Sarah Jeong highlights a gigantic plot hole in Star Wars, and now that she’s brought it up I can’t stop figuratively kicking myself for not noticing it myself — my excuse is that I avoided thinking about the prequels as much as possible, so it’s unsurprising that a lot would slide by, but this problem is so huge even that isn’t a good reason. The short summary:
At the end of Episode III, Anakin gets three limbs chopped off and then falls into hot lava. He lives.
His wife has babies, under medical supervision. She dies.
Whoa, that’s right. In this incredibly advanced science fiction civilization, they have “bacta tanks” that can heal massive damage, they have amazing knowledge of the nervous system to the point that they can build neurally controlled prosthetics that are indistinguishable from the biological version, but somehow a Space Princess with access to the resources of an entire planet doesn’t even get an ultrasound to determine that she’s carrying twins. This makes no sense. They clearly must have the technology; they have life form scanners and the ability to clone people, which implies a deep knowledge about reproductive biology.
Which means they must choose to reject the use of common, trivial technology to benefit women’s reproductive health.
What could cause people to reject the use of simple medical procedures to save lives? One thing that I can think of: religion. That says a lot about the “hokey religion” of the Jedi; apparently there’s something profoundly evil imbedded within it that suppresses the use of technology and information to benefit the health of women, as if everything in a woman’s reproductive system is forbidden (to be fair, maybe they’re just as prudish about men’s crotches, and perhaps millions of men are dying of untreated testicular cancer in the galactic federation). Now I have to wonder, though — if there is such a strong prohibition against technology approaching women’s nethers, does the Star Wars universe have vibrators?
These are proscriptions even more sweeping than those of the real Catholic church, and suggests that maybe there’s a reason the Empire is so successful in recruiting immense numbers of minions. There’s the cloning thing, which suggests that maybe the secular empire was at least a little bit less squeamish and definitely better informed about baby-making than the Rebellion. Maybe they were also fighting against a repressive religion, the Jedi, that was spreading its toxic, repressive ways throughout the galaxy. I could see how that would inspire military action against the peaceful, meditative religion that still manages to somehow field fleets that make nearly miraculous victories. Perhaps the Jedi are the Islamists of that age…and maybe “Jedi” is a corruption of “Jihadi”.
It also puts the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star comprehensible. That might be the Star Wars equivalent of nuking Mecca — which does not justify it, of course. But then that makes the Empire analogous to the United States of America, where the people who abhor the weird foreign mystery religion can blithely talk about torture and nuclear weapons and continuous bombardment of populations.
I think I’m going to have to detest both sides now.
Didn’t Padme die as a result of Anakin doing a Jedi throat squeeze on her when he got upset at her on the volcano planet? Presumably, she lived long enough to deliver the twins but died afterward. That’s why the emperor told Vader that it was his fault that she died.
Jeong’s article covers that: nope. “Medically, she’s completely healthy.”
That also doesn’t salvage the big problem that they didn’t know she was having twins. That takes a lot of ignorance to avoid noticing.
By the way, I should have added that there’s another possible explanation, besides the patriarchal oppressiveness of the Jedi religion. It could just be that George Lucas is a sloppy, stupid hack of a writer.
Killing the mother is a good old movie making tradition. Think about it and you’ll easily remember a lot of movies where mothers are noticeably absent or die as a sad climax. Think Bambi.
Good points well made, but I think it is not intentional. George Lucas is just a very, very, very lousy writer. And even good male writers have often been bad when writing about issues regarding women, so it is not at al surprising that a bad one cannot write coherently about them too.
Actually the only male writer who wrote about women perspectives competently was Terry Pratchett. Caveat: As far as I can tell, being male myself.
re @2 & @4:
yes, Lucas MO is inconsistency. He apparently likes to keep audience puzzled throughout his stories, thinking it a form of interest.
@4 I seem to remember that a number of women reviewers assumed (this was before he was a household name) that, based on Equal Rites, Terry Pratchett was the pen-name of a woman.
Had the character lived it would be difficult to explain her existence without her appearance or mention at any point afterwards. The plot was not well thought out by Lucas.
It’s not like Darth Vader did not suffer. Unhappy, alone, persistently temperamental, a slave to fear. Padme’s end was sinister, unwelcome, unexplained, and biased, but she got out easy…certainly without the pain of really knowing what would happen to her children’s father.
The Force is unnecessarily unfair as it strives for balance. It lets millions die all the time to Darkness and then gives glimmers, only, of hope to the Good Side. It’s made for Tragedy. The Force is the essence of Tragedy. Without pain and suffering, the fight for good is worthless. Sometimes it is incredulous to watch.
PZ, others have already pointed this out. (At least in a general way.)
Bambi’s mum died ,i never knew that. Over here in GB enough people put down Jedi as their religion in the national census that the option was included in the next census .
Only ever watched star wars once ,haven’t seen the others.
Woman, the man has no more use for you, you can fuck off and die already.
Really, our lives do not solely revolve around those of men. Not our lovers’, not the fathers’ of our children, not our sons’. But as long as storytelling doesn’t get that and reduces us to our aspects, it will suck. Just look at Padme. Smart, competent, political leader. What does she get reduced to? Love interest of the hero/villain, incubator for the next generation. End of story, dead.
