PT Why do people Hate Padme's reaction to Anakins massacre?

I am firstly gonna say people use that scene and reaction as a stupid excuse to hate on Padmes character. Padme is one of the most unique characters created in the SW universe and deserves so much more than what the fandom and Lucasfilm gives to her.

Anyway, as the thread suggests, why do people hate it for? Seriously, people need to actually think about the scenario and the relationship between Anakin and Padme. Padme cares for Anakin deeply, ever since TPM. After his mothers death, Padme knew that Anakin needed her more than ever, and she wanted to be there for him. When he admits to the slaughtering of the Tusken Raiders he's in a fit of rage, consumed by guilt and grief, he knows what he did was wrong and she sees that.

Do you expect her to tell him what you did was wrong? She KNOWS that Anakin already knows what he done was wrong (I.E 'I'm a Jedi, I'm better than this"). She isn't going to stand there and scold him, make him feel even more horrible than he currently is feeling. Padme's character is one of compassion, empathy and kindness, and that's what she's always shown to Anakin. Her telling Anakin off wouldn't do any favours to him, he needed her to be there for him and console him and that's what she did.

 

Because everybody has a spouse that has just returned from a killing spree during their first date and they know exactly how they reacted and it wasn't like Padme.

I think it happened on one of the episodes of the Bachelorette as well.

Why didn't Raffi get a rose?
Why couldn't you save him?
I know I would have!

Sometimes there are guys no one can pick
You're not the end-all, Ani.

Well, I should be!
Someday I will be.
I will be the most wanted bachelor ever.
I promise you.
I will even learn to stop people from being sent home.
It's all Chris Harrison's fault!
He's jealous!
He's holding me back!

What's wrong, Ani?

I killed them.
I killed them all.
They're dead.
Every single one of them.
And not just the producers...
but the camera crew...
and their interns too.
They're like Paparazzi ...
and I slaughtered them like Paparazzi!
I hate them!

To be angry is to be human.

I'm a Bachelor.
I know I'm better than this.

... He got a rose that night. He made it to the final show, but wasn't picked.

 

I dont think that bachelorette example is a fair comparison as it really makes the entire scene seem very shallow, Anakins mother had just died due to these raiders. And she didn't die quickly, they tortured her, used her for their own sadistic enjoyment. They made her suffer.

Padme saw her friend hitting rock bottom, and at that moment she let her own compassion and feelings dictate her actions rather than logic, which is evident in most if not all of her choices concerning Anakin. Padme saw the worst in him and accepted him, because in her eyes the good in him outweighed all. Did it cost her in the end? Dearly. But that's the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala. Star crossed lovers who never stood a chance.

 

Some people are so used to exposition in movies that they dont understand or expect subtext.

 

I dunno, if my best friend confessed that he slaughtered women and children, I’d be more than a little miffed. Yes, he’s obviously regretful and hurt by what he’s done, but I would definitely think he’d need to get counseling. Hell, I’d help him get that counseling he obviously needs. Instead she just went, “To be angry is to be human” and does apparently nothing to help him.

I get why she didn’t scold him, I’m just thinking she could’ve done more to help him.

 

Her performance just seems so klunky and wooden in that scene , and she's not helped by her dialogue either .

 

I wouldn’t imagine many of us have friends and allies that have killed with a plasma blade, either. In relation to SW world, it’s not uncommon for Jedi (or anyone really) to have killed people- so I never understand why people hold the same morality in real life as they do in the series.

On the other hand, I think Padme was a detrimental enabler in her relationship with Anakin. But I think that’s just part of their tragic love story.

 

It's possible that Padme feels sorry for Anakin and his mother more so than for the Tuskens who all the locals consider to be animals too? Not saying that she's right but that's just a plausible POV given the circumstances.

