Yes, I like your Lyra characterization--- very much the sort of person who could have come out of the Skywalker-Organa-Solo blend of nature and nurture, all that passionate idealism and conviction of rightness. (And now I really want the reality-check discussion Anakin gives her, because Anakin would pull no punches but he also gets in a very real way what the world is like and how people can get cornered, how your only choices are bad ones.)
Luke, Anakin, and ability development: not only was Anakin allowed (indeed required) to develop his Force-powers at a younger age, but... even when he was "only" using them for mundane things, there was a lot more of... on some levels freedom but on others responsibility; I get a sense that Anakin's skill at fixing things and flying would have made him valuable as a slave, and so in a sense he was supporting the family? At nine. Whereas Owen and Beru were very much the adults in the family, and Luke was expected to help out, but it was as a kid. In some ways, the second decade of Anakin's life is almost more restricting or "kiddified" than the first.
Oooh, I'm glad you like my "let's go rescue Shmi" approach to Anakin's training. And, exactly on why the Jedi (with the possible exception of Qui-gon) wouldn't have gone there. *facepalm*
Naboo: Yes, I want more on their political system, period. Queen is obviously not just a ceremonial position, a la the British monarchy, but they also have a constitution that gets mentioned and... oh, George Lucas, stop dangling these cool toys in front of us and them dropping them half-finished. LOL.
I have very strong feelings against age limits as opposed to maturity limits, not that this would be news by this point in time, lol. Or rather I have strong objections to the way the prodigiously talented outliers get erased, or worse, held back, by them. Because if you tell someone over and over and over that they aren't really that capable, that they're just a kid, they start believing you. And they certainly don't exercise their talents. And it's hard if not impossible to reclaim that ability all of a sudden when you finally hit the "acceptable" age to be doing whatever it is. (The US example is really interesting, because it comes from a paradigm where a) the Founding Fathers were really opposed to career politicians and I think the age limits may have been part of that--- they wanted to make sure the holders of high public office were doing something else with their lives, which, um, did not work out so much, and b) they were also assuming that the franchise, let alone the holding of office, would be restricted to white male property-owners, which is a much more homogeneous group, culturally speaking, and it becomes more valid to make generalizations about the probable chronology of the developmental curve of a population when you narrow it down to people with a more common set of experiences--- as opposed to the broad general population of 35-year-olds from different cultural/SES/etc. backgrounds who can vote, and hold office, in the US today.)
Granted, I'm saying all this in the context of thinking that the tradition of teenage elected monarchs is stupid (not least because it makes less of Padme's awesomeness as a unique outlier who is unusual in her ability to do this), and also that I think it would have been even cooler if she'd been Palpatine's badass Senate-page protegee (who maybe gets elected Senator on the strength of her actions in the Battle of Naboo plus being the Chancellor's protegee), so.
Padme-the-younger: that all makes sense. (And now I'm wondering about Leia's career as a Senator, which we never actually get to see, and also her relationship with "the top brass" in the Rebellion.) But, yeah, Padme is a kinder creature, in ways that maybe her parents' lives never really allowed them to be. (Though house-spouse!Han maybe has some of that caretaking capacity, it just wasn't fostered in his environment until that point in his life.)
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Luke, Anakin, and ability development: not only was Anakin allowed (indeed required) to develop his Force-powers at a younger age, but... even when he was "only" using them for mundane things, there was a lot more of... on some levels freedom but on others responsibility; I get a sense that Anakin's skill at fixing things and flying would have made him valuable as a slave, and so in a sense he was supporting the family? At nine. Whereas Owen and Beru were very much the adults in the family, and Luke was expected to help out, but it was as a kid. In some ways, the second decade of Anakin's life is almost more restricting or "kiddified" than the first.
Oooh, I'm glad you like my "let's go rescue Shmi" approach to Anakin's training. And, exactly on why the Jedi (with the possible exception of Qui-gon) wouldn't have gone there. *facepalm*
Naboo: Yes, I want more on their political system, period. Queen is obviously not just a ceremonial position, a la the British monarchy, but they also have a constitution that gets mentioned and... oh, George Lucas, stop dangling these cool toys in front of us and them dropping them half-finished. LOL.
I have very strong feelings against age limits as opposed to maturity limits, not that this would be news by this point in time, lol. Or rather I have strong objections to the way the prodigiously talented outliers get erased, or worse, held back, by them. Because if you tell someone over and over and over that they aren't really that capable, that they're just a kid, they start believing you. And they certainly don't exercise their talents. And it's hard if not impossible to reclaim that ability all of a sudden when you finally hit the "acceptable" age to be doing whatever it is. (The US example is really interesting, because it comes from a paradigm where a) the Founding Fathers were really opposed to career politicians and I think the age limits may have been part of that--- they wanted to make sure the holders of high public office were doing something else with their lives, which, um, did not work out so much, and b) they were also assuming that the franchise, let alone the holding of office, would be restricted to white male property-owners, which is a much more homogeneous group, culturally speaking, and it becomes more valid to make generalizations about the probable chronology of the developmental curve of a population when you narrow it down to people with a more common set of experiences--- as opposed to the broad general population of 35-year-olds from different cultural/SES/etc. backgrounds who can vote, and hold office, in the US today.)
Granted, I'm saying all this in the context of thinking that the tradition of teenage elected monarchs is stupid (not least because it makes less of Padme's awesomeness as a unique outlier who is unusual in her ability to do this), and also that I think it would have been even cooler if she'd been Palpatine's badass Senate-page protegee (who maybe gets elected Senator on the strength of her actions in the Battle of Naboo plus being the Chancellor's protegee), so.
Padme-the-younger: that all makes sense. (And now I'm wondering about Leia's career as a Senator, which we never actually get to see, and also her relationship with "the top brass" in the Rebellion.) But, yeah, Padme is a kinder creature, in ways that maybe her parents' lives never really allowed them to be. (Though house-spouse!Han maybe has some of that caretaking capacity, it just wasn't fostered in his environment until that point in his life.)