Star Wars smuggles a gender critical message? Contains spoilers **Title edited by MNHQ**

[Dervel]

Spoilers obviously:

So the evil resurrected Emperor has this whole scheme to setup his granddaughter Rey to strike him down so that he can posses her body in some bizarre Sith ritual and become “Empress Palpatine”. He passed over his son and makes his granddaughter the focus of his machinations and manipulations.

The subtext seems pretty clear the Emperor (a tyrannical patriarch) requires a female body to endure past his own corrupted and failing form (that’s on life support at this point!), but in order to do this requires the utter annihilation of the original female identity of Rey?

Am I stretching?

I think you’re massively overthinking the whole thing!

Just enjoy it as the sci-fi fantasy it’s supposed to be.

Oh Good Grief, it’s Star Wars!
Be thankful they’ve got some decent female characters and stop over thinking stuff!

You're stretching it!

It's more likely the writers had to completely re-write the bloody thing after Carrie Fisher died and everyone complained about the last one. So they resurrected an old character because they lacked imagination to come up with an original plot.

Or maybe he tried it with his son before, if failed, son got away and had a daughter who he then hid in the desert because he knew what a psycho his dad was?!

I must have missed the bit in the film where they explored the Emperor being trans .

no.

there wasn't even going to be a personality transfer. only the power and evil would have transferred to Rey if she had succumbed, she would still have been Rey not a trans emperor.

not everything is about the epic struggle for establishing the physical reality of womanhood beyond male fantasy. this debate isn't even on the radar for most people. the directors are probably patting themselves on the back for ensuring that most of the recent star wars films manage to pass the Bechdel test.

That's stretching a bit far I think. There were bits that resonated though - the idea that there were more people out there that were too frightened to rise up because they didn't realise there were others:

“They win by making you think you're alone"

In the car on the way home from the cinema with DH and my two boys WTFing in the back. It would have been a much better film if Ren and Kylo Ren had ditched the battling for the bedroom about 25 min in. The only dramatic tension was their will they-won’t they. As DS2 said: “that’s two hours of my life I won’t get back!” I’m too frazzled after 2 hours of noisy chaos and wall-to-wall CGI to consider the patriarchy.

I've heard weirder fan theories. I read it as Palpatine would die but by the act she'd effectively become as bad as him, rather than him possessing her, but as he said, some Sith powers are a bit unnatural.

Further FWR-StarWars thoughts - Rey could've been better written. The actress is great (particularly when given a comic line), but the character's struggles and temptations seemed to resolve a bit too easily, leaving an unpleasant Mary Sue flavour. Every time they do this, it reinforces the nerd stereotyped belief that female leads = shit films. I also suspect angry internet fanboys were the reason why Rose was effectively cut out of this one. :(

@EndoplasmicReticulum I read the “they win by making you think you’re alone” as an anti far right message to all of us to not let the Trump/Johnson bastards and their followers win but I’m probably being over optimistic there .

They put the spoiler message on a bit late, in my opinion!

Every time they do this, it reinforces the nerd stereotyped belief that female leads = shit films. I also suspect angry internet fanboys were the reason why Rose was effectively cut out of this one.

From the star wars fan sites, it reads that actually the mega fans love strong female leads, and the character Rose Tico was too weak, and that’s what the lashing out was about. What they totally got wrong was attacking the actor Kelly Marie Trans’ not the character.

Sorry for my derail Dervel!

I think there have been plenty of popular action and sci-fi films with female leads, they do well if it's a good film. Rose was annoying and Rey was under-written, but it's because they are really modern CGI based action films, with none of the storytelling of the originals (which were for kids, but they still had a lot more downtime for the story to unfold.)

Daisy Ridley is brilliant. Too bad the writers and director are not.

No, OP.

Maybe I was over-reaching! Though Palps does end up defaulting to sucking the life out of Rey and Ben to heal himself, which begs the question why wasn’t that his plan A unless he for some reason preferred to posses Rey.

@GirlDownUnder I happen to really like Rose and was really disappointed she was so sidelined in RoS. It feels as though they gave the toxic elements of the fan base what they wanted. Rose to me was the character I think I identify with most. As much as I’d love to be a Jedi or star fighter pilot I think she represents the more average person in the story who just wants to do what’s right. I think she is rather strong because of that.

He didn't know they were a dyad (or however they want to spell that) until they were fighting together. Their power alone wouldn't have been enough.

Snoke knew they were a dyad in fact he tried to pass off their connection as one of his machinations in TLJ, and as Palps was pulling Snoke’s strings he surely knew also.

I missed that, but then I wasn't incredibly invested in TLJ. And the writers of this one certainly didn't give that feeling.

Harrison Ford to George Lucas: "You can write this shit, George, but I bet you couldn't say it!"

And I hope everyone was equally perturbed by Carrie Fisher's questionable relationship with a slug.

I was kind of fascinated with the Leia/slug thing as a kid. How did that work? Probably better not to know.

Rose to me was the character I think I identify with most. As much as I’d love to be a Jedi or star fighter pilot I think she represents the more average person in the story who just wants to do what’s right. I think she is rather strong because of that.

I get this. Being brave is being scared, but doing it anyway.
I think the uber fans are maybe very polarised in their views of women - we either have to be total Amazon warriors or slaves with no agency.

I liked Rose too. Her storyline was not something I’d really thought about, or looked in to before, it was just the original comment by TirisfalPumpkin that Rose had been cut, that dropped me down a rabbit hole.

I’d need to read more / be more invested in the whole subculture to probably fully understand, but in all I don’t think the whole back saga re Kelly Marie Tran is ok - it all seems a little toxic.

Sorry, I’m rambling

Slugs wrap around each other in a slugplait and exude their sluggy secretions all over each other.

So the bikini would seem entirely practical.

I can understand why Leia has that ‘I’ve seen it all’ look towards the end...

Sorry for the slight detail, but thank you for adding ‘slugplait’ to my vocabulary.