 

I've always found her reaction appropriate. Padme was influenced by her own feelings towards Anakin, and in turn let herself accept the trauma that occurred on a distant, alien world to exist in a disconnected manner from what she accepts as her known life on Coruscant. Of course that wasn't so smart in the long run, but then again this is a tragic tale, in a genre where violence doesn't quite automatically operate on the same bleak terms as in more naturalistic forms of fiction. Thus I think Anakin's deeds against the Tuskens is allowed to be something of a "turn of events" in Padme's mind rather than an unarguable act of a person already beyond redemption. Similarly, the OT heroes can kill countless Empire redshirts without suffering any psychological fallout.

 

Also, droids are people too (where is @CIS Droid when you need him?)

 

Padme was a leader. She understood the brutalities of war. The Tuskans were at war with the civilized people of Tatooine. Padme herself had witnessed a group of Tuskans try to murder Anakin, a mere boy, for sport. They kidnapped and murdered his mother. Retaliation is perhaps understood by Padme. I'm not sure if Anakin carrying out the attack with his own hands and confessing it openly makes him more respectable or less. The great nations of earth carry out equally egregious attacks, also in the name of vengeance, that kill and maim innocent civlians on scales barely comprehensible. Who takes the blame for those deaths?

Anakin's response to his mother's death was at its core extremely human. Rage against the unjust loss of a loved one. I think this actually strengthened Padme's desire for Anakin, to see the depth of his love for those closest to him.

 

If you see your friend in such an angry state, screaming in tears while throwing objects around the first thing you want to do is try to calm them down and make them feel better. You wouldnt straight away throw them into your car and book an appointment to your nearest counsellor. You'd sit with them, console them and try to make them feel better. And that's what Padme done.

 

Pretty much this. Padme was like 10 years older than Anakin, and intelligent enough that she was voted queen as a teenager... she should have realized that something had broken inside him and that he needed professional help to fix it....

Yes, console him... but not star a romantic and sexual relationship with him while he is under such distress. Also, did Padme ever try to do anything to help Anakin manage his mental state? I mean later, once he calmed down...

Anyways, I don't hate Padme, but I found their relationship cringe-worthy: Padme fell in love with a boy ten years younger than she was who mostly whined and fumed about his father figure like a 13 years old would, and later went in murderous rampage, killing a bunch of children... and I was like "what does she see in him?!".

Their behaviour would have worked better if both of them were like 13 or 15 years old.

 

Padme is about 4 years older.

"and later went in murderous rampage, killing a bunch of children"

You're not painting the full picture here...

 

Um Padme was 5 years older than him, and your description of their relationship is very condensed, brief and shallow. Padme did not start a relationship with him after his mothers death, she continuously rejected his advances till they were both about to be publicly executed, then she pledged her love to him.

 

I keep forgetting that they made Padme a 14 years old in the novelization...

But anyways, how many hours or days passed in between their visit to Tatooine and the Battle of Geonosis? Not many, I think...

 

The *Sand People* were just mad because the encroaching moisture farmers had killed a couple of their mothers that were simply trying to get some water for their kids on the land they still believed their own.

I can totally understand them taking it out on a moisture farmer, Shmi. She kind of had it coming. She knew the stakes when she decided to become a moisture farmer.

You'd think a Senator would understand this. It's kinda what they talk about all day.

 

The novelization is not canon. However Padme being 14 years at the time of TPM and Anakin being 9 is canon. The only reference to anything '10 years' in the films is the gap between TPM and AOTC.

Time is relative in Star Wars. We do not know how long it takes for a ship to go off a planet, we do not know how long it takes for a ship to travel to and from another planet, and we do not know how long it takes to travel to and from different systems.

 

The films give us things that can help us deduce.

OB1 was just captured while talking to the Jedi Council. Anakin learned about it immediately thereafter. They took off for Geonsis w/o hesitation immediately as well.

Yoda shows up shortly thereafter after a side trip to Kamino.

So all of that happened rather quickly.

