I was 14 when Star Wars: A New Hope came out and it was the first film I’d seen that gave me a female role model.  It gave me a woman who was smart, sassy, sexy, competent, canny, uncompromising, more than capable of rescuing herself, not in the least damsel like, who flirted with all the boys, and knew her way around both a spaceship and a gun.

Between 1977/8 and 1980 (when Empire came out) I saw A New Hope over 20 times…then I stopped counting. 🙂

It took me a while to realise that though Princess Leia was a rockingly cool chick Carrie Fisher was the true definition of epic.

When The Force Awakens came out and there was General Organa – a women who’d lost her friends and family, brother AWOL, lover missing, son turned away – and she was unbowed and unbroken and still putting her big girl pants on every day to fight the good fight I teared up in the cinema.  Someone referred to the pic above as Carrie/Leia’s “done listening to men”face 🙂

Leia Organa may have been a role model for my generation and the ones who came after but Carrie Fisher was indomitable – in her openness and willingness to talk about her mental health, the way she shut down idiotic interviewers who asked her about beauty and weight issues rather than talk about more important things and her continuous epic smackdown of social media bullies.  My Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram feeds this evening have shown an astonishing outpouring of love and respect.

Despite what the reports are saying I choose to believe she “drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.”

I’ve just rewatched A New Hope, am about to dive into Empire Strikes Back and save Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens for tomorrow.  Then I’ll see Rogue One again at the cinema.

There’s a suggestion making the rounds on social media that one way to honour Carrie would be to:

• normalize discussions about mental illness and its treatment
• take life a little less seriously
• destroy a fascist regime

I’m so onboard with that idea.