Well, to be devil’s advocate, was Palpatine ever supposed to have aged naturally? His appearance in ROTJ is quite, for the lack of a better word, “alien” looking. That’s not to say that I think ROTS solved it brilliantly, but I never interpreted OT Palpatine’s wrinkles as being natural, and he does look kind of melted. I also remember the novelization (which was Lucas canon) hinting at his unnatural age.
Although I know now that this is not the case, but when I watched ROTS for the first time as a teenager I thought Palpatine’s aging scene was him being transformed back into his true age by the Force lightning. Which made sense to me after all that Plegeuis talk about artificially maintaining life with the Force. In retrospect though, that’s giving the PT too much credit.
No, not aged naturally. Aged unnaturally and deformed by the dark side. But still a gradual process that occurred in part due to aging.
Again I wouldn’t have minded it too much if they made him look like in ROTJ or if there’s was some sort of explanation besides “scars.”
That was my impression as well. That he was just corrupted by the dark side.
Of course nowadays I try to ignore the PT, but when I first saw ROTS I assumed that his “aged” look was his true form and that his more natural age (e.g Ian McDiarmid without makeup) was maintained by the Force and that his fight with Mace drained him of power, thereby returning his appearance to his true deformed self.
The reason I don’t tend to give Lucas too much crap on this particular part of the movie is because it doesn’t really make sense to me that he’d age from regular Ian McDiarmid to melted-face old man in just 20-ish years. So I think that they’d be forced to make an excuse for it regardless.
It’s just a pity that the EU retconned him into regularly aged person, and not some ancient evil that hid his true age. Which I feel would have been the intention anyway in the OT, because I doubt that someone looking more or less like he did in ROTJ would have had a hard time being voted as the supreme chancellor or the Republic. A melted face, and evil yellow eyes should have tipped the Jedi off, so he definitely would have had to have looked normal at this point in history.