Star Wars: Darth Chad and the Ultimate Boomer

Irami Osei-Frimpong
3 min readJan 2, 2020

I left The Rise of Skywalker satisfied. Star Wars is best served as a story about how we negotiate inheritance. The Jedi and the Sith are functionally eternal, but they always need human vessels. The question is how do you negotiate that institutional and biological legacy if you are the vessel.

Darth Chad

I appreciate Leia, Han, and Luke raised a fascist because White parents are so bad that even if they have everything in the world going for them, they still end up raising fascists. Don’t forget, Luke was a twerp. Leia was a snob, and Han was just a dude. Parenting is hard. There is no reason to think any of them were competent just because they had money and titles, and it turns out that they weren’t competent. Of course they screwed up raising Ben.

Just think of Emperor Palpatine as White Supremacy. It has designs on your kid, and if you are a crappy parent — not because you love too little but because you are bad at parenting — you raise Ben.

Rey

She was great. I thought Daisy Ridley did a good job. I appreciated her scrappy physicality in the The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. I’m amused by the fact that Rey had the most ethical and charming sensibilities of the White lot because she was raised as a foundling. It’s ridiculous that it’s totally believable that White parents are so bad at parenting that you are better off getting your ethical bearings as a scavenger.

Apparently, people don’t appreciate Rey and Darth Chad’s relationship. I do. It makes sense to me. She grew up being a Rebel Alliance geek scavenging empire ships. One of my favorite images is her eating breakfast with the fighter helmet in The Force Awakens. You can’t really blame her for falling for the hunky Force guy in power. My only problem is that I wish Finn would have professed his feelings, and she would have had to shut him down explicitly.

Finn, Lando, and Jannah (That other ex-stormtrooper)

I do think it’s amusing that the best people at the end of the film, that is, the only ones I would trust for a weekend to watch my kids are Finn, Lando, and Jannah. These are three people without a legacy, because if you haven’t noticed, imperalist (white supremacy) culture corrupts everything it touches, and discards the rest as those it can use as objects. When they were stormtroopers, Finn and Jannah were just the Emperor’s black flesh of White supremacy. But even the discarded have better ethical sensibilities than those who find a recognized place in the order.

Emperor Palpatine

In the ultimate boomer move, this guy designed the entire extravaganza to suck a little more life out of the next generation for HIMSELF.

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