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anghraineI'm fond of ROTJ Han/Leia, and it's difficult to miss the chemistry in ANH and ESB, but it's still weird to me when 21st-cent fandom tries to argue that Han/Leia as written in ANH and ESB is some pure unproblematic thing.
The thing is, SW official "canon" has shifted about a LOT over the years, not just w/ the Disney acquisition or whatever. While Han's treatment of Leia (esp his rejection of her clearly stated boundaries) is bad anyway until he gets over himself in ROTJ, the timeline has evolved with the various retcons. The most important of those retcons for this is making Luke and Leia twins, which makes her Luke's age. Luke comes across as pretty damn young in ANH, but was originally still a couple years older than Leia.
Specifically, Luke is 18 in the ANH script. Han is 30ish. Leia is "about sixteen."
Sixteen. When Lucas wrote Han talking about "a princess and a guy like me," he was imagining him thinking about a sixteen-year-old girl.
On top of that, the ESB script doesn't say how much time passes between movies. My gut feeling from the opening crawl is that it's been at least a year and could probably range up to around three years. But who knows, maybe it's four years, or six months. Han ignoring Leia when she tells him to stop is gross af regardless, but as written, it's entirely possible that she's still a teenager at the time. The twin retcon in ROTJ does raise her age to Luke's, and later retcons aged Luke up slightly, but those are retcons! They have no bearing on how Han/Leia was written.
It's just. It's fine to like Han/Leia! It's even fine to like ANH/ESB!Han/Leia if that's your deal. Fiction is not reality etc. But the attempt to hammer its writing into 2022 socially aware moral purity just seems really ill-conceived and incompatible with what actually went into the writing.
The thing is, SW official "canon" has shifted about a LOT over the years, not just w/ the Disney acquisition or whatever. While Han's treatment of Leia (esp his rejection of her clearly stated boundaries) is bad anyway until he gets over himself in ROTJ, the timeline has evolved with the various retcons. The most important of those retcons for this is making Luke and Leia twins, which makes her Luke's age. Luke comes across as pretty damn young in ANH, but was originally still a couple years older than Leia.
Specifically, Luke is 18 in the ANH script. Han is 30ish. Leia is "about sixteen."
Sixteen. When Lucas wrote Han talking about "a princess and a guy like me," he was imagining him thinking about a sixteen-year-old girl.
On top of that, the ESB script doesn't say how much time passes between movies. My gut feeling from the opening crawl is that it's been at least a year and could probably range up to around three years. But who knows, maybe it's four years, or six months. Han ignoring Leia when she tells him to stop is gross af regardless, but as written, it's entirely possible that she's still a teenager at the time. The twin retcon in ROTJ does raise her age to Luke's, and later retcons aged Luke up slightly, but those are retcons! They have no bearing on how Han/Leia was written.
It's just. It's fine to like Han/Leia! It's even fine to like ANH/ESB!Han/Leia if that's your deal. Fiction is not reality etc. But the attempt to hammer its writing into 2022 socially aware moral purity just seems really ill-conceived and incompatible with what actually went into the writing.
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on 2022-02-22 02:28 am (UTC)I'm going to (try to) put my stampede of cerulean ungulates answer in another post so that if you don't have the mental cutlery to deal with it or even have it in your comments section you can do what you want with it (delete, screen, etc.) and still have the part where my opinion is concurrent with yours be visible to the world.
no subject
on 2022-02-24 04:04 pm (UTC)Stampede of cerulean ungulates!
on 2022-02-22 02:52 am (UTC)2) The closest I get to being able to make Han and Leia's onscreen behavior be in any way all right is to headcanon that in the offscreen space between ANH and ESB, Leia had developed a habit of dragging Han into bed with her for some combination of stress relief and post-combat yay-we're-alive celebration but then refused to talk with him about what that meant to her, not least because Princess-and-Senator Leia "We have no time for our sorrows" Organa has really a lot of stress that she's just kicking under her mental bed and needs something to do with it that's not going to affect the fate of the galaxy so that she can clear her head for the things that will affect the fate of the larger galaxy. But she also doesn't have any spare cope for anything that's not the fate of the galaxy. And Han... sort of gets this but also sort of doesn't, and, not unreasonably, given his own background, would rather like to know that she's not thinking of him the way that Jabba thinks of his dancers, so to speak. IOW, he's less pushing her for a relationship that she doesn't want and more asking her to define the one that they already have (and trying not to feel like he's a princess' plaything rather than at least a friend with benefits). And Leia gets about as much stress relief from blowing her stack at Han (because, again, it's NOT anything that affects the fate of the galaxy, whereas she's having to keep her cool in meetings with various Rebellion war-leaders and political allies and so forth and sometimes she'd really just like to tell them to fuck off but she can't and that's before you get to the whole thing with her having watched her planet get blown up in front of her in a way that she probably has next-level survivor's guilt about right after she'd been tortured) as she does from sex with him so it doesn't occur to her not to fight with him.
Also I think that Han would get it if Leia said something the content of which was basically, "Look, I have kind of a lot on my mind right now and I just need to blow off steam and if we both survive this whole nightmare we can sit down and have a good long talk about what we want to do with the rest of our lives and whether that includes each other but I just have no cope for that right now and can I just blow off steam with you until we find out if we're even getting a rest of our lives?" (Not least because I think that was probably kind of his relationship with Qi'ra, whom by the way I love.) But... like, if Leia was in a mental place with Han where she could say that to him she wouldn't HAVE to say that to him, maybe. Or words to that effect.
And, you know, wow, that's making the audience do a lot of work to get something that's not sketchy out of Han and Leia as we see them onscreen. See again that I concur with your opinion.
3) I said I'd come back to their currently-canonical progeny, didn't I? There is SO MUCH about Han and Leia's relationship and both of their relationships with Luke that I see reflected in just about all the things, all of them, that fandom, or at least large and vocal swathes of it, hates about Ben Solo|Kylo Ren that... well, it's one of the reasons I thanked you for this post to begin with. I'd go on, but that really is a herd of cerulean ungulate megafauna and I'm not sure that's fair to you.
Re: Stampede of cerulean ungulates!
on 2022-02-24 05:05 pm (UTC)2) There are definitely a lot of ways to headcanon Han and Leia's relationship and how they got from Point A (blahblah "female advice" blahblah) to Point B (no means yes, actually) to Point C (I'll respect what choice you make). It's personally pretty difficult for me to see ESB!Leia sleeping with anyone at all, and my impression has always been that Han and Leia's first time was either in ROTJ (I'd guess between leaving Tatooine and arriving in the Rebel meeting) or soon after the end of it. But also, my tendency is to emphasize the things I find disturbing or dislike, so I've never really tried to find a way to ameliorate it.
3) Tangential, but one of the things I find interesting about the end of ROTJ and Luke is that he's poised between the Force / his friends and family, the dead / the living. He loves his friends, but he's also this kind of liminal figure, and while it's not the arc I would have chosen for any of them, it's not hard to believe that he'd be a difficult person to have a relationship with on the day-to-day level (...esp people who aren't his psychically linked twin). And it makes a certain sense that none of them are particularly suited to the care of a troubled and impressionable child, let alone one being stalked and manipulated from afar.
(I do not personally think that he'd have ever become Kylo Ren w/o Snoke/Palpatine in the picture, however, and I think their actions and influence have more of a direct effect on that than anything Han/Leia/Luke did or didn't do.)