Kay. So when I was 13 I watched Episode 2 significantly more times than was necessary and I absolutely could not make sense of Padme falling in love with Anakin. It just didn't make sense. There was no logic to it at all. Being me, I set out to solve this using, wait for it, a two page chart documenting Anakin Skywalker's emotions and personality traits across episode 1, episode 2, and the original trilogy.
Stay with me here, cause this made, and to a certain extent, still makes a lot of sense to me. Here I could cross-reference his developing personality with Padme's, as well as mathematically add up desirable traits against the undesirable ones. Here, surely, was the logical answer to her falling in love.
I remember the look on my mom's face when I told her what I was doing, proudly showing her the list I was composing as I complained that I still hadn't made sense of it.
She told me this: "Feelings don't have to make sense."
I was confused, insisting that I could figure this out. The answer was out there somewhere, perfectly sound and logical, just waiting for me to find it.
But no. "Feelings don't have to make sense," she said again, "And a lot of time they don't."
To this day I have to stop my train of thought to remind myself that feelings don't have to make sense. I still expect them to though. My first reaction to feelings being a rather logical analysis of the factors at play, solving for the emotion by examining the factors that affect it. Once I've identified the emotion and then the factors, it's easy enough to change the factors to change the emotion. Right?
I can't get a handle on feelings that people around me don't have control over. I know they don't have to make sense, but that doesn't make it any easier to understand.
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