To further pile onto Kevin Henderson’s comment, there was absolutely no reason to kill off Padme at the end of Revenge of the Sith. There is actually a throw away scene between Leia and Luke in the Return of the Jedi where they discuss their mother, and Leia speaks of remembering her face. This suggests that she lived for a time after the birth of Luke and Leia. The decision to kill off Padme just after her twins are born, is sloppy writing at best. Lucas barely paid any attention to the original films. This is all on top of how bad they were as films to begin with.
I’ve never really understood the thought processes behind these kinds of objections. It’s a story. That’s how the story was written. That’s what happens. Trying to work out how “realistic” it is seems entirely beside the point to me, because it’s not real. It’s fiction. Were the point of this particular scene to make a commentary on the realities of gynecological medicine then maybe you would have a point, but the scene is there to get rid of a character who will not be appearing in the next episode. Indeed, the whole “mother dies in childbirth” motif seems like a piece of conscious archaising to me, redolent of fairytales and medieval literature. Its function is narrative and stylistic, not commentative.
Perhaps it’s a cultural thing? When I read stories I expect narratives, not some kind of scientific modelling of a world. That the book says this thing happens is good enough for me, because it’s not up to me what happens, it’s up to whoever wrote it. I see articles about this kind of thing on the internet all the time (“why did Batman forget he had x piece of technology?” “Why didn’t the Hobbits just fly to Mount Doom on the backs of the Great Eagles?”), and they baffle me because I have never taken a step back from a work of fiction and said to myself “yes, but that wouldn’t have happened that way” or “that’s unrealistic” or “can we extrapolate from these two unrelated details to make out something else about this world”. Not only doesn’t this stuff bother me, I don’t even notice it in the first place!
When I read a work of fiction for pleasure I make a compact with the work that it is telling me what is happening. The words and pictures are my eyes and ears now. To question what they’re telling me and dismiss it as unrealistic is entirely contrary to the exercise at hand – rather like seeing someone at the door and saying to myself “that’s unrealistic! How on earth did anyone think that would be a good idea! What sort of society has people I don’t like knocking on my door at 7am?” Just as I don’t assume the real world has an author, I don’t process a story I’m enjoying as if it had one either – I treat it as if it were a real place happening in front of me.
Which is different from the kind of critical mindset I would bring to a work of fiction as an historian. I don’t read Apuleius’ Golden Ass in that way, or Vergil’s Aeneid, because I’m interested in those as cultural artefacts, not as stories to enjoy for myself. It’s the difference between studying the physics of a rope swing and enjoying a nice swing on it.
Which is in no way to condemn how other people engage with stories. It just seems profoundly weird to me to mix up the two modes of engagement. Perhaps it does not to others.
I’ve got a simpler explanation for this plot hole: other than for a handful of lightsabre fights, the three prequel films were utter shite.
An even simpler explanation, already alluded to by others: The films are all shite.
It’s called worldbuilding. A good one helps a lot with the story.
There is a major difference with this galaxy religions and the Jedi : they have actual supernatural powers (even with the midi-chlorians mess). I’m an atheist, but if someone uses telekinesis, telepathy and predicts the future, I would have to think about it. By the way, that’s Han Solo’s position too (and he became a believer).
As a major religion, the Jedi are particularity bad. A mere 20 year after being wiped out by the Empire, almost nobody thinks they were real. In this galaxy, people thinks Joseph Smith did read gold tablets with a magic stone 150 years after the fact.
As for the pregnancy, we don’t know if Padme knew that she had twins.
And she didn’t planned to have them on a hellish planet with only the onboard medic droid to help.
I’m not sure why I assumed PZ was familiar with this piece The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad.
@cartomancer, I think you may have answered your own question here. In the case of the Star Wars films, they are essentially a cultural artefact as well as a form of entertainment. Just because they are not 1000s of years old doesn’t mean they haven’t and don’t have an impact of the world of entertainment (in fact go back and watch sci-fi pre Star Wars and Post Star Wars for just a sampling of the shift in how space is presented). As someone who loves film, not just the ones under discussion, but in general, I actually care about such things as narrative consistency, the Star Wars Saga specifically the prequels, suffers greatly from a lack of that and a lot of attempts to retcon events to Lucas’ liking.
In reference to the “not like reality”, it has more to do with internally consistent within the story. We as the audience make and agreement (unspoken) that when you the story teller tells a story, that you will follow the rules of the world you created. This allows the audience to suspend disbelief. The moment you as the story teller breaks that contract, it breaks the illusion and takes the audience out of the story. So yes, we can believe in space wizards willingly, technology that will save a man from extreme tissue damage due to cold, and replacement mechanical limbs, but a mom randomly dying in childbirth? That’s breaking the contract.
#12: The reason is that we also look for internal consistency. A good story flows, with each moment connected to the previous and to the next. You can make up whatever the heck you want and still have a good story, if it hangs together.
The big flaw here is that it doesn’t.
