Jar Jar Was A Sith Lord

A good villain is someone you love to hate, like, you know, Palpatine.

But in order to love-to-hate a character, you have to take them seriously, and nobody could ever take Jar-Jar seriously! No, he was an annoying pest and everyone just wanted him to go away, and apparently Lucas thought everyone would be charmed by him.

I think his role diminished for two reasons. First is that it just made less and less sense for him to be an active participant. He kinda sticks to the main cast like a barnacle in The Phantom Menace, but after that, there's just no reason for him to be following Anakin or Padme around so he isn't. Even so, I think Lucas tried shoehorning him in, which is why he's in Episode II talking to the senate even though his whole personality and intelligence level suggest he... well, actually maybe that calibre of intellect should be in government. Ba-dump-bump.

The second reason is target audience. TPM seems aimed at children. 8-12 year-olds, I think. Attack of the Clones was a bit higher with the love story and more prominent political machinations. Revenge of the Sith has some tragic moments and horrible things happen, so it's clear this isn't for 10 year-olds anymore. I think Lucas was aging the films with a theoretical cohort of Star Wars fans who started with TPM. Basically, either Jar-Jar would be unrecognizable as a character, or else his slapstick antics would just be too jarring next to scenes of Jedi being cut down by Clone Troopers.

I mean, imagine Anakin slaughtering children and then Jar-Jar comes in, yells, "Oh, no-sah, Ani! What'n yousa doin'!?" and then slips on some blood with a comedy "boing" sound effect. I just can't see it. It's even impossible to imagine Jar-Jar reacting to anything in a serious tone because the whole way the character speaks and moves is designed to be silly.

So why keep him in at all? Why use him in Episode II? Well, I think there are two reasons there as well. One is practicality: he's an idiot, so he's easily duped into doing things. Of course, this sword has two edges and it doesn't make sense that he'd be left in charge, but that's a flaw whether he was meant to be the Dark Lord of the Sith or not.

The second reason is that I suspect Lucas heard about the hate for Jar-Jar and I think he resented that, and I think he put Jar-Jar in just to screw with people who hated him. This is only a suspicion, but I'm thinking about Episode III when he doesn't have any relevance to the plot, but he walks by the camera and looks directly into it (or close) like a middle finger to everybody who didn't like the character. Maybe it's Lucas being resentful of fan rejection, maybe he's just mad that Ahmed Best got depressed over the poor reaction and he was giving Best some work and a little support, but either way, I think this might have been a small factor in Jar-Jar's appearances.

PS

It's also possible that his role petered out because Lucas sat down to write Episode II and wanted to include all of the main cast from Episode I and he couldn't think of anything else for Jar-Jar to do because he never had a plan for the character at all past TPM.

Yes. Although, with the caveat that theories like this can be great fun to toy with while discussing films.

My point is that I don't think Lucas was going with audience pressure. Especially if Jar-Jar was so important, it seems more likely to me that he'd double-down on that because that reveal might work. I think it's far more likely that he did exactly what he intended to do with the character: used him as a comedy sidekick aimed at entertaining younger viewers.

I still haven't seen the Clone Wars TV show; I know it's supposed to be quite good. Fudging those numbers to make the plot works makes sense to me, and just reinforces my point: it's not a well thought-out piece of worldbuilding.