Re: Anakin--- I remembered reading and loving that idea about Anakin aging along with Luke! That is just too... Anakin and so endearing to boot.
Re: teenagers: the sheltering thing makes sense. In fact in some ways it could account for Lyra, and Lyra's issues, because someone prodigiously talented who's maybe never been pressed beyond her own limits and to whom everything has come easily, who then goes into a line of work where she has to deal with other people in crisis, could easily end up with superiority issues, that idea that she gets to deal out justice and decide who's worthy of compassion. Because nothing has ever come hard to her and she can't imagine the pressures that could make someone, say, decide to smuggle spice for a crime lord.
And Luke... now that you make me think about it (I love all the thinking you're making me do!), I almost think he was... held back (shades of Anakin!) by his upbringing, because Owen was busy trying to make sure that he didn't turn out like Dear Ol' Dad, and probably did hold him back from developing his talents--- we definitely see that with the refusal to let him go to flight school and the keeping him on the farm when his gifts clearly lie elsewhere. And I think, as with Anakin, that that produced the whininess--- except that Anakin had had more of an experience of stretching to the limit of his abilities in a real-life, do-or-die setting (see: Podrace; see: droid control ship) before he started training with Obi-wan and so he knew what was wrong, even if he expressed it clumsily. But bless him, he had enough sense of himself to really want to move ahead and stretch his abilities to their limits, even if he maybe got an inflated sense of what those were, possibly because Obi-wan wouldn't let him test his limits and have the experience of genuine failure after trying his hardest. (Honestly, I think the smartest thing Obi-wan, or Qui-gon, or anyone could have done in training baby!Anakin was to say, "Okay, as soon as you're skilled enough to plan the mission from start to finish and take the lead in carrying it out, we'll go rescue your mom." Motivation right there. Kid probably would have been a Jedi before he needed to shave regularly at that rate.)
With the Naboo... hm. There is certainly a difference between being intellectually capable of wrangling political-science issues in the abstract and being emotionally ready to cope with being a life-or-death decision-maker. And also the Naboo as a pacifist society probably got away with it for a while precisely because their life-or-death decisions erred on the side of compassion, and because they appear to be a wealthy enough society that there are not have-nots to deal with. In fact they might have embraced the teen-monarch thing for reasons connected with wanting to harness that adolescent idealism in service to their culture, if that makes sense. Getting the "smart and passionate about social justice" influence maybe as a counterbalance to more mature but more self-interested influences (say, from the private sector). (Interestingly, Naboo politicians seem to come in two flavors: really young women, and really old guys. IDK what that actually means about the cultural/political structure.)
On the other hand, my gut instinct is that if you've got kids that age who are actually able to pull off being good rulers... then they definitely need to be in some kind of real-world leadership role, even if "ruler of a planet" is probably too much--- but, you know, being class president or whatever would probably be way too little! And, see above on limits and challenge and having the experience of doing something that's hard for you, it would actually be abusive to keep them from having those real-world experiences, much the same as it's abusive to make an 8-year-old lie in a crib all day long. So if they have enough of a gift for and love of politics to be good at it, they need to take that out for a spin in some real and meaningful way. And I also think that with politics it's somewhat harder to separate "intellectually competent to make the right decisions" and "psycho-emotionally capable of doing the work" just because it takes so much psychoemotional capacity to make the right decisions in the first place.
Where the abuse comes in for me in Naboo culture is if kids are getting pushed into it because they have the talent and not because they have the passion for the work at least at that point in their lives. (Given that they can serve a maximum of eight years, I'm less worried than some might be about the transience of adolescent areas of interest, because even if your passion changes radically as you get older, "Queen" still looks good on your resume, lol, and the skills learned would apply in almost any field, because you nearly always have to wrangle people, at least a little.)
Personally, I think the whole teenage-ruler-as-institution issue is a lot like Anakin's "oops, did I do that?" destruction of the droid control ship that we talked about elsewhere--- that it's a cheapening of each of their awesome. Instead of embracing the crazy awesome that Padme would have to have been to be elected queen at 14 in a system that didn't institutionalize teenage monarchy--- that she was actually Just That Good, and that she was someone so truly prodigious that it wasn't abusive, you get a system where it's normal (and which brings the abusiveness issues, as in, the fact that you're probably not going to have enough people that age who are actually capable of doing the work in a purely practical sense to make a system of it).
Oh, yes, I love Padme-the-younger! She's a lot like how I see Leia, in some ways--- not so strong in the Force, but a masterful people-wrangler and she knows it. Except Leia has more of Anakin's fire and Padme-the-younger is a kinder creature, innately--- which is also a part of Anakin, just not one that the Jedi Order really fostered. (Which says many things about how the OJO was screwed up.)
no subject
Re: Anakin--- I remembered reading and loving that idea about Anakin aging along with Luke! That is just too... Anakin and so endearing to boot.
