The Case for Padmé
TW: This essay discusses suicide, postpartum depression, and other mental health issues.
Length: 7k+ words
A woman lies on an operating table. Around her are floating screens and skeletal droids. Two men, an alien, and a droid look on. One medic-droid approaches the men. “Medically, she’s completely healthy,” it says. “For reasons we can’t explain, we are losing her.”
“She’s dying?” One man says.
“We don’t know why,” the droid says. “She has lost the will to live. We need to operate quickly if we are to save the babies.”
The other man: “Babies?”
The droid: “She’s carrying twins.”
All goes quiet. The scene progresses with little other dialogue. A privacy screen is brought in and another droid, which says soothing nothings as the twins are delivered. The woman is distraught: she cries, she screams. The first man looks on. At first, the woman only speaks to name her children: “Luke…Leia.”
Her movements are limited and she barely manages to raise a hand. After giving birth, the woman’s eyes are closed, brow furrowed. “Obi-Wan,” she says, breathing uneasily, “there’s good in him. I know there’s, still…” She dies.
So goes the much-maligned death of Padmé Amidala, heroine of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. While Padmé’s death is far from the most-mocked thing about the prequels (that’ll probably always be Jar Jar Binks), it may be the most mocked part of her character. Padmé’s romance with Anakin has gained a following over time; discussions around her death are relatively static. This Gizmodo article from 2012 ranking Padmé as second-most “undignified” death “in Science Fiction and Fantasy” could’ve been published last week. For many, Padmé losing the will to live retroactively ruins any good moments she had, solidifying her spot in the Bad Female Character canon. It is simply too egregious, too preposterous, a stretch too far for even the most explosive Star Wars third act. But–why?
True, Padmé’s death complicates previous lore and is a big dramatic set piece that’s hardly grounded or elaborated on. The same can be said for most of the Star Wars prequels. (And of all things, Leia remembering Padmé isn’t that difficult to explain. She has the force! Plus, unlike Luke, she was raised by someone who knew Padmé. Sloppy yes, but not unreasonable. Obi-Wan calling Yoda “the Jedi Master who taught me” when he at most took a beginner force-wielding lesson from him as a youngling bothers me much more.) In our current digital age where every stray and unsightly corner of the Star Wars prequels has been refashioned into nostalgia, Padmé’s death is kept to the shadows. There is something about this moment that enrages people on a pure, knee-jerk level. Something that registers as off across galaxies, demands to be written out in fanfics and made into a punchline in every recap. Again–why?
Padmé’s death lands as a major societal taboo while embracing Star Wars’ oldest influences. This reaches across aisles and gives everyone a reason to be pissed off. Padmé is a mother character who loves her kids but finds herself unable to go on: she is a woman who rejects motherhood in the most basic sense. She is also a classic Ophelia-lite character, a tragic heroine who dies when betrayed by her love. Moreover, Padmé operates as a withering personification of democracy, of peace, of hope for unconditional love in the face of brutality. The trilogy loses her as it plunges fully into darkness. All of this is blunt and operatic and not easy to fit into some pre-approved Good Female Character mold. So it is blanket-dismissed as degradation, an insult to Padmé’s previous triumphs and unworthy of analysis. And so it goes that most call Padmé’s death inexplicable, and shy away from the big word: suicide.
This essay aims to bridge that gap, taking Padmé’s death seriously and arguing against commonly pitched fix-its. It also serves to set up my following essay, “The Skywalker Suicides Part II”, and establish a thematic connection to Luke. In short, this is a good faith, overwrought close reading of the one thing no Star Wars fan will stop laughing about.
The Case for Suicide
For the above Gizmodo article, Charlie Jane Anders writes, “[Padmé’s] basically a giant plot device and it’s not even clear what kills her other than the needs of the storyline.” Goes a 2023 viral tweet: “The funniest thing about the Star Wars prequels is that Padmé dying from a traumatic twin delivery is entirely plausible and yet she had to die of a broken heart??” (Told you that thing could’ve been written today.) In her book Star Wars Meets The Eras of Feminism: Weighing all the Galaxy’s Women Great and Small, Valerie Estelle Frankel concurs: “Padmé dies for no clear reason…her death makes no sense medically.” All reflect a common sentiment: Padmé’s death is vague, unclear, and illogical.
Admittedly, the phrase “died of a broken heart” doesn’t get much across. It’s become the go-to line for her death, but it’s far from all the films say. Let’s go over what we are told about Padmé, and what we know. Star Wars often uses droids as expository devices (see: the whole first stretch of A New Hope) and, at least in George Lucas’ hands, is shot in a straightforward documentary style. We are given no strong reason to doubt what we’re seeing and hearing, and what we see and hear is the following:
Padmé is a pacifist who has been opposed to the current galactic war since it began. A former child soldier, she is hesitant to go into battle or wield a weapon in adulthood, and routinely says she wants a diplomatic solution to crises. While Padmé voices her politics freely, she speaks of her personal wants rarely. Her early conversations with Anakin are consumed by politics, her child-queen upbringing, public perception; only on the brink of murder is she able to tell him she loves him. This confession comes with another: “I’m not afraid to die.”
