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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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If anything, I find The Last Jedi a very strange film to use as a vehicle for that criticism? The female characters in The Last Jedi aren't very good role models, even if all you value is strength!

The major female characters in The Last Jedi are Rey, who achieves very little in the story and whose primary moral struggle is to do with resisting the appeal of sexy Adam Driver; Rose, who is a sidekick whose big heroic moment is saving the life of the man she's in love with; Holdo, who makes a series of bad calls, is overwhelmed by the First Order, and has to sacrifice her ship just to give the other characters a chance to escape; and Leia, who we last see nodding to a young male hero and telling everybody to follow him. If you look at the heroes whose actions actually drive the plot or save the day, it's mainly Finn, Poe, and Luke.

As Adam Roberts put it:

It’s great to show the good guys being led by strong, confident women, but it would surely be more progressive if these leaders were not—whisper it—so incompetent. I mean, the First Order senior staff seem pretty incompetent, and exist in a state of constant sniping, upheaval and infighting, but there is, surely, a big difference between a (male) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they’re all so ruthless and personally ambitious, and a (female) officer corps that is dysfunctional because they just don’t have the ability to plan six hours into the future. Add to this that the female officer corps all have really great hairdos, and we are surely encroaching on Egregious Sexism.

I don't know, I just feel like if I were going to pick a mediocre-to-bad film to defend to the hilt on the basis of it having good role models for girls in the form of its strong female characters, maybe I wouldn't pick a film in which the two female leads are motivated in large part by their attraction to more proactive male leads, and where the female supporting characters are demonstrably bad at their jobs.

I might choose a film that actually has compelling, three-dimensional female characters with well-rounded motivations, who overcome various obstacles through their talent, courage, and virtue; or failing that, at least a film with female leads who actually succeed at things.

Well-spotted, but I'm sure the person who said that to me was basing it off a YouTube video about how only misogynistic chuds don't like Star Wars.