But then that makes the Empire analogous to the United States of America, where the people who abhor the weird foreign mystery religion can blithely talk about torture and nuclear weapons and continuous bombardment of populations.
I’ve always thought this was the case. Even though Star Wars predates the War on Terror by quite some time, I find it pretty much a way of making jingoistic rightwingers cheer on the Islamist terrorists.
Before the “prequel” garbage, the Jedi’s were basically portrayed as a desert based religion with weird mystical viewpoints, who conducted suicide missions against a vast, technologically superior and better organised empire (who, themselves, had a massive obsession with their own religion and militaristic hero worship).
Rogue One hammers it home quite hard I thought. The street scene in Jedha City (even the name!) is basically a HUMVEE patrol with some dismounted infantry getting hit by an IED triggered ambush and a bunch of insurgents taking them all out. If you’d changed the Stormtroopers to NATO troops, you had a scene played out across Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, the rebels (insurgents) who survive the resultant Shock and Awe on Jedha embark on a suicide mission….
It’s always bugged me too, I always took the view that the droid doctor was just terrible at his job. When your robot Obstetrician shrugs its shoulders and suggests that it’s patient just doesn’t want to live it might be time to unbox a new model. You certainly don’t just sadly agree with it.
It’s lazy writing. The story needed Padme to not be around for Luke and Leia, but why not give her a heroic death defending her children?
I was under the impression that Padme essentially died of a broken heart. But then, I tend to treat Star Wars more as mythology than science fiction per se- what’s the point of investing time and brainpower constructing a logically consistent fictional universe when George Lucas will just declare it all non-canon anyways? Besides, everyone knows Star Trek is better.
Let the flame wars begin.
Even a throwaway line about something preventing Padme from being successfully treated would have worked. Instead we’re presumably supposed to believe she died of a broken heart.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
I never took the religion of the jedi to be a religion like we have here and now on earth but one with some reality to it those who had strong force within then could do seemingly magic things with the help of some kind of symbiotic organisms called midi clorians or something. I thought Solo’s comment about hokey religion was using religion as an insult and not an actual description of them as being about belief in some kind of god or something. The jedi seemed to be kind of like the school for mutants in the marvel universe, and kind of like the trills in star trek or the Goa’uld in star gate. They also seemed to be rather controlling and bureaucratic and dogmatic in practice like any entrenched belief system a little arrogant and privileged.
As for the plot hole sounds like a perfect thing to fill with another movie. The contradictions are “begging” to be cleared up. They could go on for decades filling all the holes in that saga.
What Lucas did was introduce high quality computer graphics to movie making and help to legitimize sci-fy as a subject for movie making
now of we could only legitimize really good writing.
uncle frogy
I see a number of comments missing the entire point of the link in the OP. Here, I’ll fish it out for you before yet another “but George Lucas is just shit, so whatever” comment:
It’s not about Lucas being a bad writer. It’s about our ignorant, misogynistic society that makes this writing broadly acceptable instead of hopelessly laughable.
Dr. Ball agrees with you.
This is why they should have “never” just thrown away the expanded universe. The closest we get to a sort of clear idea about what the force might be in the “canon” stories, now, is the encounter with the father, son and sister, who embody the different parts of it. Within the framework of the expanded universe one gets the sense that the Jedi order has become as tied to fear as the Sith, if for different reasons. The whole idea of only training children was an attempt to prevent them from *ever* being tempted to the darkside. There was a third branch of the order, known as the sentinels, disbanded when it is deemed they where, “too likely to be tempted to the darkside”. Why? Because it was their job to hunt the Sith, on their own ground, while all the other branches just guarded worlds, or contemplated their limited view of the force.
Heck, even the recent cartoon manages to put this imbalance across, with the creature that is not a darksider, but was able to so casually open up a Sith holocron that it was just ridiculous, something a Jedi can’t do without turning to the dark.
As for the whole Padme issue.. You are assuming that Padme is the “mother” Lea talks about. But, while Luke was adopted by distant relatives, Lea was adopted by a married senator, who presumably lost his wife while Lea was still young. That said.. The force can, to some extent, override technology, even prevent it working as intended, and we don’t really know how strong Padme was, or even how strong you need to be, to, say, choose to not allow yourself to be saved. Rather, the suggestion may be, instead, that she wasn’t in perfect health, even if she appeared to be outwardly, and to save the children she carried she did more or less exactly what the Emperor hints at a prior master doing – giving up life force, to make sure they lived, even if she didn’t. This was why what Palpatine claimed was both true, and false – you can save someone using the force, but doing so *requires* you sacrifice the life force of someone else to do it. A very dark side sort of act, when done without someone’s concent, but also something that the child of the light does to save Asoka in Clone Wars, when they where both on the verge of death (and further unbalancing the force in the process, most likely, since all that was left, by the time they left was the child of the dark, both the father ‘balance’ and the sister ‘light’ having died there).
But, yeah… like a lot of things, either they slashed the details needed to comprehend what was going on, to fit it in the time needed, or they failed to put them in at all, which, again, wouldn’t be a problem if they hadn’t basically decided, in the newest movies, to cut loose *everything* that might give clearer insight into the whole thing, including the fall of the Jedi into what they became, in reaction to fear of the very thing they sought to study and use.
