Tumblr crosspost (1 September 2020)
Nov. 14th, 2023 04:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAn anon said:
you seem to have a lot of conflicting feelings about han and leia, and I wanna know your opinions :D
I replied:
I do! I’ve talked about it a few times before, but (as usual) I don’t mind ranting again. I’ll put it under a cut, though.
you seem to have a lot of conflicting feelings about han and leia, and I wanna know your opinions :D
I replied:
I do! I’ve talked about it a few times before, but (as usual) I don’t mind ranting again. I’ll put it under a cut, though.
My reservations about Han/Leia basically come down to one thing: no means no. It doesn’t matter if Leia secretly wants him; it’s Leia’s choice to act on her feelings or not.
She keeps choosing “not” through the early part of ESB, and Han keeps disregarding it, to the point of enraging her enough to kiss another man in front of him. Before their iconic kiss in the Falcon, she explicitly tells him to stop and he straight-up ignores it. Harrison and Carrie sell it really well onscreen, yes! But while their personal chemistry is great, the actual interactions as written are pretty awful IMO.
And I’ve mentioned it before, but the basic timeline was not at all set at the time. Leia wasn’t imagined as Luke’s twin back then; in the ANH script, Luke is 18 and Leia is 16. We don’t know how much time has passed since ANH. A year? Three years? It can’t be much more than that. So Leia would be somewhere between 17 and 19, while Han is in his 30s. It’s bad enough to ignore the “stop” of anyone, but it was written with Leia as a teenage girl. D: D: D:
That said, Leia’s 20-odd in the current timeline, so canonically speaking, Han passes … a very low bar (though tbh I’m around the age he is in ESB and personally find the idea of hitting on people Leia’s age super gross).
What most complicates my feelings is ROTJ, though in some ways it makes the ESB behaviour worse in contrast. Whenever I mention my reservations, there are always people who go That Was Another Time (as if that negates it, and as if 1980 is Restoration England or something). But that ignores the total reversal of ROTJ!
In ROTJ, there’s that moment where Han is about to make Leia’s feelings all about him and then stops doing it. There’s the later moment when, instead of pressuring Leia to give in to him, Han respects her autonomy and is ready to step aside if that’s what she wants—after Leia has said she loves him multiple times and kissed him. He’s grown since ESB! That’s the point!
I mean, not ignoring her wishes is still a pretty low bar, but I feel like they reach a relatively solid footing at the end of ROTJ that is a far cry from ESB. It’s just. There’s so much that goes on to get them there and I’m intensely uncomfortable with a lot of it. It … doesn’t ruin Han/Leia for me (they’re kind of like gravity), but it does make it really complicated.
She keeps choosing “not” through the early part of ESB, and Han keeps disregarding it, to the point of enraging her enough to kiss another man in front of him. Before their iconic kiss in the Falcon, she explicitly tells him to stop and he straight-up ignores it. Harrison and Carrie sell it really well onscreen, yes! But while their personal chemistry is great, the actual interactions as written are pretty awful IMO.
And I’ve mentioned it before, but the basic timeline was not at all set at the time. Leia wasn’t imagined as Luke’s twin back then; in the ANH script, Luke is 18 and Leia is 16. We don’t know how much time has passed since ANH. A year? Three years? It can’t be much more than that. So Leia would be somewhere between 17 and 19, while Han is in his 30s. It’s bad enough to ignore the “stop” of anyone, but it was written with Leia as a teenage girl. D: D: D:
That said, Leia’s 20-odd in the current timeline, so canonically speaking, Han passes … a very low bar (though tbh I’m around the age he is in ESB and personally find the idea of hitting on people Leia’s age super gross).
What most complicates my feelings is ROTJ, though in some ways it makes the ESB behaviour worse in contrast. Whenever I mention my reservations, there are always people who go That Was Another Time (as if that negates it, and as if 1980 is Restoration England or something). But that ignores the total reversal of ROTJ!
In ROTJ, there’s that moment where Han is about to make Leia’s feelings all about him and then stops doing it. There’s the later moment when, instead of pressuring Leia to give in to him, Han respects her autonomy and is ready to step aside if that’s what she wants—after Leia has said she loves him multiple times and kissed him. He’s grown since ESB! That’s the point!
I mean, not ignoring her wishes is still a pretty low bar, but I feel like they reach a relatively solid footing at the end of ROTJ that is a far cry from ESB. It’s just. There’s so much that goes on to get them there and I’m intensely uncomfortable with a lot of it. It … doesn’t ruin Han/Leia for me (they’re kind of like gravity), but it does make it really complicated.