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Everything in the Star Wars prequels is poorly written, and yet Padme and Anakin’s relationship still manages to stands out as particularly awful. Even setting aside clunky ramblings about sand, nothing about their budding relationship is okay. For starters, when they meet, Anakin is only nine years old, while she’s 14. A mere five years may not seem like a huge age difference in the long run, but that’s vital timing. She’d be a freshman getting into high school, and he’d be a fourth-grader getting into SpongeBob. And further, she’s the queen of an entire damn planet, while he is a slave child who almost certainly hasn’t had “the talk” yet.

When they meet again ten years later, Padme’s a big-city girl trying to have it all (“all” in this case means balancing political infighting with repeat assassination attempts). Meanwhile, Anakin is training to be a chaste wizard-priest-knight with a rattail. They have absolutely no common ground, save for their prior shared adventure when he was an overly precocious child and she was a teenager who looked and behaved like an adult. That’s what they build their love on: The rapport they used to have back when they were separated by an ocean of puberty. It’s not exactly unethical when they inevitably hook up, since they’re both young adults by that point. But she was basically his space-babysitter in the first movie, and the next time they meet they start boning. That’s weird, Padme. That is a weird thing to do.

Me: