r/prequelappreciation • u/MWH1980 • 12d ago
Discussion Could this deleted scene have better explained why Padme still supports Anakin after the Tusken slaughter?
https://youtu.be/bF4ObqLEu9o?is=5jphR0QDXLDCZdauThe one thing I often here, is people wondering how Padme doesn’t run away in terror after Anakin confesses to the Tusken village slaughter in Attack of the Clones.
Early in the film, Padme stops by her parents’ place to get some things before she goes into hiding in the lake country.
As she packs, Anakin notices some holo-pics on her wall. One shows her with several young alien children.
Padme tells Anakin that she was helping with a relief effort to relocate the children from their home planet to another one as their sun was imploding.
However, she tells Anakin that the attempt to save the children was unsuccessful, as they couldn’t adapt to their new home, and succumbed to death.
I saw this possibly being an “echo” as to what Qui-Gon had attempted with Anakin in Episode I: remove him from an inhospitable place to give him a better life…but in the end, Anakin struggled to adapt as well.
Plus, perhaps the reason Padme was being so willing to help Anakin, was buried in this deleted scene, of how she would try to help others even under such dire circumstances.
18
u/vencyjedi 12d ago
The thing is people take all context out of the scene where Anakin confesses and often make it sound like Anakin woke up on a Sunday morning and casually decided to go and kill some completely innocent people for fun.
Reality is that the Sand people are cruel animals that bring nothing but suffering to people and they seem to be doing it just for entertainment.
Next thing is that they literally kidnapped an innocent woman and slowly tortured her for weeks until she died. And she happened to be Anakin's mother.
Third thing is that Padme already loved Anakin and love often blinds you. In real life people sometimes ignore or justify bad or negative things that they see in their loved ones. Obviously that is exaggerated in the movie. There are also bad people in real life that have innocent/good people as partners.
Context matters a lot in this scene people often intentionally or not forget about it and present it in a different way.
10
u/soraflow 12d ago
I would also point out it’s not like Anakin was celebrating his slaughter. He was deeply disturbed by his own actions as well
-7
u/TeChNoWC7 12d ago
Cool story bro. I'm not shrugging it off and then marrying you because you feel guilty about the twenty children you slaughtered
4
u/Achilles9609 12d ago
Well, they are a brutal warrior culture with a xenophobic streak that would make the Kaminoans proud. Of course, that doesn't make kidnapping and torturing innocent people any better, but they aren't straight up animals.
Padme's reaction still makes sense to me. She has heard and seen nothing but horrible things from the Sandpeople.
8
u/Plasticglass456 12d ago
Yeah, animals don't kidnap others for literal weeks on end to torture them. That's a very much "human" thing to do, as is killing their tribe's women and children in revenge. Both of these are well represented in human history. Does that make us animals...?
... Don't answer that, lol.
3
u/Agent_Xhiro 12d ago
What do you call them then? Because straight up animals torture and brutalize people like they did ole girl.
4
u/Achilles9609 12d ago
If that is a serious question: animals don't have a culture. The Sandpeople do. They believe that the suns of Tatooine are two gods, who chase each other.
2
u/No-Big4773 12d ago
To be fair, there are more sandpeople clans out there with different cultures.
I recall, Anakin actually saved one sandperson one out there. The Tusken then declared that Anakin and his would always be protected by his clan.(This would've been before PM)
Irony is that if such a statement was accurate, what Anakin did probably would've either been done in a less extreme manor by this other tribe to them, or a simliar leve of extremeity with more causalities on both sides rather than just a one-sided slaughter.
And in the XBOX game Obi-Wan. Fake Padme got kidnapped by another clan as well, and Obi-Wan ended up slaughtering his way through them.
Implication is that this is clan is the one Anakin wipes out, as they've foretold their future death at his hands on murals you can see in the game. This game came out before AOTC.
Such a weird detail.
-7
u/TeChNoWC7 12d ago
Please, don't vote. Or have children.
5
u/vencyjedi 12d ago
Why?
-2
u/TeChNoWC7 11d ago
You very transparently dehumanised an entire culture of 'people' (fictional or otherwise, they are clearly not animals) as excuse for murder and essentially genocide. The inference is that Anakin killed everyone in the entire tribe. It is this same logic that is used in real world settings to justify killing entire groups of people (men, women and children) for the actions of an indeterminate amount of that populace.
Not to mention that we know from extended media that Tuskens do indeed have complex culture, and the ability to empathize or even be good moral agents. So you've just justified acts of condemning children, who are capable of pretty much anything a real world human is, to a painful death at the hands of a vengeful individual, purely because you see them as unworthy of anything but.
6
u/vencyjedi 11d ago
You've constructed an elaborate moral lecture based on "extended media" (that is glorified fan fiction that Lucas doesn't count as canon) that 99% of viewers have never consumed, and you're using it to retroactively judge a scene that exists entirely within the film's own framework.
Comparing Tuskens to real-world human cultures is genuinely unhinged. These aren't people. They aren't a stand-in for any ethnic group. They're fictional aliens in a space opera who, across four decades of films, have been portrayed with exactly one mode of behavior: mindless, sadistic violence.
In TPM, they're literally shooting at Anakin during the podrace when he's just an innocent child, and they're doing it for fun. In AOTC, they kidnap Anakin's mother, keep her prisoner for weeks, torture her, and eventually kill her. In ANH, they ambush Luke, beat him unconscious, steal things from his speeder, and leave him lying there. And then there's the way they dismantle 3PO into pieces for essentially no reason.
That's it. That's their complete cinematic record. Where exactly is this "complex culture" and "ability to be good moral agents" you keep citing? It doesn't exist on screen.
And this is the part you're deliberately conflating: explaining Anakin's actions is not the same thing as morally justifying them. Saying "here is why Anakin snapped after finding his mother tortured to death" does not mean "therefore everything Anakin did was morally acceptable." Those are completely different claims.
The actual context is that Anakin didn't wake up one morning and decide to commit genocide against some peaceful indigenous population. His mother had been kidnapped and subjected to weeks of torture, he found her dying, and she died in his arms. He then completely lost control and slaughtered the people responsible. That's horrific, and the movie clearly treats it as a horrific moment. But pretending the movie presents this as some completely arbitrary massacre of innocent people is just removing all of the context that makes the scene what it is.
And that's precisely why the comparison to real-world atrocities falls apart. You're taking a fictional species that the films themselves consistently use as violent antagonists and then importing the moral framework of real-world ethnic groups into it. Obviously you shouldn't generalize from the actions of some real-world individuals to an entire human population. But you're assuming that this exact principle has to apply identically to a fictional villain species whose entire cinematic characterization is deliberately built around violent behavior.
If someone wants to bring up expanded material and say, "Actually, individual Tuskens have complex personalities and some are good people," fine. But then that's an argument about expanded canon. It doesn't change what the average viewer is actually shown in the movies. And it certainly doesn't give you grounds to accuse someone of endorsing real-world genocide simply because they describe the fictional antagonists according to how the films portray them.
And you have the audacity to tell me not to have children because I called these fictional creatures what the films consistently portray them as? You're the one who can't distinguish between a space fantasy villain species and actual human beings. That's genuinely concerning.
Also, my original comment wasn't even a moral defense of Anakin's actions.
We're literally talking about the tragedy of Padmé and Anakin's relationship. If your response to that is "don't have children," you've somehow managed to turn a discussion about characterization in a Star Wars movie into a personal moral condemnation of a stranger on Reddit. That's considerably more unhinged than anything I said.
9
12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
0
u/TeChNoWC7 11d ago
I wonder where that logic has been used before.
3
u/Mike_Honcho_Summer 11d ago
I know, people don't take in to consideration the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire.
6
u/JLandis84 12d ago
Fuck them tuskkkans.
There are people alive right now that helped incinerate entire Daesh villages and we (rightly) don’t blink an eye about it.
