The Phantom Menace will always be one of my favorite Star Wars films, for the simple reason that one of the main characters is a fourteen year old queen.
Yes, the fact that she’s a democratically elected child queen is pretty stupid when you grow older and think about it even a little bit, and you realise that she actually made some really idiotic decisions such as the Vote Of No Confidence, plus both Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley play the role pretty flat,
but to my ten year old brain she was just the most utterly fascinating being. She wasn’t just a princess but an actual queen. She ruled a whole planet and didn’t let anything scare her, from the Trade Federation to droids to Jedi to Gungans. She turned to other means to save her people when the Senate utterly failed her. She made new alliances where old ones fell apart and led her troops from the front.
And she was only (in universe) a few years older than me.
Plus she got to wear awesome clothes.
I never wanted to be Princess Leia growing up, although to be fair I didn’t really know too much about her. Star Wars was not a big thing, or a thing at all, in our house when I was little. But I longed to be Queen Amidala.