Of all the trilogy’s characters, Padmé has the most storied relationship with death. She’s been in public service since twelve and by the age of fourteen not only is her life under constant threat but she knows how to wield a blaster and command an army. The only reason Padmé isn’t dead before twenty is because of her identical handmaidens, who serve as doppelgangers for enemies to shoot instead of her. Attack of the Clones opens with Padmé witnessing her own assassination, then finding herself unable to comfort her dying decoy. She only finds words to speak of the moment when talking vaguely, asking others to find her killer. When Anakin tells her he’s had a vision of her dying in childbirth, her reaction is pragmatic: “…and the baby?”
This slow dance with death comes with a lifelong political inertia. Padmé’s reason to become a Senator is because she “couldn’t refuse” the incumbent Queen’s request. “I was relieved when my two terms were up”, she confesses. By the time of Revenge of the Sith, she openly fantasizes about abandoning her senate post and running away with Anakin. This desire for family is voiced alongside a declaration of escape: “this baby will change our lives.” Padmé wants kids but foremost, she wants a different life. This can easily be read as Padmé wanting to live, for the first time, not in the service of others.
Ani, I want to have our baby back home on Naboo. We can go to the lake country where no one will know…where we can be safe. I can go early and fix up the baby’s room. I know the perfect spot. Right by the gardens.
Padmé, Revenge of the Sith
Then it all goes wrong.
For the first time in their relationship, Padmé tells Anakin “I don’t know you.” His downfall comes at the expense of everything Padmé has ever cared about: peace, freedom, love. She witnesses the Republic become the Empire through a burst of applause. Her husband calls her a liar and physically abuses her, cementing his turn to the dark. Padmé observably survives the attack–Obi-Wan checks on her and finds she’s breathing, the droid tells us she’s medically fine–but her hope for a future dies on Mustafar. “You’re going down a path I can’t follow,” she begs of Anakin–and she can’t. She loses the will to live.
We don’t need a space therapist to declare Padmé a suicide victim to make a diagnosis here. Firstly because Padmé is not real, and secondly because the film spells it out just as boldly. All other options are ruled out on-screen, in plain terms: “She was alive! I felt it!”/”Medically, she is completely healthy.” Any other explanation requires a twisting of these words–the suicidal reading only asks we pay attention. If Padmé has lost the will to live, we must conclude that she wants to die.
Padmé’s death is the most clear cut suicide in the franchise. She has no indication that her death will benefit anyone, nor has she been told by anyone that death is on the horizon; and yet, she wants to. The love of her life has become master of Hell, the father of her children has set the galaxy aflame, and the ruling body she gave her life to has gone obsolete—indeed, always was. How could we talk Padmé off the ledge at this moment? How could anyone? Ultimately, the film doesn’t ask us to. This is a tragedy. The point is not to berate our protagonists into healthier living choices, but to watch them fall into the abyss. At the end of every good tragedy, there’s nothing else left.
So Padmé falls neatly into the canon of self-annihilating tragic heroines. Her death is not inspiring, or productive, or well-adjusted, but it is her death. The means, the reasons, the aftermath, all belong to her. Padmé, the victim of multiple assassination attempts from the ages of fourteen to twenty-four, warrior on the frontlines of the battles of Naboo and Geonosis, survivor of Nexu claws, force choking, and a difficult trauma-informed birth, dies firmly and exclusively because she wanted to. If she wanted to live, she would’ve lived. This is not a weakening death, especially when compared to oft-cited “strong” deaths like having Anakin kill her. One wonders: how is Padmé choosing to die less empowering than having that choice taken from her?
In discussion around Padmé I tend to see two main rebuttals to the concept of Padmé killing herself. The first concerns her status as a mother and the second as a #StrongFemaleCharacter. While said rebuttals may be catchy and well-intentioned, they tend towards snappy dismissals of depression, a remarkably narrow view of what female characters should say or do, and an aggressive strain of genre illiteracy. Though I welcome critique and thoughtful what-ifs on Padmé’s ending, I believe these rebuttals are fatally flawed and only serve to cull more thoughtful discussion. I will go into my issues with them below.
Note: When writing about fandom, quoting people I disagree with is inevitable. For the sake of sticking to actual arguments instead of inter-fan fighting, I will not be naming or linking back to any post or comment I mention here. I will be naming and linking back to actual published articles, as I believe publishing an article implies a willingness to exist in public conversation that being mean to me on Tumblr doesn’t. Additionally, for the record: I don’t intend anything I write as harassment or singling-out.
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?
After years of fraught discourse, locating the most widely spread post about Padmé’s death would be a fruitless—and most importantly, boring—task. But if you ask me, it’s this Tumblr post from 2017, with almost 80 thousand notes: “still can’t believe that someone would write Padmé dying from ‘loosing her will to live’ after just having two beautiful babies and meanwhile that burned circus peanut has enough will to survive 100% burning and tripple amputation. only a man could write that bullshit.”
It’s since been deleted, so I added the post to my queue to screenshot it. The things I do.
