Prequel meming

Feminism has been obnoxious for far longer than the past decade, it is just more visible now. And yes, I think it influenced the fandom's take on Padme.

I probably come off as militantly anti-feminist, but I'm not actually that hardcore. By all means, not all feminists think alike. However, over the years it is hard not to notice feminist-like thinking in a lot of Padme commentary.

I also think there is a tendency for feminists to spin what they love as being in line with their ideology when it isn't necessarily in line with it. Leia is often claimed to be a paragon of feminism. I recall seeing an article where the author tried to make the argument that Luke doesn't rescue her, she had an escape plan all along. Hahaha. Now that's some denial!

I like your open-mindedness and nuance here, Arch Duke, but I agree more with Smitty here:


Indeed. The rise of feminism in online discourse predates the #MeToo movement. That moment, I would suggest, is when feminism finally found its footing in modern-day meme culture. However, by 2013, it was already pretty strong, and I think it was something that Disney hijacked with the character of Rey and the marketing of the Sequel Trilogy, arguably finding its peak expression in "The Last Jedi" (even though, ironically, Rey is a bit diminished in that film next to Kylo and Luke). There were numerous times that Rian Johnson, in particular, delighted in shooting down and slaying critics of the film on his personal Twitter account, especially when it offered him an opportunity to virtue-signal how progressive he supposedly is around the cause of feminism. Yet there are plenty of feminists who think his film sucks.

A little bit of personal history here:

I was banned from the RationalWiki group on Facebook in November 2014 for writing a single post (in a reply section) in defence of Matt Taylor: the famous project leader of the European Space Agency's Philae landing mission (the successful mission to land a robot on a comet), who was excoriated for wearing a flashy, Hawaiian-style shirt emblazoned with gun-toting, femme-fatale women (or a single strawberry-blond babe in different poses) when giving a public address (AKA: Shirtgate). The argument, if I can justify it with that term, was that his shirt was misogynistic, wildly inappropriate for a public-facing scientist to wear, and that it sent a message that women aren't welcome in science and the STEM fields, except as inferior lab assistants and play-things of men. Taylor himself received such a furious online backlash that he was forced to recant his heresy, in a video in which he literally sobbed out an apology, essentially kowtowing to the mob. Bizarrely, there is no mention of the apoplectic controversy on his (admittedly meagre) Wikipedia page. It's like it never happened (again: shades of "1984" here). But happen it did.

Anyway, a male feminist on the FB group started the topic off right after Taylor confessed his crimes, smugly saying he was "personally satisfied" with Taylor's apology -- satisfied that another human being, with a great accomplishment to his name, was shamed and broken by a rabble of online bullies, effectively. Various people agreed with him. Some disagreed. I noticed that all the people disagreeing had already been removed from the group (their names were greyed out and, if you hovered the mouse over any of their names, you were greeted with a message saying they were no longer a part of the group). Me being me, I felt compelled to object to the Orwellian censorship on-hand, and to give my own two cents, much in line with the people already banned. Of course, there was no discussion (evidently as there hadn't been to any of the people already banned): I was summarily removed minutes later and could no longer access the page on my account. It remains that way to this very day.

I remember pointing out the particular hypocrisy of that page/group with all its intellectual distaste of religion and its treatment of women as, very often, second-class citizens. This is especially the case under Islam, where hundreds of millions of women are forced to dress and act a certain way for the entirety of their lives, in accordance with dress codes and prescriptions laid down in that religion's so-called holy texts. "How dare you tell a woman what to wear or blame her for being raped because of how she looks!" -- the typical cry of the "enlightened" progressive mind. Yet these same mentalities, or many of them, were doing exactly that to Matt Taylor, by deeming his choice of clothing to be unacceptable, feeling satisfaction at his teary apology, and banning people who disagreed. Now, again, this was 2014. The lynching mentality of modern-day feminism was already very much in place; and, to me, while saddening, it was no surprise to see it carry over into Star Wars, or become baked into the rules and mindset of the moderators (or the most animated and self-righteous of the mods) on TFN. 

