Does the way Padme and Shmi are discussed in fandom ever make you . . . uncomfortable? I feel like Padme gets bashed a lot (with positive media about her being dismissed because it makes her âtoo perfectâ), while Shmi gets this weird treatment of held up as this paragon of virtue and morality in way that seems to deliberately ignored just how much her life fucking sucked and refuse to engage with the slavery issue at all. I think the canon writing for them can and should be criticized, but some of the fandom criticisms get to be just as problematic, IMHO. With Padme in particular, I get the sense a lot of the criticism doesnât even stem from actual analysis of her character, but fans who are upset that itâs Anakin who she loves. I get the feeling that if her character remained precisely the same, but it were a different dude who she married, she wouldnât get nearly as much criticism from certain segments of the fandom. Am I wrong on this one? What are your thoughts?
no i would agree! i do think it is weird. i think it's a combination of factors, primarily that these are female characters and people are always weirder about female characters for systemic reasons, and then, yeah, the inherent arms race of the Did Darth Vader Do Something Problematic Discourse. buckle in. this..... long.
luke and anakin are the main characters of the series, and by virtue of being the ones to carry the narrative, a lot of how you read star wars is dependent on how you read their stories, and how you read their interactions with each other. they carry a lot of the themes of the saga - it's not only their story, but they are the biggest players in it, and their stories are designed to reflect each others', to be mirrors, to tell the story of how evil can corrupt good, but evil is not absolute, and love is where it loses. for all that i've written literally hundreds of thousands of words about The Meaning Of Star Wars, it's not altogether that complicated a premise. i watch these movies the way i do because this is the story i see in it. because i see that kind of a story, that reflects on how i see everyone else in star wars.
if star wars is about how evil is inherently weak because unconditional love is always stronger, then the part of ANH where han chooses the rebellion over his life as a smuggler becomes about that. the part where leia says, "someone who loves you," becomes about that. when leia strangles jabba, it is about that. when leia comforts luke over the loss of obi-wan kenobi, the fact that luke even grieves a man he barely knew, it becomes about that very thing. the cheers and frantic hugging and bright, happy joy of the rebellion after luke destroys the death star becomes about that; the rebellion is cast as a large, loving group, united in their desire for something better, filled with people who love each other and are excited to succeed because they do. the climax of the series becomes about this very thing.
if the OT is about unconditional love and its ultimate, unstoppable power to level the playing field and destroy the root of all evil, the PT is about what can happen to that love in the face of tragedy people are ultimately helpless to stop. anakin is not capable of saving his mother. he wasn't capable as a child, and although he had the power as a jedi, through systemic forces and death itself, he never did. anakin is not capable of ending slavery as a child, and neither is he as a singular jedi knight. the things and causes that matter to him only eat him alive, because he can never act on them; the war he fights in is not a violent struggle for justice that can satiate this, but a sham war, state violence for meaningless purpose. he's never capable of saving padme, and even outsources his only idea to do so to someone who will accept, "will you do what you're told?" as payment. it's easy for me to see - compared to the rebellion's open joy, luke's gaggle of friends who he saves again and again, who save him again and again, who hold each other in their joy and comfort each other in their sadness, who openly love each other to the degree where han abandons a probably fairly well-paying life as a smuggler to become a terrorist hunted by the empire, an act which causes him no small amount of suffering but we never see him once genuinely regret it - why anakin's story ends differently from luke's, because, like, that's just what i see in the story.
now my arrival to the point; if you're seeing that story, shmi's life becomes a horrible tragedy. she's a woman left in enormous, incredibly pointless suffering. her name fades out of history, and the only person who remembers her is the proverbial monster at the end of this book. to me, when tiny anakin runs back to shmi, mourning leaving her, i see the only display in that entire film we have that anyone cares that shmi skywalker is enslaved. everyone else quietly moves on. qui-gon says they're not there to free slaves. her words, "be brave, and don't look back," become horrifyingly tragic in such a context, because she's losing the only person who is showing her real compassion, because unfortunately that only person is her nine year old son, whose safety she wants to to ensure by sending him with qui-gon.
