Today’s Wicked Girl is Rey, heroine of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, as an analogue for Dorothy Gale of The Wizard of Oz.
About the Look
Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in, A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin'. She made her escape, went from gray into green, And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean, But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky Where color's a fable and freedom's a fairy tale lie.
Rey grows up on a harsh monochrome world, dreaming of somewhere she belongs. She’s swept up into adventure, meets a cast of people missing something vital to a fulfilled life, finds both good and bad wizards untrustworthy, and never stops searching for that sense of home.
It’s up to interpretation if she finds it. I’ve struggled with The Rise of Skywalker, mainly the final act. The rest is messy, but Star Wars is messy, serials are messy, stories are messy. The end is bleak. The legacy of the Skywalkers is sacrifice, loss, loneliness, destruction, and death. So why would I want Rey to become one? Why would I want to end the story— both Rey’s personal story, and the entire Skywalker saga —exactly where it began? Why would I want that for Rey or for me?
Well, I have the exact same reaction to the end of Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has the choice to be Queen of Oz or no one in Kansas and she chooses to go home. She isn’t even allowed to keep her silver shoes. And no one there believes any of it happened. Why would I want that for Dorothy or for me?
Maybe I care about these characters too much. If the story tells me it’s a happy ending, I should accept it. But I believe “there are no happy endings because nothing ends.” Dorothy and Rey deserve better than the perfunctory happiness their narratives provide them.
About My Look
My look is inspired by the art of Kathleen DeLeon. The shirt is available in my TeePublic. The jacket and boots are the same secondhand purchases I wore yesterday. The jeans are also a secondhand purchase.
The bracelets were made by my daughter Aeris, as a gift for her Anakin-obsessed Mom. But I thought they served to reference Rey’s balance between the light and dark.
The outdoor photos were taken in Minuteman National Park, which has pretty gardens like Naboo and was the spark of Revolution.
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