A more popular version of this post comes with a lengthy addition pitching the “Palpatine sapped Padmé’s life-force theory”, which I’ll get into later. For now what matters is that “two beautiful babies” line and the assertion that no man could understand a mother’s devotion. The former would find new life in Kristin Devine’s 2019 article “Defenders Of The Gold Bikini 2: The Fempire Doesn’t Strikes Back”, where she writes, “Padme swooning and dying ostensibly over a man—under any circumstances—but particularly when she had two beautiful babies to care for[?]…No one does that.” She goes on to describe Padmé’s death as “[dying], because, feelz, [rather] than liv[ing] to raise her children, or to use her considerable influence over Anakin to try and stop him.” Padmé’s death, she writes, “reduces” her “into a quivering disaster and frankly a terrible mother.”
The 2017 article Devine cites (and Frankel, later on), “Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?” by Sarah Jeong, at least admits “depression after giving birth, and death caused by emotional shock, are both real things”, but counters with “you’d think that if Padme were dying from being very sad, someone would at least mention postpartum depression? You know, in passing.” This article has a clear tongue-in-cheek bent but neither it’s popularity and frequent use of the premise of Padme’s death, of mothers being suicidal, as comedy fodder have done Padme analysis any favors.
Traces of Devine can be found in both a recent comment on my page, “I’m a Mom and if my husband turned evil I’d be like ‘fuck you! My baby and I are outta here!’ My little boy comes first before ANYTHING else. Padme just suffered the double whammy of being poorly written by a clueless male” and a recent reblog on a post from the currently-deactivated husborth: “the whole plot of ROTS is clearly written by somebody without a uterus[.]” I resent that the trace of a valid critique–Star Wars as a whole is rather squeamish about the non-panty-ripping working of female bodies, and Padme’s pregnancy is given an odd distance–must come couched in such ugly bioessentialism, and a refusal to believe that mothers can be sad.
A more popular version of this post comes with a lengthy edition pitching the “Palpatine sapped Padmé’s life-force theory”, which I’ll get into later. For now what matters is that “two beautiful babies” line and the assertion that no man could understand a mother’s devotion. The former would find new life in Kristin Devine’s 2019 article “Defenders Of The Gold Bikini 2: The Fempire Doesn’t Strikes Back”, where she writes, “Padmé swooning and dying ostensibly over a man—under any circumstances—but particularly when she had two beautiful babies to care for[?]…No one does that.” She goes on to describe Padmé’s death as “[dying], because, feelz, [rather] than liv[ing] to raise her children, or to use her considerable influence over Anakin to try and stop him.” Padmé’s death, she writes, “reduces” her “into a quivering disaster and frankly a terrible mother.”
The 2017 article Devine cites (and Frankel, later on), “Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?” by Sarah Jeong, admits “depression after giving birth, and death caused by emotional shock, are both real things”, but counters with “you’d think that if Padmé were dying from being very sad, someone would at least mention postpartum depression? You know, in passing.” This article has a clear tongue-in-cheek bent but neither it’s popularity nor it’s frequent use of the premise of Padmé ‘s death—of mothers being suicidal—as comedy fodder have done Padmé analysis any favors.
Traces of Devine can be found in both a recent comment on my page, “I’m a Mom and if my husband turned evil I’d be like ‘fuck you! My baby and I are outta here!’ My little boy comes first before ANYTHING else. Padmé just suffered the double whammy of being poorly written by a clueless male” and a recent reblog on a Tumblr post from the currently-deactivated husborth: “the whole plot of ROTS is clearly written by somebody without a uterus[.]” I resent that the trace of a valid critique–Star Wars as a whole is rather squeamish about the non-panty-ripping working of female bodies, and Padmé’s pregnancy is given an odd distance–must come couched in such ugly bioessentialism, and a refusal to believe that mothers can be sad.
Surely we can interrogate George Lucas’ way of writing female characters without propping up pregnancy as some magical, singular act that only women are so blessed to understand. The idea that women are destined for the sacred duty of motherhood, something men could never comprehend (so they’d best not go to any of those doctor appointments, no, they just wouldn’t get it), is basic conservative ideology. This is not an ideology that loses its power when disguised as a toothless jab at a man.
How many more examples do I need? Writes a commenter on Star Wars fansite The Imperial Talker: “as a mother myself, I was upset that she couldn’t summon the will to live for her children’s sake.” Another, on the Jedi Council forums: “Padmé was about to have children…that only strengthens someone’s will to live.” Screenrant, solving depression: “arguably, she would have been more determined, wanting a better life for her unborn child.” Rachel Bolton in a Padmé retrospective: “One facet that my younger self focused on was imagining all the different ways Padmé could have survived. Dying of a broken heart was dumb! Why didn’t she try to stay alive for her children?” A 2017 Tumblr anon argues “the losing the will to live made no sense when a) she had two children that needed her”, echoed neatly in a 2012 comment on SWTOR forums: “How come she lost the will to live? She got 2 newborn children to take care of! The love of children is probably the strongest emotion of woman.” Another comment on this thread: “It is because Padme, in the end, was selfish. She couldn’t have her man and kids be darned if she didn’t get to keep her man then she would rather be dead. Who cares what happened to her kids. She wanted her Jedi…At least, that was what I took from it lol.”
