ST Princess/General Leia Organa/Carrie Fisher Discussion Thread

It’s to bad we will never know how different IX would have been if Carrie had lived.

 

I don’t know, and it’s a shame on so many levels. She was such a confident person, but also a deeply insecure one, that she would freely admit. She was on fire the whole year after The Force Awakens during all her press and interviews and her point of view was so sharp and exact, especially about women’s roles in Hollywood. Her work in The Last Jedi had such a beautiful ease and strength. I think she would’ve been really spectacular.

 

I find the implications of this trilogy very unfortunate as it relates to Leia, women and motherhood.

It was suggested during the trilogy and in expanded material that's Ben's fall was partly because he felt abandoned by his parents. Despite both Han and Leia being attentive, loving and present parents there was the suggestion that Leia working as a politician and leader to build the New Republic led to Ben feeling isolated and alone. Furthermore, in TROS we find out that Leia did in fact train as a Jedi under Luke but stopped before her training was complete due to a vision that it would lead to the demise of her son. She stopped training as a Jedi, however she later went on to train Rey and her son ended up dead anyways.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Women have fought very hard to become equal members of our society (and there is still ways to go) and one of the most fundamental have been in gaining the right and acceptability to work and more recently to serve in combat roles in the military. During the OT, Leia was a hero of the Rebellion and a fighter for democracy, justice and peace. She was the counter point to the more esoteric force users and kept the conflict grounded. So it's very odd now that Lucasfilm and Disney decided to write a story where Leia working to restore democracy and a peaceful government and her becoming a warrior Jedi Knight as negative things.

Lastly, she at the end gave her life up for a simple force whisper at her son. To reduce this strong character, one of the most powerful women ever shown on film to a plot device to turn her evil son good was the final insult to her as a character.

I find the integrity of her character to be another casualty in the new canon. Such as shame.

PS. Rest in Peace Carrie. May the force be with you, always.

 

Rise of Skywalker: Billie Lourd Played Young Leia in Flashback

 

For the numerous faults TROS has, the way they did their best to have Leia still play a major role in the last film is something I will always be thankful for.

The greatest thing the ST has done is justified Leia being the "other hope" IMO

 

Leia was wonderful in the film. Sure you could tell that her lines weren't originally written for this film but for me it doesn't matter. They did the best they could and gave a wonderful send off to the character while honoring Carrie at the same time. Recasting would have been an absolute travesty.

 

I think Leia's role in TLJ is really underrated. I like the way RJ explored her as a symbol of leadership and hope while also giving us a look into her emotional burdens after dealing with so much loss. Her use of the force and her reunion with Luke were IMO beautiful moments. Her costume, the way she was shot, her mentorship with Poe, her scene at the end with Rey, her scene with Kylo (which should of had some payoff) all work for me. It's a nice contrast to TFA, where she was just kinda there.

It works for me as a final movie for her.

 

Blowing up the New Republic and having Leia quote her Jedi training were hue mistakes. She has pretty much her entire legacy destroyed, just like Luke and Han sadly.

 

Saw TROS again today (4th time) and Leia's role is finally starting to click into place for me.
I think her part initially felt a bit disjointed because of the obvious reasons - the fact that they'd cobbled together old footage to try and fit it into the story and some of the dialogue seems a bit awkward. But I've definitely come around to her death and get the same 'peace and purpose' vibe from it as I did from Luke's in TLJ.
One thing that did amuse me slightly was Kylo and Rey's reactions after she manages to get through to Kylo and Rey senses her death. They've just been having a furious fight, Rey's just stabbed him with his own lightsaber, they've created a ridiculous mess, and Leia's intervention is a bit like mom knocking two kids' heads together and telling them to stop messing about and get a grip. I like that - it really seems to snap them out of the fight.

I think Leia's influence in TROS is pretty underrated - she does a lot to help resolve things.

 

I think they did the best they could with Leia and I like what they did, too. I would've liked more to her death scene, but I understand their restrictions and I still think they got their point across: Leia brings Ben back. I like that Palpatine even specifically references that "the Princess of Alderaan" had disrupted his plans. Some of the dialogue will always be a bit wonky because her acting is directed at something else, but they did their best.

 

I’m wondering if Leia overreacted to her vision about Ben dying, much like Anakin did about Padme. If Leia had completed her training and trained Ben herself rather than sending him off to Luke and having him come under the influence of Snoke, maybe things could have turned out differently. It seems like force visions can often be wrong (Empress Rey, Han and Leia dying on Cloud City, etc), or just showing a possible, but not certain future. Also, I wonder if Palpatine was behind both Anakin and Leia’s visions?

 

Leia's relationship with the jedi and the Force and her skills were not treated well in this trilogy. It seems that they didn't have any idea about her jedi training for one way or another in TFA, TLJ showed that she can definitely use the Force when needed, but made it obvious that she is not the jedi in normal sense. Suddenly in TROS she is now a jedi master. Maybe Rey really had to persuade Leia to teach her, yet Leia now being legitimate jedi master is just weird and seems to contradict both TFA and TLJ making trilogy quite broken in that regard.

