It wasn’t just the dodgy acting that disturbed fans and casual viewers.
The Anakin and Amidala love story that dragged across the prequel trilogy was as creepy as it was crass.
The additional idea that Jedi mind tricks and coercion were also involved from the early days of The Phantom Menace just makes it even worse.
Unfortunately a recent photo showing a young Jake Lloyd smirking in the arms of Natalie Portman hasn’t helped and quickly went viral.
The new argument about Anakin’s fixation with Amidala says: “Being eight and just leaving his home world and only family he’s known, his mother, he meets a woman who looks like her, is caring like her, and is seemingly unimportant to all. He sees his own mother in her. According to Freud, our first example of what our romantic and sexual partners are comes from our relationship with our parents. We form our ideology and compete with our same gendered parents for the opposite affection.
“Later when his own father figure, Obi-Wan, was trying to help the young couple Anakin saw competition and believed Obi-Wan was trying to take the Queen away from him. He saw them, the older two, and believed he has to kill his father figure to have the relationship he desires with his mother.”
The Reddit post from mybustersword soon attracted a flood of comments.
One returned to the rather unsettling idea that a lonely and smitten child Anakin used the Force to bind Amidal to him and then (unwitting or otherwsie) kept her affections when tehy were reunited as adults by constantly reinforcing the compulsion.
It said: “There’s a theory that he unknowingly taps into the force, and imposes his will, in a sense leaving her forced to love him.”
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Another added: “She fell for him because of a low-key, unintentional, jedi mind trick played out over years whenever they were together.”
It is deeply uncomfortable to imagine, but makes horrible sense.
Of course, other commentators couldn’t resist suggesting that it was Anakin’s fetching “rat tail” braid or Hayden Christensen’s “Thousand Yard Pout” that did the trick and sealed the deal.