Star Wars has been infamous for decades for having virtually no female characters.
When TFA was released, there wasn't even an action figure for Rey.
Yes, the characters were bad and the story was mediocre. There was virtually nothing they did right.
Maybe you could just say that instead of just blaming the feminist agenda.
Star Wars started in the 70s. There weren't a lot of women in any sort of action role back then.
The lack of women and minorities in roles is always looked at as some sort of nefarious plot, as if it was intentional in all cases. There weren't a lot of female writers or directors or producers back then. The men that were writing the stories were writing from their experiences and dreams, it wasn't intentionally trying to leave women out.
When you have a photo of the writers and producers of the movie wear shirts that say "the force is female", and then the director of the same film say he wants a shirt that says "talk to me about my film feminist agenda", how are you going to say that there was no agenda?
I think agenda is honestly too strong of a word. I don't think the movie's focal point, or mission was to make this a feminist movie. The feminism wasn't even my biggest issue. There was a lot of bad in this movie that had nothing to do with feminism.
But part of what contributed to the bad story and bad characters was that in the process of trying to create strong, female characters, they gave these characters no depth, and seemed to go out of their way to show that you don't have to look like the stereotypical beautiful whatever to get a job done.
There is no way that killing the hot sister and leaving chubby Rose was by accident. Why give Holdo pink hair? Even her dialogue towards Poe...she calls him "fly boy", and is just dressing him down. All of the men in this film were portrayed as borderline retarded, emotional, and inept.
Yes, they were all bad characters. But a PART of why they were bad was because of the mandate to show strong females...but not give those females any chance to actually show the audience why they're strong and capable. They are strong purely because they are female.
I don't live in the states, so didn't see action figures. But did Finn and Poe get figures?
And i would also imagine that a reason why there weren't many Rey figures is because boys are the ones that usually play with them, and they mostly won't want a girl figure