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.  

Remembering the 'Droids on Star Wars Day

Today is, of course, Star Wars Day.  May the Fourth be with you all, my darling indefatigable boozers.

Remember to spare a thought for the plight of 'droids in that galaxy far far away.  This is something that tends to get dropped from discussion in the extended universe, but 'droids occupy a weird slave niche in the Star Wars universe despite being so heavily anthropomorphized it is not clear what, if anything, is the difference between a 'droid and an organic sentient being.  Without any such questions being raised, 'droids are subject to being forcibly abducted (by Jawas) or reduced to parts by Gamorreans in a weird 'droid house of horrors on Bespin.  'Droids can, through the use of restraining bolts and programming, be quite literally robbed of free will.  R2-D2 can only regain any sort of ability to act freely after he tricks Luke into removing his restraining bolt.  There are 'droids that seem to own themselves and have careers--IG-88 comes to mind--but these would still be subject to the rampant discrimination exhibited at, say, the Mos Eisley cantina.  Though Mos Eisley is a wretched hive of scum and villainy located on a backwater planet, and Bespin isn't exactly the galactic core.  Things may be better in a more cosmopolitan area like Coruscant, but we really never see any 'droids as a significant part of mainstream culture.  The largest role they seem to occupy is in the armed forces of the Rebel Alliance, where they are taken for granted as astromechs, and in one of the Rogue Squadron novels Wedge Antilles casually has his astromech's memory wiped.

One might, with the new information available from episodes 1-3, take the rather nasty state of affairs regarding 'droids as resulting from an anger leftover from any atrocities committed by the 'droid army, but that neglects any thought of whether the army 'droids could act freely in any meaningful sense.  Also, I refuse to seriously consider the new movies as existing, even less so now that Disney has bought the franchise.  I will continue to boycott Disney for their successful lobbying of congress to destroy the integrity of the intellectual property system in order to protect their own back catalog.

While I am bringing the current and local galaxy into this, it's also an interesting reminder that A New Hope was released in the 70s, with legal racial segregation at least very much in recent memory.  As is the case in most Hollywood movies, the cast of Star Wars is mostly white men, so a white human male bartender refusing service to R2-D2 and C-3PO is probably more of an attempt to comment on U.S. culture than an attempt to create an internally consistent reality.