Warning: This post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
It’s the kiss heard ‘round the galaxy. No, not the long-awaited smooch between Ben Solo (Adam Driver) and Rey Palpatine… uh, Rey Skywalker at the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While that was a “for #Reylo fans only” moment, the more consequential, and controversial, lip-lock happens in the final scenes of the film. As the Resistance is celebrating its triumph over the Palpatine-led Final Order, Commander Larma D’Acy (Amanda Lawrence) — previously seen in The Last Jedi as a Vice Admiral Holdo loyalist — finds her girlfriend, an X-Wing pilot, among the crowd and the two share the franchise’s first on-camera same-sex kiss.
It’s only a quick buss in terms of screen time, but it lasts long enough to register with the audiences that have been hoping to see LGBTQ romance represented in the far, far away galaxy that George Lucas created four decades ago. To be fair, the animated series Star Wars Resistance beat The Rise of Skywalker to the punch by several months, revealing in September that aliens Orka and Flix were an openly gay couple. And if you’re a devoted reader of the Star Wars novels, you’ll remember that Imperial deserter Sinjir Rath Velus — a hero in Chuck Wendig’s 2015 book, Aftermath — was similarly out of the closet, the first such character in the official canon.
Smittah