Things in human affairs don't just emerge from a vacuum. They are usually the result of converging factors many years in the making. Of course, I don't blame anyone for thinking that 2005 is pretty removed from our present year, and all the events that have happened since. There weren't even smartphones back then. And it's unfair to blame feminism, or present-day feminist warriors, for all the criticism toward Padme's portrayal in ROTS that has been there since Day One. I think it has deeper roots than feminism; or all the arrogant, reactionary mouthpieces now speaking, harassing, and banning people in its name. Indeed, some attitudes to Padme, or her death scene, could be construed as positively anti-woman and anti-feminist, which I think suggests something of the range of responses that art is capable of provoking in people. Unfortunately, people of a fanatical bent, determined to find enemies and destroy things they hold to be inferior, aren't capable of accepting that basic fact; much less tolerating people of a different opinion.

In a more general sense, there seems to be a disdain of weakness, and an unspoken expectation -- increasingly the case in recent years -- that women should be depicted as ass-kicking, powerful, take-no-prisoners "girl bosses"; and anything to the contrary, least of all in a fantastic, larger-than-life entertainment like Star Wars, is tantamount to falling back into 19th Century stereotypes and merely furthering the patriarchy with regressive portrayals of women. Yes, I'm using feminist lingo at this point; but feminism has largely gobbled up all the available oxygen, and it's now harder to understand the possibly more amorphous objections that people had to Padme's character arc in 2005. I think it all boils down to a basic flaw in perception and orientation. Most people still carry certain biases around that men and women should act in certain ways; and anything outside of that means distorting the fundamental "reality" of men and women, either out of laziness, ignorance, or malice. Thus, Star Wars fans are still butting heads over the way Padme finishes her prequel journey. The assumptions and biases haven't changed. All feminism has done, in the main, is coarsen the discussion and caused people, especially those who don't like Padme dying of grief/sadness, to dig their heels in deeper. So much for the egalitarian dream of letting people be people or that women shouldn't be judged because they may experience weakness or go down an unconventional path.

I think this is basically the nub of it -- and beautifully said, too!

Indeed, the particularly stupid thing about judging Padme as an inferior example of feminine power is that it is based around ideological hangups that force people into boxes. And human beings cannot exist in boxes. At least, not for long without things going wrong. 

As Carl Sagan memorably put it: "There are many different ways of being human." And many different ways for humans to imply they are happy or fulfilled, or go down paths believing that they will become those things, when they aren't. Yet we constantly obsess over facades or a particular way of doing things. 

This is such a strong discussion!

I think the fact of the matter is that Padmé is a complex character and that her death is a complex matter as well. There is, indeed, a common idea that a character is either weak or strong based on arbitrary instances while most people are at times strong and at times weak, just as they are at times vulnerable and at times (seemingly) invincible. Padmé was practically invincible when she was conquering back her palace in Episode I just as she was probably in a most vulnernable state when she died.

That's being human and for all the claims of wanting to see real people on screen, most viewers actually don't and like to stick to characters that are less challenging, more one-dimensional and easier explained. I also think that the most rabid critics of Padmé suffer from tunnel vision as they regularly ignore that Padmé is really the driving force of her relationship with Anakin and also ends their physical relationship by oppising him and his views on Mustafar. Yet, and this has been wonderfully written in this thread, her spirit lives on and Luke brings that spirit to fruition decades later.

That said, I personally think Lucas could have ditched the "She lost the will to live." line ("broken heart" was perfectly fine as a explanation, although I am also convinced that 99% of critics don't get what "losing the will to live" means) and I do see the point that such a death would probably have not been written for a male character or that this would have been much, much more unlikely at least. So there might be a bit of a cultural bias in a sense that such a death is more likely to be attributed to a female character. However, Padmé as a complex character is way too strong for me to bother and I accept it as part of the old-fashioned roots of Star Wars. But that's the only little bit of criticism that I don't necessarily agree with, but I see a potentially legit point.

I sent it to you a few days ago.

Maybe I should start tattooing your shared links all over myself to help me solve the mystery.