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Star Wars? Isn’t that a bunch of overlapping megafandoms?
It’s true! Star Wars is an enormous megafranchise primarily consisting of three trilogies of movies (one in progress), and a couple spin-off movies; it also contains animated TV series, video games, novels, many novels that were retconned after the franchise changed hands, and so on.
However, I have consumed barely any of the “Expanded Universe” materials, and you don’t have to either! For this manifesto, I’ll be focusing on the Original Trilogy and Sequel Trilogy movies. The Original Trilogy was released from 1977-1983, and consists of “A New Hope,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Return of the Jedi.” The Sequel Trilogy was released from 2015-present, and consists of “The Force Awakens,” “The Last Jedi,” and “The Rise of Skywalker.” (I’ll probably use acronyms throughout.)
In order to explain Lando, Poe, and their potential individually and collectively, I’ll also be discussing several other main characters of the movies and parallels/counterpoints among them. Sorry if there’s information overload!
Who is Lando Calrissian?
(from Star Wars Adventures in ABC, released 1984, uploaded to Flickr by Celeste Monsour.)
The first Star Wars movie, “A New Hope,” introduces us to many characters who you might recognize from pop culture even if you haven’t seen them. Among these are Han Solo, a scoundrel and a smuggler who has a soft heart beneath his crusty exterior; Leia Organa, a princess from the planet Alderaan who can hold her own with a blaster, and Darth Vader, an intimidating villain who kills people with lightsabers. Han and Leia bicker about their priorities in life and the rebellion, and there’s a flirtatious undertone.
In “The Empire Strikes Back,” Han and Leia are escaping the Empire on Han’s beloved spaceship, the Millennium Falcon. Han realizes that they are near a potential refuge in Cloud City.
HAN: Lando's not a system, he's a man. Lando Calrissian. He's a card player, gambler, scoundrel. You'd like him.
LEIA: Thanks.
HAN: Bespin. It's pretty far, but I think we can make it.
LEIA (reading from the computer): A mining colony?
HAN: Yeah, a Tibanna gas mine. Lando conned somebody out of it. We go back a long way, Lando and me.
LEIA: Can you trust him?
HAN: No. But he has no love for the Empire, I can tell you that.
(from Empire Strikes Back script)
Lando (played by Billy Dee Williams) greets Han happily, and their banter reveals that they have a long history--Lando was previously the owner of the "Falcon" before losing it to Han in questionable circumstances. However, things go south when the Empire shows up. Vader, aware Han and Leia might land there, arrived at Bespin first, and demanded they be captured/turned over (in the case of Han, who bounty hunters are after) in exchange for leaving the city under Imperial control. Lando turns them in, but quickly has a change of heart after Vader insists on "altering the deal" and taking Leia and Chewbacca (Han's alien friend) with him. Lando gives the word to evacuate the city, and joins up with Leia and the other rebels to plot to rescue Han.
In "Return of the Jedi," set six months later, Lando and the gang succeed in rescuing Han from carbon freezing. They then turn their attentions to destroying the Empire's new superweapon; Lando, now a general, borrows the "Falcon" to lead the rebel aerial attack. With Han and Leia working together on the ground to destroy the shields, he and copilot Nien Nunb are eventually able to take out the Second Death Star and defeat the Empire.
Lando will appear in The Rise of Skywalker, due out this December, but we know little about his role.
Who is Poe Dameron?
The sequel trilogy picks up thirty years later, with the “Resistance” facing a similar challenge to the old Rebellion. In “The Force Awakens,” Poe Dameron (played by Oscar Isaac) is one of the first characters we meet; he is described in the opening crawl as General Leia’s “most daring pilot” and is tasked with a secret mission for her. Poe is quickly captured by the evil First Order, but not before entrusting his plot MacGuffin to his loyal droid BB-8.
With help from defecting Stormtrooper Finn, Poe escapes, only to crash-land on the desert planet of Jakku and be presumed dead. Finn has to team up with desert scavenger Rey to rescue BB-8 and return him to the Resistance. Finn, Rey, and BB-8 run across an older Han Solo, back to the smuggling life, and get into an aerial battle with the First Order. However, offscreen, Poe has survived and made his way back to his ship, in time to come to the rescue and be reunited with BB-8.
Finn and Han go to rescue Rey from the First Order’s new “Starkiller Base,” which is essentially a new and improved Death Star, while Poe and other pilots plan to blow it up from space. After some various space fights they both succeed.
Shortly after, “The Last Jedi” sees the Resistance struggling to evacuate. Poe, going against Leia’s orders, sends his pilots to take out a First Order dreadnought, but almost all of the pilots are killed in the mission.
