The Romulan Republic wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:I'm not sure Lando is even all that morally ambiguous a figure in the movies. He's pretty obviously doing everything he can to warn Han and Leia off of Bespin before Vader nabs them, he actively pisses off Darth Vader when he didn't have to do that and might well have been left alone in charge of his city just by not doing so. And then he pretty much signs on for the Rebellion and becomes one of the main leaders at Endor.
Well, I'll admit he was trying to make the best of a bad situation, and he did end up unambiguously with the heroes in the end.
Yeah. Basically, as far as I can remember, at literally every point we even see Lando in the movies, he makes a morally correct choice. Sometimes he takes great personal risks. Like infiltrating Jabba's palace as a guard. Or llike telling off Darth Vader to save a friend; that takes balls of durasteel, don't you think?
He's got a shady past, but is morally quite clean in the present.
I disagree. Lando, at least prior to the Yuuzhan Vong era about which I know virtually nothing, got exactly the roles he was comfortable in. He's a gambler and a personally charismatic organizer of moderate-sized, highly profitable enterprises. If he'd wanted to enter top level Republic poalitics he could have- but he doesn't, by all evidence. He prefers to be an independent agent, and he does well for himself in that role.
Maybe so, but their are other ways he could have been used in the stories more.
He could have been- but he still manages to appear, and he does so
doing what he does best. Just as Han never really fit in as a general or a politician in the old EU, and routinely wound up circling back to his roots as a smuggler, chancer, and gunman.
Sometimes, a character's particular happy ending doesn't involve becoming powerful, and sometimes a character becoming powerful wouldn't constitute a happy ending for them.
You have made something of an assumption, I think, about what I am arguing. I don't believe I said anything about "powerful".
It is my experience, however (at least in the EU) that Lando was given a fairly minor role in the stories. They could have done more with him as a character.
And to be honest, he would have been an asset to the NR as a businessman/politician/general at high levels, had they taken him that route.
He might have been an asset, but I don't think he would have enjoyed it very much, and it would have forced him to put up with crap like Borsk Fey'lya (does anyone think it a coincidence that his name seems to rhyme with 'fail you' or 'failure?').
Granted,
nobody enjoys politics that much, except for crap like Fey'lya, but still... let me just say that I feel Lando got a happy ending out of the old EU, even if more could have been done with the character as you say. To me that counts for something, because I don't really like seeing characters dragged endlessly face-first through crisis after crisis as though nothing they can ever do will earn them peace.
Them presenting Poe as a standard white male lead doesn't mean the actor who plays Poe is himself not a Latino or a member of some other minority often thought of as 'white.'
It is not my experience that Latino is generally equated to white.
To phrase my words more precisely, if you don't already know a Latino is a Latino, many Latinos will simply be taken for 'white' unless they in some way characterize themselves as Latinos. Unless they have a conspicuous appearance of the types South America once called 'mestizo' or 'mulatto,' it's going to be difficult or not impossible to tell Latinos from, say, French people or Italians.
It's not that there's no such thing as anti-Latino discrimination, it's that in terms of a work of art, a Latino you don't specifically point out as a Latino will be viewed as 'white' in many cases. Whereas a woman will not be seen as a man, nor will an African-American be seen as 'white.'
Regardless, I wouldn't say that they really presented Poe as anything in terms of race. His racial background, as far as I could see, had pretty much zero overt effect on the character.
Well, yes. Point being he looks like the 'generic white male lead,' and then turns out to be a bit character, while the male lead is a black guy and the most competent protagonist is female.
