response part four (Padmé's derailment)
Jan. 29th, 2012 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghrainePadmé and SFCs, continued!
only her relationship with Anakin Skywalker had changed. Once Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, though, the perception of her character – pregnant and torn between the many identities that women are forced to confront – had shifted, and so too we began to see a change in how female characters were used in the EU books.
I don’t believe George Lucas ever intended to present Padmé as weak or to minimize her heroism because of her pregnancy.
Okay. I’m - the thing in ROTS is that Padmé’s heroism is not minimized because of her pregnancy. The fact that she is pregnant does not make her weaker, or anything. It’s because Padmé no longer does the things that we saw her doing before. I mean, nobody expected her to be out with her blasters blazing while eight months pregnant, no.
But she’s - time is really fuzzy in ROTS - but there was certainly plenty of time she could have been doing that, earlier in the pregnancy, instead of spending the whole time staying at home. We could have seen her doing stuff in the Senate, we could have seen her forming the Rebellion - which, indeed, she did. There are plenty of things we could have seen her doing and her pregnancy was not what prevented her from doing them.
In fact, when asked about the character in The Clone Wars, voice actress Cat Taber quite often makes a point of emphasizing that when discussing Padmé with George Lucas, they both want to be clear that she is a strong character.
Yeah? [sigh] I can easily believe that Lucas meant her to be a strong character and that everybody meant her to be a strong character. I haven’t seen TCW cartoon, but I’ve heard that people tend to really like her portrayal there. Much more than they do the Padmé we got in ROTS, so the fact that her voice actress was trying to make her strong is … nice, apparently she succeeded! But I’m not sure how relevant it is? Uh, intent is not magic! Intending to make a strong character does not mean you actually did so. I mean, Stephenie Meyer thinks Bella Swan is a strong character, and no.
At some moment though, the fierce heroine of The Phantom Menace was lost in the minds of many fans.
For me, it was, I think, a little more gradual than it is for some other people? In that there’s lots of stuff in AOTC where I thought, “...wait.” Why is she now relevant as Anakin’s love interest more than in anything she does in herself? Why is her response to somebody, who it’s not perfectly clear that she’s actually interested in - though I think we have to assume that she is - that her response to him admitting that he’s just committed mass murder is ‘everybody gets angry.’ Like, what? I started to think there was actually something seriously wrong with her!
And then, then they both seem to forget about it and they go and kill a bunch of robots and things, and he loses his hand in a fight and then they go and get married. Her characterization just seems sort of wobbly then, in that she she kind of has to be - what she does seems dependent on what the plot and specifically what Anakin’s storyline needed her to be.
So you know, when he needed somebody to say ‘no, it’s okay!’ that’s what she did. When he needed somebody to be ‘no, our love can never be!’ that’s what she did. When he needed somebody to say, ‘oh yes, I do love you after all’ that’s what she did. When he - the plot - he needed to be married, they got married. But Padmé, Padmé’s arc, is like Leia’s in that it ceases to be a central arc through the second and third, but sort of unlike hers in that it’s all over the place.
But yeah, ROTS for me just sort of - I mean, I understand why for so many fans that’s where it falls apart, but for me it’s just a continuation of the things that were already starting to bother me in AOTC, how she’s sort of relegated to a less significant position, she’s only really relevant as an adjunct to Anakin, even her early role as - one of the things she does in TPM is, she’s kind of Palpatine’s stooge. She clearly has a relationship with Palpatine and we see the hints of it early on, but that just vanishes and we have no idea how she changed her mind about him, or when, and what their relationship became if there even is one - that’s a thing that could be interesting. So things that are even in her arc just sort of fall away.
As a fan of the franchise and also a proponent of strong female heroines I can’t help but notice that when lists are generated on geek websites or in genre-specific magazines, Padmé and Leia are often also-rans or not in the mix at all.
