crosspost: on Hufflepuff Padmé

[anghraine]

In relation to this post, thusspakesophie on Tumblr asked:

I loved your Hogwarts sorting + loyalty essay! But I'm having a hard time squaring Padme-as-Hufflepuff with what we see of her leadership style. Hufflepuffs operate in teams by establishing consensus (eg Ernie Macmillan's constant appeals to his audience, or Mark Watney's humour->group cohesion) but Padme is VERY independent. She'll ditch anyone who isn't performing and often steps in herself to solve things. She rarely consults others. I think her loyalty is ideological; she's a Gryffindor.

Thank you! However, I disagree on both counts.

a) I don’t recall leadership style having much of anything to do with the Houses. Harry’s self-deprecating leadership of the DA, Dumbledore’s persona of all-knowing passivity as headmaster, and Oliver Wood’s style in leading the Quidditch team don’t really look like each other at all, for instance.

As far as I remember, we also don’t see Hufflepuffs as leaders or followers. They side with this person or that, they have representatives of their interests (Ernie, Cedric), but not much beyond that.

b) I disagree about Padmé ditching her groups as a rule. While she can be reckless by temperament (though I wouldn’t say as a rule), I don’t think she is by values. Overwhelmingly, she acts out of the belief that she’s serving the welfare of the group she represents and/or belongs to.

She frames her deposition of Valorum as a matter of speaking for her people. She constantly emphasizes her sense of duty and obligation as a member of the Senate through AOTC and ROTS. She’s not simply pursuing her ideological ends with the Republic as a vehicle. The Republic as she sees it is her lifeblood.

If you look at the “Seeds of the Rebellion” scene, we can see the sharp contrast with true Gryffindor Bail Organa. He has to pull himself back from a principle-driven FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. But Padmé doesn’t; while influenced by her relationship with Anakin and perhaps Obi-Wan, she immediately joins the chorus of people leery about a fight that would risk the common good. Although fandom rightly criticizes the excision of that scene/her role in forming the Rebellion as part of her overall marginalization in ROTS, she … still has a pretty limited role in its formation, honestly. It’s at least as much Bail’s scene as hers.

I agree that Padmé has some strains of Gryffindor in her temperament. But that’s not unusual. Any given personality ‘type’ is not about the complex entirety of personality, which no type can encompass, but what’s most central and pivotal to someone’s character. And I don’t think that temperament is the driving impulse of Padmé’s character (as it is Anakin’s, for instance). The core of her character is service to a communal good. It goes from service to Naboo to service to the Republic, but that is what drives her (@notbecauseofvictories has a good post about it here). And when the possibility of the service she knows is finally quashed, she loses the will to live. It literally destroys her spirit.

Again, that forms a sharp contrast with an actual Gryffindor like Anakin, whose evident loss of spirit results in subjection, isolation, repression, and misery, but not life-killing despair. His cause, however warped, keeps him going, and the Empire is the vehicle for it. But the Empire is an imperfect means to his ends, and he has little (if any) sense of obligation to its norms and structures, just as Luke has no sense of obligation to the norms and structures of the Rebellion. But Padmé’s relationship to the Republic dominates her psyche. At the end of the day, she’s a fundamentally different type of person.