moral person who cares about humanitarian issues above anything else, I need more than just "this pretty boy is kinda dorky and sweet sometimes." I need know what would DRIVE her to pursue a relationship she knows is forbidden for a reason with a man who is pretty clearly unstable and almost dangerously obsessed with her. What insecurity is making a relationship with Anakin seem so immensely compelling to her, let alone a MARRIAGE.

So either I think the romance needed to be a little more... romantic and eliminate the things like the jokes about dictatorships and the Tusken massacre so Padme doesn't seem like a complete idiot who believes it's okay to murder people so long as those people are Tuskens, or Padme needed to be more explicitly someone who was a little corrupt herself so that Padme being okay with murdering Tuskens and jokes about dictatorship doesn't feel so out of character for her. Or both, maybe a little of both. She's corrupt enough to enter into a relationship with someone she knows she shouldn't without giving up her position as a senator because it's what gives her power, but she's not SO corrupt that murder of an entire village down to the last child is okay so perhaps leave that bit out.

Padme is a character I REALLY loved as a kid when I first watched the Prequels (which were the first Star Wars films I EVER saw) and so I still really like her generally due to pure nostalgia, but my feelings on her have gotten far more complex as I think about her and her narrative more critically.

Ahsoka I think works fine right up until you get to the Ahsoka show where she's just blatantly and wildly out of character and completely flat at the same time. There's things I wish were done a little differently in TCW for my own personal taste, but I think that generally the idea of Ahsoka as someone who only really knew Anakin through the context of war and as a child actually does work. Some of his more violent outbursts can be more easily explained away through the context of the situation as well as a child's sort-of more naive outlook on the adults around them. Ahsoka also never sees him do anything as heinous as the Tusken massacre or make jokes about dictatorships (at least none that I can remember), so unlike Padme, she's not ever blatantly ignoring anything that should be a massive fucking red flag. Well, there's the abusive training from TOTJ, if we choose to consider that canon, which I think Filoni was technically on the fence about. But even that is something that seems to not cause any long-term damage and that Anakin tells her is for her own protection, so it's easier to set aside perhaps than the massacre of an entire village down to the last child.

What makes the Ahsoka show frustrating is that it doesn't ALLOW HER to have an adult perspective on it where she looks back and sees all of the things her child self wouldn't have been able to notice. She never looks back and sees the outbursts of violence or some of his more unorthodox comments about the Jedi as the warning signals that they were. She elects instead to IGNORE everything that he's done in order to double down on the opinion she'd held as a child (and that she'd been able to KEEP up until Malachor) that Anakin was a genuinely good person overall rather than acknowledging that while Anakin had good MOMENTS, he was in fact a bad person and a bad teacher, and she can only move forward if she LETS HIM GO. Ahsoka deserved that and now she'll never get it and it sucks.

Obi-Wan I sort-of disagree with you on in that I don't think Obi-Wan's ever BLIND to his faults. I think this is part of a major misconception of his character that a lot of people seem to share. But Obi-Wan spends like all of AOTC being VERY aware of Anakin's faults and has to figure out how to let go of his worries in order to have faith that Anakin has learned enough to fix and learn from his own mistakes. So by ROTS, it's not that he's blind to Anakin's faults at all, he's just chosen to have faith that even when Anakin stumbles, he'll always pick himself back up again. We see this most evidently in his reaction to Anakin's temper tantrum in the Council chambers about not being made a master where he's clearly disappointed in Anakin's behavior, but he later tells Anakin that despite that, he's still ON HIS SIDE and tries to give Anakin guidance on the situation. He takes Anakin's apology later as a sign that Anakin is sort-of figuring things out a little more, but he is uh. Wrong. Anakin's apology is sort-of half-assed AT BEST, but I can see where Obi-Wan would at least see it as good first step in the right direction. But I don't see Obi-Wan's faith in this film (or in TCW) as a flaw or a blindness because he cares too much about Anakin. It's his STRENGTH. Much like the Jedi themselves, just because his faith was betrayed and misplaced doesn't mean that he was wrong to decide to have faith in the first place. It was STILL the right, healthy choice to make.

The guilt we see him have in the Kenobi show is more a product of the uncertainty surrounding why Anakin did what he did than it is about Obi-Wan caring too much about Anakin to handle what he did. I think if Obi-Wan had KNOWN about Palpatine, and Padme, and the visions, and how all of those things came together, he might've had an easier time of it. But he knows VERY VERY LITTLE about why Anakin is making the choices he's making, and in that uncertainty, the easiest thing to do is blame HIMSELF. Especially since, at the beginning of the show, he believes Anakin to be dead. In some ways, it might feel easier to blame himself than it is to blame Anakin or even Palpatine. And this ISN'T healthy, but I don't think it's necessarily a problem because he blinds himself to Anakin's faults. His journey at the end is about accepting that he may NEVER know why Anakin did what he did, that there might not have BEEN anything he could've done differently or better to cause a different outcome, and that there is likely nothing he CAN DO to keep Luke and Leia from going down the same path. All he can do is have faith again, faith that he did the right thing by giving Luke and Leia to the Larses and Organas, faith that the Larses and Organas will raise Luke and Leia well, faith that Luke and Leia will not be like Anakin and repeat his mistakes.

Rex is definitely just a product of not knowing the truth. I imagine he'd have a LOT less positive gushy things to say about Anakin if he knew Anakin was the one who betrayed them all and became Darth Vader. I'm STILL waiting for someone to show us Rex's reaction to that because I would maybe DIE to see Rex react to finally discovering that particular truth. With what we do have though, I think Rex is mostly come to peace with what's happened to him. I don't think it's that he's choosing to ignore the things that hurt so much as that he's gotten himself to a place where he CAN just... let himself remember good moments with people he'd cared about. The end of it sucked and there were moments in the middle that sucked, too, but there are still a lot of good memories acquired during the war, good people he'd met, good lessons learned. Rex seems like he's in a pretty healthy place by Rebels, having had to live with the truth about the chips for a while and do what he can to live his life as happily as possible with what's left of his family. He can't do anything to change what happened, so he's let it go. He obviously does still have some PTSD from the war, that's always going to be true, but he genuinely seems like one of the most healthy characters in Rebels despite how shit his life has been.

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