| Megiddo said: That's not what I understand feminism to be though. I would think the recent Star Wars sequels where female characters are shown to be wholly superior to the male characters in practically every way would be more the kind of feminism OP is asking about. To which I would say that Horizon Zero Dawn is actually a pretty good case. Since other than the father figure, pretty much every male character in that game is either completely incompetent or fully dependent on Aloy or both. That's the sort of "women power, rah rah rah" feel that I understand feminism to be all about. |
I don't think you're really understanding either of those pop culture products. In my view of it, The Last Jedi is a feminist-friendly movie, but is it really about like sisterhood and the relationships between women? I dunno, I don't see that as a thematic focus. Like all of the mainline Star Wars movies, The Last Jedi is about the eternal quest of Jedi to restore balance to the Force. Family and balance is the real themes. For example, there are three main sources of conflict between the young and the old in this movie, with, in each case, the older party representing more caution and the younger more boldness: that between essentially Leia and Poe, that between Luke and Rey, and that later between Luke and Ren. The first is essentially a case of the younger party having to learn from the older. The third case is one of the older clearly being in the right. And in-between these poles you have the relationship between Rey and Luke where each learns something from the other. And I don't think I really need to explain the whole family thing in the context of the Star Wars franchise and where the relationship between Rey and Ren is likely headed in that connection, do I?
Yes, many feminists were excited about The Last Jedi, as well as about The Force Awakens, but that's not because Star Wars has become the epitome of feminist thought ideologically or something. It isn't. The Last Jedi offers a couple of subjective lines that one can interpret as saying something feminist if you choose to read them that way. That is all. Star Wars, like the company that owns it, is a deeply, deeply centrist film franchise and will go on being so. The reason that many feminists (myself included) have appreciated these two films more than others in the franchise is because the Star Wars universe has traditionally very one-sidedly male and is now almost balanced in its demographic composition.
If one examines the earlier two Star Wars trilogies, one observes that, in both cases, there are very few women in them, and the leading ones, by the end, have been relegated to the background and heavily degraded. By the end of the original trilogy, Luke is rescuing his stylishly bikini-clad sister from sexual enslavement and by the end of the second, prequel trilogy, Padme has been reduced to the suicidal forbidden love interest of our hero-turns-villain protagonist. In this context, I find it difficult to sympathize with, or really even understand, the objections that people have to characters like Rey or the role of women in the new current trilogy of mainline installments.
