People get on my case because of how much I love the prequels but okay hear me out:
They gave us Padme Amidala. Padme in my opinion, is one of the greatest characters Star Wars has to offer and without Padme there’d be no story.
Without Padme, there wouldn’t be the Skywalker family. Anakin wouldn’t have fallen in love with anyone else. He was always very aware of what code he was breaking and it always sat funny with him. But for Padme, no code was important enough to leave unbroken. For her, it didn’t matter because the love he had for her was stronger than any force.
Both Padme and Anakin are some of the most well written characters in the franchise and I get so angry when people write the prequels off. Padme had such unrelenting faith in Anakin that she flew all the way to freaking Mustafar while nine months pregnant just to prove he still had goodness in him.
She knew all of the terrible things he had done but she wasn’t willing to give up on him because she knew him in ways even Obi Wan didn’t. She knew Anakin still had a lightness inside of him despite all of the horror he had participated in. And she wasn’t wrong either. She knew his character even better than he himself did.
Padme was the only thing in the world that mattered to Anakin Skywalker, and Padme was the only one strong enough to know what that meant.
As a child queen, she was able to gain an alliance with the Gungans, something that had eluded those of Naboo for a crap load of time. As a senator, she assisted in gaining the clone army and driving back the Sith occupation, all the while struggling with her feelings for Anakin and not knowing if duty should be thrown away in place of her heart.
Padme Amidala is beautiful and we don’t deserve her.