Edited and paraphrased from a post I made elsewhere:
I’m going to address what we Anidalas guessed correctly about the events of Episode III and what we didn’t.
There is one obvious point to keep in mind that distinguishes where we are now re Episode IX from where Anidala fans were 2002-2005: EVERYBODY knew Padmé was going to give birth to Luke and Leia and Anakin was going to become Darth Vader, therefore things won’t end well. We as Anidala shippers dreaded it. The prequels were basically a journey from Los Angeles to New York where you always knew the destination, but we just didn’t know the route or where we were going to stop along the way.
The fates of the ST characters are as open-ended just as the fates of the OT’s characters at the end of TESB. We know where we left from but we don’t know where we’re going. We can only guess from the landmarks. This of course causes a lot more consternation but a lot more thoughtful and careful consideration. Indeed there was meta here and there about Anidala and lots of thoughtful discussion but nothing on the level of what I’m seeing now.
Still we had to guess how the endgame between Anakin and Padmé was going to play out aside from the obvious pregnancy and giving birth.
It was a given to me that poor Padmé was toast; I didn’t see her hiding on Alderaan for a few years and her fate left off-camera. It’s just not how stories are told in films, what Leia said in ROTJ and the assumptions fans made about it notwithstanding. I knew for sure she was going to die in ROTS.
When I saw the digital (and current) cut of AOTC in 2002 where Padmé took Anakin’s roboclaw hand in hers during their wedding, I knew right then and there that she was going to lose her life trying to save Anakin from the Dark Side. Why? I saw it as a symbol of her accepting the monstrous side of Anakin along with his good side and that she was invested in him as a whole. Of course she would do anything and risk anything for him. As soon as I saw Padmé running off to Mustafar, I knew her doom was approaching.
I predicted that Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side was predicated on losing Padmé. Most Anidala fans agreed. It was obviously the one thing he feared the most and that soliloquy he delivered at his mother’s grave wasn’t for nothing. Shmi’s death had hurt him deeply and like hell he was going to let the same happen to the love of his life.
I’d also predicted in a fan fiction I wrote in 2003 that he would dream of Padmé’s death and it would shake him to his core. The difference was that in the movie Anakin dreamed of Padmé dying while giving birth while in my story he dreamed of her being shot in battle.
There were other fans who more or less agreed with me and some who had very different ideas. For instance, it was a popular theory that the Jedi Order was going to rain hell on Anakin for breaking their no attachments rule (expulsion, jail, scandal) and that’s what would push him to the Dark Side.
The big one most of us missed? Vaderkin attacking Padmé. Nobody believed or wanted to believe Anakin would ever hurt a curly hair on Padmé’s head. He loved her too much! Most of us thought that Padmé would come to harm or meet her demise via a third party, such as the Trade Federation or Count Dooku’s forces. We didn’t think he’d Force choke her and break her heart. In retrospect it makes sense; once he became Darth Vader, he would do evil stuff including things we didn’t think he would’ve done before.
Nobody predicted Padmé would die in childbirth (those avoiding spoilers anyway).
I was also surprised that discovery Anakin and Padmé were in a relationship wasn’t treated as a big deal. It seems to have been the worst-kept secret in the universe rather than a star-shaking scandal.
