Carrie Fisher: *points to my mental state* You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.

There is a tendency among Star Wars fans to assume that you came to it as a child, sitting wide eyed in front of worn out VHS tapes, soaring plastic x-wings through the air in chubby fingers. It didn’t happen like that for me. I watched Star Wars for the first time at the age of seventeen - my immediate family thought sci-fi and fantasy was a bit silly, a bit weird, and the nerd renaissance hadn’t happened yet so if you could reel off too many facts about lightsabers it was still a sign that you were dangerously unsocialised. But Star Wars saturated my consciousness. How could it not? It was Darth Vader advertising sinus-clearing gum, it was references in Spaced, it was a kind of proto-meme. It was too big to ignore, and so many people I liked seemed to like it, so it was time to do something about it. Accompanied by two of my best mates, I rented the trilogy from Blockbusters.

I can’t remember how exactly that instant love felt - I think I remember (though isn’t this how I feel ever time?) the swooping of my stomach at the crawl text, the first triumphant blast of the overture, the satisfaction of finally being part of this massive, culture-consuming thing. I think we watched all three films in one sitting, spurred on at my delight. I demanded that we talk Star Wars, exclusively, insistently, in the same way that we talked Harry Potter and Doctor Who and Lord of the Rings, with forensic exactness and affectionate mockery. We were, in 2007, just about touched by the internet as a daily part of our lives (no smartphones, this was get-home-and-log-on-to-Messenger time) and there was a definite net-inflected language to the way my shippy heart took to Han and Leia, the meme-ish smart-alecky snideness of the way we used the same Whiny Boy Voice to impersonate both Luke and Hamlet and their daddy issues (a school set text, plus we’d just discovered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the notion you could get paid to do fanfic was properly life-changing). My Livejournal entry (haha, like I’m giving you the link) recording the momentous occasion is all “OMG”s and “made of win”. I was seventeen, and I was young enough to be delighted. 

One of our regular rainy lunchtime chats was to ‘cast’ members of our friendship group as characters in a film; my friend turning to me and saying “You’re probably the most Leia-ish, sort of like, ‘why aren’t things happening? I have told them to be happening’” was, to my teenage self - fuck it, to my adult self - the most cherished of compliments. I was of an age where you begin to form Views About The World, and Leia provided a model for me: no-nonsense, smart but never dour, always open, happy to bestow a hug or a wounded comment. In retrospect, so much of that is Carrie Fisher’s performance. Leia as written is all of those things but a different actor - someone more guarded, more trope-aware - might have found them harder to synthesise. Fisher’s great strength in those films is her vulnerability, the way everything shines out of her face, and when coupled with her precise, scornful authority becomes a character that is instantly familiar, iconic for more than her hair. Leia was me, and she was who I wanted to be. In her publication of her teenage diaries that came out this year, Fisher wrote about knowing that she felt things too deeply, that there was something “too much” about her; she also writes about how carefully she cultivated a worldly persona, hiding how nervous she was through filming. It’s always tempting to apply new information after the fact, but I think it comes through in Leia, or I want it to at least - a public figure barely out of adolescence, fighting a war, falling in love: she’s all front and she’s all honesty, all at the same time.

The other thing that shines through, deliciously, is Fisher’s wit. She is undisguisably clever. She nails her comic moments, she gives a sense of wheels turning in her brain, all the time. Comedy was her forte, both as a performer (a minor appearance, but her episode of 30 Rock is a serious favourite) and as a writer. But others will eulogise her talents in these areas better than I can. I would come to learn more about her life later on, her honesty, her coolness, her charm, her openness both about her mental health and Hollywood’s sexism, and it would cement her as something close to a hero for me (by which I am not damning with faint praise - I find it very hard to use the term without feeling like a knob). Once again, she gave me a model to live by, not as Leia but as herself. She was a gadfly stinging away at the hide of a dinosaur, irritating the right people and refusing to shut up, and that is a great thing to be. As Harrison Ford told her, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.”

But for now I am thinking of myself almost a decade ago at the age of seventeen, very much a child in very many ways. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter than I never watched Star Wars as a kid - as though there’s only one way to love something. I watched it when I did, and it was shaped for me, as so much of my consumption of fantasy and sci-fi was then (god, it still is), by a desire to know how to achieve good in the world. How to take down the empire. Princess Leia was testament to that. Of course, real life rarely parcels the fight into handy quests, metaphorical colour-coded missions of good and evil, and Carrie Fisher was testament to that. In my mind, the two are inextricably intertwined, as I think they were for Fisher herself. Only last month, she wrote to a fellow bipolar sister, “We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges.” It’s a line that would do any heroine proud.