 

In TFA, I also had the impression that Leia had forgone the Jedi path and had not trained as a Jedi. Perhaps Abrams decided to make her a trained Jedi because he wanted to make a stronger connection between Leia and Rey. Perhaps he also wanted Rey get some training and Luke was no longer available for that.

I think he was very limited by Carrie Fisher’s passing, I believe that Leia would have had a much stronger presence in the film had Carrie been able to be in it.

 

@Swashbucklingjedi

I didn't even think of that. Why does TFA and TLJ make Luke to be so vital to the galaxy and Rey's training when Leia could just as easily have trained her the entire time.

 

Overall I find Leia's place in this trilogy horribly unsatisfying and outright depressing. But I'm going to focus on the fact that every single movie should have had a mother/son scene. My other criticisms are with the story development as a whole. I disagree with basically every narrative decision they made with respect to Leia, and I certainly disagree with her getting no emotional, narrative focus, when they amount of trauma they have subjected this character to verges on torture porn it's so OTT.

But anyway, specifically with respect to Leia as a mother, SW has such a major problem with the way it writes mothers. Even Princess Leia, such an iconic feminist character and one of the most popular film characters of all time, was sidelined as a mother. Then, they fridged her for Kylo, and somehow that's supposed to make Kylo more sympathetic to me. Kylo wrecked Leia's life in every possible way, and her end was dying for him at a strangely arbitrary time, without anything from him to her. Even there, she actually died to get him stabbed with the way it all played out. It's just very strange. I mean, I'd be cool with her choosing not her son's life if there was a pov attached to it, like for example The Good Son. But this was just a tacked on fridging with no depth and no coherence. Was she dying to save him or Rey? And why not Han?

I can't even sympathize with how they were between a rock and a hard place with CF's passing. JJ chose to have no Leia/Kylo moment last time he had the chance. RJ and KK chose to end TLJ with Leia alive. JJ chose to use her the way he did. He could have simply had her on Coruscant fighting the political fight, and left her live at the end. The Leia/Kylo stuff was already so horribly undeveloped and unsatisfying. There was never a way to add depth without CF here to participate, but the way they did it just seems like the worst of all options.

 

Even though her role in TROS was inherently compromised, Leia still played an instrumental role in the redemption of her son. In that respect, she helped bring a peaceful resolution to the Skywalker family's legacy.

 

The bolded is the definition of fridging. She died to serve a purpose in Kylo's story, and it happened without any pov for her. Princess Leia deserved better.

 

At least she seems to actually have trained Rey.

And I thought Leia awakening something in Ben Solo and their joint memories forming an interaction with Han was kind of touching.

 

Quite the vocabulary word. Don't know what else could have been done without Carrie Fisher herself. I think they made the best of an impossible situation. While I think the interpretation of that moment is up for debate, I also think her communication with him in TLJ was also a major moment for his arc.

If Carrie were still alive, perhaps Ben is redeemed and both live on rather than pass into the Force, but given the circumstances, I'm satisfied with the conclusion as it is.

 

Again, all of this is about using her for Kylo's arc, though I disagree he had any where Leia is concerned. After that moment in TLJ Kylo had no reaction whatsoever to thinking he witnessed a subordinate kill her. Regardless, Leia had a legacy of her own before this trilogy. What they chose to do with her reduced her in every respect to being nothing but Kylo's mother, and she was horribly undeveloped and sidelined in that role as it is.

They had so many options. One of them was to show Leia accomplishing something. She devoted her life to the Republic. They could have put her in that role in the end. They could have given her one win for her own legacy after they stole everything from her. Or they could at least have made her choice to intervene make some logical sense. Why now? Why to save Rey? And if that was her goal, have Maz tell us that in a voiceover. Instead the movie ignored the fact that Leia died to save Rey from getting stabbed by her son. Why the hell did Leia choose that particular moment to die?

 

Also; I noticed both "visions" related to Dagobah - Luke had his on Dagobah in ESB, and in Luke's TROS story about their last training session and Leia's premonition it looked like they were training on Dagobah.

I think there is more to Leia's vision than we are seeing. It seems ironic that she foresaw her son dying at the end of her training, then his actual death occurs at the same time her physical form fades. So could this metaphorically be the end of her training, her last Jedi act in redeeming her son? Just spitballing.

Or is "the death of her son" a metaphor for his turn to the dark side perhaps?
She rejoins the Jedi and he is reborn?

I don't think either vision came from Palps to be honest, but who knows.

 

They ran out of plot and footage? That's what it's down to.

Luke, Han and Leia all died to "save" Ben. Their lives were turned so that they were only responsible for siring him, turning him and then saving him.

Leia really suffers - she loses her husband and brother and then, instead of dying to help bring back the Republic, she dies to redeem her son - hell, she doesn't even know it redeems him. She trains Rey but does Rey really need training, considering what she can already do? So Leia is reduced to that. Oh, wait, I forgot, she's now a general instead of a princess.