#And yk thats glucas’s fault more than anything else

[eightbitpale]

Op your tags are so interesting. Because i think that they lend themselves well to a conversation about a tension that i see demonstrated over and over in conversations about Padme - is she written like a character, or is she written like a symbol? And it’s so hard to divorce the two, because both in universe and within the narrative itself she’s positioned as this paragon of idealism, in a way that almost makes her more of a structural feature of the story more than an actual character. Its like, of course she loses the will to live and dies in the end! if she survived then the tragedy wouldn’t be complete. She IS idealism and hope, so of course she dies when hope does.

But from a watsonian perspective, I think people often find her death is unsatisfying within the specific context of the movie because it’s just not foreshadowed properly. She’s propped up as a paragon of truth and justice in order to make her eventual death symbolically significant, but the exact mechanism of her death - profound, personal psychological pain, which is indicative of a nuanced internal struggle - is actually undermined by a characterisation that intentionally flattens her into a moral paragon. When she dies, we understand academically that it makes sense, but despite that it still sort of feels… left of field for her character, who until mustafar has given no real indication of suicidal, nihilistic tendencies.

it is interesting that for all the talk of “fixing” padme and making her “more than a weeping wife”, the idea of padme choosing to die while pregnant remains this huge taboo. post after post about freeing her from sexist writing, and ppl still can’t imagine a padme separate from her children. her ultimate purpose remains motherhood. padme refusing motherhood/being unhappy in motherhood is taken as a total impossibility. it has to be sith life force draining, it has to be the force choke, it has to be bad space gynecologists (??). it can’t be that a mom lost the will to live despite her babies. that doesn’t happen!!