Kagehi, didn’t Luke specify when he asked Leia about her mother that he meant her biological (their shared) mother? I haven’t watched it in a while, but I seem to recall he specifically said he didn’t mean her adoptive mother. Although considering that the whole “secret siblings” plot twist hadn’t probably not been written when that scene had been, it probably doesn’t make much difference, given all inconsistencies that come out of working that way.
As usual, PZ ruins everything. There’s something to be said for suspending disbelief during movies. Helps to keep them entertaining.
If reality in Star Wars movies was important, you couldn’t hear things explode in space.
I first saw this on Tumblr, and I linked it to another post I’d seen, sometimes you can just tell when a piece of fiction was written by a man.
I thought the whole point was that she died of grief. The love of her life turned out to be Darth Vader who just choked the shit out of her, and she lost the will to live. Call that hokey if you want, but it’s not unexplained.
As for not knowing they were having twins, the pregnancy had to be kept secret. They had good reason to avoid the established medical system. Maybe they could have brought in some droid that they reprogrammed or a rogue doctor sworn to secrecy, but the failure to do so is not some giant plot hole.
Padmé Didn’t Die of a Broken Heart
#31
But mykroft, inconsistencies within the plot are detrimental to the willing suspension of disbelief.
When my wife was young, she was a huge fan of the series, so much so that we made it the theme of our wedding.
With each succeeding prequel, she lost more and more affection for the series, and that scene ended up destroying her love entirely, Lucas, who had begun by writing one of the most dynamic female leads in film history, had so clearly ended up with a woman as simply a disposable prop.
What she said as we left the movie was, “George, women find out every day that they’re married to Darth Vader. They don’t just die.”
@PZ, OP:
Wait, the oppressive colonial force that uses targeted assassinations to interfere in other planets’ trade agreements while kidnapping children and brainwashing them into their order based on fanatical devotion to a poorly-understood concept like “the force” is evil? I couldn’t have guessed!
Out of curiosity, do we know how old the Jedi Order is? It’s entirely possible that their backwards ways have induced a period of extreme stagnation and regression; medical technology invented by their more scientifically-minded ancestors is still around but no one knows how it works anymore so there’s no way to develop it further; if a bacta tank can solve your problems, that’s great; otherwise, too bad. If your missing limb or other problem falls under the range of medical issues for which our droids have intact solutions pre-programmed, you’ll be fine; otherwise we’re out of ideas.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen any of the movies; do we ever see anyone make a bacta tank? Explain the principles behind super-prosthetics? Maybe suffer a problem that can’t be easily fixed and doesn’t involve reproductive health?
Idiocracy was a terrible movie overall and I won’t defend it, but the idea of a primitive society having (and using) many specific pieces of technology invented by advanced ancestors which have been reduced to black boxes was a tiny little nugget of halfway-decent floating in the sewer of its plot. With Star Wars having droids and other automated systems, they’d be a prime candidate for a regressing society coasting on the momentum of its predecessors’ work.
Or that could be it too. I like giving writers the benefit of the doubt and coming up with ways their works are actually great but come on, we’re talking about George Lucas here. There’s only so much I can do to patch up his plot holes.
@Sarah Jeong, linked article:
Hold up, democratic republic? Padme is a hereditary monarch of an entire planet.
I’d always gotten the impression that the “Republic” was a sort of federal government elected by planetary rulers, most of whom were hereditary or otherwise non-elected.
IIRC — and WikiP backs me up on this — Padme was actually a limited-term elected monarch.
No, don’t ask me how it was supposed to work.
My own “patch” over this hole was to assume that it was Sidious’ doing, ‘shunting’ Padme’s life to Anakin, since her death and Anakin’s survival are both to Sidious’ benefit. As to twins being a surprise, I’d assumed she’d been avoiding facing the issues of the pregnancy entirely.
That’s my own spackle over it to keep enjoying* the films, but yes, in reality it absolutely is because Lucas is a crap writer who’s part of a misogynistic culture.
*Well, not 1-3, that’s more tolerating than enjoying.
Padmé ⇒ Padmé
@Hatchetfish:
See the link @#34, which agrees with this at first, but then offers the idea that Anakin may have done it subconsciously.
Well, yes.
@34:
Oh man, that link contains way more bullshit than is worth wading through. The author’s preferred explanation is far more hokey than the default.
The movie’s explanation is that “she’s lost the will to live”. You may choose to reject that because reasons, but that’s the explanation told to the audience in those precise words. So anyone who thinks that there was no explanation, however crappy, wasn’t paying much attention. Over-interpreting things in order to tease out some other, inexplicit explanation is the opposite problem.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that no one actually dies from this in real life. People become horribly depressed, and that can lead to death through various means, but you can’t commit suicide through bad feelings alone. As a fictional trope, however, there’s nothing strange about it at all. It’s been around forever.
As others have noted, it’s also problematic as a narrative.
I know I’ve seen at least one writer interpret what happened in that scene as Palpatine doing exactly this, remotely stealing her life force to preserve Anakin to use as a weapon.
euclide @16:
Not directly on-topic, but this sort of claim bugs me.
