Angry Princess
Before anyone gets on our case about being mean to Sci-Fi goddess, Carrie Fisher, how about some soap with an Imperial perspective. Today’s Adventures of Grand Moff Tarkin flashback continues the dinner party arranged by the recent unexpected arrival of Lady Thalassa Tarkin. But this time, General Motti can no longer restrain himself as her loyal cousin.
Re: Today’s strip. Carrie Fisher is awesome. To this day she remains both friendly and approachable to fans and seems to happily grant interviews about Star Wars. She has a great sense of humor and has that plucky twinkle in her eyes that made Leia so exciting to watch on the screen. Age has separated Carrie from Leia visually AND vocally as you’ll notice in the Justin Lee Collins “Bring Back Star Wars” interview. It’s all those cigarettes she reputedly smoked, even back in the day. Carrie’s bad habits inspired our brief cigarette binging Leia in Blue Milk Special. Here’s the Bring Back Star Wars segment with Carrie. For those unfamiliar with Justin Lee Collins, part of his shtick is playing the horny fanboy, he’s not really a stalker but he is a great variety show presenter.
I can hardly believe George Lucas sent Carrie a Slave Leia statue with removable bikini. It sure hints at the rumors I’ve heard of a possible relationship between the two during the Original Trilogy years. Other than Carrie’s strong smoker voice, this interview also adds more to the bizarre love triangle which is the focus of our current Blue Milk Special storyline. Leia is one of my favorite characters with so much unexplored potential, so I’m going to take a moment to wax lyrical in her honor.
Leia’s importance to the Rebellion was heightened after the death of her ‘father’, Senator Bail Organa. She acted as a figurehead for the Rebellion, and in the Expanded Universe she used her status and influence in combination with her strong personality to recruit the Vorzydians and the Circarpousians. She would later be superseded by Mon Mothma as the leader of the Alliance against the Empire, but in those early years Leia took an active role in rebel leadership.
Today’s strip acknowledges both Leia’s important role in the Rebellion as well as the profound impact the loss of her planet and loved ones must have had on her. However, it takes a crush on one of the two men in her life for her to give up her nicotine addiction and find a new distraction from all the emotional pain. Although the films ignore the potential depth that her loss would give her character, she must have been suffering through so much. She was both a victim of the Empire possibly guilt-ridden in her weakest moments, and carrying the weight of a fledgling Rebellion on her shoulders. That’s perhaps another reason that her friendship with Luke, Han and Chewbacca became so strong and important to her.
Today’s strip also continues the soap that has been developing with the bizarre love triangle AND it all ties into Biggs and Wedge next week. “How so?” I hear you ask. Come back soon to find out.
For the next couple of weeks Blue Milk Special will be updating five times a week + 3 Tarkin flashback strips. That’s 8 strips a week. That means you can check back every day of the week and get more BMS!
To start reading Blue Milk Special from the beginning click here.
As a female SW fan and a Leia fan, it’s nice to finally see a fan project take her seriously as a character and really think about what she went through. Most people would break after suffering all that, but she never does. I think that’s pretty awesome. She’s awesome for other reasons, of course, but I like that you’re delving into stuff the official material never seems to.
On a more general note: I just found your comic this week and sped through the archives. I’m really enjoying it. The art style is perfect for the tone/theme and the jokes are consistently funny. It’s like a really long, detailed Robot Chicken special, only I get to see a little every day instead of once a year. Well done to you both. 🙂
Not broken, but a bit cracked certainly. But it also shows a strength of character that she could actually pull back together & heal the wounds. Let’s face it…Not many people are forced to watch their family, friends & WORLD blown into bit of kibble.
Hi Rod & Leanne; another new reader here!
I had heard of your comic periodically for some time, and resisted adding it to my ever lengthening list of followed webcomics, until the other day an ad at TWC snagged my attention, and I was hooked. I’ve binged my way through the archive in the last couple of days and am now caught up, and I am about to subscribe to the RSS feeds and add this to my TWC faves, making it official.
Anyway, I just want to say great comic, and good luck with keeping up this amazing, grueling pace you’ve been setting for the last few weeks!
I had a feeling that banner advertisement was going to get attention at last. About a month ago we decided “screw it” let’s actually try promoting the comic. This particular ad actually grabs the eye and captures the BMS sense of humor all in one. So glad to hear that it is through our new ad that you found us and, more importantly, that you like what you found.
The 5 days a week updates will end by June and the Tarkin bonus strips are going to start winding down by next week.
I find the direction you took Leia interesting as compared to Carrie Fisher who herself had problems with alcohol, pills, and cigarettes after a while. She had problems as a kid (her mom was apparently nuts), and then in trying to become an actress she gets typecast and for the most part her career is stillborn with Star Wars.
Heh, that’ll teach me about posting BEFORE reading all of the blog notes. You were thinking the same direction as me and that was one of the reasons you took Leia that way. 😀
DidnT know Beck’s is international, let alone interstellar…
Good think she’s not into Becks Gold, would have lost all respect in her!
I have to disagree about Leia, but only because I think Carrie Fisher as an actress just didn’t have the emotional depth to portray the sort of agony a person would be going through after the destruction of their homeworld. Fisher was very young (15 when cast, 16 when principle photography began) and while she did DECENTLY, I think what we see as stoicism was actually just Carrie Fisher being– Carrie Fisher. I think she is happily smiling at the destruction of the Death Star not because she’s happy to be alive and has compartmentalized her grief– but because that’s the only emotion she was able to display at that time.
This is not to take away anything from her accomplishments. She is, after all, Princess Leia. She also overcame some pretty awful addictions and emotional baggage to emerge as a bright, funny, and (let’s face it, still gorgeous) woman. I respect her for all of these things, but comparing her performance to, for example, Natalie Portman as Padmee Amidala shows pretty convincingly who the better actress was at the
“Star Wars” stage of their career.
Of course, your mileage may vary (and probably will).
Just working my way through the archives, and loving it. (Sorry to reply to such an old comment, but I found it interesting.)
@Chris Rivan – FYI, Carrie Fisher was born in 1956 – so she was probably 20 when filming began on Star Wars, whereas Portman was born in 1981, and was no older than 18 when filming began on A Phantom Menace.
I wasn’t as impressed with Portman’s performance as Padmee as you seem to be – but that probably has more to do with how I felt about each movie than each actor’s “emotional range”. Because Star Wars was first, it set canon for an entire universe. That’s a double-edge sword, giving those first stars freedom to break ground, but also causes any missteps to be glaring, over time. Portman had the luxury of dropping into a more mature vehicle with time and money available to “fix” anything in the film. I doubt they had that freedom in the first film. Portman probably compares more favorably, craft-wise, with her cast-mates than did Fisher with hers, in those films. But is that due more to the skill of Fisher or Portman, or each cast overall? And how do you factor in the different production environments?