PT Why some people hate "Padme dying of Sadness" ?

The most egregious part of Padme dying from "heartbreak" is that, to some extent, it makes it seem like she abandons her children.

 

With regards to Anakin, the only reason he lasted long enough for Palpatine to arrive and "save" him is because of his will, it was fueled by anger and hate, but it was still his will that kept him alive until Palpatine could get there. Otherwise he should have been dead.

But yes for the rest, Padme, the only woman main character, for some reason lost the will to live, was so heartbroken by Anakin that she dropped dead. I mean I can understand a slow wasting away sort of situation caused by situational depression or suicide caused by trauma but that's not what happened to her. According to the other poster Lucas wanted to make it clear it was Anakin's actions that caused her death, her broken heart and yet, he didn't really commit to that because those things suggest a complete sense of hopelessness and absolutely utter despair, and the very fact that Padme is using her dying breaths to say "there is good in him" says she is not hopeless and completely filled with despair. Even naming her children suggests she has hope.

To commit to it he'd have had to show her as devastated beyond hope, none of this "there is still good in him" but believing he was truly gone and he'd taken everything she cared about with him to the point that she didn't even care about her children. She'd have had to have been a glassy eyed wreck, murmuring about how nothing was left, etc, or something like that anyway. Instead she looked like an otherwise healthy woman in some pain from childbirth and saying "there is still good in him".

It still isn't really a good look to have a woman who had shown immense strength of character just DIE from emotional upset but at least it would be consistent with the idea of her having completely lost the will to live.

I mean a nice easy to way to make sure everyone knows Anakin caused her death is by having it be complications of him having CHOKED her the cause of it. All this did was create ambiguity.

Anakin slaughtered children, twice, but we never really saw it and I really think somehow that allows a lot of people mentally to let Anakin off the hook, to cast the blame other places. It's easy to blame the Jedi for their own genocide when you aren't seeing Anakin slaughter their children. It's easy to let him off the hook when it's the children of the Tuskens who had thus far been shown only as faceless violent creatures and again, when we don't see him striking them down. It's easy to let him off the hook for Padme's death when it's some nebulous "she lost the will to live because she was so upset by what Anakin had done" because ultimately no one can MAKE you lose the will to live.

 

He loses the will to live and lets Vader "kill" him and take over.

Because Bail and the other characters are still alive at the beginning of Episode IV. Padme isn't.

As I've said before, I don't agree with this because I think it's like saying mothers who commit or attempt to commit suicide as a result of post-partum depression are bad mothers.

Yes, that was Vader's will. Surviving as a result of hate and anger is not something to be admired. It is not strength.

 

Then have her die between III and IV. Leila even says, “She died when I was very young” when discussing Padmé on Endor. It doesn’t take a genius to infer that at some point Padmé...died. It’s the same reason we don’t see Ezra Pound or Ahsoka in the OT. In-universe, they’re either dead or in hiding on another planet.

Honestly, this trilogy is infamous for the gratuitous hand-holding and ‘let me spell out the obvious’ that this would’ve been one of those rare moments that we’re allowed to piece it together ourselves. Padmé survived the events of III but is nowhere to be found in IV? Simple. At some point, she died. We could've even gotten a follow-up comic/novel detailing what happened to her after III, maybe showing how she died (likely either in battle or assassination.)

Really, it's OK to allow viewers to use their brains every once in a while, dear movies.

 

well I think you hit the nail on the head with this last statement here. Especially when you take (if you take) all nine movies into account. The events and things that happen to people is so alien to Earth that you can conclude anything and everything is possible, from dark wizards surviving and floating through space and landing on an ancient sith planet with nobody noticing to the most recent canon of Boba Fett surving the sarlacc. Dying of a broken heart in a space opera fairytale is no less silly OR wonderful in the stories greater context.

Also, I have read with assumption on my part droids are to know everything simply because they are machines filled with hundreds of millions of medical data as if they are superior than flesh and blood in the field of medicine. Why? Obi-Wan in AOTC clearly states: 'if droids could THINK there would none be none of us here would there?' the point here, imo, is the medic droids were totally devoid of the emotion of sadness. Machines do not have such emotions, which I think was the real heart and intent of the scene.

Finally, I will add as an aside, I don't think a woman who is dependent on her man is weak or damaging to society anymore than I think a man who is dependent on his woman is weak as long as they work as a team. Which is what marriage should be about. Partners and equal in every way.

 

There are scientific ways of understanding sadness though without delving into the "humanity" of the issue. A sudden drop of serotonin for example. The only way for that scene to make sense is for the robots to have been badly programmed.

My issue is that it's contradictory. She's hopeful enough to tell Obi-Wan that there's still good in Anakin, but she can't muster the strength to not die of sadness for the sake of her kids? Seems way too contrived for story purposes.

Lucas should have just had Padme be catatonic through the child birth and then die without saying a word if that's really what he was getting at. Suggest that Bail and his wife pick out the name Leia and that Owen and Beru pick out the name Luke.

