nadine ༉‧₊˚.

but it is quite frightening how half the fandom speaks about her as if she is the devil’s reincarnate. “she broke up with hayden because he’s an introvert!! 😡😡” hun if you actually did a quick google search instead of using twitter as your source then you’d know they ended it on a mutual decision. in fact I would say breaking up due to personality differences is completely understandable. sometimes, you find someone, you bond for a while whether that be months or even years and fate decides you are not meant to click. that is life. even if there is a bigger picture that we don’t see, it is between hayden and rachel. they’re on healthy terms now and co-parenting their daughter.

and may I mention the blatant lies that some fans create out of thin air to bring her down when they have nothing else to criticise her for… “she abuses her daughter!!” “she abused hayden while they were together!!” “hayden isn’t briar’s bio father!! rachel cheated on him!!”. it is sick to be fabricating these stories all because you don’t like a celebrity.. now let’s say in an alternate timeline: the rumors were true and hayden wasn’t the bio father. he would still be taking on the role of a father figure in her life which speaks volumes over “the other man” who was supposedly briar’s bio father and “abandoned her” prior to her birth. so, I don’t see your guys’ logic.

I read the lore for her and I think she's pretentious and when the fandom tries to portray her as an innocent character it really rubs me the wrong way.

Like we know Anakin is a messed up character, I like him, and even I can understand he's kinda an asshole and he is suppose to be. But Padme lowkey isn't much better and it comes across as off putting.

This happens to me mostly with Anakin and Padme, to people who constantly (and rightfully so) bash anakun but then go ahead and act like Padme is this flawless character who did no wrong. And yeah, Padme and Anakin might not be that comparable and surely Padme did more good than wrong. But to act like she was forced or manipulated by Anakin to date him or anything, like she wasn’t a grown adult 5 years older than him, who surely knew better than to stay quiet about the mass kill he did to the tuskens, and his aggressiveness and poorly made jokes(his dictatorship joke), is ridiculous 💔

I love both Anakin and Padme, I do, and I like Anidala. I’m guilty of that. But my like for them won’t prevent me from analyzing and criticizing their characters, both as fictional written pieces of fiction and as persons despite being fictional. People are so quick to bash Anakin and baby Padme when she’s also at fault of things. Loving a character isn’t defending them blindly, is accepting their flaws as parts of them instead of denying them.

Also before concluding this very long post I want to say that I hate with all my being that theory that implies that Anakin, subconsciously or consciously, manipulated and forced her with the force to love him and that’s why her character feels weird and contradictory. Like oh my god just admit the writing was awful and move on. Or, like, ADMIT that a woman can have these god awful flaws in her and do dumb shit for a man, it won’t make her less of a Girlboss it just shows she’s human and bad with the love department and how it affected her rationality

One of the most persistent fandom headcanons is the “soft dad Anakin” AU. The version where the war ends, he stays on the Light Side, Order 66 never happens, and he becomes this fiercely loving, devoted, protective father to Luke and Leia. The version where he heals, goes to therapy (in spirit if not literally), and pours all that intensity into healthy family life.

It’s a comforting fantasy.

It also fundamentally misunderstands who Anakin Skywalker is in the prequel era.

Let’s start with the text itself.

"Anakin disregarded the moral point of the tale, and instead fixated on a glimmer of hope he found in it. He knew it was dangerous, but he was willing to give anything to discover this mythological power so that Padmé might cheat death. He would willingly lay down his own life, lose their child, and destroy everything else he held dear to save Padmé from his mother's fate - and save himself from enduring a life without her. In exchange for Padmé's life, he was prepared to watch the whole galaxy burn."

In one of the Disney canon novels, Anakin reflects that he would “willingly lay down his own life, lose their child, and destroy everything else he held dear to save Padmé from his mother's fate.” He is prepared, explicitly, to sacrifice his unborn child if it means Padmé lives.

That’s not subtext. That’s not interpretation. That’s canon interior monologue.

And that alone tells you everything you need to know about what kind of father he would have been.

1. He Does Not Prioritize His Child. He Prioritizes His Attachment.

A good parent prioritizes the safety and welfare of their child above all else. That doesn’t mean they love their spouse less. It means that once you become a parent, your responsibility shifts.

Anakin’s does not.

He is willing to let his child die if that is the price of keeping Padmé alive. Not because he carefully weighted two impossible choices. Not because he was forced into a moral dilemma. But because, in his mind, the child is secondary.

The core of Anakin’s fear is not “my child will grow up without a mother.” It’s “I cannot survive losing Padmé.”

His driving motivation is not fatherhood. It’s abandonment trauma.

He is still the nine-year-old slave who lost Shmi. He is still the traumatized child who never learned emotional regulation. And instead of processing that, he transfers the entire weight of his psychological stability onto Padmé.

That is not the foundation of healthy parenting. That is emotional dependency.

If your child grows up knowing, consciously or unconsciously, that their father would have traded their life for their mother’s? That does something to a person. It breeds insecurity. It breeds resentment. It creates a hierarchy of love.

Anakin doesn’t see it that way. But children feel these things.

2. His Love Is Possessive, Not Selfless.

Anakin doesn’t love gently. He loves intensely, obsessively, desperately.