In a 2014 post speculating on Padmé’s mental headspace in Revenge of the Sith, the writer known as starwarsanon uncritically stresses that motherhood “is supposed to be a woman’s greatest achievement and one of her greatest moments[.]” On a different starwarsanon post, in response to her writing that Padmé did “not want to face the world where she had born children to a monster”, a commenter says, “this one is a harder sell. Most parents would endure hell and high water to see their children grow up.” She concurs: “Yeah, I struggle with Padme giving up on life and not living for her children as well…how can you not live for your children??”
On fangirlblog’s 2012 article “The Power to Save Padmé”, an anonymous commenter: “There’s one huge problem with the ‘she has nothing left to live for’ argument: the baby(s)…As a mother and an army wife who has had contact with other wives who have given birth after losing their husbands in combat I can tell you right now the idea of Padme giving up with her beloved husband’s child in the equation is nonsense.” Questions a 2021 Quora post: “Why did Padme lose her will to live? She just had 2 kids. Doesn’t that make her a bad parent?”
Another response to one of my posts: “Yeah actually I tend to really really hate mother characters who give up on their children. Same intense dislike I have of Tolkien’s Rían, who is so sad boohoo about her husband dying that she abandons her son to go and drop dead on his grave.” They concluded: “Get up woman. You have shit to do.” (No, I don’t believe this user’s hasty add-on in the tags that they think deadbeat fathers kind of suck too makes this any less vile a statement.)
The use of “woman” as a pejorative. Ugh.
And on, and on, and on.
In 2016, Sociologist Orna Donarth published her book Regretting Motherhood, in which she recorded multiple testimonials from women who regretted their choice to give birth and raise children. Her intent was not, as she clarifies, to provide an “‘emotional freak show’ of ‘perverted women’” but to give voice to “a wide range of emotions about motherhood that are begging to be dealt with”:”a deep seated taboo.”
“Mothers who regret are branded as selfish, insane, deranged women and immoral human beings who exemplify the ‘whining culture’ we allegedly live in.”
Orna Donarth
She identifies this as a structural issue: “Western societies vehemently push women not only into motherhood but into the subsequent loneliness of dealing with the consequences of this persuasion.” Women are told constantly to have children, that they will regret not having children, and pressured into giving up any other aspirations to detrimental, and subsequently, suppressed effect. Obviously, all children deserve to grow up in a healthy and caring environment—the home of a mother who was coerced into having them and is now regretful, not being one. Collective shaming and refusal to think beyond the nuclear family model only worsen both child and mother’s fate. Back in 2004, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive coined the term “reproductive futurism” as a way of describing how society prioritizes potential future children over all other concerns, positing the amorphous public idea of “The Child” as “perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics.”
Obviously in my need to write Padmé Amidala apologia, I am doing neither of these texts due analytic diligence. My bad. What I want to argue here is that common discourse about Padmé’s death frequently kowtows to both societal refusal to discuss depressed mothers and cultural worship of “The Child.” Padmé’s saccharine fantasy of raising her children in domestic bliss takes a cultish precedence in analysis. No matter that the man she wanted to raise her kids with just choked her and killed countless other children. No matter that the galaxy has become an infinitely more hostile place to live. Mothers are supposed to go on, raise their kids, and be happy.
This is seen in how often people cite real mothers as opposition to Padmé’s fate. While some may argue Padmé’s death contradicts her prior characterization (as established, I don’t think this holds water either), the vast majority characterize her death as flying in the face of immutable biological fact. Babies make moms happy. Moms don’t get sad. Moms always stick it out for their kids, and if they feel anything other than complete joy, that’s their failure. Naturally this goes hand in hand with calling suicide a selfish act and Padmé a weak, selfish person.
(One commenter helpfully informed me that “it’s still a selfish act to abandon a living creature that depends on your for survival…Instead of getting into a debate about the moral implications of a mother killing herself and leaving her kids behind, maybe you should be more concerned about helping all parties out of that scenario ALIVE.” Unfortunately I cannot make Padmé real and give her counseling, so I had to block them.)
Padmé does not need to be a textbook example of postpartum depression or a regretful mother for the societal biases against these to be weaponized against her. Indeed, the veil of fiction and severity of real life biases work hand in hand here, allowing people to leverage toxic language against characters who will never reply or change and therefore can be shamed for all eternity. This is but a particularly determined strain of reproductive futurism: entirely fictional children and scenarios, used to deny real shades of human complexity.
What is employed here are not children as people, but children as the political props that they become – the things in whose name awful things are done. “Think of the children” being a slogan that almost completely forecloses any possibility of actually doing so.
Elizabeth Sandifer
Frankel writes that Padmé dies having “fulfilled her biological destiny…a person with [no] life or priorities outside of [Anakin’s] (even her children!)”: “Technology and evil triumph visually over motherhood[.]” Again, I resent that Frankel’s more valid critiques must come with stock outrage at Padmé not prioritizing her babies. It would be more accurate to write that Padmé’s death is a rejection of supposed biological destiny. Padmé escapes the trappings of endlessly caring feminine archetype, if not into real humanity, then into something intangible and boundless. This is what people recoil from.