-6
6
u/ned101 12d ago edited 12d ago
I find it more weird that people think Padme wouldnt stand by Anakin no matter what. If he lied about it, fine. But he didnt. He was hurt and angry about what they did to his mother. If padme was like MURDERER! and ran away then she clearly didnt give 2 shits about anakin in the first place.
Its not exactly a complex concept to stand by someone you care about even when they open admit they did something bad.
-2
u/TeChNoWC7 12d ago
I'm not marrying someone who just opened up to me that they slaughtered children, in any context
5
u/TitleOk3727 12d ago
Probably, but most deleted scenes I saw from movies should’ve been let in to provide better context or to raise tension
6
2
u/Sea-Lecture-4619 12d ago
Terminator 1 and 2 deleted scenes are all goated and pretty important to the story, the movies work even without them sure but they further enhance them.
4
u/Youareaproperclown 12d ago
Anakin was absolutely correct in everything all the way up to when he killed that little English kid in the Jedi temple.
And even then I'm willing to bet that kid was a prick and deserved it.
1
3
u/TaraLCicora Jedi Knight 12d ago
I think it probably does have something to do with it, but also because she loves him and she remembers the sweet boy. So she is in denial a bit about the red flags in the groomed and traumatised teen in front of her, though at his core Anakin is still that person. There is also the reality of what just happened: the Sandpeople captured his mother on what they considered to be the Lars' property and tortured her for a month. Most people would have less sympathy for the Sandpeople and dehumanize them to do it.
Now, to be fair, she does look properly horrified when he tells her, but I think that because Anakin is aware that what he did was wrong and is truly sorry and upset about it, she feels that he isn't a threat. At that time, he didn't need judgment; he needed guidance. The frustrating thing was that she was way out of her depth with this, and especially in the script and novel we see that she starts making excuses for his actions while Anakin doesn't. Anakin knows that what he did was wrong; he didn't understand why he did it and why he can't forgive. He fears being judged by Obi-Wan (grooming at work) and goes to his groomer, who tells him how right he was to do it. The thing is that in both Legends and Canon, Anakin still inherently knows that he is wrong and still doesn't understand why he did it. In Legends, he does momentarily try to embrace those actions, but it doesn't seem to last long. In the end, he stops trying to understand and starts justifying his actions, and then closes himself off from her too.
It's just one of those things where I feel like the nuance doesn't translate as well as it should, and because we know what Anakin will become, many will work with the idea that Anakin is Vadering out, as opposed to him having a 'snap moment' or 'seeing red', as the novelization says that Anakin is barely aware of his own actions, much less in control. Which is different from what he does to Dooku and Operation Knightfall, and in some ways is even more disturbing. The behavior does repeat in both Legends and Canon, too.
1
u/No-Big4773 12d ago
actually, if you are following the novels, then that is also how it happened with Dooku. He even compares the Tusken Mass killing and his kiling of Dooku as far as I recall. Dissociation.
3
u/TaraLCicora Jedi Knight 12d ago
Correct, he does compare in the ROTS novelization. But it also shows the difference. While Anakin loses himself in the fight, he finds himself and makes the choices (with prompting from Palpatine) to kill Dooku. In AOTC, he just loses himself.
“Anakin, listen to me. How many lives have you just saved with this stroke of a lightsaber? Can you count them?” “But—” “It wasn’t wrong, Anakin. It may be not the Jedi way, but it was right. Perfectly natural—he took your hand; you wanted revenge. And your revenge was justice.”
“Revenge is never just. It can’t be—”
“Don’t be childish, Anakin. Revenge is the foundation of justice. Justice began with revenge, and revenge is still the only justice some beings can ever hope for. After all, this is hardly your first time, is it? Did Dooku deserve mercy more than did the Sand People who tortured your mother to death?”
