The premiere of “Rogue One,” the first stand-alone “Star Wars” film, is six weeks away, and fans have gathered online to speculate about what treasures the film will hold. What’s the deal with the set photo of a shaggy alien that looks a little like a robo-sasquatch? What are the chances that all the rebel heroes will survive to the end? Is Darth Vader going to murder any of them personally? Oh, and how is this movie going to treat women?
“Rogue One” stars Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, the newest bold “Star Wars” brunette, and the conventional wisdom is that her very existence confirms the franchise’s recently enlightened embrace of strong female characters. But a vocal group of die-hard female “Star Wars” fans is asking for more. Online, they form a rich community of women who come together to bond over their “Star Wars” obsession, cast a critical eye on the role of women in the films and embrace minor characters overlooked by the fandom at large. In doing so, they’ve created for themselves what the films still don’t quite deliver — a “Star Wars” universe that revolves around women.
In “Rogue One,” Jyn will lead an all-male crew of rebels. In trailers and teasers, the emotional heart of the film appears to be Jyn and her father, and her central conflict lies with a crew of male villains (among them: Darth Vader). Rey, the scrappy heroine in last year’s “The Force Awakens,” and Leia, the tough princess of the original trilogy, were also surrounded by men. So on “Scavenger’s Hoard,” a new “Star Wars” podcast hosted by two female fans, Rachael — who goes only by her first name online — noted that the films have created “these entire worlds populated almost exclusively by men,” so even when a female protagonist is added to the mix, there remains an “absence of any meaningful relationships between women.”
On Twitter, Johnamarie Macias, the proprietor of the popular “Star Wars” site “The Wookiee Gunner,” lamented that the franchise remained stuck on its daddy issues instead of exploring a mother-daughter dynamic. “Super happy that Jyn is the lead,” she wrote, but added: “Why does the father have to be the scientist? GAH!” And on the podcast “Fangirls Going Rogue,” the three hosts discussed the role of Jyn’s mother with guarded enthusiasm. “Mothers tend to get erased, or they’re there to die,” the co-host Tricia Barr said. “Hopefully
Even a brief glimpse of a female character is enough to send shock waves across the internet. In a “Rogue One” trailer, a black woman in a luminous robe flashed onscreen for perhaps a second. “Who is she? What’s her role going to be like? How did she end up in the rebellion? Is she going to show up in some later media? We need to know!” Lauren Kell, who runs the Tumblr “Women of Star Wars,” said in an interview. “We want all the information about the women of ‘Star Wars,’ no matter how obscure.”
In recent years, a whole world of chatty podcasts, metacriticism, and fan art and fiction has cropped up to satisfy that need. “Fangirls Going Rogue” has done much to elevate the work of female writers and actors at Lucasfilm. It’s part of a podcast sorority that includes “Scavengers Hoard,” “Rebel Grrrl,” “Lattes With Leia” and “Rebels Chat,” on which Ms. Macias and her mother, Maria, discuss the Disney XD animated series “Star Wars Rebels.” On Tumblr, predominantly female fans come together to engage in “shipping” — imagining romantic relationships between characters like Finn and Poe, or Rey and Kylo Ren — and to share fan-created art celebrating their favorite characters. These destinations also have a political bent. Ms. Barr started the site FANGirl Blog to “redirect the tone of the conversation among the fandom aimed at fangirls, which at times had been hostile,” she wrote, and to encourage Lucasfilm to “create more strong female characters.”
Women are conquering the physical “Star Wars” fan landscape, too. Frustrated by the lack of sci-fi-centric fashions at conventions and official outlets, Ashley Eckstein, an actress who voices the character Ahsoka Tano in the animated series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and “Star Wars Rebels,” started her own online shop. That shop, Her Universe, now sells a lightsaber-printed skirt and an R2-D2 pendant bracelet, and it also offers a chance for women to connect. The site spotlights a “Fangirl of the Day,” like a lightsaber-wielding first-grader dressed as Rey and a grandmotherrocking an R2-D2 T-shirt and droid-print leggings. Partly thanks to Ms. Eckstein’s deep engagement with fans, her character has become one of the most beloved figures, though Ahsoka Tano never appears on the big screen.