 

It 'happened quickly' because the film quickly cut to the beginning to the end of trip there. They're not going to film the entire space journey to the planet, that'd just be boring.

It's like in a movie where a character is going from one country to another, let's say from America to Australia. Approximately it's 23 hours, assuming its a direct flight. The filmmaker won't film all 23 hours. They'll cut from the character boarding the plan to the character arriving. To the audience it feels like a short time, when in reality a significant portion of time has passed. The same can be said here. It could of taken 1 day, 2 days or 3 days to get from Tatooine to Geonosis. We don't know, because time is SW space is rarely ever explicitly mentioned, but can be assumed.

Also you missed key events from the taking off to straight away Yoda coming to save the day
>Anakin and Padme arrive and go through the Droid Factory
>They are caught, arrested and put on trial. Sentenced to public execution
>Execution commenced onto Anakin, Padme Obiwan.
>Mace Windu arrives with the Jedi to rescue them, the battle begins.
>Yoda arrives after they are heavily out numbered.

 

Actually, there's a comparatively equal trip between the Yoda travel and Anakin travel.
Tatooine, Geonosis and Kamino are all infinitely closer than Yoda's Coruscant to Kamino travel.
So Coruscant to Kamino is > Tatooine to Geonisis and Kamino to Geonsis

If you zero out the much closer distance of T to G and K to G as essentially being equal, then you have
Yoda's C to K = Anakin's G arrival to Yoda's G arrival.

Anakin's G arrival to Yoda's G arrival was clearly a matter of hours, but absolutely not more than a day

Therefore Yoda's C to K arrival is only a matter of hours

This makes the Yoda's K to G and Anakin's T to G less than a matter of hours.

So we definitely are only talk a day or two at most.

 

This cannot be stressed enough!! I gotta say though that without Lucas and all the people that worked on the character, Padmè's character would have been lost in translation in the movies too had it been up to Portman alone; I can understand why people, the fandom and Lucasfilm struggle with her as time passes. Still that's not an excuse for what has been done with her.

Exactly! Without her there Vader would have existed much earlier in my opinion. Even the AOTC novel alludes to this:

It also seems as if Anakin seems ashamed for feeling pure anger for the first time (and acting horribly on it )a little further on as if the emotion is alien to him due to his training as a Jedi. I've seen people call her an enabler, a blind fool that ignores that the Tuskens I are living beings too- I believe that the whole premise of Anakin's fall makes people uncomfortable as it stems from things we all struggle with and what is often lost is that she acted more Jedi like in that moment than OW in the whole movie; allowing Ani to forgive himself through her understanding.

Welcome to the Boards!

 

Ohh yes this is true

 

There's also accountability. If he's truly ashamed, sorry and wanting to address it head on, he needed to report this to the Jedi Council. She should have told him this.

Perhaps a soldier will admit to his spouse that they did more than kill *the enemy* but killed innocent bystanders that were not even close to being permitted by the rules of engagement (and in this case, even the enemy really wasn't permitted). Some might not want to report it to authorities. But we aren't talking about a victimless crime here. That is just an outright inappropriate course of action. Can you empathize with the spouse's circumstances? Maybe (probably not though). But empathy doesn't make things right. Empathy is supposed to point you to the right course of action, not the opposite.

For the record, I don't hate Anakin-Padme romance scenes as much as others. For Anakin, it is his first and only love interest. My first serious love interest was a mess of stupid conversation. And I was fully aware of it in real time, asking myself "why am I talking about this with her? This is not good conversation." But that awareness only made it worse. And that's exactly why I was saying "less than smooth" things to her. I was nervous and was thinking about thinking instead of just conversing. And I naturally conversed with the girls easier than the guys. But there was nothing natural about my nerves that this conversation "had to go right".

But that girl never told me she murdered innocent children. I have a feeling my insane infatuation would have turned into insane disgust.

 

Thank you
Agree 100% w/ what you said, I wish ppl would realize it too