DrDre said:
TV’s Frink said:
I don’t remember anyone saying that girls couldn’t relate to Luke.
I do know my daughters identify much more strongly with Rey.
“I think there was an assumption being made for quite a while that girls didn’t care about Star Wars or that girls weren’t identifying with characters like Luke Skywalker or Han Solo; they were only identifying with Princess Leia or characters in other movies along those lines. And you know I think that it is not just Star Wars that is making this change, I think culturally, I want to believe that there is real movement and momentum beginning to happen where those kinds of lines are being blurred and people are recognizing in the creative community that um little girls, and little boys, for that matter are crossing over into identifying with lots of different characters and lots of different stories; And we as filmmakers should not be the ones providing those boundaries we should just tell the stories and they should be open a wide variety of not only gender but ethnicity. and that is another thing we are really working to do is to make the casting reflect society in a much more equal basis.”
- Kathleen Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm, Star Wars Celebration 2016
As I interpret Kennedy’s words, she’s literally saying, that in the past filmmakers were providing boundaries by not casting women or people of different ethnicity in certain roles making it harder for women and people of different ethnicity to identify with these characters. She seems to thus imply that these past filmmakers (among them Lucas) were delibirately catering to boys, and white people, because they didn’t believe these stories would appeal to anybody else, and that only recently these lines are beginning to be blurred. Filmmakers should thus facilitate this movement by casting on an equal basis.
While it is true that men and women were not given equal opportunity in the film industry, I think it is faulty and inherently sexist to assume that a character’s gender is in any way important in the way men and women relate to these characters. As such, the fact that Rey and Jyn are female protagonists is important, because it reflects equality in casting, not because their gender makes these characters more relatable to women. If the inherent assumption is, that by casting women in gender neutral roles in Star Wars the franchise will become more appealing to women, then I would consider such a notion higly superficial and sexist.
For interest, info and a bit of balance…
Kathleen Kennedy’s quoted words appear in this article here:-
’A Princess in the Stars: A Female Perspective on Growing Up with The Expanded Universe’
http://www.theexpandeduniverse.com/single-post/2018/03/08/A-Princess-in-the-Stars-A-Female-Perspective-on-Growing-Up-with-The-Expanded-Universe
^ Quite an enjoyable article, that. Although the tile refers to the EU, it also lends itself to SW as a whole as well.
Though this is a ‘Has SW finally jumped the shark?’ thread, so further discussions on diversity and the political situation of Star Wars is likely better suited to the ‘Culture, politics, and diversity in Star Wars’ thread, or other more suited threads.
Huh, a bit of deja vu for a moment there.
Thank you.