 

you're looking at it from a medical standpoint though, not a life force/soul/whatever you want to call it perspective. SW isn't Trek or other sci-fi shows that places science as the be all and end all. I think the issue here is people are missing the forest for the trees. Lucas wanted to create a fairytale set in space...fairy tales have certain tropes, people may not like those tropes or think they are unhealthy or whatever but it is what it is. OR you can say as you suggested they were crap medic droids.

This I can agree to, the way the scene was executed could have been done better to make it less contrived. But as her dying of a broken heart, I'm alright with it from a story standpoint.

 

But this particular trope (dying of a broken heart) stems from a time before we had the scientific understanding of how sadness can relate to overall health. Using that trope in a setting like Star Wars doesn't make any sense. I'm supposed to believe that they've discovered how to travel faster than light, but they don't understand basic things about body chemistry? That's still a mystery to a medical robot? It doesn't make any sense within the universe.

 

'There's still good in him' she says. It's as if she had followed Anakin through that dark forest called Vader and then found him in some kind of tomb, and then refused to go back out of love, and stay there with him. 'Losing the will to live' would have been a mere side effect of not losing the will to love. The end of that shared arc.

A pregnant woman and her child share the same blood. Padme was not FS...but Luke and Leia were. Was that a part of it? Padme knew something to be true, decades before Luke, and both Luke and Vader shared Padme. 'I can't live without her' says Anakin. She went with him and that's how Anakin lived inside Vader.

So maybe she felt it somehow.
(Shmi was not FS either, but in TPM she often speaks as if she knew. Anakin was meant to this and that. She knew he would come in AOTC, and that made her complete)

'She's completely healthy'+ 'she's lost the will to live'='we're losing her' , when spoken by a droid, and a medical one at that, is weird.

'Reasons we can't explain'. Is he impersonating a deity, just like C3PO the philosopher in ROTJ, the same C3PO who told ANH/TESB with sound effect and everything to those ewoks? That is, is that the voice of Lucas saying 'those science reasons are not the reasons you are looking for, and it's about dramatic reasons and feeling and rhyming'?

 

well I can't tell you what you should or shouldn't believe, but we are talking about a universe where the force exists, yet the majority of people scoff at the idea. Science has not proved it to exist apparently. Just because they have technology light years (sorry for the pun ) ahead of our own means squat in terms of knowledge on Metaphysics or force ghosts. So two things 1) I am suggesting Padme's death wasn't due to any physical medical condition, but a draining of her life force and 2) we can't expect people (including humans) to have the exact type of physiology as us. Unless you are to claim every planet our heroes visit have the exact same structure as Earth (as in oxygen levels) in order for them to walk, talk and run freely without falling ill, or we could survive an environment with two suns etc. We shouldn't (IMHO) treat these people as Earthlings. These people can hop into X-wings without space suits even.

well this we definitely agree with.

 

Maybe it could've. But I also think that's weak and doesn't give us much about the character or her conclusion. Even what you cite, I see as things writing around the movie.

Though I think that's if you think that's the only reason that's happening. I think some may not agree with that.

Even in ROTS, I think that's not on display.

 

My only real problem with Padme dying is "wait a minute... did Leia remember her mother or not???". As I understand it, a person's ability to remember is practically non-existent when they're fresh out of the womb.

 

"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."

 

That "crude matter" still has to obey the laws of science though. Obviously the laws of science in any fantasy setting are different than they are in our world due to the existence of magic, but even the Jedi use scientific instruments to measure medichlorians and stuff like that.

 

I'm pretty sure the Jedi's bodies aren't obeying the laws of physics when they disappear.

 

It's an observable phenomena that can be linked back to the field of energy known as the force. Same as ghosts. Like I already stated, the rules are different in a fantasy setting as opposed to real life, but there are rules none the less. After all, if there was no attempt to even try to sort out a scientific rational due to the existence of the force, there'd be no space ships. So obviously science exists in the GFFA.

 

Anakin slaughtered children, twice, but we never really saw it and I really think somehow that allows a lot of people mentally to let Anakin off the hook, to cast the blame other places

Why not? Star Wars is part science-fiction/part fantasy. Leia has been established as Force sensitive, along with being the sister and daughter of two powerfully Force sensitive individuals. There are certain elements that I would find implausible - like Padme giving up one child and keeping the other for a few years before her death. But Leia experiencing vague memories of a dying mother through the Force in a sci-fi/fantasy saga is not implausible to me. Which is ironic, in a way.

 

Good post here. The SW universe has never fully explained all the rules and there is a lot we have to just accept, like it or not. Like Maul surviving being chopped in half. . Dafuq? Nice catch too about obiwans droid comment and then the droid scene at the end of ROTS regarding Padme.

Marriage wise, I don’t think my wife or I would ever drop dead if the other was gone but I know I’d be sad. I hope she would too.. We are both independent people but IMO certainly rely on each other to be that strong support anchor when needed. We feed off each other and are good friends. Yeah, it ain’t always pretty but we’ve stayed together for 20+ years for some reason. And it ain’t just my extreme handsomeness. .

 

No, you haven't.

 

It is pretty hard to imagine that your husband said to you "I don't like sand" or somehing like that. ))

 

OK, let's continue.

What's your favourite love story in SW?
AOTC?