“This woman should be dragged out into the street, her teeth should be remove [sic] with a claw hammer, and then every child in the town should be lined up and made to cut a piece off of her with a knife. Then she should be burned alive.”
A comment on one of Orna Donath’s articles, recorded in Regretting Motherhood
In 1964, science fiction legend Isaac Asimov published “First Law”, a short story wherein a man at a bar tells his friends about a time a robot supposedly broke free of their programming and “injure[d] a human being, or through inaction allow[ed] a human being to come to harm.” The robot in question: Emma Two, who choses to protect the life of her miraculous robo-baby over a human’s. The final line: “What is even the First Law compared with the holy ties of mother love?”
“First Law” was a quick, early work that doesn’t fit in much with Asimov’s later canon and one he’d dismiss in the 80s as a “spoof”, but it’s central logic of motherhood transcending futuristic limitations is as familiar now as it was then. Am I to believe Isaac Asimov, remembered by Judith Merril and other women as “the man with a hundred hands,” was conquering gender divides and identifying some crucial female perspective when writing that last twist? Or was he relying on convention—is this idea of motherhood as purifying and uncomplicated, convention? Is something not more interesting happening when Padme smiles at Luke, and then her smile fades—full of love, but it’s not enough? Her prophetic final words, declaring there is some part of her husband she does still know, delivered through heavy breaths—how haunting, for it not to be enough.
Our discourse is trapped between two poles: if Padmé is good, she’s a healthy, happy mother (and her death is a betrayal); if Padmé is bad, she’s an awful, neglectful mother (and her death was necessary). Surely amidst the wreckage, we can find some non-exhausting way to talk about Padmé and motherhood.
Padmé Amidala Did Die of a Broken Heart
Here’s where I tread more lightly. There’s no getting around Padmé having a significantly reduced and responsive role in Revenge of the Sith. She’s one of the prequel’s two notable female characters along with Shmi, and both die to further Anakin’s development. The deletion of her “Mother of the Rebellion” scenes means Padmé only makes three real choices in Revenge: to have kids, to go see Anakin on Mustafar, and to die. As noted previously, the distance the movie keeps from Padmé’s pregnancy, not even allowing her the “throwing up in a toilet” cliché and fitting her with a tiny, practically dainty baby bump, is significant. Both Anakin and Padmé are sweaty and battered during their climactic death/rebirth, but Anakin’s wounds are allowed to up the rating to PG-13, whereas Padmé’s birthing set-up goes to great lengths to hide the messy reality of her body. This is gendered treatment. These final choices reflect the prequel trilogy as a whole’s regretful fidelity to Padmé-as-ornament. Natalie Portman herself described Padmé’s arc in Revenge as “it’s not that she goes through this big change internally, but that external things are changing around her.” Taken in account with the prequels’ other female characters, from Sabe to Beru Lars, being decidedly background with no autonomy, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
And yet. There are a great many arguments that use this reduction as a springboard to say Padmé’s death is bad because it is “weak”, that Padmé is not worth caring about because she doesn’t do everything exactly right, and to judge Padmé not by the story she is in or her characterization, but by their own strict ideas of what a strong female character is. This is not feminism. This is barely critique.
These arguments amount to a stripping of agency. What decisions Padmé does make in Revenge are taken from her or distorted and Padmé is remade into a character that not only wouldn’t fit in a tragedy, but has no arc or thematic significance. It judges Padmé by strict competency: is she a good enough leader at fourteen? Is she proficiently skilled at untangling herself from a codependent relationship? No? Then what’s the point of her?
Not only does this kind of talk hold Padmé to an odd standard few male characters are held to, it’s a shallow take on female characters, full stop. As Anika Dane writes in her 2015 essay “The Queen’s Sacrifice”: “A universe populated by cookie-cutter ‘strong’ women is not really so much better than a universe populated by cookie-cutter ‘weak’ women.” Observing how Padmé fits into wider trends of female characters is one thing; dismissing her because she doesn’t meet a set quota of #GirlBoss moments is another.
These arguments pitch a Padmé that died by Anakin’s choking, or after an attempt to kill him herself, or somehow survived, a Padmé that never loved Anakin and was being mind-tricked the whole time, and so forth. Again, it’s one thing to write fanfiction and explore alternate scenarios, and another to proclaim these alternate endings as “correct” and the canonical ending as “incorrect”: a refusal to engage with the text. The latter is what I write about.
The title of this portion comes from “Padmé Didn’t Die of a Broken Heart”, Joseph Travano’s massively influential 2015 essay. Whether or not this essay invented the “Palpatine killed Padmé” theory, it went a long way towards popularizing it. The sum of Travano’s theory is that Padmé wanted to live, actually, but neither droids nor Jedi could sense that Palpatine was sapping her lifeforce across space, draining her energy to revitalize Vader. Sometimes this theory is revamped to make it Anakin that took Padmé’s lifeforce but the general idea is the same. Padmé died through intra-dimensional force draining. She had nothing to do with it.
