Okay, okay, the character's family name is actually Dune, but that doesn't fit the theme of the blog.
I was awake at an unreasonable hour this morning, and watched The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 7, "The Believer." No spoilers are forthcoming; the episode was just the catalyst for my thoughts to coalesce and for me to realize that those thoughts needed to be expressed.
Carasynthia Dune, AKA Cara Dune, AKA Marshal Dune, is exactly the sort of woman I fall for. Cara is loyal to her friends, protective of innocents, strong of arm and sharp of aim. She's a hero. I want her to look at me the way she looks at the series' titular character when she accepts the duffle bag from him.
But note that I'm writing here about the character, not the actress Gina Carano who plays the role.
Actresses.
Once upon a time, I was an actress. I trod the worn boards of my high school stage, declaimed my lines with some minimum of skill and talent, and when my time in high school was done, so was my time as an actress. Before that, however, I had learned enough about what drove people to want, to need to act that it became one of my Rules for a Happier Life: Don't Date Actresses.
When I was in that phase, it was a dark age. We knew nothing about the figures we saw on the screen except for what we saw on that screen. It was years before we knew that Princess Leia's actress got addicted to drugs. We didn't know that the creator of Star Trek raped one of the actresses on set. We didn't know that our heroes had feet of clay.
In the movie Moulin Rouge... the 1952 version with Zsa Zsa Gabor, not the one with Obiwan Kenobi... the artist Henri de Toulouse Lautrec is given the line, "One should never meet a person whose work one admires; What they do is always so much better than what they are!"
And yet, we now live in an age of social media. It has become indispensable for public figures to be able to give their hot-takes on all the issues of the day, and for their fanciers to absorb those hot takes. I speak, in particular, of Ms. Carano here, though my issues might well include Ms. J. K. Rowling and numerous others.
During the prolonged aftermath of the recent election, Ms. Carano apparently tweeted out that she supported recounts, and that she believed the incumbent deserved to win the election. This statement, this opinion, resulted in howls of anguish from fans of the series. The role of Cara should be recast, or better yet, the character should be killed off. When Pedro Pascal, the actor who portrays the titular character of the series, praised her acting, people reacted negatively.
This behavior is insane. It's the kind of behavior which led John Boyega, Oscar Isaacs, and Daisy Ridley to declare they had no further interest in participating in Star Wars projects in the future. It's the kind of behavior which led Harrison Ford to demand that Han Solo be killed off as part of the price for participating in The Force Awakens.
We, as consumers, as fans, have to let it go. There's a line between Ms. Carano saying that she supports a politician supported by nearly half of the American public, and Gene Rodenberry raping Grace Lee Whitney on set. The former may lead to tsks and headshakes of disagreement; the latter rightfully deserves anger and ire.
My point here is that though there is no going back to the days when all we knew was what we saw on the screen, we should carefully judge which parts of the creators' behavior are subjects of disagreement, and which are worth getting up a torch-and-pitchfork mob about.
In the meantime, I'll be over here watching my dream girl, Carasynthia Dune, punch out armored stormtroopers with her bare hands.