Re: teenagers: the sheltering thing makes sense. In fact in some ways it could account for Lyra, and Lyra's issues, because someone prodigiously talented who's maybe never been pressed beyond her own limits and to whom everything has come easily, who then goes into a line of work where she has to deal with other people in crisis, could easily end up with superiority issues, that idea that she gets to deal out justice and decide who's worthy of compassion. Because nothing has ever come hard to her and she can't imagine the pressures that could make someone, say, decide to smuggle spice for a crime lord.
And Luke... now that you make me think about it (I love all the thinking you're making me do!), I almost think he was... held back (shades of Anakin!) by his upbringing, because Owen was busy trying to make sure that he didn't turn out like Dear Ol' Dad, and probably did hold him back from developing his talents--- we definitely see that with the refusal to let him go to flight school and the keeping him on the farm when his gifts clearly lie elsewhere. And I think, as with Anakin, that that produced the whininess--- except that Anakin had had more of an experience of stretching to the limit of his abilities in a real-life, do-or-die setting (see: Podrace; see: droid control ship) before he started training with Obi-wan and so he knew what was wrong, even if he expressed it clumsily. But bless him, he had enough sense of himself to really want to move ahead and stretch his abilities to their limits, even if he maybe got an inflated sense of what those were, possibly because Obi-wan wouldn't let him test his limits and have the experience of genuine failure after trying his hardest. (Honestly, I think the smartest thing Obi-wan, or Qui-gon, or anyone could have done in training baby!Anakin was to say, "Okay, as soon as you're skilled enough to plan the mission from start to finish and take the lead in carrying it out, we'll go rescue your mom." Motivation right there. Kid probably would have been a Jedi before he needed to shave regularly at that rate.)
With the Naboo... hm. There is certainly a difference between being intellectually capable of wrangling political-science issues in the abstract and being emotionally ready to cope with being a life-or-death decision-maker. And also the Naboo as a pacifist society probably got away with it for a while precisely because their life-or-death decisions erred on the side of compassion, and because they appear to be a wealthy enough society that there are not have-nots to deal with. In fact they might have embraced the teen-monarch thing for reasons connected with wanting to harness that adolescent idealism in service to their culture, if that makes sense. Getting the "smart and passionate about social justice" influence maybe as a counterbalance to more mature but more self-interested influences (say, from the private sector). (Interestingly, Naboo politicians seem to come in two flavors: really young women, and really old guys. IDK what that actually means about the cultural/political structure.)
On the other hand, my gut instinct is that if you've got kids that age who are actually able to pull off being good rulers... then they definitely need to be in some kind of real-world leadership role, even if "ruler of a planet" is probably too much--- but, you know, being class president or whatever would probably be way too little! And, see above on limits and challenge and having the experience of doing something that's hard for you, it would actually be abusive to keep them from having those real-world experiences, much the same as it's abusive to make an 8-year-old lie in a crib all day long. So if they have enough of a gift for and love of politics to be good at it, they need to take that out for a spin in some real and meaningful way. And I also think that with politics it's somewhat harder to separate "intellectually competent to make the right decisions" and "psycho-emotionally capable of doing the work" just because it takes so much psychoemotional capacity to make the right decisions in the first place.
Where the abuse comes in for me in Naboo culture is if kids are getting pushed into it because they have the talent and not because they have the passion for the work at least at that point in their lives. (Given that they can serve a maximum of eight years, I'm less worried than some might be about the transience of adolescent areas of interest, because even if your passion changes radically as you get older, "Queen" still looks good on your resume, lol, and the skills learned would apply in almost any field, because you nearly always have to wrangle people, at least a little.)
Personally, I think the whole teenage-ruler-as-institution issue is a lot like Anakin's "oops, did I do that?" destruction of the droid control ship that we talked about elsewhere--- that it's a cheapening of each of their awesome. Instead of embracing the crazy awesome that Padme would have to have been to be elected queen at 14 in a system that didn't institutionalize teenage monarchy--- that she was actually Just That Good, and that she was someone so truly prodigious that it wasn't abusive, you get a system where it's normal (and which brings the abusiveness issues, as in, the fact that you're probably not going to have enough people that age who are actually capable of doing the work in a purely practical sense to make a system of it).
Oh, yes, I love Padme-the-younger! She's a lot like how I see Leia, in some ways--- not so strong in the Force, but a masterful people-wrangler and she knows it. Except Leia has more of Anakin's fire and Padme-the-younger is a kinder creature, innately--- which is also a part of Anakin, just not one that the Jedi Order really fostered. (Which says many things about how the OJO was screwed up.)