I could spill a good deal of ink going over this essay’s fragile claims (Travano argues that Palpatine could’ve only known about Padmé’s death if he killed her in the same breath that he cites Palpatine on Coruscant sensing Vader dying on Mustafar, shoddy stuff, c’mon), but that wouldn’t be an honest rebuttal. This is an outline of a theory, not a study, and the vague notion of “Palpatine killed Padmé” is what I really take issue with–and what really caught on. The “Palpatine sapped Padmé’s Lifeforce” Theory is immensely, persistently popular. It is the go-to explanation for Padmé’s death. I’ve seen it on TikTok. I’ve seen it on Reddit. I’ve seen it on Twitter. I’ve seen it scrolling Pinterest looking for Padmé concept art. This is not a theory that exists as a school of thought on its own, but as an add-on, a patch: oh, you don’t like canon? Well here is this secret other canon, just for you.
A common thread among fans of this theory is a rejection of genre, specifically romance and tragedy. Travano concludes: “So please, please(!)–stop talking about murderous broken hearts in Revenge of the Sith. The film deserves better treatment than that, and you deserve to watch this classic one more time.” Frankel derides Padmé’s death as “a gothic storm,” wherein “she succumbs to despair”, praising “[s]mart, colorful fan theories…suggesting the Emperor saps Padmé’s life to raise Vader…or that Padmé’s throat injuries really are fatal but she forces herself to live long enough to save her twins.” A 2021 Reddit thread re-pitching the theory: “So we can all agree on the fact that the medical droid saying she lost the will to live because of sadness is the cause of her death is a bit lame.” Questions CultureSlate: “Why else would Lucas show both scenes simultaneously in Revenge of the Sith? Was it just a poetic representation of what was happening?”
This can be seen in other writings on Padmé’s death. Anthony Price for Yahoo UK & Ireland: “She doesn’t even get a heroic death, instead dying from a lack of a will to live. A broken heart. Cliché anyone?” (This article has since been deleted and wasn’t archived, so just trust me, this was said.) Writes Tricia Barr for the aforementioned “The Power to Save Padmé”: “Certainly it could have been worse, whether a Romeo-and-Juliet Shakespearean suicide or a melodramatic ‘I can’t live without him’ overt declaration of hopelessness.” Reddit: “I feel like in that case ‘complications arising due to being force choked and left sprawled out on the ground’ would be a better explanation than ‘lost the will to live’ but Lucas thought he was doing Dramatic Storytelling.” Another fangirlblog commenter: “it’s all on George, who I suspect felt uncomfortable with having her death occur offscreen between the trilogies (or maybe he genuinely thought such a death was romantic?).”
Here is the truth this line of thought skirts: Padmé’s death is romantic. Dying because she can’t bear to live without her partner is a common tragic convention and Star Wars is not the poorer for pulling from Shakespeare. Such tragic tropes are not above critique, but they do have one thing this theory forfeits: autonomy. Juliet choosing to die without Romeo is equally her refusal to live in a world that forbids their love and wishes to enslave her in any number of passionless marriages. If her body is to be bought and sold, she’ll stop it at the source. No part of this choice would be improved by Paris sucking her life-force or Friar Lawrence calmly informing Juliet that she is suffering from some hyper-specific grief disorder. Tellingly, neither Screenrant nor CBR get into what the theory means for Padmé’s character in their articles, instead praising the theory for for “confirming the lore of Darth Plagueis” and “ensur[ing] the Chosen One is forever plagued by anger, despair and guilt”, respectively.
The point of grand, operatic moments like Padmé’s demise is not to mimic a perfectly healthy and well-adjusted love affair, but to show love the way it is felt: galaxy-defining, endlessly consequential, and yes, life-and-death. Padmé really, truly loves Anakin. This is shown even in the concept art of her arriving at Mustafar with a knife, as pitched by artist Iain McCraig: “She gets off that ship with the knife. She runs up, throws her arms around him – he lets her. She’s got the knife at his neck, she’s going to kill him – he lets her. And she can’t do it, she loves him too much to stop him, even when he’s become the monster.” Padmé embodies the saga’s positive controlling idea of unconditional love. She must die as Vader’s hate rises: “love won’t save you Padmé.” This is the language of the genre.
The other thread among fans of the Palpatine-killed-Padmé theory–and haters of her death as a whole–is that Padmé’s death is wrong because it’s not “strong”. Again and again, a line between a good female character and a woman who died tragically, is drawn. Writes starwarsanon: “I have a lot of conflicting feelings about [Padmé] that have constantly changed over the years. On the one hand, she is a strong, political leader. On the other, she lost the will to live and died of heartbreak.” Under the otherwise enjoyable fangirlblog article “What is Strong?”, the comment section strikes one note: “I’m disappointed that you don’t talk more about Padme’s death in this article, because that’s a such a major sticking point for everyone I’ve heard criticize Padme’s portrayal. I personally have a hard time believing in the strength of a character whose identity is so bound to one person that they literally die from that person’s loss, or disillusionment in them, or shame at being unable to save them”, and “she just gives up because the man she loves has turned evil? No, it doesn’t wash with me. In fact, it angers me that this strong woman was given such a pathetic end.” Another comment on “The Power to Save Padmé”: “the argument is that Padme is a strong and heroic character – and a character like that should not be written with a death contingent on her own emotional weakness.”
