Since I’m not done going on Star Wars rants, it’s time to discuss one of the more criticized narrative, uh, choices made in ROTS: the death of Padme Amidala.
I would like to preface this by saying that the woman dying in childbirth trope is both overdone and kind of misogynistic, and the idea of Padme Amidala of all people dying of a broken heart is dumb as shit.
BUT
THAT SAID
Padme's death as a concept is not, fundamentally, as dumb and nonsensical as it feels. It was poorly executed, but it’s not, at its core, a bad idea.
(I feel kind of dirty)
My arguments are as follows:
In conclusion: Padme’s death, as shown on screen, sucks shit. However, it could have been justified with the addition of some context and narrative groundwork. That said, Padme dying later on in the course of rebelling against the Empire would have made more sense with less effort, as well as being less misogynistic overall.
Recently, I was part of an argument discussion regarding Obi-wan’s role in Padme’s death by childbirth in ROTS. In it, the question was raised of, “Why didn’t Obi-wan heal Padme? Surely he could have had enough Force healing to do the equivalence of chest compressions until a real doctor could get there.”
Short answer: no, he couldn’t have.
Long answer, Watsonian:
- Obi-wan doesn’t have Force healing. It’s just not a talent he possesses, just like psychometry is also not a talent he possesses but other Jedi do.
o There was an argument made that he should have been able to “brute force it”. I think this is horseshit, for the reasons outlined below.
- While there are many uses of the Force that are unconscious—increased reflexes, mild precognition, “I have a bad feeling about this”—using the Force on things outside of oneself has been shown to require a certain amount of training and mental discipline. It takes sustained mental effort to affect minds, lift objects, and, indeed, heal.
o This is right after Order 66 and the fight on Mustafar. That’s a lot of trauma for a regular, non-psychic person. The thing about trauma is that it makes it hard to think. Everything’s a panic response. Think about the last time you were stressed, and how hard it was to remember to do things, let alone get up the wherewithal to do them. Now add the death of everything you know and everyone you love, which you got to feel on the inside of your head. Obi-wan was mentally bleeding out; even if healing occurred to him, it’s unlikely he could have been able to affect any real change.
- Obi-wan is a diplomat-soldier, not a doctor.
o Bodies are intensely complicated things, and learning how to properly treat them takes years. Years Obi-wan spent learning galactic law and politics, because that was more directly relevant to his job.
§ While taking care of Anakin Skywalker, known trouble magnet.
o Even if Obi-wan did learn some medicine, it would have likely been battlefield medicine, not obstetrics. Learning how to avoid bleeding out while things are exploding is a set of skills different from learning how to give birth.
- Draining life from one person and giving it to another is an established Sith skill; it is not unreasonable to assume that Palpatine drained Padme to stabilize Anakin. Whatever Force powers Obi-wan had left at that point would have been insufficient to overcome that, assuming Obi-wan even realized what exactly was going on.
Long answer, Doylist:
- While Force healing is a thing that exists in later installments of Star Wars, it is unknown if it existed during ROTS.
o Lucas has gone on record as conceiving of the Star Wars that he puts on screen and the Star Wars that fans put in books to be two different universes, and Force healing did not appear on screen until the sequel trilogy.
o Lucas made shit up as he was going along. There’s a reason plot threads in ANH don’t link up quite right to the rest of the series. So if Lucas didn’t think of Force healing when ROTS was being written, it functionally didn’t exist.
- George Lucas was more interested in the fairy-tale element of the hero’s mother dying in childbirth more than he was interested in that scene actually making sense. Relatedly, he is welcome to Catch These Hands.
Long answer, miscellaneous:
- Can’t say I’m thrilled with an argument that boils down to “Obi-wan Kenobi could have fixed everything had he just tried harder and been better”
o It relates to a train of thought I see cropping up in fandom sometimes, and that other people have also pointed out and discussed, where the way people talk about Order 66 drifts awfully close to “the Jedi were out of touch and unpopular, so they had their genocide coming.”
o As a bit of in-universe propaganda, I live for this thought process, I really do. The idea of people in the gffa thinking “well the Jedi were corrupt and fell due to their own hubris” and then never examining what they’re actually justifying? Sublime. Phenomenal. Love it. Real life people buying into this thought process? Not thrilled. A group of people bringing about the violent, bloody end of their culture and people—including children and elderly—because they weren’t nice enough or didn’t solve other people’s problems enough….isn’t a take I’m thrilled about.
o Also, Obi-wan is one dude. One very competent dude, but one dude. One human, mortal dude. He can’t do everything, fix everyone, always be on top of everything, always have the exact right answer. He’s going to fumble, and fall, and make mistakes, and say exactly the wrong thing, and miss obvious solutions to problems because he just didn’t see them. He already hates himself enough; we don’t need to go finding more blame to pile on.
- During the argument, and in thinking about it afterward, I think the main point of contention was around perceptions of the Force and a Jedi’s relationship with it.
o To put it in D&D terms, I see all Jedi as magic users, but not all as the same class.
§ Wizards, clerics, druids, etc., might all be magic users, but they are all fundamentally different. There is a certain degree of overlap, but they also just flat-out have different spell lists. At the end of the day, a wizard will not be able to fill a paladin-shaped hole.
· In this conception, the question that was asked is, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?”
o Wizards don’t get healing spells. At no point would the wizard have had access to healing word. He can’t cast healing word, because that’s not something the class can do.
o Wizards can only cast spells they have spent the time, in-game, to copy down into their spell book. He never copied down healing word, or any other healing spell.
o Healing word is a 1st-level spell, and all this wizard had left was cantrips. Even if he did have healing word because of in-game justification and a permissive DM, he couldn’t have cast it.
· Related question: “Why didn’t the wizard ever take a level in paladin? Even one level of a multiclass would give him lay on hands, you’d think he’d want that.”
o Because when you can spend your action with lay on hands and save one person, or you can spend it on meteor swarm and save a bunch of people, meteor swarm wins every time.
o However, others see all Jedi as all the same class, but of differing domains.
§ In this conception, all Jedi are working from the same base spell list, but differ in what spells they have to prepare vs which ones they get automatically. The question then is not, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?” but rather, “Why didn’t the knowledge domain cleric prepare healing word?”
· The point of being out of spell slots still stands, but this is a much more reasonable question to be asking.
In summation: let the tired man rest and stop trying to blame him for everything that goes wrong in Star Wars.
As you can see, I moved away from the heavy armor into a more steampunk look fairly early, because it's easier to sew fabric than it is to sew leather. Also, fabric breathes a hell of a lot more than leather does, and if I'm gonna wear this to a convention I would really rather not be an entity comprised entirely of sweat. (That's why I decided on a coat that covered me from throat to wrists over a shirt and vest-- shirt and vest is less sewing, but more layers. With the coat I can totally get away with having on a bra and nothing else. Sure, I'll have to launder the coat more... but the reduced sweating is so, so worth it.)
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