#the main thing i'm ammending the Draft for is... it needs more women

[rotzaprachim]

writing a sw austen themed thing is really interesting because like, one of the things about austen’s women is they lead extremely narrow lives within the confines of a very specific kind of upper-class femininity. you can write things like pride and prejudice and zombies, and I heartily enjoy that, or you can go odd postmodern routes that seek to simultaneously modernise and girl-power the text whilst simultaneously excising many of the questions of agency, gender, and female interrelationship that exist in the original- i wish to uphold no classic works as the epitome of feminism for many reasons, but this trend bothers me greatly - but one of the interesting things about austen to me is the utter worlds of fascinating plot and comedy she details within those confines, and if I’m writing that kind of AU i don’t want to break that. and it brings this thing up that in some ways it feels odd to have blaster and lightsaber wielding action heroines engaged in croquet and cross stitch and interested in their marriages and homes and children, but comparing austen to sw i find actually underlines the poverty of female characterisation within star wars. austen’s women hold their own distinctiveness abroad broader patchworks of human comedy and are sharp and flawed and interesting; a catherine morland, an elizabeth bennet, and an anne elliot are three very different things. as much as these women’s lives are scaffolded around traditional goals of marriage and family, their lives are lived out in relation to other women and in configurations far more complex than “frenemy.” austen can have an endless number of stitchery-in-the-parlour scenes because every woman is distinct enough that comedy and drama arise simply from their proximity in the same place, and this is just.... not something star wars can easily say for itself. it’s the epitome of strong enough to carry the man versus strong enough to carry the narrative