I saw the tweets about this today, and I was like oh yeah, I remember hearing about that.
And then I saw the pictures and just— wow. What it would have meant to have these women in the movie, all this time. I can’t properly articulate it but it’s hitting me unexpectedly hard.
Wow thats a shame, even a nice old lady too. These Space Valkyries should have been left in.
I lived, ate, and breathed Star Wars from age 2 until 2005 when RotS finally beat the enthusiasm out of me, and I have NEVER, EVER in all my reading on behind-the-scenes and makings-of heard of these shots. It’s a shame there was no relaunched edit of the original trilogy they could have slipped these in OH FUCKING WAIT THERE’S BEEN LIKE 3 OF THOSE NOW.
Fuck. FUCK. Whoever decided to edit out and bury these needs to french kiss an angle grinder.
I want to see the old lady in the A-Wing. Seriously, it’s like, she’s somebody’s grandma. Some kid in the Outer Rim Territories got greased by the Empire for seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see, and her grandma, the bush pilot, decided “Fuck this, I’m gonna strap on an fighter and make the Empire fucking PAY for the moment it decided to fuck with MY FAMILY.”
DON’T. MESS. WITH. GRANDMA.
These are quickly being put into the “always reblog” category.
Whenever there is a war, there are women who are warriors. Then they get erased from history. Happens in real wars and fictional ones alike.
Less than 5% of general aviation licenses go to women. If these had been left in, you can bet that number would be higher.
^^^That knocked the breath out of me.
I just can’t believe they not only took them out, but refused to put them back in during the seventeen times they updated the movies. And of course the only possible explanation for this is: you do not belong here.
Literally though. How many stupid remasters have they done but THIS gets left out? Ugh
for the record the names of these characters are Sila Kott played by
Poppy Hands and Dorovio Bold played by Vivienne Chandler. I couldn’t find the name of the old woman though 😦
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dorovio_Bold
“As well as her appearance in the briefing, footage of the character in a cockpit during the Battle of Endor was also filmed, but not used in the final cut of the movie.”
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sila_Kott “Although played by British actress Poppy Hands in Return of the Jedi, Sila Kott was later dubbed over by an American man’s voice.”
That old lady has been fighting the Empire since its inception. She knows, more than the younger pilots around her, what they lost, what they had before, the swift and increasing evil of the galactic takeover.
Way back on the seventies, even before the first Star Wars movie came out, Laura Mulvey, feminist film theorist published her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In it, she explained, according to Freudian theory, the two pleasures from cinema come from 1) identifying yourself in the story to forget about life for a while, and 2) enjoy looking at visually appealing images and people. Because the industry was entirely controlled by straight white men, though, they inherently filled the first niche with people like them and the second one with objectified and sexualized women, especially there solely for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
Left without lead characters to identify with, minorities —what an ugly and deceiving word when they amount for the majority of people in the world— had to desperately search for themselves in background characters. A big part of the fandom consists of women, people of color, queer or with disabilities, latching on to the few characters they could find representation in. They get attached to this characters, love them like part of their own family and friends, because they provide something that is so rare to them in mass media: a voice.
One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.
Seeing this, it’s no wonder how confused and scared straight white males are, now that they can’t find themselves leading the charge of the new Star Wars franchise. Two movies in a row they’ve had to sit on that theater and face the minority’s reality, facing a situation that is so unlike anything their psyche is used to they react like wounded animals, with a primal fear of being erased from a narrative they are sure to own.
The best part is, for the first time, they are so desperate to find themselves that, like lost children in the dark, they have latched themselves to the one character that has given them a chance at representation: Kylo Ren. They have projected on him their airs of grandeur, blind expectative of an easy redemption and even the misguided self-assurance that, in the end, he will be the ‘true hero’ —instead of the women and people of color who are actually fighting evil in the story. Inadvertently, though, they have willingly chosen to self identify with the most annoying, manipulative, mediocre, unbelievably self-righteous and unbearably whinny fuck-boy this franchise has ever created.
Though, looking at their reactions and comments online, they might not be too far off on that one.
I need Han to accidentally be force strong, mostly because HE WOULD HATE THAT SO MUCH
“Wow so you’re basically a self-taught Jedi”
“WHAT–ARE YOU–I’M THE BEST PILOT IN–”
“That’s force shit”
“I’M AN EXCELLENT SHOT”
“Yeah, because of the force”
“I’M INCREDIBLY PERSUASIVE”
“That’s the force making people believe your terrible lies against all reason ”
“I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL”
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He gets it, gets why seeing yourself in a character is important, and that is so rare. Too many creators and authors and actors get wrapped up in what their intent was when creating/writing/performing, and don’t see that the moment the work is out there, it’s open source for head canons, interpretations, fanworks and meta. This is all the more important for people of marginalised groups. So of course Luke is gay, if you read him that way. The power is YOURS not Mark’s, and he’s not so egocentric that he misses that. This should be far more common than it is, this generous acceptance of fan interpretation and evolution of canon.
knitting in the dark 