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

And coupled with the fact that they induced labor, I'm leaning toward the idea that they were the ones who killed her because whoever programmed them must've not accounted for humans. I mean, do we know the species of miners they would've normally worked with? They must be familiar with humans as they had that robot with the scooper-hand-things and seemed to know how to deliver human babies.

 

@DARTHLINK thank you for your earlier post.

@devilinthedetails Thank you as well, I appreciate it. I don't normally divulge that sort of thing but in this case I felt like the depression excuse being bandied about as an explanation for Padme's loss of will to live isn't a fair representation of women or women who suffer from it. Just because someone is depressed does not mean they have nothing to live for or that given a choice they will give up when something gets too hard.

This is just one of those things I think that Lucas didn't really give much weight to with regards to how it might come across when taken with other elements of the saga. He just knew he needed to to get her to the point where Anakin's vision comes to fruition and he forgot about ROTJ/Leia remembering her mother. I also do not think he ever intended for people to diagnose his characters with disorders 15 years later. I just watch the movie without having to break it down based on modern day social cues. The main reason it stuck out like a sore thumb to me was because my daughter was only 5 and a half when ROTS came out so I felt the loss for the twins more than for Padme.

 

From a writing standpoint, Lucas basically wrote himself into a corner. He wanted ROTS to revolve around Anakin fearing for Padme's death, but Lucas already established that Leia knew her mother from when she was a very young child. And since episodic Star Wars don't ever do time skips, you're kinda stuck trying to put in excuses like baby Leia having her eyes open the whole time. It's just comes off as incredibly contrived, especially since Padme could have died from any number of things (ex. Anakin force choking her) but Lucas just put in a throwaway line about her being sad.

 

The difference is one was in the OT, the other wasn't.

 

Aaaaaaaaagh!

Hmmm . . . I'm glad that Lucas had allowed Padme to die of a broken heart. It saved her from becoming a feminist cliche - an ideal woman that can do no wrong.

 

As a difference, I think the jedi have their whole trying to control emotions thing. Though also I think Padme had the emotional exhaustion of the pregnancy and such as well.

Based on what's said in ROTJ (I think, images, feelings), I don't think it's a stretch that some can think Leia's memories are connected not to direct memories.

 

In the context of this situation, I can see the idea of it being that way the character.

 

Except the medical droid literally says there is nothing wrong with her physically, she's just dying. So it's pretty hard to substitute some other reason when the medical droid basically points out there IS no other reason. Usually it's old people who die of a broken heart, not otherwise very healthy young women. It was lazy writing, it may have been meant to be poetic or whatever but it was kind of insulting IMO to suggest that her broken heart at her husband's turn was more important than her two new born children or anything else. Pregnant women throughout history have managed to survive all sorts of tragedies, it's tough but women's bodies are generally made to support a pregnancy during real life which includes all sorts of tragedies The reason it used to cause a lot of deaths was due to physical issues, excessive bleeding or infection after the birth or some sort of medical reason the mother shouldn't have born children due to the technology of the time not being able to deal with a medical issue. Padme had none of them, she was just a perfectly healthy person who died of a broken heart about her husband, apparently not particularly caring that much about the two infants she was giving birth to.

 

What makes you think Padme had no one? Bail is no one? Mon Monthma is no on? There were clearly people who still would have been her allies, they never would have blamed her for Anakin going to behind her back and lying to everyone. And while there were obviously not many Jedi left, certainly two of the most important were STILL alive and were her allies, even though she'd been lying to them. Plus she had her children and her family back on Naboo. She didn't have "no one" anymore than anyone else did, she didn't lose anything more than many other people

Anakin? Well Obi-Wan lost Anakin too, heck he had to actually fight him. The Republic? Bail, etc lost the Republic too. The Jedi lost everything too, the younglings were slaughtered in their home The Jedi Temple, the Jedi knights and masters were killed by troops they'd fought along side with, they were completely and utterly betrayed by one of their own. Anyone who was left was now isolated and hunted.