Tricia Barr
As a female fan, I’ll also admit I’ve struggled at times with Padmé’s character. She does make some poor choices – but so do Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. Was it a lack of strength that caused her to fall in love with Anakin? Not at all. The biggest bad decision – to lie to everyone about their marriage – was one they made together…So why then is Padmé’s choice to love and be loved often met with the most disdain?…wasn’t that love, which is so strong, heroic and mythic in Luke Skywalker, exactly what Padmé expresses in her dying breath in Revenge of the Sith?
Under SWTOR forums post “Please explain Padme’s death”: “Personally, I would tell me daughter that the force choke did it. I wouldn’t want my daughter thinking that some baby (annakin) could have that much power over a strong woman like Padme.” Screenrant, again: “That Padmé would have lost the will to live is somewhat bewildering given how much she had overcome” (in 2024! War never changes). Summarizes Lizy Cole: “The critics never liked Padmé’s death because she’s supposed to be a strong female character and yet she was weak enough to fall for Anakin in the first place and weaker still to just pine away and die because he joined the Dark Side.”
I won’t make the argument that Padmé’s death is an infallibly feminist piece of writing. Nothing about Padmé is. But these are flimsy, exceptionally loose lines of thought that require little justification other than “female character succeeding = good, female character failing = bad.” Not only do they ignore that the prequels are a tragedy and Padmé is a tragic character, but they ignore the rest of Star Wars. Padmé attempts the same deprogramming that Luke does in the climax of Return of the Jedi. Is she weak for being interrupted by Obi-Wan, a factor entirely outside of her control? How is Anakin not the weakest person in this equation for falling to the dark side in the first place? But–and there it is–Anakin’s psyche is a focal point of Star Wars and can be properly wrung for sympathy. Anakin’s traumatic upbringing and somehow rougher young adulthood, riddled with exploitation and a religious, self-eviscerating belief in one’s importance, climaxes in violence. Padmé’s own climaxes with grief. Yet Anakin has a weapon, and yells, so it is Padmé that goes out foolish.
Padmé, like Anakin–like Luke, like Leia–is terribly human. She makes choices guided by idealism and hope, choices affirmed in Star Wars’ larger narrative, if not her fate. If Padmé debuts in Star Wars showing these ideals through more traditionally “strong” means–charging into battle, staying stoic in the face of death–then progresses into quieter means, committing to diplomacy and a faith in her troubled husband, this only signifies that Padmé has tried the ways of being strong that would make her a simpler character, and chosen to move beyond. By trying to pin Padmé down as falling too hard on either side of a capable/incapable divide, critics end up flattening her completely, only bothering to mention that she dies thinking of Anakin, never to ask why.
Anika Dane
Padmé can’t join Anakin, that would go against everything she stands for. She can’t fight him, she made that choice back in Attack of the Clones when she agreed to marry him. She can’t talk him out of it, she tried and failed. She does the only thing left to her, or so she believes in that moment. She dies. If protecting her was what drove Anakin to this horror then she will take herself out of the equation.
Here I return to the criticism of Padmé’s death existing only to darken Anakin: so does Dooku’s. So does Qui-Gon’s. So do the younglings’. So does the entirety of Order 66. Everything in these movies comes back to Anakin, because they are the Anakin movies. Every choice Obi-Wan, Bail, and Yoda make in the final act of Revenge of the Sith is about Anakin. Padmé is, in fact, the sole character who’s narrative alignment to Anakin is reciprocated—virtually every choice he makes in Revenge is about her. Both Yoda and Obi-Wan’s final decisions come with little build-up. The only difference is they get to orally explain what they’re doing, whereas Padmé is so overcome with despair, she can only sob. Obi-Wan relegates the rest of his life to raising Anakin’s son. Yoda abandons his fight with Darth Sidious to isolate himself in a stupid and homophobic swamp. Are these passive, anti-man choices? Are they a betrayal of all the young men looking up to Obi-Wan and Yoda? Or are they the kind of melodramatic options left at the end of a tragedy?
It’s not necessarily the right choice or a good choice. It’s not the choice I want her to make. But it is her choice. She owns it and we shouldn’t condemn her for being wrong or being weak unless we are also going to condemn everyone else in the movie. And I believe that to do that would be missing the point. It is an entire film, an entire trilogy, of wrong and weak choices. Maybe that’s why so many people hate the prequels. They succeed in telling their story and their story is sad. It has to be, that’s the only way the original trilogy works.
Anika Dane, cont.
