‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Perplexed Over Why One Main Character Isn’t On ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Merchandise

This past Friday was Force Friday, when Star Wars fans were encouraged to spend dollars and/or credits on Star Wars merchandise. In that sense, it’s like literally every other day of the year. But what makes Force Friday extra-wallet draining is that it features the debut of brand-new product for, in the case of this year’s event, upcoming Star Wars projects, including Disney+ live-action series The Mandalorian, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order video game, and The Rise of Skywalker. There’s Rey toys, and Poe shirts, and Kylo Ren high-waisted pants, and frozen pizzas topped with porgs. Basically everything and anything a Star Wars devotee could want, unless you like Rose.

As pointed out by Jenny Nicholson, there is a conspicuous lack of Skywalker merchandise featuring Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marrie Tran. “I remember #WheresRey around the first Force Friday, but what makes #WheresRose more insidious is all the evidence of where she was designed into merch and then willfully removed. The fan conduct toward Rose/KMT was shameful and catering to those fans sends the worst message,” she tweeted, referring to the harassment Tran — the first woman of color to land a leading role in Star Wars — faced from the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Twitter. She eventually deleted her social media accounts.

Nicholson has the receipts.

While it’s possible that Rose merchandise undersold for The Last Jedi (although I can’t imagine that her Funko sold worse than generic First Order Stormtrooper will), it’s curious that she was removed from “the GROUP artwork on something [as] innocuous as a tote bag,” as Nicholson pointed out. Other fans have noticed her absence, too.

Where’s Rose? Hopefully we find out soon.

https://uproxx.com/movies/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-rose-merchandise/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38946423)

Where's Rose?

Disney is at it again with the merchandising shenanigans and Star Wars fans are calling them out. Last Friday was a special day for fans of that galaxy far, far away: Force Friday. It’s when new Star Wars Merchandise is revealed and this time it was a triple Force Friday as Disney unveiled products to promote the video game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, and the conclusion of the new trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

But that excitement was dampened when fans noticed that the new Rise of Skywalker merchandise was not only sorely lacking in Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), but it looks like her image was actually removed from various designs.

Jenny Nicholson @ Halloween

@JennyENicholson

I remember #WheresRey around the first Force Friday, but what makes #WheresRose more insidious is all the evidence of where she was designed into merch and then willfully removed. The fan conduct toward Rose/KMT was shameful and catering to those fans sends the worst message

This isn’t the first time that fans have noticed a conspicuous lack of a character in merchandise. There was serious controversy over the lack of Rey in the original Force Awakens merchandise, though some claimed she was left off so as not to spoil that she was the new Jedi hero. However, the exclusion of Rose Tico, is extra insidious, given the racist and misogynist response to her character in the past and the horrible treatment of Kelly Marie Tran by so called Star Wars “fans.” Even though Rose is a great character, Tran has been a consistent target of trolls, so much so that she’s been driven off social media. And now she’s being pushed off merchandise? Why?

Here’s more examples:

Jenny Nicholson @ Halloween

@JennyENicholson

Replying to @JennyENicholson

The version of the movie poster featuring Rose from leaked merch designs, vs the version of the poster ultimately going on shirts, trading cards, and tote bags

This last example, where Rose has been erased from a poster and replaced by some slug alien we’ve never seen? Super-duper bad and insulting. Not only is this erasing a woman, but a barrier-breaking woman of color who’s been publicly attacked just for daring to be female and non-white in Star Wars. It’s a bad look.

So why is Rose not in these posters and merch? Is Disney daving to the trolls? Are they hiding a spoiler? My first, terrified thought was that she’s not in the film very much and might be killed off early on. She did end The Last Jedi in distress and Rose is no where to be found in the two trailers we’ve seen for Rise of Skywalker. We have only seen her in one still from Rise of Skywalker so far, however. So there’s some hope.

Is the erasure of Rose the work of a stupid executive somewhere, or does it hint at something even worse: the erasure of Rose Tico from the next film all together? We hope it’s just bad marketing decisions and that we’ll learn “where’s Rose?” sooner rather than later. We’ll also have to see how they handle the merchandising for Jhanna, played by Naomi Ackie. As a black woman, she’s also breaking barriers in Star Wars, so let’s hope that the executives and the fans learn something and don’t screw up there too.

https://www.themarysue.com/where-is-rose/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38946446)

Fans looking at the current line of Star Wars merch are wondering: Where's Rose?

A few years back, fans of the Star Wars franchise noticed a weird omission in some of the toys and merchandise produced for The Force Awakens: There was precious little stuff with Daisy Ridley’s Rey on it, despite the fact that she is, pretty inarguably, the main character of this new trilogy of films. Thus was the #WheresRey hashtag born on Twitter, demanding that Disney give people a chance to put everyone’s favorite female Force-sensitive desert dweller on their various torsos and phones. Said campaign has mostly been a success, but it’s now spawned a sort of sister movement, one centered on a character whose performer—like Ridley—has been largely hounded off of social media due to the loudly shouted opinions of certain contingents of Star Wars “fans”: Kelly Marie Tran’s heroic mechanic Rose Tico.

