There are some official works and fans who make the Naberries out to have working/middle class origins. That's often done to give Padme a "down-to-earth"/"the sensible one in the senate" quality,and to set her apart from the corrupt elite.
While I can't really see Padme as having a relatively underprivileged background,this read would've been way more interesting if she isn't immune to some of the same biases and prejudices - plus,a heap of her own ones.
I used to dislike the idea of middle-class-by-origin Padme,but your reads on her make it interesting,IMO. If she's going to have a comfortable but "lesser" upbringing,actually address class issues. Let her have hidden complexes about it! Show the subtle discrimination she's been through!
youve given me a lot to chew on anon, thank you!
i've been trying very hard to pinpoint for myself why exactly padme's sensible personality doesn't click for me if it's entirely class related, not gonna lie. i think i like her to be middle class because i feel the middle class experience is to be somewhere in between two very different existences. on one hand, you're very aware of how much worse people have it and it's close enough that it's personal. but on the other hand, it's still very much a life of relative comfort. i dont know what is it with social mobility in this setting because the senate in star wars is very much populated entirely by the elites. even bail organa (one of the top tier good guys) is royalty for example and i kind of enjoy how being confined (by her career) to this social circle is what fuels padme's isolation and her choices. she's kind of one of them, kind of isn't and the whole time she's trying her best to serve the (common) people that her work is increasingly pulling away from. i feel like padme either being born into nobility or born in the working class would give her a stronger connection to a specific economic class which is a fair thing to headcanon but i personally happen prefer a version of padme that wants strong connections but is made to be alienated from everything that could give them to her, including a proper sense of class solidarity. she's got her ideals and she's sticking to them but she's spent her life essentially negotiating between the over-privileged and the under-privileged (because one of padme's principles was still trying to make the system work) which required her to be more of a conduit and less of a person. its a deeply middle class experience imo and thats #myhill
its all very interesting though because padme's political career started with humanitarian action. the story she tells in aotc about those dead children is the backbone of her politics and i think its also fair to mention that she was young and it must have been traumatising to experience it. but at the same time, we do get that dinner scene in tpm where she can't really wrap her mind around slavery on tatooine. i feel like those two things can co-exist because it has less to do with padme herself and more with how the republic does not encourage its citizens to be aware of whats happening outside of the republic. even padme is subjected to that, because she's still a citizen, she cant just absorb the life experience of every single being simply because she has good intentions. and aside from that, her life's mission is to address the problems within the republic and make it work for the people the way it should, which is an important mission because the eventual empire proves how much damage an institution like the republic is capable of causing.
the really fun ambiguity with padme starts regarding how she'd approach problems outside of the system - is reforming the republic the first step of her ideal for a better future or is that the whole project and the rest is supposed to click into place? there's a big question of intervention or non-intervention in her politics i feel should be fun to explore, especially given she married mr anakin "well if you can't cajole people into behaving nicely & upholding justice, you should do it by force" skywalker which i think starts having Implications once the entity enforcing galacting justice is a political superpower. unlike anakin, i feel like padme would be aware of that but then what's her vision?? like mrs amidala PLEASE say something about your external policies, the masses need to know. i suppose you could connect those beliefs with privilege or the lack of it, but here's the thing, privilege affects your ability to spot a problem that affects other people & sometimes your interest in fixing it, it does not (from my point of view) really affect how good you are with coming up with working solutions. you can have total awareness but you also need the skill to translate that into policies that work & to the horror of activist groups everywhere good intentions alone don't mean you're automatically the right person to take charge. you can be, if you're good at that sort of thing but you can have personal experience with all the horrors of life and still not have a single clue how youd address them on a large scale. pointing out faults & fixing them are not necessarily skills that come hand in hand, basically. going into an average facebook comment section is a big proof of that lol i enjoy talking about padme's politics and speculating about them but i think she had strong and weak points at her work outside of her position on economic ladder, im wary of saying that the class she was born into in any way improved or restricted her ability to do good. im interested in how class affects padme-the-person, basically, because class does inform our anxieties and preoccupations by a lot but politically she has such a sensitive role as the mother of rebellion, i want to avoid generalisations (saying this very off handedly & not as a criticism to you, anon. you've given me some very interesting things to think about and im just sort of branching off of them)
