If we are talking about breakthrough female characters in mainstream American media then Princess Leia can't be ignored. People might forget nowadays, but Leia's feisty and somewhat aggressive personality was sort of a subversion of the typical damsel in distress trope.
Leia Organa was aptly played by Carrie Fisher, she was the princess of Alderaan and helped the Rebel Alliance fight against the evil Empire. Her father was Darth Vader and her mother, Padme Amidala, died at childbirth. Her two children, Luke and Leia, were then taken to different planets and the identities of their real parents were hidden. In the first movie her role is mostly that of a captured princess waiting to be rescued, but her actions and attitude are everything but submissive.
Even before she is freed, Leia isn't afraid to talk back at Darth Vader and in her first appearance we see her defending herself from the stormtroopers before she gets captured. She often has quips and a few snarky comments for her companions and enemies alike. She also isn't afraid of grabbing a blaster and shooting her way out of situations. In older reviews for Star Wars some reviewers called her tomboyish, something that today seems weird but at the time, this type of spunky personality in a female character from a fantasy film was unheard of.
All of this helps to instill more of a personality to her, and is very much in line with the type of woman Leia is supposed to represent: a post-women's liberation girl who wants to see herself in the movies as the old models were expiring. Although Leia has to fulfill her role as a princess to be rescued because Star Wars follows into a specific tradition in story tropes (being a princess rescued by a knight) and to be faithful to Flash Gordon (Leia playing basically the same role as Dale Arden did in the comics and serials), Lucas still had to adapt her character to more modern sensibilities, ones that would have been more fitting to it's time.
However, Leia's duties are not related to combat but to leadership, that's what she truly is at the end of the day, a woman who can help the rebels win the fight. In Empire we see a far more personal and intimate side of the princess as we see her juggling her affection between Luke and Han. Eventually, she confesses her love to Han and escapes the claws of Vader at Bespin along with her friends and Lando.
In Return of the Jedi, however, she becomes more active, dropping into the battlefield and fighting alongside her troops in Endor. Not to mention, dressing up as a bounty hunter, infiltrating Jabba's palace and killing him. Some people have complained about the metal bikini, which is fair, as it's not really necessary, but it's also somewhat faithful to the pulpy fantasy roots of the franchise. Also, the imagery of a warrior woman rejecting the sexualization of a hideous and chauvinistic creature that chained her and strangling him with her chains is quite interesting.
In this movie we get to see both her personal relationships (her love for Han and her sisterly affection for Luke) and her loyalty to the rebellion. All perfectly balanced and conveyed with small moments within the film's rather busy but well told storyline.
Leia was a very tridimensional female character with agency and more dimensions than usual, her role wasn't just to scream and faint anymore, serving as another fighter and as a more developed human than her trope would suggest. Her importance to Star Wars was fundamental but it was only a first step. Since she comes from an era when feminism was barely gaining importance in media, her role isn't as active as it could have been and her representation still fell under the restrictive femininity of Hollywood, there was a lot of ground left to cover (and there still is) but we can all agree that she was a great first step for American big budget cinema, one that would define franchises of it's genre forever.
A point of interest was that originally Leia was supposed to be the protagonist of some sort. It's no secret that Star Wars was originally going to have a female protagonist who saves her brother, but after some rewrites and after developing the idea further, Lucas decided to change the sexes, add another storyline about brothers and turn one of them into a girl, leaving us with the films we know today. I can't help but to wonder how this early draft of the story would have played out. Perhaps we would be flooded with female protagonists after its success? Who knows.
Leia became one of the most revered women in sci-fi and a feminist icon in cinema. Being able to stand up to the men that surrounded her in the story. Funny how nowadays her attitude would be considered too angry and too aggressively feminist for people to handle, but this was more than necessary and fitting for the character's situation.
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| Fisher hanging out with stuntwoman Tracey Eddon |
Her role in the sequel trilogy was diminished, not because the writers and filmmakers had a gripe against her but Carrie Fisher's age was a determining factor in making Leia be more in the background but still provide some emotional and moral support for the main characters in the narrative. Something appreciated but that we will touch upon when we take a look at each entry in the sequel trilogy.
A legacy that can't be denied. Princess Leia is an immortal character that is now one with the force forever.
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