Uh. Me, personally, I tend to see - I see Leia there a lot, and I very rarely see Padmé at all. Maybe this is just my bias, that I only remember the times I’ve seen Leia - there’ve certainly been a couple where I’m like “oh God, they didn’t include Leia, what’s wrong with them?” But I see Leia there a lot - not near the top, but definitely there.
Did losing “the will to live” seal her fate as a strong female hero?
Well, she wasn’t the hero after TPM, so...yeah. It was certainly a really blah way to go out, but I think for many it was the last straw rather than in and of itself the thing made her cease to be impressive.
Or are fans simply too hard on her because she died, or failed Anakin in some way?
I don’t think Padmé really failed Anakin, particularly. I think that some of the ways she reacted to him were … really unwise, and in some cases actively … unhelpful, but that - of all the many people that failed Anakin, Padmé was - I think Padmé failed Padmé, more. For me that’s where, that’s the hugest point of the whole thing, where she justifies his mini-genocide, it’s not - the horror is not that by justifying him, she’s making it easier for him to justify later murders. I mean, that may be an effect, but for me, that’s not what makes that scene so ‘holy shit, what did you just do?’
Padmé is - that’s not the kind of person she is, at least as far as I’ve understood. She is not the kind of person that would be okay with that. She’s somebody who cares about justice and about rights, of everyone, she’s somebody who would regard the Sand People as actual people and not - evil teddy bears. For me, at least in my interpretation of the scene, it’s like what she is doing, and what she says seems to me a betrayal of her own principles and her own values, and so I lose a whole ton of respect for her there.
I would say in terms of Anakin that, while that is horrific, and of course, doing it is rather worse than justifying it, it does fit his arc. It does fit what we have already seen of him. This is someone who we’ve already seen espousing fascism, this is somebody who’s clearly angry, clearly unstable, this is somebody who in the ten years since we last saw him, something clearly went wrong somewhere, because he was nine years old, brought up in slavery on Tatooine and he’s fine, and the Jedi take him away and he comes back and he’s angry and “we need a dictatorship” and stuff. So what he did, while horrible, and - and I do have issues with it as a device - it fits with the trajectory he’s on. It doesn’t fit Padmé’s trajectory, so it makes her character seem kind of … fractured, I guess.
Personally, I think many fans’ take a view of Padmé that is simply too superficial.
Yeah, I disagree with you.
I’ve asked Lex, who was among a core set of fanfiction writers I knew from back in the Prequel Trilogy days who really understood the power of her character, to go into more detail about her portrayal in the movies.
...Hm.
Before he does that, though, I thought it was important to go back and look at what exactly the term “strong” means, because we can’t talk about Padmé without taking that step first.
Is she going to pull out the dictionary? Because … please, no?
Let’s start with the word itself.
Type it into the thesaurus
Okay, it’s not quite the dictionary?
and you’ll get a wide range of synonyms. Some for physically powerful: burly, brawny, strapping, sturdy, and beefy; others for robust: stout, solid, resilient, and tough. The there’s more for fervent: great, intense, fierce, passionate; and also for keen: dedicated, firm, zealous, and eager.
Popping over to the dictionary (courtesy of Microsoft Word’s Encarta feature), “strong” is flushed out by 25 different definitions.
[sigh] Okay, it is going to be the dictionary. I guess it’s not as much of an issue here. In case somebody managed - in case you don’t know, something that happens in discussions of … various isms is people who pull out the dictionary and are like, “well, the dictionary says that it’s this so I’m right,” completely ignoring the fact that dictionaries are not created in a vacuum, and that they evolve over time and so simply “this is what the dictionary says!” is often actually not a very highly regarded argument in … um, but in this case I guess, it’s … kind of irrelevant but not actively oppressive, so I guess we can go with it.
The ones that are particularly relevant: 1. physically powerful, 2. using force, 3. robust and sturdy, 4. emotionally resilient, 5. healthy and well, 6. thriving, 7. likely to succeed, 8. convincing, 9. knowledgeable, 10. exerting influence, 11. effective, 12. felt powerfully, 13. distinctive, and 14. extreme.
