MerlinTheGoat
Well-Known Member
Her gender is irrelevant, i'm sick of people hiding behind calling everyone sexist to cover for bad writing. I would say exactly the same if she was a guy. I have no issues with powerful female characters, quite the opposite. When the reason for their power is well explained and justified, I absolutely love those characters. Ahsoka is a good example. She was already established as force sensitive and went through the proper training to use it even before she was introduced. She starts out pretty bratty and obnoxious, but we see her process of becoming both stronger and more mature throughout Clone Wars and Rebels.
For as bad as the sequels are, I also have zero qualms with the concept of Leia being a force wielder. They establish in ROTJ and ESB that she's force sensitive, and also explain why. She inherited her potential from Anakin, and they even took a moment in Ep9 to show that she was trained by Luke. It didn't come as a surprise or a shoddy retcon. The Legends content also makes her a Jedi, and there are a number of other female Legends characters who can use the force and are properly justified for doing so.
The force is in everything in the SW universe, it is required for life to exist and binds the universe together. That does not mean that anyone can feel or control it in the way that force sensitives do. There are specific genetic requirements to do the sorts of things that Jedi/Sith can do. Most people do not possess the capacity. To put things into perspective, there are hundreds of quadrillions of people within the galactic republic, and only about 10,000 jedi prior to Order 66 and only 2 Sith plus a couple of their rivals. There are exceedingly few people in the Star Wars universe who are force sensitive at any given time (or at least that WAS the case back when it was actually rare and special).
Prior to the prequels making it even more explicit, the original trilogy still established that the ability to truly feel and control the force is a genetic thing. As Luke said in ROTJ (and reiterated by Yoda), "the force is strong in my family". Then the prequels introduced midichlorians as a way to precisely measure one's capacity to use the force beyond just what is required to live. Even Disney's own canon still acknowledges and reinforces the critical role of midichlorians. Mando season 2 refers to it by "M count". Moff Gideon had no capacity to wield the force himself, he created clones of himself and spliced them with Grogu's DNA to create an army of force sensitives. Episode 9 also gets into the genetic requirements, with Palpatine having created clone bodies to transfer his soul into. He struggled to make one that had both the genetic capacity to use the force on his high level while also not degrading. He only succeeded in doing the former, the body however was dying. Snoke was another such failed attempt. One of his other attempts was Rey's father, who lacked force sensitivity himself but still carried the gene and passed it onto Rey.
In that regard, at least Rey was established as a force sensitive right at the start. The big problem with her usage of the force is that she was still just handed her powers on a silver platter without working for them. She did nothing to earn it, just could suddenly beat the crap out of a powerful well trained Skywalker family member with zero training and levitate a butt ton of enormous boulders with ease. But Sabine has the opposite problem. There's a reason why Kanan never tried to train her as an apprentice (he didn't train her to use the force, he just gave her some sword training in an attempt to get her to rally the other Mandalorians against the Empire), or why Ahsoka never mentioned this in Rebels. Sabine was written at the time as having no force sensitivity, and that was perfectly fine for her character. She didn't need to be a force user and it cheapens her character.
