There are spoilers for The Force Awakens below. Consider yourself warned.
I've always been a Star Wars fan in one form or another. My parents made sure I was properly introduced to the original series when I was young, before I saw any of the prequels - and while the prequels dimmed my fascination with the story, I can't tell you how many times my brother and I beat each other up in our back yard with cedar branches, imagining them to be lightsabers - and us, Jedi.
Of course, back then, I didn't really have a Jedi inspiration to look up to. There was Luke, who I loved, but was yet another in a long line of guys who had the kind of symbolic resonance I wanted.
I mean, Luke Skywalker being Luke didn't stop me from dreaming, and I know it didn't stop anyone of my or other generations. We imagined our way into being Jedi, whether through Halloween costumes or through convention cosplay or though fanfiction - both terrible and sublime. One of the earliest recorded pieces of my writing is some truly awful middle-school self-insert fanfic, where my friends and I fall into the Star Wars universe through a store-portal in a mall.
There was always, though, that sense of frustration. I had to turn to the extended universe for my girl Jedi, for my fierce women warriors, for lightsabers wielded by hands other than male.
I went into The Force Awakens with little to no proper expectations. In fact, it was only a feeling that I should probably avoid spoilers that prompted me to go on the day after it opened, and I certainly wasn't expecting to walk out wanting to both cry and jump for joy. Finally, finally, years after the first time I asked for and didn't receive a lightsaber for Christmas, I felt like I'd gotten one.
Not only was Rey the protagonist, the eventual wielder of a lightsaber filled with so much internal mythology, a clear new "Chosen One" for this new age, but she was so utterly human. She was strong, without that strength leading to coarseness. She cried, but it didn't make her weak. She ran away from the call, but that didn't condemn her. She didn't lose half her outfit conveniently to a torture-porn style slash across the back - and her outfit wasn't sexualized to begin with. She didn't lose her agency in the name of plot.
She was everything I'd never known I needed to see in a movie, and in a Star Wars movie, no less. In a year that saw both the great (Mad Max: Fury Road, Inside Out) and the terrible (50 Shades of Grey, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, ) for women in lead roles, The Force Awakens provided the shining bookend - and it wasn't just about Rey.
There are women pilots, women grounds-crew, women Stormtroopers, women commanders, women in power and women without, women scavengers, women existing in ways that the imagination can pick them up and carry them along - no need to invent these characters because they're already there.
Now, we come to my point: How important is this? I'm 24. I know the world, I know how I move in it, how I exist in it, how I can try to make changes in it. I don't need a hero on the big screen to show me that anything is possible - but it's a lesson I might have learned so much earlier than now if there had been.
Rey, and Rey's story, is so important because - because I would need extra fingers to count the number of times I've been told that a friend's daughter, a friend's cousin, a friend of a friend's child - their four-year-old, their ten-year-old, their young-enough-to-be-impressionable child - fell in love with Rey. How many pictures I've seen of these girls, the future, dressed in a costume that didn't have to be altered to be un-sexy on a seven-year-old. Dressed in a costume that maybe makes them feel braver, maybe makes them feel stronger, maybe makes them feel like they can take on anything.
I'm to an age where I don't need a lightsaber in my hand, a costume to remind me that I can be brave. It really doesn't hurt, though.
