Requiescat in Pace: Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher has died.

This is my tribute, not quite to Carrie Fisher, but to Princess Leia.  They are not the same, but they are inseparable, and it was as Princess Leia that I knew her.

It was Princess Leia who helped me find my freedom as a woman.  

There are still a lot of social justice problems with the Star Wars universe, and I don't want to ignore them, but I choose to talk about them another time.

When I found Star Wars I was in second grade, lonely and bored nearly out of my skull with second grade and with most of the books in the classroom and desperately short of female heroes I could admire.  (Western fairy tale and myth collections, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Laura Ingalls Wilder, C.S. Lewis, Robert Lewis Stevenson, etc.: my childhood reading was canonically European but conspicuously lacking in women who fight, lead, and make their own decisions about what to do with their bodies and lives.  Our school library did have a copy of The Hero and the Crown, but I was too intimidated by the thick, blank cover and the glares of the librarians to check it out until years later.)  

I wasn't allowed to watch movies except when I was so sick I couldn't enjoy them, but I was allowed to buy novelizations of the original Star Wars trilogy:

I read these until I know them nearly word for word even now.  It was my first taste of high drama with characters I could identify with.  I loved Princess Leia.  I admired the heck out of her.  I wanted to be like her.  I spent so many interminable mind-killing church services desperately wishing and wishing I'd been born into the Star Wars universe.  The Force didn't tell women to shut up and submit and go to heaven by having babies.  Anyone with an affinity for the Force could become a Jedi knight, not just people with penises.  (And I, obviously, would be a Jedi, because we are all the heroes of our own stories.)

Princess Leia was a leader in the Rebellion, under Mon Mothma (another woman!).  And she didn't just sit around and be the love interest.  She ran blockades, endured torture without breaking, came up with solutions while under blaster fire, stood with the other generals at the battle of Yavin, got bullied by Han Solo but talked back to him, disguised herself and walked into Jabba's palace to rescue Han, went with the ground commandos on Endor, and eventually became President of the New Republic.   

Princess Leia was a warrior and a leader and a woman. 

Princess Leia is still my hero.

Requiescat in pace, Carrie Fisher.