Padme was far from the only one who supported Palpatine for power, he had to be voted in after all and she didn't do it, because at the time she wasn't a member of the Senate, she simply called for a vote of no confidence against the previous chancellor(and it was JAR JAR who had supported his emergency powers in AOTC not her) and she was one of the people who had seen that there were problems after that and were trying to put stops on his power grabs.

When it's a fictional I believe we can judge because someone had to write it and young otherwise healthy people, pregnant or not, do not usually just lay down and die because they are upset or sad. People get depressed and don't just literally lay down and die, they might kill themselves, they might go into a downward spiral that eventually leads to their death, etc but not just "OK I'm very despairing, think I'm just gonna die now" and then just die an hour later for no physical reason an advanced medical droid can explain. No one says she wouldn't or shouldn't be upset. No one I believe thinks she had to be sitting there giving birth barking out orders on what to do next to fight the new Empire. But it was literally portrayed as she popped out the kids and was like "I'm out, someone else can figure out what to do with them"(yes I'm being slightly facetious to make a point). This doesn't remotely fit with the Padme we saw not only over the two previous films but even the rest of Return of the Sith.

Dead and "defeated, weak or lame" is NOT the same thing. You can come back from "defeated, weak or lame"(and I don't recall any of the white male heroes doing any of that, defeated sure, but weak or lame? Not really). No she didn't "choose" to die, she was just so pathetic apparently that she couldn't help but die because things went badly for her, as they had just done for at least half the rest of the GFFA, including her allies in the Senate and the Jedi who'd been slaughtered by Order 66 and Anakin who personally slaughtered the Jedi children

Now I don't think she was pathetic, I think her ending was written in a way that made her look that way.

 

Why?
If Anakin had hurt her more, so that she got fairly serious injuries and thus the droids had to choose to save her or the children, and they choose the twins because of logic. Two lives vs one. Or her injuries were just too severe.
Why would that make her a feminist cliche?

And not doing anything wrong?
Padme made misstakes in the PT. She trusted Palpatine when she should not have.
She knew what Anakin did with the Sand People and choose to keep it a secret and not suggest he talk about it or seek help.
She married Anakin even knowing it was against Jedi rules, setting up a problem to come.
Her "plan" on Geonosis makes no sense.
Padme was not perfect prior to this.

And I think it a stretch and a pretty big one.
Luke asks Leia what she REMEMBERS about her real mother.
So it clearly is about memories.
Leia remembers when her mother died, what her mother looked like, that she was kind to her and that she was sad about something.
Those are pretty consistent with early memories, say 3-4 years old.
Other lines in the RotJ script made it clear that her mother took Leia with her to Alderaan.
Obi-Wan told Luke about it and thus his question about Leia's mother comes less out of the blue.

I've seen a lot of fan theories to explain this away and how it was not a ret-con.
"Force-memories", "Leia is talking about Bail's first wife." "Bail talked about Padme and showed young Leia pictures."
I find none very satisfying.
It was a ret-con, plain and simple.
Given how RotS was structured and how Anakin was like. Yes Padme dying makes the most amount of sense as Anakin would not let her go easily. And her dying off-screen would lack dramatic punch.
I argue that it was possible to make a PT that was more consistent with RotJ but you would need changes.
Like say that Padme and Anakin split up in ep II and he does not know that she is pregnant. She marries Bail and Leia is known as Bail and her child. Neither Anakin nor Sidious has reason to think otherwise.
Then in ep III she dies.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

"Takotsubo Syndrome would be a diagnosable medical condition." -- but it is a syndrome caused by feelings... is it not? do droids understand feelings?

"Padme is also not a post-menopausal woman, but a woman who is obviously of child-bearing age and in her twenties (27 years old, I believe)" -- well... this is a long shot... but you don't have periods when carrying...

"Syndrome is most common in patients over the age of fifty, and age matters a great deal in anything cardiac related (source: Mayo Clinic). More than 90% of reported cases are in women ages 58 to 75" -- well there are some other 10% are there not?

Tristan and Iseult is a medieval work set in medieval times. Medical knowledge in medieval times was pretty poor, but medical knowledge in a galaxy far, far away is more advanced. -- well, i like the idea of him alluding to tragedies in pop culture.

