What the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Got Wrong About Female Resistance
The Star Wars sequel trilogy promised a new political imagination. With Rey, Leia Organa, Rose Tico, Jannah, and a much larger ensemble of women than the original films, it appeared ready to move beyond the franchise’s old gender hierarchy. The galaxy would be rebuilt by people who had been excluded from power, not merely restored by another heroic man.
That promise was only partially fulfilled. The films gave women visibility, authority, and emotional importance, yet often stopped short of imagining what feminist resistance might actually require. Their heroines could fight, lead, pilot, and sacrifice themselves, but the political systems around them remained frustratingly underdeveloped.
The result is a trilogy that treats female empowerment as a matter of individual courage while leaving questions of collective action, economic power, race, and institutional change largely unresolved.
Rey’s strength was made politically weightless
Rey is introduced as a capable survivor who scavenges for technology, navigates hostile territory, and protects herself without waiting for rescue. Her resourcefulness offers a compelling alternative to the princess or damsel narratives that shaped earlier science fiction. Yet the trilogy repeatedly turns that material intelligence into a spiritual problem about identity and destiny.
Her relationship to resistance politics is especially thin. Rey joins the fight against the First Order, but the films rarely show her learning how the Resistance operates, whom it serves, or what kind of society it hopes to build. She becomes central because she possesses extraordinary power, not because she develops a political analysis or builds relationships with ordinary communities.
That distinction matters. A feminist reading of heroism should ask how power is shared, not simply who gets to wield it. Rey’s journey ultimately suggests that legitimacy comes from personal virtue and inherited myth rather than democratic participation.
Leia becomes a symbol instead of a strategist
Leia remains the trilogy’s clearest connection to feminist political leadership. She commands the Resistance, makes difficult decisions, and carries the memory of previous liberation struggles. Her authority is never explained as an exception; she is simply allowed to be the person in charge.
Still, the films frequently use Leia as an emotional emblem rather than giving her sustained political agency. The Resistance is presented as a small, mobile military group, but its civilian base, internal debates, and relationship to the wider galaxy remain vague. We are told that Leia has spent years organizing opposition, yet we see very little of the organizing itself.
This absence softens the radical implications of her leadership. Leia’s career could have opened space for questions about care work, coalition building, political compromise, and the costs of maintaining a rebellion. Instead, her most significant contributions are often framed through motherhood and personal grief, familiar emotional registers that limit how women’s public power is represented.
Rose exposes the limits of inclusion
Rose Tico briefly points toward a more expansive understanding of resistance. She is a working-class maintenance worker, a woman of colour, and someone whose political commitment grows from direct experience of exploitation. Her knowledge is practical rather than aristocratic or mystical. She understands that war is connected to profiteering, labour, and the suffering of people far from the battlefield.
Her critique of the wealthy arms dealers on Canto Bight is one of the trilogy’s most promising ideas. The sequence suggests that elite pleasure depends on endless conflict, and that rebellion must challenge the economic structures sustaining violence. Yet the subplot is rushed, and Rose’s insight is subordinated to Finn’s personal development.
The treatment of her character also reveals a recurring problem: diversity is present, but the perspectives associated with it are not allowed to reshape the story. Rose is important as representation, but her political knowledge does not become the basis of the Resistance’s strategy.
The trilogy mistakes visibility for feminist politics
The films offer an impressive image of women standing together: Leia directs operations, Rey fights beside allies, Rose repairs ships, and women take part in the final battle. The famous all-woman battlefield moment in The Rise of Skywalker is visually affirming, but it arrives without enough narrative groundwork to make the solidarity feel earned.
Feminist resistance is more than assembling women in the same frame. It involves confronting hierarchy within liberation movements, recognizing differences among women, and deciding whose safety and freedom are being prioritized. The sequel trilogy rarely examines these tensions. Women can occupy heroic roles, but the franchise does not substantially revise the assumptions behind heroism itself.
| Character | What she represents | What the trilogy leaves unexplored |
|---|---|---|
| Rey | Survival, self-definition, and inherited power | Collective political education and democratic legitimacy |
| Leia | Female leadership and revolutionary memory | The everyday labour and coalition work behind resistance |
| Rose | Working-class and racialized knowledge | How her economic critique could transform strategy |
| Jannah | Formerly conscripted people choosing liberation | The long-term politics of deserters and displaced communities |
| Holdo | Command authority outside masculine performance | Conflict between secrecy, trust, and accountability |
Jannah and the missing politics of liberation
Jannah’s story could have expanded the trilogy’s understanding of resistance more dramatically than it does. She and other former stormtroopers were taken from their families, trained through coercion, and forced to serve an authoritarian regime. Their decision to defect is a powerful image of collective refusal.
Yet Jannah’s past is treated mainly as an intriguing mystery. The films do not explore how these former soldiers recover from indoctrination, reconnect with their communities, or negotiate responsibility for acts committed under compulsion. Nor do they show the Resistance making room for people whose histories are complicated by forced participation.
This omission is particularly striking because liberation movements are made of people with unequal risks and conflicting memories. A truly feminist account would take seriously the labour of healing, testimony, and repair. It would ask how a movement avoids reproducing the discipline and violence of the regime it opposes.
The villains remain tied to masculine domination
The sequel trilogy is less interested in critiquing patriarchy than in replacing one powerful man with another. Snoke, Kylo Ren, Hux, and Palpatine represent different forms of authoritarian masculinity: spectacle, entitlement, bureaucratic cruelty, and imperial possession. Their power is often personal and theatrical, built around domination rather than durable institutions.
That critique is recognizable, but it becomes repetitive. The films imply that the answer to violent masculinity is a morally better individual, especially Rey, rather than a different structure of power. Even Kylo Ren’s emotional instability receives extensive attention, while the people harmed by his rule remain comparatively distant.
Female characters are therefore invited to defeat masculine tyranny without being shown designing a more just political order. The narrative celebrates the fall of the emperor, but gives little sense of how communities will govern themselves afterward.
A stronger vision of female resistance
The trilogy could have made resistance feel transformative by showing women disagreeing about strategy, building alliances across class and species, and organizing beyond military victory. It could have followed Rose’s economic critique, given Jannah’s community a central role, and allowed Leia’s leadership to include the visible work of negotiation and care.
It also could have treated failure as politically meaningful. A movement shaped by feminist principles would not require every heroine to be flawless, exceptional, or symbolically pure. It would make room for accountability, disagreement, grief, and the slow work of building trust after authoritarian violence.
Popular culture often turns liberation into spectacle, much like the polished fantasies examined through the business of chance, where systems of power can be made to look like individual entertainment. Star Wars deserved a sharper examination of the structures beneath its battles, merchandise, and heroic myths.
Read the sequel trilogy alongside feminist criticism of war, empire, labour, and representation. Revisit the scenes where women speak about power, and notice whose knowledge is ignored, whose suffering is made visible, and whose future is left imaginable. That deeper conversation can turn familiar franchise spectacle into a more useful debate about what resistance should become.