Last week, we examined the self-quarantine fates of Succession’s Roy family. This week, we continue our exploration into how fictional characters are handling self-distancing—which probably says something about how I’m handling it—by looking at the characters of the Star Wars sequel trilogy. How do people who spend most of their time crammed into spaceships or on hidden rebel bases together handle their time apart? Let’s find out by ranking them on a totally arbitrary scale of virtual meeting apps!
General Hux
The good news is, Hux’s apartment has never been cleaner—he has used his time in isolation to do a thorough spring cleaning. The bad news is that when he’s not cleaning or itemizing the contents of his junk drawer, Hux is carefully staging the corner of his apartment visible to his co-workers during virtual meetings. He’s going for “cool dude with many outside interests and hobbies”, but he forgot that the mirror by the door gives a perfect view of the ungroomed part of his apartment and everyone can see that he’s been watching porn on the personal laptop he left out. He is really disappointed none of his co-workers want to “hang out” when the meeting is over.
Power ranking: Google Hangouts
Rose Tico
Rose is staying busy during the lockdown, keeping up with her job remotely and organizing neighborhood assistance for the high-risk members of her community. She’s supporting local businesses by doing her holiday shopping early, ordering takeaway, contributing to the local furloughed workers fund, and she’s leaving travel hand sanitizer in the mailbox for her postal worker. Secretly, everyone on the block is crushing on Rose, but she just wants to find someone to help foster animals from the shelter.
Power Ranking: Zoom
Kylo Ren
Kylo Ren has tried on every item of clothing he owns twice, and he has convinced himself that Panama hat he bought on vacation looks good on him. He’s also gotten really into Amazon Prime workout videos and spends a lot of his virtual hangout time talking about “body weight counter-resistance” and the virtues of subscription spin classes. As far as Ren is concerned, he’s on staycation, and this is the perfect time to “really focus on me” and “detox my mind and body”. He has almost worked up the nerve to cut his own hair.
Power Ranking: GoToMeeting
Finn
I’m going to be real, guys, Finn isn’t coping very well in self-isolation. He is a social creature, and he has never really lived alone. At first, he thought he would like to have so much time and space to himself, but it turns out, he really does prefer to be with other people. He’s also dwelling on the moment he hesitated to accept Poe’s offer to quarantine together, and whether or not their subsequent remote interactions have been awkward. Poe chose his favorite movie for virtual movie night, that has to mean something, right?
Power Ranking: Slack
Poe Dameron
Poe Dameron is the Houseparty king. He has become the virtual hub of his friend circle’s digital life. He’s got four games of online chess going, he coordinated movie night, he started an Instagram Live book club, and he’s working on a playlist for a Saturday night remote dance party (including lots of Finn’s favorite songs, naturally). Poe is embodying the #AloneTogether dream. He is barely sleeping at night for the crushing loneliness overwhelming his soul, and he really wishes he’d pushed harder to convince Finn to stay with him.
Power Ranking: Houseparty
Rey
Meanwhile, Rey has this self-isolation thing down. She enjoys the virtual hangouts Poe sets up, but she’s just as happy spending her days reading, baking bread, and catching up on all the culture she missed during her equally isolated desert childhood. She is on the neighborhood assistance rota Rose put together, though, so she gets out of the house regularly. Otherwise, she is perfectly content with her own company and doesn’t understand the manic gleam slowly filling her friends’ eyes.
Power Ranking: BlueJeans
(Lainey: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is now available on digital and I’m grudgingly adding this post to our “SD Recommendations” page because, well, it was kind of a letdown, non?)
