It’s not a secret that we here at Big Shiny Robot! and my colleagues at the Full of Sith podcast are fans of equality, gender parity, and better, more diverse representation in our favorite forms of genre media. We’d love more of it in our comics, our movies, our toys, our video games.
And it’s not some “politically correct trend,” it’s something we’ve believed in for a long time and care about.
Well, on the last episode of Full of Sith, which you can listen to here.
On it, we told a story about a listener who tweeted at our show after one of our discussions on diversity and, in particular, the objectification of Leia Organa as a sex object in her “slave Leia” costume. And she tweeted the following at us:
“Can we petition to replace the term: “Slave Leia” with “Leia the Huttslayer?” she asks. Why do we call her a name that’s a reminder of the fact that Jabba enslaved and objectified her, instead of a name that celebrates what she did to escape that bondage? Leia the Huttslayer is a much better representation of what Leia is all about.
So of course we thought that was a great idea and started spreading the word:
It hit tumblr, garnering more than 20,000 notes, mostly positive. Sure, there have been a few who cling to the fact that we shouldn’t “politically correct” something that has been around for 30 years in its current form. One person even claimed it was canon.
But here’s the thing: no one ever calls her “Slave Leia” in the movie. That’s a marketing thing. It’s something we’ve done. That’s what we call her. Why not change it up? Why not remind people of how badass Leia was, rather than how gross Jabba was? When you call her Slave Leia, and you objectify her as a sex object, you’re literally doing the same thing she murdered Jabba the Hutt for. So why keep that going? It’s basically admitting that you don’t understand what you saw in the film.
Will it happen? Well, it’s up to us to just refuse to use the name “Slave Leia.” Maybe Lucasfilm and its licensees will follow suit, maybe they won’t, but we’ll at the very least done something about it on our end to fight this subtle bit of sexism that we’ve helped perpetuate over the years.