Frankel argues that Padmé in The Phantom Menace “works as a metaphor for contradictions of third-wave [feminism]”: “as queen of a planet, she literally has it all, and yet has little power to save her people.” Queen Amidala, she writes, is a “girl power” flavor of child prodigy common in the “nineties and 2000s”, citing “Xena, Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Powerpuff Girls” as peers. Padmé shows strength and intelligence but has youth as a handicap to her abilities, as “to make [her] less threatening to the traditional gender dichotomy.” From these origins to a Shakespearean ending, Padmé emerges as a woman out of time. Dane writes, “in Episode Two Padmé moves away from the Leia archetype and in Episode Three she becomes someone unrecognizable from her daughter and her younger self. Throughout the series of three movies, Padmé fades away before our eyes.” Perhaps the best word for this illusive duality is “immaterial”, which itself comes with two warring definitions: “unimportant under the circumstances; irrelevant” and “spiritual, rather than physical.” These qualities make Padmé more complex and therefore more rewarding to study. The prequel trilogy would be worse without them.
Coda
George Lucas is an abstract filmmaker. He got into filmmaking and editing via a series of abstract shorts in college. Dale Pollack’s Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, published in 1984 and updated in 1999, recalls him particularly adoring a short called “2187”, which consisted “of news footage with image and sound juxtaposed out of context. Halfway through the film, a man wakes up and says, ‘You’re 2187, aren’t you?’ and smiles, the only dialogue in the film.”
I said, ‘That’s the kind of movie I want to make—a very off-the-wall, abstract kind of film.’
George Lucas to Dale Pollack
Former Industrial Light & Magic employee Dave Johnson is quoted in the book recalling: “His forte was designing and constructing film stories, but his attitude was ‘Let someone else work with the people.’ Look at his student films—they’re all about things and facts. People are just objects.” In 2022 Disney+ docuseries Light & Magic, Lucas says “Movies are kinetic. It’s about movement. Forget the actors. Forget the story. It’s all about movement.”
His directing is at its best when he lets this imagery, this momentum, overtake all cinematic needs. The two parallel scenes of Darth Vader’s birth and Padmé’s death, filmed separately then collided in the editing process, stand among his best work for this reason. Such sharp visual contrast—black and white, birth and death, blood and machine—lends itself naturally to the allegorical opera so many people pretend the prequels aren’t. All the great extremes Anakin spends the three films battling between (light vs. dark, good vs. evil, man vs. child, mother vs. father, self-creation vs. self-annihilation, joy vs. sorrow) are present in the sequence. Of course it’s suicide. Of course it’s rage that revives Vader and despair that kills Padmé. For now in the film there exists nothing but emotion.
Here all critiques of logic and contingency with the original trilogy fall apart. Firstly because this is far from the most illogical or canonically incoherent moment in the prequels, and secondly because Anakin living through pure rage and Padmé dying from pure sorrow does have a sound, operatic logic to it. The two affirm, rather than contradict the other. To nitpick this logic is to reject the language of these films as a whole.
To those who do care for the people, the parallel provides a fittingly high voltage resolution to Padmé and Anakin’s shared grooming by Palpatine. For all that Padmé’s child-queen status is glossed over in fandom, a good chunk of The Phantom Menace rests upon Palpatine’s ability to manipulate a fourteen-year-old girl with no other apparent mentor figure, to guide her tongue and berate her as “young and naive.” Padmé is present as Palpatine looks down at a nine-year-old Anakin and selects his next target: “we will watch your career with great interest.” Whereas Palpatine works to bring out Anakin’s messier, darker emotions, planting within him lifelong seeds of jealousy and suspicion, he stifles Padmé completely. She serves not as his right-hand, but a vessel.
Through all the tragedy, this moment reverses his manipulations. Anakin is transformed into a cold, industrial creature, sleek in ways only machines are. Padmé cries in front of more than one person and screams, both for the first time. Palpatine’s dark, bloody surgery center; Padmé’s bright, white tomb.
The effects of child abuse are realized in two stunning extremes. Frankel writes, “She’s wearing the simplest white gown she’s ever worn in the series—the personality that shone through all her costume choices has faded away,” but one could equally read Padmé’s simple gown as freeing contrast to the hopeless complication of Vader’s machinery. Padmé leaves the world no longer in the most elaborate costumes of her powerless years; Vader enters the worst stretch of his life encased in metal. We bear witness to both the beginning of Vader’s lifelong servitude to Palpatine, and what we know it will lead to: a great, defiant scream, however near the end. The parallel also gives us as neat a microcosm of why the Jedi failed as any: Palpatine weaves a tale, Obi-Wan says nothing at all.
Tricia Barr closes “The Power to Save Padme” with the following: “it’s worth considering why Padmé’s death scene has affected so many people’s perceptions of her character so substantially…Why does one weak moment, disappointing as it is, undermine everything else about Padmé’s strengths to such a degree? Is there a double standard at play – would a male character with an equivalent weak moment be judged so harshly? Perhaps he would, but I wonder.”
A welcome moment of nuance from an article I otherwise disagreed with wholeheartedly—but also, not a hypothetical. We haven’t had to wonder how Star Wars fans would respond to a male character’s suicide since 1980, when Luke Skywalker let go.
Next Time: The Skywalker Suicides, Part II: The Case for Luke
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