if you're seeing a story about how anakin is bad at accepting change and bad at letting go, how his attachments are possessive by some inherent quality, then shmi's wisdom - "be brave, and don't look back" - would make her a paragon of virtue in such a story, and her being enslaved would be this weird piece of set dressing, not easily reconciled with the rest of the plot. they're not there to free slaves. this is why people who do see this story in star wars frequently dismiss That Whole Slavery Business as being pointless; it's either a metaphor for childhood being restrictive, or anakin's childhood was actually supposed to be totally fine, or everyone's just making a big deal out of it because people love woobifying villains. this is a fine thing to see in the story, i guess, although it's probably obvious i personally don't buy it. this interpretation is not without its side effects, however, and i think this idea does an enormous disservice to shmi, whose frankly intense onscreen suffering (she is tortured to death, holy shit) probably should be allowed to matter more than being the highlighter over anakin's possessive attachment issues. her suffering becomes even more meaningless, because the only person who, onscreen, extends shmi skywalker any kind of compassion - who cares, demonstrably, if she's hurting - is explicitly condemned for doing so.
this isn't to say anakin's response to her death is morally correct, because it obviously is not! and maybe this would be a story about possessive attachment if shmi's death was natural and unavoidable and anakin still responded with explosive violence, but simply put, it isn't, and that changes the narrative enough for me to discount that as being true. if you have deduced anakin's problem is attachment, rather than his inability to act on those attachments in any meaningful way, you've created a world where no one was supposed to care that shmi was enslaved. anakin was supposed to be able to leave her behind without feeling guilt, and he was supposed to be able to ignore his visions of her suffering. dreams pass in time. this is a world where it's not just okay for the suffering of the people you love to not matter to you, that is, actually, the only virtuous way to live your life. with regards to shmi, this turns her personal agony into a footnote, the warning that anakin got of the darkness growing within him before it completely took him over, instead of shmi's personal agony mattering because it's inherently unjust to do to someone what she was forced to go through. shmi doesn't matter because she was an innocent person in pain; she matters because she was a warning anakin ignored.
that's why shmi as a paragon of virtue can never be discussed with shmi as one of the most tragic characters in star wars; they can't really coexist, can they? because it would be kind of uncomfortable to go yes, this woman was enslaved, her labor was coerced from her via an explosive implanted in her body, she lost her only family and continued to be enslaved for years, until one good thing maybe happened to her, which was brutally cut short by being tortured to death, and the last she saw of her son was dying in his arms, but no, dreams pass in time. no one should have particularly cared that this was happening to her, and in fact, onscreen, the only person who does is anakin, and even then he's tormented by the fact that he cares. he is explicitly not supposed to. dreams pass in time. the two conceptions of shmi cannot coexist, or the argument becomes kind of cruel. you essentially have to lessen the degree to which she suffered. which is fine, i guess. you do you, or whatever.
to contrast, luke sees his father, who is demonstrably much worse on a moral level than shmi, who luke would have legitimately had every right to abandon, and goes to free him from a form of slavery anyway. and he is completely and entirely vindicated for this in every conceivable way. do we all see where i'm going with this? i think i'm belaboring the point by now. i can move on.
padme makes, essentially, a very similar choice to the one luke makes; the narrative itself has shown you previously that in the universe of star wars, showing unflinching love in the face of evil can work. but her decision is cast as rash and naive because she fails, which is a really weird way to blame padme for being strangled. because she failed, it's her fault, but because luke succeeded, he's the hero. padme dies because she goes into labor - there's no sign in the film prior that she was anywhere close - which was induced by being strangled into unconsciousness, and fans for years have been obsessed with how "weak" this makes her. these arguments are honestly just bold misogyny. i used to pay lip service to the idea but i've since come around; i think it's fucked up, plainly, to act like padme was at fault for something anakin did to her, and it is downright batshit insane to act like it would be impossible for a pregnant woman in surprise labor who is unknowingly giving birth to twins who has just been strangled so severely she passed out from oxygen deprivation to die because of that. padme is not even allowed to die directly because of anakin's actions without people going, "but padme was so toxic, she was obsessed with him, they're both examples of possessive attachment!"