An atheist doesn’t believe in deities, but may well believe in the supernatural/paranormal.
Area Man #42, http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/More/Cardiomyopathy/Is-Broken-Heart-Syndrome-Real_UCM_448547_Article.jsp
There’s been some great fanfic written about what would have happened if Padme had survived. This one is the best, I think. (If you get a warning about adult content, just click through, this one doesn’t have anything like that.)
@38, Owlmirror:
Wait, seriously?
OK, I’m changing my opinion to “George Lucas is a sloppy, stupid hack of a writer.”
In any case, I’m pretty sure it was a plot point in Episode 1 or 2 that Anakin would “bring balance to the force” and in Episode 3 one of the Jedi, learning about his conversion to the dark side, said: “You were supposed to bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness” or words to that effect.
Because I remember thinking: “Dude, the Jedi who represent the light side of the force have had uncontested control of the galaxy since, like, forever. What did you think bringing ‘balance’ actually meant?”
I’d be slightly miffed to learn that never happened.
@45, John Morales:
It bugs me on a number of levels.
1. Unexplained phenomenon in apparent contradiction to all of known science isn’t evidence of the supernatural.
2. Proof of the supernatural is not proof of deities.
3. Proof of deities is not proof of any specific deities nor confirmation of any religions.
Admittedly, none of those three are directly applicable to Star Wars, but the ideas come up a lot.
There’s a video on youtube that argues, worth a thought my opinion, that the reason Annakin goes to the dark side isn’t Padme, or fearing her death, that’s just the final straw, but it’s the law unto themselves full of it Jedi. The problem is Lucas’ cack handed dialogue and direction.
I’ll explain it bad, so here’s the link:
https://youtu.be/-2BNdF_NCVQ
But yeah, the treatment of women is pretty shit in Star wars. Didn’t Carrie Fisher say that Lucas told her she couldn’t wear a bra in the first movie because something something, constriction in space. But he was quite happy to have her wear a skimpy swimsuit when chained to a slug….
Escaping from evangelical hell https://proxy.freethought.online/singham/2017/01/22/escaping-from-evangelical-hell/#more-40055
I don’t know much about how it worked in the old EU, but I’ve become somewhat of a fan of the new canon lately, so I can only make my comment on how the Jedi work in that:
I’m pretty sure everything about Padmé’s death is due to sloppy writing from Lucas, like a lot of other problems in the prequel films. The best in-universe explanation I can give is that they were trying to be really secretive about the pregnancy due to Anakin not wanting anyone to know and the medical droid they had on hand just wasn’t programmed well enough to handle the situation.
As for religion: the Jedi are mostly established as not really caring much about anyone other than themselves following their rules (aside from obviously not being fans of people killing innocent bystanders and such). Their rules were meant to prepare and train those with Force abilities, not to serve as guidelines for anyone else (to the point where one of the new books mentions that Bail Organa, Leia’s adoptive father, knew almost nothing about the Jedi order’s traditions despite being good friends with several of their masters). As far as I know, their only rules regarding healthcare would be “help people get it”. Not that they were meant to always be right, at least in the new canon. They tend to be portrayed as having been well-meaning, but getting too caught up in upholding traditions and rules without much reflection on them. Even that is mostly a thing for Jedi who survived their order’s destruction than for Alderaan or any other planet in the Republic, though, since the Jedi tended towards just letting societies have their own rules and religious practices. Considering that there canonically were only about 10,000 Jedi knights alive during the Clone Wars, they probably couldn’t have enforced their rules if they tried, anyway.
So I don’t think this characterisation as the Jedi being a rapidly spreading repressive majority religion for the people to rally against quite works. If anything, they were a religious minority which most people didn’t know much about that ended up victims of genocide at the hand of a religion with similar basic beliefs (both the Jedi and the Sith focus on the Force), but much more interest in power and in enforcing rules on everybody else. The Sith are the ones whose leader, Palpatine, manipulated his way into being in charge of the galactic government (so healthcare issues and budget cuts would presumably be his doing), demand everybody follow their rules, specifically want to control secular government in the Star Wars galaxy, employed stormtroopers, and tried to wipe out a religious group they disliked while painting them as the secret conspirators.
All of that rambling boiling down to: as far as I can tell from what’s canon now, the Jedi had no interest whatsoever in making proscriptions limiting women’s healthcare, but Palpatine and the Sith probably did.
As a child I had a father who was a uni professor in a science subject and from an early age have never expected, nor found, my light entertainment to be anything more than extremely porous. Star Wars barely makes it as high as the ‘light’ category. I’ll sit and watch them but never take them seriously enough to get slightly upset when they fold in on themselves.
Actually, no. He asks her if she remembers her mother, then when she replies about only remembering her face he comments that he doesn’t remember her at all. She asks what this is about, and he goes on about how the force is strong in his family, he has it, his father has it, and his.. sister has it, followed by the comment that, “Its you Lea. You are my sister.”, and she replying that somehow she had always known. More or less. The implication that he might have wanted to know about their shared mother is only implied, in the sense that she might have known her, but since they where both basically adopted there is no reason why she wouldn’t have, in the context, have talked about her adoptive mother. In fact, since the sister revelation doesn’t happen until later in the conversation, its unclear of Luke even meant their shared mother, and not just whom ever she remembered as her mother.
