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I bet money, despite your claims that genders are always chosen for specific reasons, that you cannot explain or even GUESS why Luke, Vader, Tarkin, Palpatine, Admiral Piett, and Ben Kenobi all needed to be men.
Feel free to make me lose this bet!
I would actually argue that the themes of Star Wars dictate some of those choices.
Star Wars is Flash Gordon serials, samurai movies, and ancient myths repackaged as a space story.
Why does Luke need to be male? Because he's the apprentice knight. He's the hero on a quest to save the princess, so he's male. It's not a "need" like it could be no other way, but it plays into what Star Wars is doing. Chihiro in Spirited Away is a girl for many reasons, but one of them is because Spirited Away has that Alice in Wonderland/ Wizard of Oz vibe, and those stories want girls as protagonists.
Luke's opposite number, Darth Vader, is the Black Knight, so he's male.
Ben Kenobi is the samurai master from a Kurosawa film - he's male.
I would argue that Rey has to be a girl by the same reasoning, by the way. Not so much with The Force Awakens, but The Last Jedi takes on themes of subverting expectations. In this way, the young knight can't be male, because we're changing expectation instead of telling myth.
Ultimately, neither story "needs" their protagonist to be male or female (we can picture a woman wanting off of Tatooine just as easily as we can picture a man finding Luke Skywalker in Ahch-To), but the themes of the stories want certain kinds of characters.
And, outside of the scripts themselves, the authors picked themes and characters based on what they wanted. Lucas wanted an adventure serial, so he put himself into it as wish fulfillment. JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy wanted to make a statement, so they elected to change the landscape of the cast. Some of that is necessary and some is arbitrary.
JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy wanted to make a statement, so they elected to change the landscape of the cast.
Han Solo was going to be a fish monster, too. C-3PO was going to be a used car salesman-type. But, ultimately, those were abandoned to better suit the story. That original concept of Luke being a woman, I would argue, is the same.
As for Lucas' vision for Episode 7, it might or might not have had any bearing on The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. I'm assuming that they had something to do with it, but probably not exhaustively.
I was aware that Lando was created to balance the cast a bit more.
It's all the same thing: they (writers) make characters certain things for certain reasons. Mostly (and most often) it's story reasons. But sometimes, or partially, they make decisions based on external factors.
Sometimes I think he pulls a lot of crap out of his arse. Lucas didn't originally plan any of that crap. He 'experimented' a lot, sure, but that was about it.
Luke is a girl, Han Solo has a lightsaber, and Chewbacca has his original design. Bet you didn’t know Zeb from Rebels had roots that go back this far, did you? Then there’s the version with General Luke Skywalker and Annikin Starkiller.
"Lucas also made a statement in Empire Strikes Back, making a new character black specifically to offset the lily-white cast of the first. He also wanted many black actors in Cloud City."
Like where the heckk did this come from? I tried searching for this and found no such thing or semblance close to it.
The lightsabers were originally going to be stormtrooper weapons too, like crowd control batons made of light.
It is true that Lucas winged it as he went along. Kenobi wasn't lying to Luke in A New Hope, as Vader was specifically not going to be Luke's father when it was written. Luke's father was potentially going to reappear in the sequel to help the rebellion, and the surprise was going to be that he survived Vader's attack without Kenobi realizing it.
Then of course comes the fact that A New Hope was originally called Star Wars, and the "episode" part with the ANH title was added after it became a hit (and honestly, A New Hope is probably the weakest of all the Star Wars titles, too, it's kind of awkward as a title).
I'm also pretty sure that if the prequels had come out first, fans would feel their childhood was "destroyed" by having the heroic Ben Kenobi just hiding out on Tatooine for 18 years and then sacrificing himself in the first movie of the next trilogy. Ben didn't even do that to save any lives, he just didn't want Luke to wait for him..... Literally! Like, LITERALLY. He didn't want to slow Luke down, and that's why he sacrificed himself. There's no other reason. It's even worse when you realize the Empire wanted them to escape so they could follow the Falcon, so Ben's sacrifice was even more futile.
Then in the next movie, Yoda gets the same treatment, having also hidden out for 20 years. What happened to these Jedi? I'm sure people would also hate how the serious Yoda acted like all silly when Luke arrived and pretended not to be himself.