Characterization of Padmé (SPOILERS for Ep. 3)

Upon rewatching Phantom Menace yesterday, I realized why Padmé's characterization in Ep. 3 bugs me. There are ten years between Ep. 1 and Ep. 2, but the character of Padmé doesn't mature significantly during this time.

Not that she's IMmature - she never was immature, she was Queen of a whole planet at 14! In Ep. 1 she showed that she was capable of being tough and making difficult decisions and holding her own with a blaster. However, she was still vulnerable and inexperienced, as demonstrated in the scene where Palpatine manipulated her into calling for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorem.

Fast forward 10 years to Ep. 2, and she's still essentially the same person. There's
nothing that shows she's grown, matured, gained more political savvy, or improved herself in any way. To be sure she was sufficiently grown, mature, and savvy in Ep. 1, but 10 years a huge amount of time when you're only 24, and some personal growth and self-improvement should have happened during that time. But we didn't see it. She was exactly the same person, and her relationship with Anakin changed only because puberty was extremely kind to him

One might even argue that she grows more and more vulnerable as the trilogy progresses. I'm not entirely sure this is true, because as the trilogy progresses we also see her in increasingly intimate contexts. Our first view of her is in all her Queen regalia; our last view of her (which I'm going to rot13 because it's a major spoiler) is qlvat va puvyqovegu, univat orra orgenlrq naq zheqrerq ol gur ybir bs ure yvsr. You simply cannot compare a person's vulnerability in these two contexts.

However, we also see enough of her external self, the self she shows to the outside world, that we should have been able to perceive some significant growth, experience and maturity as compared with the first episode. There simply was not enough of this growth in the movies to do justice to the character.