 

I don't see it as a big stretch. I wouldn't necessarily expect Leia to understand her memories and how she has them and such, in this situation. I didn't say it wasn't a retcon. But not one that I think is a strong issue.

It may have been able to be done like that, but I don't think it serves the overall story and character. I also think it raises more questions about Padme, what she did and how she died and such, and why she essentially only kept one kid and such.

I was talking about the pregnancy being emotionally exhausting. I'm sorry for the confusion.

 

If they had simply had the medical droid say something along the line of, Her injuries were too much for her to overcome, but we were able to save the children, it changes the scene entirely. Padme is still a weepy Anakin fan girl throughout almost all of ROTS, and has been relegated to a plot device for Anakin's turn and the birth of the twins, but it at least adds a little dignity to her character. They could have added a small moment of exposition when Padme and Obi-Wan are talking before Obi-Wan sneaks aboard her ship, where she says, I want to name it Luke if it's a boy, or Leia if it's a girl. Padme and Obi-Wan talk about if Anakin knows what she wants to name him. She says, No, we don't really talk much anymore, but we were going to raise our child on Naboo, where we could connect again. Or something along those lines. This shows that while she is upset over what is going on with Anakin, she still has the child's best interest at heart.

Edit: plus with that little detail of what she wanted to name the child, we eliminate that stupid part of her naming the kids, which always felt random and out of place. We already know what their names are because she told Obi-Wan earlier what had intended to name them. Obi-Wan, of course, relays her wishes. Again it shows her investment in raising this child instead of just randomly spewing out names before she dies.

 

I'm somewhat of two minds when it comes to this.

I used to be very much opposed to the scenes. I thought it was incredibly dumb that, in a galaxy far far away with advanced medical technology, someone would just die because of the big sad. But, someone on the forums framed it within the context of an Arthurian tale, which swung me around to the concept.

However, something else I saw brought up was that, in a way, the scene is very much playing into some sexist tropes. I mean, how often do we see male characters just lose the will to live like that? Padme was her own autonomous character outside of her relationship with Anakin, but as soon as he turns to the dark side, she just straight dips out. So now I'm more on the side of not liking it.

 

Leia says, "She died when I was very young." Very young means she was kid, like two, maybe three. No one says "very young" when they mean "just born". If your mom died when you were just born you'd say, "She died right after I was born."

 

I'm not sure that the following response is relevant to the topic (since the topic seems to be about one interpretation of Padmé's death), but here goes: why be so sure that a certain interpretation of a scene in a work of fiction is "the correct" interpretation? I've always thought that a better way of approaching literature is to be open to alternative interpretations that one may like better personally—that way everyone stands a better chance of having an interpretation that appeals to them.

I mention above because I've never interpreted Padmé's death as being from sadness or her losing the will to live as being from depression. Rather, I always thought of her "losing the will to live" as being a repudiation of Anakin's idea that he would do anything—including killing innocents and becoming a Sith—to save her. I know it doesn't connect up logically because Padmé doesn't seem aware that Anakin's fear that she will die during childbirth is what drove him to extremes, but it is related to the ideas that most people would not appreciate a person doing a major wrong supposedly for the former's benefit, and in such an event, the former frequently ends up "paying up" even more than they would initially have absent any intervention in an effort to make amends for the damage caused.

 

That sounds great. I wish it was presented that way in the movie. I would have liked to see her have complications during childbirth (something that no one could have prevented) to really show how futile it was for Anakin to try and change destiny. But what we got was vague and (if you read the "making of" book) came late in the decision making process. It becomes more and more apparent that Lucas didn't have some grand plan concerning Padme and once ROTS rolled around, all he needed was for her to make babies and then die. It's actually a slap in the face to her character that she basically just stands around barefoot and pregnant the whole film.

 

Thanks for the additional information; I didn't know this previously. Nevertheless, I stick with the point of view that when it comes to fiction, the author can have their interpretation and the reader can have their own, perhaps different, interpretation, unless authorial interpretation is the point of the discussion in concern.