@51 Yeah, not too far off of the old expanded universe too. The Jedi started out as a small order, they expanded, then some went dark and formed the Sith – this was a result of encountering the Rakata, a race steeped in using the force far, far into the dark side, and who paid the price with eventual loss of the power, and a slow death of their race (apparently the force does, eventually, get pissed at this sort of behavior). At one time the Jedi had dozens of temples, on many worlds, and functioned as a kind of totally separate sort of organization, which went after the scary people under the bed. Eventually though, since they where supporting the Republic, out of necessity, since without its troops they where unable to really defeat the Sith empire, they because dogs of the Republic, to some degree. By the time of Clone Wars, they have become a sort of special ops group, for the Republic, instead of their own order, and their temples number in maybe half a dozen, at best, all of them beholden to the central temple, on the Republic’s capital world. And, their numbers where severely limited because they not started only seeking out very young children, who they didn’t have the vast resources to find, but, even by the time of Revan (during the final war with the original Sith empire), they strongly discouraged Jedi having any children of their own. Though, at that time they still did train “older” kids, and even adults, on occasion.
I mean, when your recruitment requires you hunt down only small children, and get permission to train them from the parents, instead of, say, stealing them… And you have gotten ridiculously picky about it, its kind of hard to produce a huge number of recruits… And then, if you are relying entirely on the “Republic” to tell you what problems need to be solved…
@Kagehi (#53) I’m sure the dialogue was “Leia, do you remember your mother? Your real mother?”
Yeah, that’s another one of those mysterious things women do. You break our tiny little hearts and we just die. It’s not like we ever say “fuck you, too”, roll up our sleeves, dump abusive shits and work our asses off for our children…
+++
Yeah, that totally doesn’t smell of “women and their bodies are mysterious”. I mean, why program a medical droid for a situation roughly half the population will experience at some point in their lives?
Technology is no match for DESTINY!
This is a fair point, and another reason I just ignore the prequels. They all work best as a rough draft synopsis of what happened to Anakin, and nothing more thought out than that.
Then again, I’ve never been the biggest Star Wars fan anyway. I mean, I grew up with it, so there’s a connection, but beyond that I’ve always been more interested in Star Trek.
…
The less said about what Gene Roddenberry was originally trying to get away with in Next Gen the better… I’m glad there was enough “no” on the set that it “only” ended up as sexist as it did.
Nothing in the literary world can withstand the power of plothole.
Padme Amidala died of plothole.
Brian @ 49
I was going to bring up the bra story too, it points to the fact that Lucas is a creepy misogynist and so the theory that he’s just a crap writer holds more water to me than any of the other “explanations” people have floated.
It’s no coincidence that he didn’t write or direct Empire, which inho still stands as the best of the episodes so far. I haven’t see Rogue One yet so I’ll reserve judgement as to whether it is the best movie of the bunch.
Anakin killed Padme.
Anakin, probably unconsciously, used the Force to will her into marrying him, after she spent that entire godawful movie talking about how it’s a terrible idea. Any time she’s away from him she gets her head back on straight, but the second he comes back, he’s Force-whammying her into loving him and marrying him.
After the fight with Obi-Wan, he uses the connection he already created through the Force to her to drain her of energy to keep himself alive.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
@56
I am 100% sure that was what Lucas was thinking and doing, because Lucas really didn’t seem very good knowing much about women or caring much, thus why the only in-universe explanation I can think of is that weak and hand-wavey. Only way it makes sense is if the medical droid was a military field droid or something or just meant for small stuff like patching up a wound or something and wasn’t equipped for pregnancy complications, or if the real reason actually was supposed to be something Force-related, but all of that is a big stretch.
Which all frustrates me, because what got me really interested in Star Wars was the The Clone Wars animated show, which is tied heavily into the prequels, but also manage to show how much better the characters and writing could be in different hands. Which is why I’m pretty glad the franchise is in new hands now. So far, the new canon books I’ve read and the Rebels show seem way way way way way better at writing women and don’t resort to this terrible “heartbreak totally does this and pregnancy is a mystical thing that no medical science can help with, right?” logic.
I don’t understand why so many commenters are getting away with hand waving to justify what is clearly a typical misogynistic treatment of women in a Hollywood script. Not only is Lucas consistently insensitive to his female characters and proliferates typical sexist storytelling tropes, but he’s blatantly insensitive to race issues as well, as exemplified by the mannerisms of one Mr Binks (clearly portrayed as having black characteristics and coincidentally part of a primitive race of natives), the Republic ambassadors with the clearly Chinese accents and mannerisms, the fact that the only black Jedi was clearly the angriest, the list goes on.
I loved Star Wars and grew up with it as a kid, but now as an adult, an informed adult on issues of sexism and racism in the media, I’m not willing to grant that asshat excuses. He’s racist and sexist and I’m very glad that he is no longer in control of the franchise.
