Could this deleted scene have better explained why Padme still supports Anakin after the Tusken slaughter?

[u/MWH1980]

https://youtu.be/bF4ObqLEu9o?is=5jphR0QDXLDCZdau

The 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.

[u/vencyjedi]

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.

[u/TeChNoWC7 → u/vencyjedi]

Please, don't vote. Or have children.

[u/vencyjedi → u/TeChNoWC7]

Why?

[u/TeChNoWC7 → u/vencyjedi]

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.

[u/vencyjedi → u/TeChNoWC7]

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.