He doesn’t want “a family” in the abstract. He wants a nurturer. He wants stability. He wants someone to fill the hole left by Shmi. He wants something he can call his — something that cannot leave him.

That is why his love is so volatile.

In Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, he confesses admiration for dictatorship. Padmé laughs it off. When he massacres the Tusken Raiders — “not just the men, but the women and the children too” — she rationalizes it as trauma.

This is a man who responds to grief with annihilation.

And she marries him days later.

In Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-Wan confronts Padmé with the truth about the Jedi Temple massacre (thousands dead — adults, teenagers, children, infants), her response is denial. She already knows he has killed children before. She chooses not to integrate that reality.

When she says, “There’s still good in him,” it does not land as clear-eyed hope. It lands as a continuation of years of deliberate blindness.

This is not a relationship built on truth. It’s built on projection and fantasy.

They love versions of each other that don’t fully exist.

Now imagine raising children inside that.

3. Anakin Is Jealous by Nature.

This is the part fandom doesn’t like to talk about.

Anakin gets jealous of Obi-Wan. He gets jealous of Padmé’s political commitments. He gets jealous of the Jedi Council. He resents anything that divides loyalty.

He wants exclusive emotional primacy.

Now introduce a child.

A baby demands attention. A toddler monopolizes affection. A child often becomes the center of a mother’s emotional world.

Do we honestly believe that pre-fall Anakin — who already struggles with insecurity and possessiveness — would respond to that without difficulty?

He might adore his child. He might be tender in moments. But if he ever perceived that Padmé loved the child more? Or that her focus shifted permanently?

That would hit directly at his abandonment wound.

And Anakin does not handle abandonment well.

The same man who slaughtered an entire Tusken village because he lost his mother is not someone whose jealousy would remain mild or well-regulated.

4. Trauma Bond, Not Stable Partnership

Their relationship is forged in adrenaline and secrecy.

The Clone Wars heighten everything. Forbidden love. Battlefield reunions. Intensity. Passion. Grand gestures.

But remove the war.

Remove the urgency.

Remove the “we could die tomorrow.”

What remains?

Two people who never truly learned to know each other outside crisis.

Padmé defines herself by service to the Republic. Anakin defines himself by the need to protect and possess the one person who makes him feel safe.

That is not sustainable long-term.

Even in a universe where Anakin never falls to the Dark Side, something would eventually rupture. His neediness would clash with her duty. Her compartmentalization would clash with his demand for emotional centrality.

Children raised in unstable emotional ecosystems feel that tension.

5. “Soft Dad Anakin” Ignores the Psychological Core of His Character

Fandom loves redemption through domesticity.

But parenthood does not automatically heal trauma.

It often amplifies it.

Anakin is:

Unprocessed in his grief

Terrified of loss

Prone to black-and-white thinking

Comfortable with violence when emotionally triggered

Deeply possessive

Emotionally dependent on one person

Those traits don’t disappear because you put a baby in his arms.

Without profound inner work — the kind he was never shown doing — those traits would bleed into fatherhood.

Maybe not as physical violence. But as:

Emotional volatility

Overprotection that borders on suffocation

Favoritism

Jealousy

Conditional warmth tied to loyalty

And children are exquisitely sensitive to that.

6. Padmé’s Enabling Matters

This is not solely an Anakin problem.

Padmé repeatedly chooses denial.

She ignores his authoritarian statements. She rationalizes his massacre of non-combatants. She lies to Obi-Wan after the Temple slaughter. She attempts to run away with him rather than confront what he has done.

She does not meaningfully challenge his darkest impulses until it is too late.

In a “happy AU,” unless Padmé fundamentally changes as well, that enabling pattern continues.

And children raised in households where one parent enables the other’s instability learn dangerous lessons about love.

7. The Hard Truth

Anakin Skywalker could have been loving.

He could have been affectionate.

He could have been playful.

He could have been fiercely protective.

But loving does not equal healthy.

Devotion does not equal stability.

Intensity does not equal safety.

The tragedy of Anakin is not that he lacked love. It’s that his love was warped by fear and possessiveness.

Without confronting that core wound — without dismantling his obsession with control and fear of abandonment — he would not magically transform into a perfectly regulated father just because the war ended.

The Dark Side did not invent those flaws.

It magnified them.

And if we take the text seriously — including his own admission that he would sacrifice his child to save Padmé — then the uncomfortable conclusion is this:

Anakin Skywalker was not built, at that stage of his life, to be a good father.

Not because he was incapable of love.

But because he loved in a way that consumes.

I just can't see them any other way, I can't see anything between them as genuine. And maybe that's my way of managing the difficult writing for them and piecing their narrative back together in a way that works for me, but I just can't see it as anything truly genuine. It's always a selfish, toxic obsession with a version of each other that doesn't actually exist because they want a fantasy that's simple and easy as opposed to something real that might require work and sacrifices and compromises to achieve. It is CORE to my understanding of both of these characters that the love ISN'T REAL, which is why Anakin betrays her, why he's able to throw away everything she values the most, and why Padme is so shocked when he does this. Neither of them understood each other and neither of them wanted to. All they loved was an idea, a shadow, something that could and would dissolve very quickly if looked at too closely.