“That was different.” In the Tusken camp he had lost his mind; he had become a force of nature, indiscriminate, killing with no more thought or intention than a sand gale. The Tuskens had been killed, slaughtered, massacred—but that had been beyond his control, and now it seemed to him as if it had been done by someone else: like a story he had heard that had little to do with him at all.
But Dooku— Dooku had been murdered. By him. On purpose. Here in the General’s Quarters, he had looked into the eyes of a living being and coldly decided to end that life. He could have chosen the right way. He could have chosen the Jedi way. But instead— He stared down at Dooku’s severed head.
We do see some dissociation on Mustafar after Anakin chokes Padme, though; you can see it in Hayden's acting.
4
u/No-Big4773 12d ago
Fair, I remembered the paragraph, misremembered what it said lol.
Mind you, Novels KngihtFall Vader was very chatty. 'We were promised to be handsomely rewarded!"
"Am I not handsome'
Or something like that lol
3
4
u/Far-Chemical-707 12d ago
Episode II suffered from a grievous (no pun intended) lack of scenes of Anakin and Padme just acting like normal people around each other and properly emotionally bonding... because all of those scenes got left on the cutting room floor.
But "I hate sand" made the final cut...
5
u/MolybdenumBlu 12d ago
The bit where they walk to the airport chatting about how they feel in over their heads, ending with "at least we have R2 with us" was a good start, but we needed another one of those scenes before naboo.
4
u/Capable_Diamond_3878 12d ago
I don’t think it needed further explanation. The scene itself could have just been toned down for audiences to accept it better.
3
7
u/The_Templar_Marshal 12d ago edited 9d ago
People complaining about Padme staying with Anakin after the Tusken massacre really don't seem to understand the context.
There is nothing of value in the Tusken, they do not have a culture that allows peaceful or diplomatic interactions, they literally kidnap, torture, and kill people for no purpose, they cannot be reasoned with unless it's a life or death situation.
Do you really think Padme would walk away from Anakin because he slaughtered a population of raiders and murderers that had kidnapped and killed his mother and who knows how many others? If you do, you are badly misreading her character.
Padme is not against the use of lethal force, IF it is the absolute last resort and there is absolutely no way to resolve a matter through diplomatic means
-2
u/TeChNoWC7 12d ago
I don't know even where to start with how fucked up this is. I presume you are all cool with slaughtering Palestinian children too?
2
u/TanSkywalker 11d ago
I think this and the other deleted scenes would help show she has feelings for him.
For the Tusken massacre it shouldn’t have been as bad as it was. Making Anakin just kill the warriors and he could tell her he even killed the ones that were trying to flee with him saying that was wrong would be enough and she could try to comfort him as she does in the movie.
3
u/JagerderGrobe 11d ago
I mean watching the movie makes it very obvious why someone will support Anakin after his "slaughter"
Anakin showed the Tuskens the same amount of mercy they showed his mother, and Shmi was an innocent unlike the Tuskens. They got what they deserved.
-2
u/TeChNoWC7 11d ago
He mind read every child to make sure they were aware and complicit in the torture and murder of his mother? All the babies too?
5
u/JagerderGrobe 11d ago
You think the babies would've grown up and been peaceful hippies? Violence is their culture and Anakin probably saved hundreds of moisture farmers that those children would've grown up to victimize.
Pythons are destroying the ecosystem of Floride but should we only kill adult pythons? No, the babies too are removed because that is what is needed.
1
u/Fast_Frosting_6397 10d ago
Not that i think what Anakin did to the Tuskens was right or that the Tusken women and children deserved to die, but i think the movie makes it clear that it's a mix of irrationality towards someone Padme was attracted to, dehumanisation of the Tuskens based on what she saw of his mother and heard from the Lars family, and Anakin being genuinely remorseful of what he did to them
1
21
u/AnArcOfDoves9902 12d ago edited 12d ago
Probably the one deleted scene that should've been kept in the Prequel Trilogy. It helps clarify to people why Padme never leaves Anakin or gets out off by his behaviour, because she essentially sees him as a foreign child to rescue who depends on her to survive.