So the word “strong,” by the book, could have quite a variety of meanings when discussing the strength of characters, and it will mean many different things to many different people.
Honestly, when we’re talking about character, I don’t see it meaning that many different things. It can have different connotations, I guess? But people generally mean that a strong character is either forceful in the sense of a character who leaves a strong impression on you, or that in-story they’re a...a strong-willed person. I mean, I honestly see very little apart from that.
Certainly it goes far beyond the notion of strapping herculean physical prowess. Yet when people talk about strong male characters, are they referring to muscle-bound supermen?
I will honestly say I almost never hear anybody talk about strong male characters. They talk about - I mean, they sometimes use strong to mean physically strong, but - like, take Luke. I almost never hear anybody say “yeah, that’s a really strong male character.” No. There’s usually no need to specify that because, the thing is, it’s really what I was talking about earlier - it’s representation.
You know, a given male character is never going to be presented or received as a representative of all men. They aren’t. Because THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM. There are tons and tons of guys in everything. Even something that “feels” female-dominated is much more likely to be about equal numbers than women outnumbering men. And what that means is that we see all kinds of guys, all kinds of figures of male strength and weakness, all over. So Guy Character #3894261 is not MAN, and if he's strong he's still not a model for what male strength must be forever and ever amen. Nobody is going to describe him as “a strong male character.”
Think about it. “I like Sam Gamgee because he’s such a strong male character!” Nobody says this! Even a character that is more conventionally strong -- I’ve never heard anyone say, “I like Boromir because he’s such a strong male character.” People don’t say that. They might say “because he’s compelling” or “because he’s morally ambiguous but still good” or they might say “because he’s so hot” or “because he’s so impressive,” “he’s such a badass,” there are a lot of things, but nobody usually feels the need to say, to specify “strong male character.” So I find this whole discussion a bit … frankly, odd.
only her relationship with Anakin Skywalker had changed. Once Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, though, the perception of her character – pregnant and torn between the many identities that women are forced to confront – had shifted, and so too we began to see a change in how female characters were used in the EU books.
I don’t believe George Lucas ever intended to present Padmé as weak or to minimize her heroism because of her pregnancy.
Okay. I’m - the thing in ROTS is that Padmé’s heroism is not minimized because of her pregnancy. The fact that she is pregnant does not make her weaker, or anything. It’s because Padmé no longer does the things that we saw her doing before. I mean, nobody expected her to be out with her blasters blazing while eight months pregnant, no.
But she’s - time is really fuzzy in ROTS - but there was certainly plenty of time she could have been doing that, earlier in the pregnancy, instead of spending the whole time staying at home. We could have seen her doing stuff in the Senate, we could have seen her forming the Rebellion - which, indeed, she did. There are plenty of things we could have seen her doing and her pregnancy was not what prevented her from doing them.
In fact, when asked about the character in The Clone Wars, voice actress Cat Taber quite often makes a point of emphasizing that when discussing Padmé with George Lucas, they both want to be clear that she is a strong character.
Yeah? [sigh] I can easily believe that Lucas meant her to be a strong character and that everybody meant her to be a strong character. I haven’t seen TCW cartoon, but I’ve heard that people tend to really like her portrayal there. Much more than they do the Padmé we got in ROTS, so the fact that her voice actress was trying to make her strong is … nice, apparently she succeeded! But I’m not sure how relevant it is? Uh, intent is not magic! Intending to make a strong character does not mean you actually did so. I mean, Stephenie Meyer thinks Bella Swan is a strong character, and no.
At some moment though, the fierce heroine of The Phantom Menace was lost in the minds of many fans.
