I was surfing around and I found a Live Journal entry that discussed Padmé. So I read it and while I disagreed with some of what the author had to say, the original post had some good points. What I agreed with was that Padmé was human. In her own way, she was consumed by love as Anakin was consumed by love. I think that she pinned everything on having this family, especially with the Republic gone to hell, and when that was taken from her, where was she supposed to go? Did anyone think for a minute Uncle Yoda and Uncle Obi were going to let her keep those kids? How would she have reacted if she ever confronted Darth Vader in his masked glory?

It's not easy confronting these things and sometimes I think fen want easy answers. Not a lot of extrapolation is given to Padmé's psyche but I think that with what's there, you can pick up the clues. In TPM, Padmé the person had to be subsumed under the strong leader Amidala. She might have been good at statecraft but outside of her cadre of handmaidens, did she really have any friends? Nope, not until she met lil' Ani. While I'm sure she loved her family and they loved her, she had been separated from them pretty much since childhood. She's the boarding school girl who didn't get to go home at the end of the year. As soon as she steps off the throne, she's a Senator. No time for dating or anything resembling a normal life for a girl her age. Again, aside from her handmaidens, she probably didn't have any real friends her age. Then hot grown-up Anakin reappears in her life and he's interested in Padmé the woman, not the Senator. For the first time in her life, she learns what it is like to be wanted, to be desired by someone. Especially a someone who's willing to sacrifice his own career, heck his life, for her. Throw in some dangerous situations, emotional drama, and some time alone on the most romantic planet in the galaxy, Padmé is as good as gone. She'd have to be more pious than Joan of Arc to turn down Anakin after all of that. He gives her something missing from her emotional life and once she has it, it's not easy for her to give it up. Both she and Anakin craved intimacy on an emotional and psychological level as well as a physical one, and for a while they were able to give that to each other.

Anyway, throughout my story, Padmé wavers between hope and despair, with her hopes tied up in having this life on Naboo happily raising her baby far away from Coruscant and finding a way to get through to Anakin. I figure somehow that's key to her fate.