padme's handmaidens are such an underrated concept. i mean, yeah you can call it women supporting women and leave it at that but like. its so much more intense than that. they basically created the persona of queen amidala together. they assigned her specific mannerisms and tone of voice and breathing patterns and all of them studied that well enough to play the role perfectly. they put all of the derangedness teenage girls put into discovering their own identity into perfecting mimicry instead & they did all that knowing that their role will always be to die in padme's place if it comes to that. idk what insane levels of devotion does it take to be like 14 and you've become so intimately familiar with your friend that you can quite literally become her. there's friendship & traumabonding and then theres "my entire life is dedicated to dying for this woman" and then there's that but with added identity fuckery and thats what the handmaidens have going on with the bonus point of being 14
ok yk what tho. thought on this more. theres something about padme growing up with her closest relationships being ride or die devoted and the way that colours her later relationships. shes a lot more isolated as a senator, with most of her friendships at the time being professional & ofc aside from that, her standards for the intensity of your average relationship arent normal so there could be some genuine failure to connect there. and thats the stage of her life where she begins her extremely intense ride or die relationship with anakin. the fandom acknowledges his attachment, loyalty & murder complexes but i think maybe we should consider that padme might have genuinely liked that about him. im straying fully into my personal interpretation here but i love the idea that on some level, the girl who grew up knowing shed have to send her closest friends off to die in her place and then carry on and do her duty would be attracted to someone who gets to lash out and take revenge and who refuses to accept loss
Oh, wow. I love this addition, especially given the context of Attack of the Clones. The movie starts with her handmaiden getting murdered while protecting her. Padme is upset and grieving literally the entire film, but trying to hold it in. The first thing she does after Anakin goes ape shit is to rush off to the planet where she knows her handmaiden's killer is to start some shit. He's, like, her inspiration.
