To be angry is to be human.

It's almost comical how much Padme overlooks only to then say "I can't believe what I'm hearing!" In RotS when the penny drops about Vader and all he'd done.

Like, he literally slaughtered children out of anger the week you married him. And that same week he spoke about how he supports fascist dictatorships over democratic process.

And yet early in RotS she jokes about how love has blinded Anakin. Woman, you married a walking, talking Red Flag.

All Padme knew about the Tuskens was that they 'walked like men, but are vicious animals' and that they kidnapped and killed Anakin's mother. Most people saw them as animals, or little more than. To her, it probably seemed like Anakin was basically hunting down a pack of wolves.

Anakin's anger was also aimed partially at the Jedi. If he hadn't had to completely break his attachments, he could've easily helped his mother. A lot of that anger gets thrown at Obi-Wan since he was the Jedi closest to Anakin.

To be angry is now just to be human, but huwoman and huchild too

Having your mother die in your arms after being slowly worked beaten and god knows what else to death over the course of several months is personally what I'd call "extenuating circumstances"

Bare in mind that these intelligent beings passively observed or actively engaged in the torture and mutilation of an old woman

to be fair the tuskens were not seeing as human in canon pretty much up to animations and book of boba fett

Here come the Anakin apologists. Someone put these guys on list.

I mean i know what I would do to people that put my mom through shit like this so i can't really fault the guy.

One plot hole that has always really, really bugged me (and I normally don’t really care).

During this Yoda is meditating and says “Young Skywalker is in pain, terrible pain”.

So the Grandmaster of the Order saw a vision of their most powerful and troubled student having a traumatic experience/contact with the Dark Side, and he never follows up with it in any way?

This honestly has to be Yoda’s greatest failure, not just as Grandmaster but as a teacher in general.

Idk if he just forgot about it because of Geonosis/the outbreak of the Clone Wars, but what about when Anakin literally goes to Yoda for counseling/therapy?

Why doesn’t Yoda ask “Hey I saw a vision of you on Tatooine and I could tell you were in terrible pain, can you talk about it? Did it involve your mother (who we left as a slave on Tatooine, rather than going back to buy her freedom and put her on a safe planet where you wouldn’t have to worry about her dying)?”

I guess he just assumes Anakin is talking about visions of Obi-Wan dying but honestly Yoda is a terrible therapist. Even a psych RN would conduct a much more thorough assessment of the problem and not just tell the person that they should be happy about the person possibly dying.

