memes

Huh... It never occurred to me (because I was a dumb kid) that Leia has to be a princess of a domain.

I guess she was supposed to be the daughter of one of the Galactic Empire's vassals like the Atriedes to the Padishah Emperor and the Corrinos in Dune. Then she would be helping a rebellion to overthrow her lord's rule over her and her fellow vassals, hence the alliance in Rebel Alliance, which is also like the Landsrad in Dune.

Dune did leave a big influence on sci-fi. Even the Force is like the whole prescience (eg. Deflecting lasers using foresight) and shared ancestral memory thing (eg. Connections to everyone and communing with the dead, which always seemed so random to me at the end of New Hope). Luke and Leia definitely embodies a lot of qualities of Paul.

Also, she's racist against Wookies? Lol when was that shown? 😆.

I feel like it was a cheesy space opera, until it tried to pivot to the Marvel style action comedy dressed up as hero epic.

Cheesy, theatrical one-liners ("You failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.") are replaced by quips that try to be humorous ("Every word of what you just said was wrong") instead. The textbook dramatic arc of conflict, catastrophe and resolution is replaced by a comicbook escalation of ever greater threats. The final conflict of Ep VI was spiritual in nature, where Ep IX saw the Evil Wizard Reborn reach into his magic hat and pull out a fleet so massive that the only way to destroy it is a supercharged reprise of "dying lightning blast".

Whether they're good isn't relevant here. Both are cliché executions of their respective genres, but cliché doesn't have to be bad, nor does it strictly need to be good to be entertaining. My point is that they're different genres to begin with, and it's that genre shift that prompts fans of one genre to find the things they dislike about the other.

I think I could have enjoyed the Sequels as an "entertaining enough in the theatre" series, if they weren't such a jarring departure from the setting and associated expectations they were tacked onto.

Far be it from me to defend most of the goofiness in Star Wars, including its politics, but I don't think there's any contradiction in those particular facets of Leia's character. Being a princess doesn't exclude her from supporting rebels, nor does it mean she can't have prejudices. The history of most aristocracies is a bunch of prejudiced nobles supporting various schemes against one another.