And while tracking the interests and main thrusts of this sort of Twitter-based campaign is about as easy as keeping track of the individual points of view of every single person participating in it, the #WheresRose campaign does appear to have two major foci, one more difficult to parse and “from a certain point of view” our way through than the other. To wit, it’s been damnedly difficult to work out every aspect of the allegation—outlined in a set of tweets by user Jenny Nicholson—that Disney has deliberately removed Rose from certain ensemble shots on merchandise, a claim that cites what are purported to be early leaked versions of things like poster designs for The Rise Of Skywalker and various product line-up reveals, and which was presumably motivated on Disney’s part by a desire to get people to stop yelling at them for five seconds, for once. (Something they’ve obviously failed at, if that was, indeed the goal.)

This is all kind of murky, though, on the grounds that this is the internet—and y’know, Photoshop exists—but there do appear to be concrete examples of official art being adjusted to remove the character, who was a prominent (if loudly debated) part of The Last Jedi—and also the first major Asian character in the Star Wars franchise of films. For instance, that “REBEL” shirt in the photographs above is clearly the same one available here, sans Rose (although it’s worth noting that it’s still, per that link, available in its Tico-full version on the official Disney store). In other instances, images seem to show art being lifted from materials like the Resistance Heroes line of books for shirts (like this officially licensed one from the UK’s Absolute Cult) that cut Rose off of the picture.

And, just to make sure this is all extra baffling, while Disney has yet to comment on the controversy, artist Brian Rood—whose version of an official Rise Of Skywalker painting exists in both Rosed and non-Rosed forms—has engaged directly with the #WheresRose followers, claiming that she was absent from earlier versions because Disney was still working out the character’s look for the new film, but has now been added in. (What does that even mean, given that the film has been done shooting for months now? We don’t know, and also we have a headache from an hour of looking at mostly terrible Star Wars merch.)

The other argument, meanwhile, is easier, and less convoluted, to grasp: There’s just not a lot of officially licensed Rose merch for fans of the character to own—a shirt or two, a tote bag with the same image, and pretty much zero new toys. Now, you can argue that that’s just market forces—rather than bowing down to the Rose Tico Irrational Hate Team—but it’s still an obvious, and vocally expressed, bummer for those people happy to see a wider array of characters in the Star Wars universe, and hoping to celebrate their fandom by giving Disney their cash.

https://news.avclub.com/fans-looking-at-the-current-line-of-star-wars-merch-are-1838811482

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38946462)

In the wake of The Last Jedi, there was a sad, infuriating amount of racist and sexist criticism leveled at Rose Tico, the new Star Wars character played by Kelly Marie Tran. The online bullying prompted Tran, the first woman of color to star in a Star Wars movie, to remove her Instagram account. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” she wrote in a New York Times piece about the harassment. “Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”

Disney stuck by Tran and she will be appearing in this December’s The Rise of Skywalker, but there are some curious decisions being made about the movie’s merchandise. As professional fan Jenny Nicholson noted on Twitter, a lot of early The Rise of Skywalker merchandise prominently featured Rose Tico alongside her Star Wars pals like Rey and Finn, but she appears to have been removed from the final products. [h/t The Mary Sue]

Now, there may be a good explanation for all of this. But regardless, when someone’s been subjected to the sort of outrageous amounts of toxic fan bullying that Tran was, the message such removals send to the worst parts of the internet will undoubtedly be perceived to be: “We hear you. What you’re doing is working. Keep it up.”

That may not be the message Disney is intending to send, but impact isn’t the same thing as intent. Any, in any case, there is a precedence for this company tapping the breaks on women in action movie franchises. Longtime Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter famously demanded that the Iron Man 3 script be rewritten to minimize the role of Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), removing the need for toys to be made of her character since he was convinced nobody would buy Iron Man merch with a woman on it.

Since then, Perlmutter’s role in Marvel Studio’s has been minimized, leading to an influx of Marvel women heroes like Shuri (Letitia Wright), the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) — and their attendant toys. Hopefully, Lucasfilm — also owned by Disney — can learn from that growth.

https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/sure-looks-like-rose-tico-is-being-erased-from-star-wars-merch/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38946468)

#WheresRose

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38979580)

@ItazuraKanemura @JennyENicholson lmao plenty of people love her. Plenty of people don't give two shits about Boba Fett and you can't turn around in this fandom without seeing something with "cool armor man" on it so pfffff

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38979592)

will be interesting to watch when avg black guy figures this out

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38979831)

Also the black bro is friend zoned by the cute white girl and has to settle for the fat Asian bitch

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38979891)

I hope the creative geniuses behind the last jedi have not been sidelined from the marketing team

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38979907)

In Brazil, libs are already erasing the blackness of light-skinned blacks

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#38980975)

Prior to this recent movie coming out, they were running articles on how it was going to be the biggest and best ever.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4359157&forum_id=2#39308107)