Then gets funking shrecked

Again, George Lucas’s lack of understanding of tone shining through, but interpreted from a certain view there is a lot of meaning in this. Ones anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can often be good, most importantly it’s a fact of life. They enslaved, tortured, and killed his mom, the most important person in his life, anybody here would be mad at the group of people even partially connected to something like this happening to a similar person in your life. Would you kill those people for doing it? Probably not, partially because you trust authorities, but another big reason is that you just couldn’t. But imagine you were developing into one of the most powerful single beings in the galaxy, would the taste of your own revenge overpower the role that real justice has to play here? What Padme is trying to say is significantly smarter than any council the Jedi are offering, anger is part of ones life, it can even feel pleasurable to act on ones anger, so this is only a human trait. Anakin responds by saying he’s a Jedi, he should be better than this, as the moral orthodoxy of the Jedi is his only guiding morals in his life, much of those ideals are in contradiction with his nature. Being a slave at a young age made him realize the pure hate in others lives, and like any kid he internalized that, and the only salve to this was his mother. This taught him that his most positive emotions don’t come out of himself but with those he loves the most, those he grows attached to, now it suddenly makes sense the way he interprets the importance of compassion in a Jedi’s life, it’s quite literally how he forms a moral compass. Now what happens when that center of goodness in ones life is extinguished, what other choice does Anakin have but to feel those guilty of such an awful thing are the most evil beings in existence, and seeing himself as undyingly responsible for his destiny, because of the constant pressure of being the chosen one, he must be the one to enact justice on these loathsome beings. See, it’s not Anakin’s strong emotions that are the center of his evil, it’s the incredible responsibility he saddles himself with and he sees as his only reason for existence. In a sense he still sees himself as a slave to this purpose, he does not see the inherent good in himself only that the responsibility he holds is the good in him. Oh how horrifying it would be if some one took this gullible, aimless youth, albeit with incredible potential, and just so slightly manipulated this fundamental purpose in life, all while showing significantly more care and attention than any Jedi gave to him. Throughout the clone wars were made to see some of Darth Vader come out in scenes like him force choking Poggle the lesser, affectively scenes where Anakin acts on his darker instincts. But what came out of these actions was fundamentally good, people were saved and these fundamentally despicable characters were taken away from their position of power that they used to exploit others. Anakin’s version of justice is rather unethical, but it wasn’t fundamentally what was wrong, what really manipulated Anakin to the Sith is his inability to see the good in himself, and to only see the good in his responsibility and actions. The scenes that scare me more in clone wars are seeing Anakin agreeing with Tarkin over the need for more decisive action, him being so easily manipulated by The Brother, Palpatine constantly driving a wedge between him and the practices of the Jedi order. The most horrifying error Anakin made was his lack of wisdom, his gullibility. This is why this scene has such meaning, from who Anakin was previously there was little choice in him taking this dark path. But this conversation with Padme is a crossroads for him, she is trying to get across to this person she clearly loves, as she does truly see the good in him, that he deserves to have these feelings, and that even after this horrible act the real decision that needs to be made is one of realizing how this isn’t a refutation of your humanity but an expression of impotent rage after the cause of something he barely understand and doesn’t reciprocate his own humanity. The theme of this conversation isn’t just on the sadism of Darth Vader coming up, but the terrible weight of responsibility and expectation that is manipulating Anakin. Padme simply wants to get across that the guilt Anakin should feel is not one of not having denied his feelings but in how this responsibility to bring good into the world is the one manipulating him towards these dark paths. “Sometime there’s things no one can fix. Your not all powerful Annie”.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on Attack of the Clones, behind all it’s ridiculous dialogue, being a very interesting tragedy on the contradiction between one’s responsibility to bring good in the world against ones own reason for against, not just on Anakin’s tragedy but of the Jedi’s moral orthodoxy unwittingly bringing them into a war they barely had a hand in creating.

With this I’ll leave you with two quotes I think are the most powerful in the context of Attack of the Clones. Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” in the context of the Jedi’s moral orthodoxy, and Kreia’s “The lesson of True Strength, means rejecting strength that is not your own” in the context of Anakin’s role as the chosen one.

People tend to forget the overtones of colonialism and racism in SW. Tusken Raiders and Jawas are native to Tattooine. The humans and everyone else are colonizers. Tuskens see them as invaders, conquerors, and usurpers. So they are incredibly hostile and raid settlements. So colonizers view Tuskens as animalistic primitives.

Padme is progressive for a Naboo. Naboo previously genocided Gungans which is why they didnt get on. Sure her understanding and sympathy for the Gungans grows in TPM but does she even know the dark history of genocide? Had she ever come to grips with that? I'd bet probably not. But even if she did it comes with the understanding as being a former head of state she does inherit a level of responsibility, that her society grew at the detriment of Gungans, and that she owes it to them to help them.

All she knows about Tusken Raiders is they shot at Anakin when they were kids during the Boonta Eve podrace, Lars family describe them as animals, and they abducted and tortured to death Shmi, and Anakin admits to having slaughtered them like animals. She doesnt know they are the Indigenous Humanoids who see themselves as trying to push out invaders with guerilla tactics and savagery.

This recipe of racism, colonialism, and genocide isnt too far from irl human denials of genocide, apologism, and justifications. People act like this scene is totally unreasonable but I'm pretty sure more than a few women have married men who admitted to murdering Indigenous families and would also be shocked if that same man ended up killing white kids.

People forget that the Republic was deeply flawed and so are all of our protagonists. Padme wasn't an unflawed person. She was just one of the best the Republic had and played major pivotal roles.

Well, Sand People aren't human amirite?

Padme has no moral compass tho... she is a borderline pedophile

And she was thinking: gosh, he looks so hot when he is angry

and this is still somehow better than the jedi's advice

anakin really got stuck around people who have a collective emotional iq of 0

I just started watching the movie for the first time and immediately looked for something to this. What the actual fuck. These plots are so loose

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I mean they killed his mom tbh it's understandable

I see a bit of Goblin Slayer in Anakin. Tho one witnessed a certain species killing and violating his sister while hiding as a kid, both indiscriminately killed men and children with an exception to Goblin Slayer since there are no female goblins