but it continues! people go from that point, and work their way backwards - it was weak, of padme, to love anakin at all. luke gets a pass because he's male, and successful. obi-wan gets a pass for loving anakin, because he's male, and sad about it later. ahsoka gets a pass, because she's a female character but a Strong Female Character - she's a fighter, she's badass, so it can't be her fault that she made the mistake of caring about anakin skywalker. but padme. we have to come up with endless, endless theories as to how padme could possibly come by the same affliction everyone else in the prequels does; she should have been written to be older, she must have been just as possessive, toxic, and fucked up, there's no possible way that this woman could have had feelings like everyone else did. it's just implausible. it begs explanation. when will padme answer for her mistakes, which were the same mistakes everyone else made? luke's only explanation for returning to save vader's immortal soul is literally, "i have a feeling," but it's instead padme who is the subject of endless, endless interrogation. part of this is because george lucas doesn't spend a lot of time developing padme's interiority - her family, her life, these are left to interpretation, and suffice to say, you can't leave a female character with blank spots without people being intensely weird about it.
the above isn't particularly related to what someone gets out of watching the saga, the way interpretations of shmi are, in my view, inherently reliant on someone's point of view; a lot of the issues that surround padme are classic misogyny-reflected-in-fandom. they are intensified, definitely, by her relation to the Did Darth Vader Do Something Problematic Discourse, purely because in the narrative she chooses a relationship with anakin, whereas most other characters in the prequels just have anakin foisted on them. that act of it being padme's choice stokes a lot of bad will for the character from the crowd of people who dislike anakin intensely. if you fundamentally don't want to engage with the idea that the prequels as a story of good turning into evil, then the decisions everyone makes in that story will, yes, look crazy to you, and because of the above, padme gets the brunt of that criticism where there's more effort to understand characters that are more palatable. if you believe anakin just was evil, that he was always predisposed to it, and that his redemption in the sixth episode doesn't qualify as a redemption, then, yes, padme's choices look unhinged, and it's easy to put the onus of that on her because she's the easiest target. it's simple to project on a blank canvas.
it goes without saying that this particular set of criticisms is kind of bullshit, really. it's not someone watching the movies and enjoying them for what they are, or even disliking them on the basis of what they are, as much as it is people huffing the fumes of the point in order to make polarizing posts on the internet for a quick hit of dopamine when the numbers tick up. even the people who i disagree with about the saga's general themes broadly accept the idea that star wars is about how evil can't be absolute as long as love persists, because they actually do like the movies, they just happen to like them in a different way, which is fine. this new kind of criticism is a little more disingenuous. like i said at the start, anakin and luke are the main characters, through which we perceive the world of star wars and how its themes are fed to us, the nerds. if your answer to one of the main characters of the series and its actual climax is, "no," then, i'm sorry, the actual criticism you have of star wars is that you fundamentally do not like it, and, "i don't like this," is not a very hard thought to have, and you probably shouldn't pass it off as critical thinking. it's just not padme's fault as a character that you, the nerd, are bad at watching movies, and weirdly proud of it, and no one is really obligated to take you seriously because you're oddly determined to do nothing, add nothing, and say nothing. it's such a bullshit set of criticisms there's not really anything else i can say than, "i guess?" which is what this paragraph is trying so hard to get at.
anyway! no, i don't think you're wrong, i actually agree, and these are my thoughts! hope you enjoyed this brick of a post hahaha
