Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5014364-20160214164433/@comment-5014364-20160214164743

Notable is that the Star Wars Original Trilogy didn't feature any female starfighter pilots - there actually were some female Rebel pilots filmed for Return of the Jedi, but they were all cut from the final film. In one bizarre instance, female pilot Red Two (named Sila Kott in the spinoffs) was played by a woman and does appear on-screen, but her footage was overdubbed with a male voice.

Apparently it was believed that audiences would be upset to see female pilots die in combat. The Prequel Trilogy actually did show a few female pilots (of the Naboo starfighters, etc.), but the Sequel Trilogy is the first time that female pilots and soldiers are actually prominently portrayed - fighting on both sides of the conflict (X-Wing pilots, Stormtroopers, even bridge officers on the First Order's Star Destroyer).

Game of Thrones actually gender-swapped some female rulers to be male; Dorne has gender-blind inheritance, and the lead Dornish envoy that Tyrion meets in the Season 4 premiere, "Lord Blackmont", was actually the female ruler Larra Blackmont in the novels. Female rulers have been genderswapped to be male five times in the TV series so far. In Season 6, the series will introduce the new male ruler of House Cerwyn (after Ramsay Bolton flayed the previous head of the family alive back in Season 5). In the novels, after the male leaders of House Cerwyn were killed by the Boltons (in slightly different circumstances), the new ruler was actually the old lord's daughter, Lady Jonelle Cerwyn.

The showrunners have never explained why they genderswapped seemingly minor background roles from female to male - it's possible that they felt they couldn't portray female political rulers without a lengthy explanation of how this could even be plausible (even though the novels present it as not out of the ordinary for Westeros). In contrast, the Star Wars sequel trilogy just presented female soldiers and military pilots without explanation, therefore tacitly presenting it as a mundane and everday occurrence in their world.

So ironically, Henwick plays characters in both Game of Thrones and Star Wars, but in Game of Thrones, any mention that Dornish culture follows gender-blind inheritance and it is very common for women to become political rulers in her society was omitted from the live-action series, even changing female rulers to be male in the TV show. In contrast, Henwick herself is also playing a female X-Wing pilot, who has already gained a large fan following, that didn't need any length explanation of how she could be a military officer.