WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in theaters now.
The treatment of women in The Rise of Skywalker was problematic, to put it mildly -- particularly when compared with The Last Jedi, a film where director Rian Johnson not only placed Rey’s inner conflict and experience front and center, but which also introduced two nuanced women front and center of the Resistance: Vice-Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran). Unfortunately, behind every great woman, there’s a gang of trolls waiting to pounce, and Holdo and Rose became the targets of a hateful online campaign that quickly turned into real-world harassment for Kelly Marie Tran, who received so many racist and sexist attacks that she decided to leave social media altogether.
In The Last Jedi, Rose Tico is grieving her sister Paige, who died taking down a dreadnought, when she meets Finn for the first time. Her hero-worship quickly changes to anger when she realizes that Finn intends to abandon ship, but she joins forces with him anyway to go to the gilded casino city of Canto Bight in an ill-conceived plan to save the Resistance. Although they fail their mission (like everyone else in the movie, including the bad guys) by the end of the movie, Rose and Finn share a kiss, and one of the final shots is of Finn tenderly taking care of Rose in the Millennium Falcon.
So when J.J. Abrams announced that Rose Tico would be back in The Rise of Skywalker, with a “very important role within the Resistance,” the logical assumptions was that she would get a similar amount of screentime as she did in The Last Jedi, and that her relationship with Finn would be at least addressed, if not continued. The first red flags that signaled Rose’s erasure from the movie were in the marketing material. Her place in the posters and t-shirts had been taken by a new bubble-eyed, phallic alien. New characters like Zorii Bliss, Allegiant General Pryde and Jannah had more visual real estate than Rose. Her absence was so baffling that it even prompted Star Wars fans to create the hashtag #whereisrose.
Kelly Marie Tran joined the press tour, talking about Rose’s great role in Episode IX and gushing about the scenes that she shared with Leia and Rey, and the great feminine energy of the set. John Boyega, who plays Finn, answered questions about his relationship with Rose saying that Rose was “his girl.” A picture of Rey and Rose on set was released, and she even got a brand new Funko pop figure -- although a very difficult one to find. Rose even got her own limited-release official t-shirt.
However, all of this, as it turns out, was pure misdirection. In the final cut, released on December 20, Rose has three scenes, and her “important role” in the Resistance is that of tech support. Finn and Rose are no longer together. In fact, someone new to Star Wars would be forgiven for not being sure that they even knew each other that well. Her scenes with Rey are nowhere to be seen, and in the ones with Leia, her lines are taken by Beaumont (Dominic Monaghan) a new character whose only real role is to allow one of J.J. Abrams' friends to have a cameo. This happens time and time again: Klaud the slug-like alien takes her place as the Falcon’s repairman; Zorii Bliss is introduced in a role Rose could have played and Jannah replaces her connection with Finn. The fact that the two women that J.J. introduced only exist to provide backstory and emotional connections to men, and have no story of their own, only adds insult to injury.
So… what happened? It's hard to tell if Disney caved in to the most racist and sexist parts of Star Wars fandom while still trying to keep her face in the movie as token representation, or if the idea to replace her role with four new characters with no arc came directly from J.J. Abrams for some other reason. Kelly-Marie Tran definitely filmed more scenes than the ones that appear on the screen -- her body appears, head chopped off, on many Resistance Base scenes. Did she have a larger role that ended up on the cutting room floor, for all the reasons above? Perhaps her fans are supposed to feel “lucky” that she’s in the movie at all.
Would Kelly-Marie Tran have promoted the movie so fervently, particularly at the beginning of the press tour, if she had known what the final result was going to be? We may never have an answer to #whereisrose.
Directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stars Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, Billie Lourd, Keri Russell, Matt Smith, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher, with Naomi Ackie and Richard E. Grant. The film is now in theaters.