When Leia is disabled, Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo is put in temporary command; she angers Poe by not telling him about her plan. Distrusting her capabilities, Poe mutinies, sending Finn and mechanic Rose Tico to disable the tracker the First Order is using to follow them, and preparing to depose Holdo if need be. After she embarks on a suicide mission to try to destroy the fleet, Poe is left with a small band of survivors, and helps them escape the cave they take refuge in.
POE: Let's get me those fuel projections. And we need to shake them before we find a new base, so... What's our plan?
AMILYN HOLDO: Our plan, captain? Not commander, right? Wasn't it Leia's last official act to demote you? Because of your dreadnought plan... Where we lost our entire bombing fleet?
POE: "Captain." "Commander." You can call me whatever you like. I just want to know what's going on.
AMILYN HOLDO: Of course you do. I understand. I've dealt with plenty of trigger happy flyboys like you... You are impulsive. Dangerous. And the last thing we need right now. So stick to your post... and follow my orders.
Why should you ship them?
There are zillions of characters in Star Wars, and these two have never interacted on-screen as far as I know (maybe in one of the spin-offs, or in the next installment). So why do I find them particularly intriguing?
-They’re both smooth, classy pilots who have blown up the bad guys’ superweapons.
-If you’re into smushnames for pairings, they could be “Poland,” and it doesn’t get funnier than that.
-But more seriously, I feel like their parallels and contrasts, with each other and with the other characters of their “generation,” make for a neat echo.
In the OT, Leia and Han fall for each other, and Lando is on the outside looking in. He doesn’t necessarily want to be involved, but Vader brings the war to him, and he has to step in.
The ST heroes are in some sense “remixes” of the OT crowd. Poe is a parallel to the young Leia—she, too, hid secret information inside a droid to hide it from the Empire in her first appearance. So Lando could be a parallel to Han in that case, as the scoundrel that the goody-two-shoes is taken with.
But also (especially in TFA), many fans find that Finn has chemistry with both Poe and Rey. Finn and Rey aren’t really romantically involved, but they’re kind of a battle couple, Finn fighting with a blaster and Rey with the Force. To some extent, Poe is the “outsider” looking in on two more major characters who have more prominent, tropey arcs; Rey is the desert kid who turns out to be strong with the Force, Finn is a one-time Stormtrooper who’s brave enough to rebel against the system, and Poe is...a pilot, who was slated to die in the first draft of the script before Isaac talked the director into giving him a bigger role. So in this sense, he’s sort of like Lando as the awkward third wheel in the emotional stakes or meta-narrative.
(You may be asking, what about Luke Skywalker, the actual protagonist of the OT and a close friend of Leia and Han? In ANH at least, there’s a little more of a love triangle teased, with Leia kissing Luke “for luck” as they fight. But as the trilogy progresses he seems to be much more doing his own thing, becoming a Jedi, and having a familial affection for both Leia and Han.)
If you’re a shipper who finds significant age differences an attractive feature, this is certainly a feature that’s in store here. (Poe is 32 at the time of TFA; Lando is in his mid-sixties.) If this isn’t generally your thing, obviously you’re under no obligation to give this a try. But one reason why I like it is because, compared to several of his peers, I think Lando would be more likely to have a “yeah I’m totally young at heart, I’m dating a hot young pilot, look at me I can still get it!” personality, while Leia and Han seem a bit more likely to feel the weight of political responsibility and family life. And I think Poe would be awestruck by the chance to get into bed with one of the heroes he adored growing up!
The flipside to that is that I generally feel new canon should respect the developments of the old. If Lando gets a chance to fly the “Falcon” again in TRoS, great, bring it on! If he does so while wearing the same outfits and rattling off the exact same quips he did at age 20...well, I’m not sure that would add a lot to the narrative. So I’m not holding my breath for what new installments will bring. But seeing as how he didn’t feature at all in TFA or TLJ, it got many fans wondering: where is he, what has he been up to? To the extent that fans get to use our imagination and fill in the gaps, I like to picture Poe having a prominent place in Lando’s off-screen adventures.
Where can I find fanworks about them?
As far as I know, the ship tag on Ao3 is about it. (But please do enjoy this gifset by every-flavored-bean on Tumblr!)
Who else can I ship them with?
I mean, everyone and anyone, Star Wars is big. But for those of you who enjoy multiship manifestoes: Poe is most often shipped with his partner in escapades, Finn. His boss/subordinate and hero/rival dynamics with Leia and Amilyn are also chemistry fodder.
Lando is most often shipped with his partner in escapades, Han. The 2018 standalone movie, “Solo,” includes them both as younger scoundrels, and features an intriguing dynamic between Lando and L3-37, an outspoken advocate for droid rights.
Enjoy your adventures in a galaxy far far away, and please do bring a cape/leather jacket/fancy blaster!