Many such minor “Star Wars” characters have been elevated to greater prominence thanks to their female admirers. On these sites, it’s not all Leia, Leia, Leia and Rey, Rey, Rey. Women may be underrepresented in the “Star Wars” films, but the universe is so vast that female fans have been able to scrape together enough material to work with. Jessika Pava, an Asian female X-wing pilot, has just a few lines in “The Force Awakens,” but on Tumblr, she has become the star of her own stories, where she strikes up a friendship with Poe and pursues a romance with Rey. It seems counterintuitive, but just a glimmer of a female figure can be quite generative for fans, who are then freed to insert their own narratives and analyses that aren’t explored onscreen.
Scroll through Ms. Kell’s Tumblr, and you’ll find what looks like a dynamic, bustling world of female “Star Wars” characters — it’s just that they’re pieced together from different books, series and stories, and then fleshed out by fan art and analysis. In some pieces, white characters are “racelifted” — Rey is drawn as black, or Padmé (the leader played by Natalie Portman in the prequels) as Asian. Women of color are so sidelined in this world that Ms. Kell has seen “an especially fiercely protective love for them” online, she said. “We are willing to just embrace and lift up and celebrate all of the women we can get.”
Speculating about the narrative potential of a black woman who appears in a short section of a trailer may be wishful thinking. But the excitement sends a message to Lucasfilm: Give us these women, and we will love them, celebrate them and buy their action figures, too.
This plethora of female-friendly “Star Wars” destinations can be fun for men, too, who can find perspectives and analyses that are often overlooked on male-dominated mainstream fan sites. The hosts of “Fangirls Going Rogue” estimate that their listenership is equally split between men and women, and Amanda Ward of “Rebel Grrrl” said her podcast was particularly popular among fathers looking to connect with their daughters over the series
But not every male “Star Wars” fan is excited about this turn. Sites like the Jedi Council Forums, a bustling message board on TheForce.net, can sometimes marginalize contributions from women. “On the boards, there’s real scorn showed toward shipping as a phenomenon,” said Rachael of “Scavenger’s Hoard.”
In her experience on forums, Ms. Barr said, “a lot of women were called outsiders if we had a different opinion from the mainstream.” Even when most men are welcoming, she said, “all you need is one persistent person to make your experience really bad.”
Even officially sanctioned sites have felt off-putting to some. Ms. Kell followed Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars” Tumblr when it started in 2013 but was soon turned off by a masculine bias in its focus and imagery. As she put it: “How many times do you really need to post pictures of overly sexualized droids?” And on mainstream sites like Twitter, women are often belittled by male fans who can’t abide feminist theorizing. When Ms. Macias tweeted asking for more mother-daughter relationships in “Star Wars,” a fellow fan tweeted back: “two straight Star Wars movies with female hero leads. I don’t understand the complaint.”
The dominant cultural image of a “Star Wars” fan may be a lightsaber-wielding fanboy, but women have always been essential creators in the fan universe. They started early fan clubs and mailed out fanzines like Skywalker and Moonbeam, packed with fiction, essays and art. In 1982, Pat Nussman published an essay in the zine Alderaan that described a female fandom so rich and vast that she was prompted to ask, “Where are the men?” She continued, “Male names are rare in columns or fanzine order lists, male faces scarce at media conventions, and the number of men writing or drawing or editing in media fandom so minimal as to be practically nonexistent.”
Female fans had an early internet presence, too. In 1995, a Star Wars Ladies Night was held in an America Online chat room every Tuesday. And in 1997, the GeoCities site the Women of Star Wars promoted discussion of “the female characters we know and love (or hate as the case may be).” Other early outposts include Star Wars Chicks, a site “created in response to the argument that ‘Star Wars is for boys!’” and Club Jade, dedicated to celebrating Mara Jade, a character in the comic books and novels.
The difference now is that these female fans seem to have a more direct line to Lucasfilm and a real chance at reshaping the official “Star Wars” universe into one that looks more like their online one. In the aftermath of “The Force Awakens,” which drew a lot of new and enlightened followers, male and female, “the fabric of ‘Star Wars’ fandom has blown apart on the hinges,” Rachael said.
That shock to the system has made women more central and necessary to the “Star Wars” internet than ever before — not just one woman, not just a little niche of them, but a whole world of them. They’re waiting for the films to catch up.
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