For me, it was, I think, a little more gradual than it is for some other people? In that there’s lots of stuff in AOTC where I thought, “...wait.” Why is she now relevant as Anakin’s love interest more than in anything she does in herself? Why is her response to somebody, who it’s not perfectly clear that she’s actually interested in - though I think we have to assume that she is - that her response to him admitting that he’s just committed mass murder is ‘everybody gets angry.’ Like, what? I started to think there was actually something seriously wrong with her!
And then, then they both seem to forget about it and they go and kill a bunch of robots and things, and he loses his hand in a fight and then they go and get married. Her characterization just seems sort of wobbly then, in that she she kind of has to be - what she does seems dependent on what the plot and specifically what Anakin’s storyline needed her to be.
So you know, when he needed somebody to say ‘no, it’s okay!’ that’s what she did. When he needed somebody to be ‘no, our love can never be!’ that’s what she did. When he needed somebody to say, ‘oh yes, I do love you after all’ that’s what she did. When he - the plot - he needed to be married, they got married. But Padmé, Padmé’s arc, is like Leia’s in that it ceases to be a central arc through the second and third, but sort of unlike hers in that it’s all over the place.
But yeah, ROTS for me just sort of - I mean, I understand why for so many fans that’s where it falls apart, but for me it’s just a continuation of the things that were already starting to bother me in AOTC, how she’s sort of relegated to a less significant position, she’s only really relevant as an adjunct to Anakin, even her early role as - one of the things she does in TPM is, she’s kind of Palpatine’s stooge. She clearly has a relationship with Palpatine and we see the hints of it early on, but that just vanishes and we have no idea how she changed her mind about him, or when, and what their relationship became if there even is one - that’s a thing that could be interesting. So things that are even in her arc just sort of fall away.
As a fan of the franchise and also a proponent of strong female heroines I can’t help but notice that when lists are generated on geek websites or in genre-specific magazines, Padmé and Leia are often also-rans or not in the mix at all.
Uh. Me, personally, I tend to see - I see Leia there a lot, and I very rarely see Padmé at all. Maybe this is just my bias, that I only remember the times I’ve seen Leia - there’ve certainly been a couple where I’m like “oh God, they didn’t include Leia, what’s wrong with them?” But I see Leia there a lot - not near the top, but definitely there.
Did losing “the will to live” seal her fate as a strong female hero?
Well, she wasn’t the hero after TPM, so...yeah. It was certainly a really blah way to go out, but I think for many it was the last straw rather than in and of itself the thing made her cease to be impressive.
Or are fans simply too hard on her because she died, or failed Anakin in some way?
I don’t think Padmé really failed Anakin, particularly. I think that some of the ways she reacted to him were … really unwise, and in some cases actively … unhelpful, but that - of all the many people that failed Anakin, Padmé was - I think Padmé failed Padmé, more. For me that’s where, that’s the hugest point of the whole thing, where she justifies his mini-genocide, it’s not - the horror is not that by justifying him, she’s making it easier for him to justify later murders. I mean, that may be an effect, but for me, that’s not what makes that scene so ‘holy shit, what did you just do?’
Padmé is - that’s not the kind of person she is, at least as far as I’ve understood. She is not the kind of person that would be okay with that. She’s somebody who cares about justice and about rights, of everyone, she’s somebody who would regard the Sand People as actual people and not - evil teddy bears. For me, at least in my interpretation of the scene, it’s like what she is doing, and what she says seems to me a betrayal of her own principles and her own values, and so I lose a whole ton of respect for her there.
I would say in terms of Anakin that, while that is horrific, and of course, doing it is rather worse than justifying it, it does fit his arc. It does fit what we have already seen of him. This is someone who we’ve already seen espousing fascism, this is somebody who’s clearly angry, clearly unstable, this is somebody who in the ten years since we last saw him, something clearly went wrong somewhere, because he was nine years old, brought up in slavery on Tatooine and he’s fine, and the Jedi take him away and he comes back and he’s angry and “we need a dictatorship” and stuff. So what he did, while horrible, and - and I do have issues with it as a device - it fits with the trajectory he’s on. It doesn’t fit Padmé’s trajectory, so it makes her character seem kind of … fractured, I guess.
