Cracked Dissects the Women of Original Star Wars

It is possible to call attention to a work’s faults without invalidating its status as a piece of art or storytelling that should be experienced by a rounded cultural consumer. Much in the same way that we still read Robinson Crusoe or Tintin books while we acknowledge those books’ contemporary European stereotypes of “native cultures;” and in the same way (though with less self-awareness) that the Victorian era revered a “classical” education with plenty of Greek philosophy, including The Illiad and Plato’s Symposium, two works that are incomprehensible if you don’t accept the fact that those Victorian-celebrated Greeks were totally pro-men-having-sex-with-men.

And we can also talk about the possible problems with Princess Leia’s suitability as a role model while we enjoy Star Wars. (Considerable paragraph on Queen Amidala placed behind the jump so as not to clutter up the main page.)

Honestly, I’m surprised that the Cracked team limited themselves to the Original Trilogy, when Padme Amidala started out as a fourteen-year-old girl who gains the top elected office of an entire planet and who, when every single legal recourse within her power fails, packs up, leaves the bureaucrats at their stupid floating desks and goes home to lead the bloody rebellion (or at least it would have beeen bloody if they weren’t all robots). And then in the second movie she’s a woman who shirks her senatorial duties and needlessly endangers her life for a guy whose religion forbids him to love her and by the third movie she’s just a vehicle for tears and the womb required to produce two other main characters who loses the will to live just as her twins are brought into the world because a guy dumped her.