Well, I’ll admitted that I hated the “Padme dies after childbirth” scene because it contradicts the scene in RotJ where Luke asks Leia about her “real mother” and Leia didn’t react like “Dad didn’t remarry”. So that scene implies Leia knew that she was adopted in the house of Organa and had known her birth mother.
Padme dying at the end of RotS eff’d up that continuity.
But for that specific scene in RotS, I would like to counter with the following:
– Padme knew she was pregnant with twins and knew their biological sex. She named them without a moment’s hesitation. Which suggests to me that she and Anakin had decided on the names well beforehand.
– the Jedi didn’t know the details about Padme’s pregnancy because she kept those secret… And Both the Jedi AND the senate respected that choice. I always saw the whole “lack of interest” about Padme’s pregnancy as an indication that the Galactic Republic was emancipated enough that an unmarried woman can decide “I’ll get pregnant now” and nobody considered it inappropriate. People didn’t act as if they’d be entitled to the details of Padme’s pregnancy because what happens in a woman’s womb is het business alone. And medical care is so advanced that you can have a high level government job without it being “threatened” by a pregnancy.
– the medical droid did point out that physically, she was fine… The diagnostic “she’s lost the will to live” was theirs alone. And why not? Don’t foget she was being treated in a civilian medical facility. Not a military one and certainly not one that regularly catered to (now outlawed) Jedi. This was a civilian medical droid. Watching SW, we’ve been conditioned to think “it’s not logical, then it’s probably the Force”, but in the SW universe itself, it’s been made clear that Force-sensitivity is rare. One in millions rare. That civilian medical droid was probably not programmed to recognize Dark Side influence, so some kind of Life drain is entirely possible as the mysterieus reason why she couldn’t recover.
That said, the whole birth scene is one of my least favourite ones in episodes II and III. It would have been so much better if we hadn’t seen the birth. Just a scene days later with Padme and Obi-Wan getting ready to take office from Alderaan (no baby Leia in sight) telling Bail they’d stay in contact and Obi-Wan holding into Luke asking Padme “Are you sure of this?” And Padme replying “Yes. Where I’ll be going there is no place for children. I Hope to come back for him later, but for now the semblance of peace is the best we can give him.”
But of course, that’s just my opinion as a lifelong Star Wars fan.
And so the comment following my comment is more handwaving. You know folks, it possible to love the franchise (as I do) and also recognize George Lucas’ old school misogyny and racism and not make excuses for that either.
In fact, by recognizing the progress that has been made as shown by the way the female heroines in the last two movies are treated, we can all be happy that there is at least progress on some fronts.
GL was born of a generation that was not forced to think about the ethical and moral ramifications of creating media that reinforces the patriarchal status quo. We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. All things considered, any Star Wars fan worth their salt knows that episodes I to III were shite anyways.
However, Princess Leia from IV to VI was pretty bad ass in comparison to her contemporary heroins. Sure she was a “princess” and needed rescuing by men on at least a couple of occasions, but she also wielded a blaster and rode a speeder like a boss.
Erikthebassist, @64.
I wrote my comment while yours was posted, so didn’t Read it before I posted mine. (Cell-phone typing while commuting van be slow)
I’d like to point out that none of my comment was aimed at the more general (and valid) critique that the prequels are less enlightened than the original trilogy (minus gold bikini) was.
My previous post was only an attempt to clarify why I don’t think that Padme’s “died in childbirth” scene could be seen as a reflection of an implied galaxy-wide indifference for women’s health.
I freely agree that storywise it was lazy writing and a shoe-horned lazy cliche that probably reflects a less progressive part of Mr. Lucas’ mindset. I would have loved to see her survive long enough to consciously break with everything Anakin had become. That would have been a promising end-scene and suggestieve of her kick-ass daughter.
The again, maybe I can’t assess the Movies in a “vacuüm” any more since I’ve been immersed in the EU since the early 80s and thus have always fallen back on the much richer characterisations of the comics, books and TV series (the occasional horrible author excluded of course. “Darksaber”? Never heard of it.)
Alex I didn’t mean to single you out. There’s several comments that seem like they are using the typical justifications for the typical not so well disguised misogyny and racism present in our media, and that strikes me as odd because usually they would catch a ration of shit for it around these parts. I’m just wondering out loud what the reasoning might be, like Lucas or the who franchize is immune from that type of prosecution.
Also consider in the Jedi-dominant prequels, slavery seems to be common and accepted in the galaxy, whereas it seems to be rare in the empire.
erikthebassist
I think the answer to your question is that one of the features of any type of folklore (into which category Star Wars certainly fits) is that it quickly outgrows the limitations of its creator and becomes a type of communal property. People who have invested themselves into it will push, pull, shove and twist it into a shape that they feel comfortable with, and that process is always ongoing.
Two other great 20th century mythographers were also pretty racist (Tolkien) and extremely racist (Lovecraft), yet their followers have worked to cause their universes to transcend that. Here’s a wonderful example I found: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881168175/harlem-unbound-a-cthulhu-roleplaying-game-sourcebo?ref=home_featured
I don’t understand why everyone is assuming that Padme was getting any sort of prenatal care, and that she was in good health at the time.
