I agree that Rey tended to take the lead, and if you insist you can say that makes him a sidekick, but by that definition just about everybody is a sidekick. When Rey isn't there, the whole section where they discuss the superweapon and the plans to go disable it, he takes plenty of initiative and even takes the huge gamble of pretending he knows exactly how to disable everything, just to get a chance to find Rey. Which I quite agree is absurd as the plot goes, but it certainly isn't an indication of a weak character or follower mentality.

Well, I do agree Rey needs to be fleshed out more as a character, and I'm not so sure they'll pull it off convincingly in the next movie. And the pilot is a flashier kind of hero, to be sure, but you don't see him going out of his comfort zone as easily as Finn does. I think at this stage it would've been impossible to make the fans compare any new character favourably to Luke and Leia and Han, but fine, call him a weak character if you must. It still doesn't show how they made him 'weaker' than he should have been - not in the battles, not in his decision-making, not in any way that I can see. Weaker than Rey, sure, but that's just because they made Rey unnaturally strong as some kind of new Anakin-like superhero of the Force.

Sorry, you're right - wasn't thinking of that scene when I wrote that. That was definitely a shameless copy of the famous Nazi propaganda movie by Leni Riefenstahl. Not the first time in modern blockbusters, either - the Two Towers movie had Saruman in a basically identical scene.

Stealing the Nazi propaganda scene was lazy in the extreme and did annoy me for that reason, but I really don't think it makes sense to see it as racially motivated.

Haven't seen all of those, but HP's and the Avengers' heroines are in supporting roles. Hunger Games and now the new Star Wars are more uncommon than you'd think. And to be honest I'm not really thinking about population ratios in the USA in this whole thing - and neither is Disney. The new movie has attracted more viewers outside the USA than inside it, and I suspect the same was true for the earlier movies. The big movie studios have long started thinking globally, at least for this kind of movie.

We're not arguing about whether women should be admitted to the Marines here. None of your numbers detract from my basic point that there's no good moral reason to say that man A beating woman B is somehow more wrong than man A, or woman C of equal strength, beating man D who has precisely the same physical strength as woman B. Those scenarios are not all equally likely, but they are all equally wrong. You may still disagree with that of course, but that at least is my view and the view of modern feminists.

Regardless of that whole debate, I don't really think any woman will seriously take Star Wars as life advice when considering whether to try physically assaulting a much stronger man. It may however have an effect on a more subtle level of the woman being the most important and essential character of the story, not subservient in any way to any man.

I'm glad you say that, but that particular paragraph did suggest otherwise. And no. I do agree that, firstly, Rey is clearly stronger than Finn in almost every way thanks to plot convenience and the Force, and secondly, neither is necessarily a particularly well-written or well-developed character so far (personally I do think they have potential). But neither of those things in any way proves your premise. Rey is a freak of nature - taking that as a basic premise, having Finn match up to her would've been precisely the opposite: making him equally freakishly strong just to avoid him being eclipsed by the woman.

And you know, as for believability, what Sidious said. Just to prove my Star Wars credentials I'll even quote Yoda himself: 'Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.'