Relate? Yes. Have an emotional connection in a case like this? No. Threepio's been dismembered and reassembled so many times by now -- mostly for laughs -- that seeing him zapped here didn't get the same reaction from me as when, say, Satine was zapped.
Well, you just have to focus on the aspects of the situation that
would distress Threepio. Maybe the physical abuse didn't harm him much, but just think about the intolerable bad manners of it all! I mean, he simply
had to get those fruits back to the party in time for dessert or the whole event would be
ruined! Protocol is what he lives for, and falling short in his protocol duties would be quite tragic from his point of view.
I once heard a bit of writing advice, though I can't remember who said it: "Every character must want something, even if it's just a sandwich." Good characters are motivated by the pursuit of something they want or need badly, and effective storytelling is about getting us to identify with their need to achieve their goals and their frustration at failing to do so, even if those goals are completely different from our own. That's why good storytelling can even make us identify with villains -- we may recognize their goals as wrong, but we can relate to need and frustration in any context.
So whether Threepio was experiencing physical pain or distress wasn't the issue here. The identification came from sympathizing with his need and the frustration of his need. What does the character want? What keeps him from getting it? How does he react to that impediment? These are the questions that define a character's arc. Threepio may not have been in great physical danger, but emotionally he was deeply distressed, because his need is for everything to be prim and proper and perfect, and for himself to be the one responsible for keeping it that way, and this situation was anathema to that.
I do question the existence of a droid spa, though. I thought droids were basically slaves with little free will of their own, with 3PO and R2 being the aberrations since they never got their personalities routinely wiped like other droids. So seeing all these droids coming in without their masters to waste money on themselves was a little weird.
It's a big galaxy, and Coruscant is the most densely populated planet in it, I believe. So even if only a tiny percentage of droids diverge from the norm, it's still going to be a large enough customer base for such a business.
Besides, maybe it's mainly geared at droid owners rather than droids. Look at all the similar spas and grooming salons for dogs and cats, or at the industry that makes little doggy outfits and fancy cat collars, and at the gourmet pet food industry. Do the pets need any of that stuff? Do they care about it? Not really. The industry is marketed at the owners who anthropomorphize their pets and project their own desire and vanity onto them. I'm sure that in a universe where people owned droids, a lot of them would treat their "pet" droids the same way.
After all, if the spa had been geared at droids rather than their owners, why would the spa "employees" have been designed to look like sexy humanoid women? That's a dead giveaway right there that the primary targeted customer base is humans who want their droids to look their best, or maybe humans who feel vaguely guilty about enslaving droids and want to believe they're rewarding their droids for their service.
Oh, hey, the
episode guide explains something I've been wondering about. Namely, why would 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker have built a prissy protocol droid? Seems highly incongruous. Well, here's the official rationalization:
C-3PO makes mention that he was previously the protocol droid for the chief negotiator Manakron system. This supports George Lucas's original character notes that had C-3PO be over a 100 years old at the time of Episode IV A New Hope. Nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker did not build C-3PO from scratch, but rather rebuilt an older droid that had previous protocol assignments.
It also reveals that this episode is a prequel to "Hostage Crisis," the first-season finale episode that introduced Cad Bane and featured the breakout of Ziro the Hutt. And yet it takes place
after the second-season premiere "Holocron Heist," the second Bane episode! It's really bizarre what's going on with the episode order on this show. They're just sticking in stories at random between other stories.