Personally, I think many fans’ take a view of Padmé that is simply too superficial.
Yeah, I disagree with you.
I’ve asked Lex, who was among a core set of fanfiction writers I knew from back in the Prequel Trilogy days who really understood the power of her character, to go into more detail about her portrayal in the movies.
...Hm.
Before he does that, though, I thought it was important to go back and look at what exactly the term “strong” means, because we can’t talk about Padmé without taking that step first.
Is she going to pull out the dictionary? Because … please, no?
Let’s start with the word itself.
Type it into the thesaurus
Okay, it’s not quite the dictionary?
and you’ll get a wide range of synonyms. Some for physically powerful: burly, brawny, strapping, sturdy, and beefy; others for robust: stout, solid, resilient, and tough. The there’s more for fervent: great, intense, fierce, passionate; and also for keen: dedicated, firm, zealous, and eager.
Popping over to the dictionary (courtesy of Microsoft Word’s Encarta feature), “strong” is flushed out by 25 different definitions.
[sigh] Okay, it is going to be the dictionary. I guess it’s not as much of an issue here. In case somebody managed - in case you don’t know, something that happens in discussions of … various isms is people who pull out the dictionary and are like, “well, the dictionary says that it’s this so I’m right,” completely ignoring the fact that dictionaries are not created in a vacuum, and that they evolve over time and so simply “this is what the dictionary says!” is often actually not a very highly regarded argument in … um, but in this case I guess, it’s … kind of irrelevant but not actively oppressive, so I guess we can go with it.
The ones that are particularly relevant: 1. physically powerful, 2. using force, 3. robust and sturdy, 4. emotionally resilient, 5. healthy and well, 6. thriving, 7. likely to succeed, 8. convincing, 9. knowledgeable, 10. exerting influence, 11. effective, 12. felt powerfully, 13. distinctive, and 14. extreme.
So the word “strong,” by the book, could have quite a variety of meanings when discussing the strength of characters, and it will mean many different things to many different people.
Honestly, when we’re talking about character, I don’t see it meaning that many different things. It can have different connotations, I guess? But people generally mean that a strong character is either forceful in the sense of a character who leaves a strong impression on you, or that in-story they’re a...a strong-willed person. I mean, I honestly see very little apart from that.
Certainly it goes far beyond the notion of strapping herculean physical prowess. Yet when people talk about strong male characters, are they referring to muscle-bound supermen?
I will honestly say I almost never hear anybody talk about strong male characters. They talk about - I mean, they sometimes use strong to mean physically strong, but - like, take Luke. I almost never hear anybody say “yeah, that’s a really strong male character.” No. There’s usually no need to specify that because, the thing is, it’s really what I was talking about earlier - it’s representation.
You know, a given male character is never going to be presented or received as a representative of all men. They aren’t. Because THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM. There are tons and tons of guys in everything. Even something that “feels” female-dominated is much more likely to be about equal numbers than women outnumbering men. And what that means is that we see all kinds of guys, all kinds of figures of male strength and weakness, all over. So Guy Character #3894261 is not MAN, and if he's strong he's still not a model for what male strength must be forever and ever amen. Nobody is going to describe him as “a strong male character.”
Think about it. “I like Sam Gamgee because he’s such a strong male character!” Nobody says this! Even a character that is more conventionally strong -- I’ve never heard anyone say, “I like Boromir because he’s such a strong male character.” People don’t say that. They might say “because he’s compelling” or “because he’s morally ambiguous but still good” or they might say “because he’s so hot” or “because he’s so impressive,” “he’s such a badass,” there are a lot of things, but nobody usually feels the need to say, to specify “strong male character.” So I find this whole discussion a bit … frankly, odd.