When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s palace like that. But I also had Darth Vader and Luke, Han and Chewbacca, the droids and Lando, even tertiary characters like Bib Fortuna and the Gamorrean guard (I loved that guy). I had Ewoks and the Emperor, and ships and the solid mass of Jabba himself, who sat on a plastic box meant to mimic the pit he dropped offenders into for the Rancor to gobble. Leia never felt like a minority among my figures, but if she had, I also had She-Ra figures to supplement, and sometimes I did, waging epic cross-fandom battles on the back porch and in the yard.
This is why I’ve been so surprised since the beginning of the Where’s Rey? conversations. The idea that Rey, a major figure in the films, would be left out of sets and Monopoly games, or anything else, seemed foreign to me, because of my army of Leias. But there are more toys these days than there were back then, a toy now for every scene, for every costume change or shift of weapon, and sets of decorative figures, and tall figures, and according to collector’s lists, Rey so far has figured less than say, Poe Dameron, or even First Order Stormtroopers (because we need a lot of enemies, I guess). In some sets, like the exclusive Target set of large figures, Rey’s not there — Finn and Poe are, with Chewbacca, the three of them representing the good guys. Rey is missing, too, from The Force Awakens Monopoly game. But if you’ve been following this saga, you know all this already, and you probably know as well that representatives have claimed that they kept Rey’s presence low for fear of spoiling the story’s big reveals.
Frankly, however, the idea that putting Rey into a Monopoly game — or anything else — would be a spoiler or reveal is utter nonsense. Put Rey into the earlier releases with her staff (the one she’s carrying around in all the trailers, right?), and there you go. It’s not as though she was excluded from the trailers; in fact, she was featured in them, and that’s part of the reason for the backlash. We were set up from the first photos of the gathered cast to understand that Daisy Ridley would have a key role, so when she’s left out of this set or that game, especially now that we know for sure she’s the biggest of big deals (sorry, Finn; we know you’re a big deal in the Resistance), the decision to drop her from this or that looks even more like utter nonsense.
But the latest word is that the second wave of toys is dropping, and Rey’s everywhere. She’s gonna be added into Monopoly, too. Rejoice! Right? I’m glad, and I’m sure many others are, too. Nevertheless, it’s the response in many cases that is a sticking point. From Entertainment Weekly’s report on the second wave toys: “This new wave of product has got key elements from the film. You see Rey with a saber, her blaster, and a number of other elements we wanted to hold back until the film had been released,” says Paul Southern, head of Lucasfilm licensing. “The timing is good to try to address some of the social discussion that has been created through the ‘Where’s Rey?’ movement.”
But we saw Rey with a blaster months before the film. Did you even watch your own trailer, bro? Look, no one wants licensed gear to spoil major plot points. I get it. It’s why we see Poe Dameron so much in the figures, I’d guess, since there are a lot of ways to render pilots and we all knew he was a pilot. Except in the case of Rey, that response just doesn’t hold water, because we’d already seen her with a blaster, with BB-8, with Finn, and as a major focus of the revealed media.
“Rey is clearly the standout character in the film,” Southern said, as reported in that same EW article. “We always knew that was going to be the case, but the excitement around her is a lot more than we were expecting it to be.” And there it is. They had no idea that one of the biggest characters of the film, a woman in an action-role, a woman set up to be a Jedi, would be in major demand. How could anyone have guessed, right? I mean, action figures are for boys, right?
After all, there are no She-Ras anymore, and even when there’s opportunity, with Black Widow, with Gamora, with other female heroes, we see a similar lack of representation in toys. Walk down the aisles with action figures in your local TRU, and you’ll see wrestlers and Transformers and Minecraft stuff — and Minecraft, as you might know, just added a female counterpart to its blocky hero Steve in Alex. We’ve been working for years to separate toys along gendered lines, and any upset to that results in a huge backlash. Why? I’m not sure; kids like toys, and if they prefer “boy” toys or “girl” toys, it’s because we’ve taught them to do so. We’ve taught children that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that girls needs princess dresses and boys get action figures, but there’s nothing inherent in any of this.
Not to side with Southern or with anyone who was behind occasionally missing Rey, but in a sense, there was no way to guess, because of that severe gendering of toys. Because we’ve worked so hard to draw these lines, Rey — and similarly, Finn and Poe — were risky. Two men of color and a woman taking the helm of Star Wars? Only Star Wars could get away with that! And we want to see all of them as they heroes they are. Star Wars has always, even when flawed, been about blazing new trails, and it’s a shame that the licensing didn’t keep up with that. Perhaps now, though, they’ve listened, and in releasing more toys, more games, more stuff in general, we’ll have sales numbers to wield, and we can say: yes, listen. Women can be heroes, and black men don’t have to be gangsters and thugs, and everyone can work together to save the day and afterward, we’ll buy all the toys. Data and money: that’s power we can wield in the future. In this case, I for one welcome our diverse toy overlords. Bring ’em on.