The whole relationship (and marriage, how traditional) was entirely on the hush-hush, entirely a secret. To preserve this secrecy, it is really not unreasonable to assume that she was not admitting to the pregnancy until it was too visible to hide. If maternal care in the Old Republic was up to a high standard as Old Republic medicine seems to be (not a foregone conclusion, see footnote), would the standard tests and monitoring during prenatal care reveal who the father was? And “who the father is” is the big central secret that fucks everyone up bigtime in this film. It’s a pretty stupid Big Secret with perplexing and problematic Reasons why it’s the big secret, but, secret it is.
We also don’t know what exactly Anakin was doing with the distant-chokehold thingie. Assume in service to the narrative that it was more than just cutting off her air?
Someone mentioned that Leia remembered having a mother who died when she was young — for whatever reason, which is none that I can see, she was raised as the Organa’s own daughter and unaware that she had other bioparents.
Lastly, I took Darth Whosisface’s promise that Padme would live if only Anakin used forbidden Sith Force skills as lies to further twist Anakin over to The Dark Side, but what if that wasn’t a lie? What if there were some remarkable healing (or at least, surviving!) abilities that only the Dark Side has access to, which were ultimately used to supplement non-Force healing and without which Anakin’s survival as Darth Vader would not have been possible?
Footnote: there are possibilities other than not-caring for reproductive care to be less advanced than trauma care in the Old Republic. Remember this is a culture of many species. While there are no doubt species differences in i.e. circulatory fluids, you still sew part A back onto stub B, more or less. Reproduction is damned complicated! Even here and now, with the species of only one planet to deal with and only a handful of those routinely treated and studied, dogs still get life-threatening pyometrias during diestrus because of a reproductive cycle that skips maternal recognition of pregnancy. Sentient species in the Old Republic come from many different planets, probably aren’t even all mammals, and for that matter I’m not sure what relevance terms like “mammal” actually would have in that milieu.
Reproduction is complicated, and different species have different patterns in which different things can go wrong. It’s intrinsically pretty difficult. Padme would need not only to be seeing a specialist — which I’ve argued above that she wasn’t — it would have to have been a human specialist.
Foootnote to the footnote: I dont’ care what your medical technology is, death immediately after childbirth with makeup still in place and quite lucid is “hollywood death” anyway.
But the plot already had a perfectly serviceable explanation for this. In RotJ, there is a scene where Luke asks Leia if she remembers their “real” mother, and Leia answers YES, she has memories of her, and that “she died when I was very young.”
Right there we have canon dialog that would have allowed for Padme to survive the end of EpIII, and go into hiding to Alderaan within Bail Organa, taking infant Leia with her, and die a few years later from another cause, thus explaining her absence for later events.
In fact, Padme’s death at the end of EpIII actually creates a fair sized plot hole because of the existence of this prior dialog.
Put me down for the “hack writer”-column. I think Lucas tried to make this love story between Anakin and Padme out to be so totally deep and meaningful that the tired trope of “dying of a broken heart” was supposed to be taken literally: This relationship about sand getting everywhere was so amazing that the betrayal by Anakin was lethal. Think “shot through the heart and you’re to blame” but with force-choking and actual death. As for the Jedi, a lot of the comments here seem to conflate the rebels with the Jedi. Remember that by the time an organized rebellion came around, the Jedi are already (almost entirely) wiped out. Aldeeran wasn’t some sort of Mecca, at best it was a haven with a lot of Republic (and thus rebel-) sympathizers. As for the Jedi before the Empire took over, they certainly seemed stagnant and repressed, yeah. They’ve been involved with politics for thousands of years and were all about rules like avoiding attachments, keeping celibacy and establishing hierarchy and whatnot. I’d liken them to portrayals of “Order” (versus “Chaos”) in many other settings where more of a balance is needed, while “Chaos” is fluid and dynamic, but also reckless, uncaring and destructive. “Order” meanwhile is more typically displayed as rigid, unthinking and dangerously strict in its own way. Kind of ironic then that the Jedi, who claim to stand for balance in all things, fall into stagnation and rigidity themselves.
@70 Not sure it would have fixed anything. After all, the whole point of separating them, and placing them in hiding, was to “prevent” Vader from ever finding them. Padme living, and having one of the kids with her… would have been found out, in a way that a daughter ending up in the the family of someone who could make up a fair reason, like the war, for hiding his wife’s pregnancy, but not the sudden appearance of someone, and their kid.
So, either way you have a major problem. The simplest explanation has to be that Luke’s comment about, “your real mother”, was an allusion to him knowing she had one, and Lea just not bothering to correct him at all. Or, she was mistaken about remembering, or.. they arranged for someone to “be” that mother, then “adopted” her when the first false mother died under unexpected circumstances.
Sure, this assumes that it wasn’t a glaring error on the part of Lucas. But, it could have been explainable, if they had just bothered to do so. Otherwise.. we assume we know its an error, because we know the facts don’t line up quite right, and are simply rejecting possible explanations, out of hand.