Princess Leia may have called him a stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, but even she eventually succumbed to the charms of Han Solo. Thanks to the effortless charisma and star power of Harrison Ford, the smuggler burst onto the scene in Star Wars: A New Hope as a fully-formed character, one who just happened to be among the most attractive people in the galaxy.
Han was much more than eye candy, though, and played an integral role in the Original Trilogy alongside Leia, Luke Skywalker and his loyal companion Chewbacca as they overcame insurmountable odds to defeat the Empire and restore peace to the universe. The captain of the Millennium Falcon hardly relied on his good looks to get the job done, but a new Star Wars book has gone out of its way to criticize the Corellian for being so ruggedly handsome.
The From a Certain Point of View collection celebrated the 40th anniversary of A New Hope by having 40 different writers all pen a short story that retold familiar events from a new perspective. The second installment has now arrived four decades after The Empire Strikes Back, and as you can see below in an excerpt from C.B. Lee’s A Good Kiss, Han’s photogenic features have been singled out for criticism.
“Some people can’t just sweep into the Rebellion with their own ship and accept actual critical missions from General Rieekan and banter with the princess all over Echo Base. Some people aren’t handsome and don’t have a presence like Han Solo. Some people are just ordinary people, okay? It offends him that Captain Solo and Princess Leia are just arguing about it, the way they’ve been dancing around each other since they’ve arrived on Hoth, clearly pretending to hate each other. Don’t attractive people have anything better to do than to taunt everyone else on the base with their unresolved tension?”
You’d imagine there are more than a few minor characters in the Star Wars universe that harbor some jealousy and resentment towards Han Solo, but it seems very unusual to draw such attention to it. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Han did more than enough across the Original Trilogy to prove that he was much more than just intergalactic eye candy.