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But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of “reversibility”, which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key–it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily–picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child’s play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code… at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, “Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?”

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

Picture, if you will, the humble redneck. They await the approach of big, fast domestic mowers. John Deeres, Cub Cadets, even weird modified Chinese stuff they looted from Aliexpress. There is jubilance, but that soon comes to an awkward hush. An unfamiliar engine note approaches.

My International 1480 combine harvester, all ten tons of it, is barrelling down the highway at a clip somewhere between “tepid” and “jaunty.” Even though I have shown up for a race, I am sandbagging a little bit, making sure that the bets get settled against my vehicle before I show them the might of a fully operational monster such as mine.

Technically, there is no violation. I had looked at the rulebook from every angle in the previous year: it has the correct number of wheels, the proper agricultural intent, and with precise work on the tiller, it can even (poorly) mow a suburban lawn. Is it modified? Oh yes, yes indeed, but I see the nitrous bottles poking out from the rows of Kubotas at the starting line.

And when I leave the starting line, it is a thing of beauty. At least for a few milliseconds. It seems that the wizards at International Harvester simply did not comprehend of a situation in which the frame of their combine would be launched into the air by means of one thousand eight hundred foot-pounds of supercharger-bolstered torque. I had erroneously believed that the loose soil of the rural community would let the wheels dip in, but now I am facing directly into the sky, having twelve o’ clocked hard on my wheelie, shooting flames from my exhaust and whirling vertical blades of death towards the grandstand.

Like, Bail Organa, bless his poor poor soul, tried to politician the Vader out of her. He tried SO FUCKING HARD. 

Leia, though. Leia is very much Anakin’s child. She is the one with the deep anger in her. She is the one who will bring peace to her new empire freedom and justice back to the galaxy whether the galaxy wants it or not. She is the one who commands armies and amasses followers as easy as breathing. She joined the Rebellion while she was in her teens. She is the one with the spirit of a warrior.

Don’t get me wrong; Bail Organa did his damnedest to raise her in the mold of her mother, fighting her battles in the halls of power with words as her weapons. And she was very good at it. But unlike Padme, Leia’s words always had an edge to them, her tone and meaning always a little too sharp, a little too angry. 

“If you will not turn to the Dark Side, perhaps she will.”

This post contains minor spoilers. Proceed with caution.

In the season two finale of “The Mandalorian” there is a scene near the beginning of the episode in which a strike team (minus Mando himself) storms onto an Imperial ship, blasts stormtroopers, etc. It’s an extended action sequence. Two of the characters are helmeted.

I was well into the scene before it hit me that all four of the characters on this strike team were women.

The fact that there was this all-female action team wasn’t new. I’ve seen that before. What was new about it was that this was the first time I’d seen a team of women that didn’t feel performative.

Remember that scene in “Avengers: Endgame”, the “she’s not alone” scene where All The Lady Characters Assembled, and you could tell the filmmakers were getting some kind of weird boner of “looooook at how many Strong Female Characters we have, let’s put them all together and have them be Strong Female Characters at the same time” and it felt super gross? That was performative.

I’ve heard and used that term before but I’m not sure I really grokked what it meant until I saw what its absence looked like, in “The Mandalorian.” 

It didn’t feel performative because each of those characters had been part of the narrative in their own time over the previous two seasons, with their own agencies and backstories. They were characters in the story as it needed to be told, they weren’t Strong Female Characters introduced for the purpose of being that (in a sexy way, of course). There was never a sense of ticking off the “kickass lady character” boxes. When Cara Dune is introduced, or Fennec Shand, or Bo-Katan, there was never that subtext of “Okay here is our Lady Character, isn’t she such a great Lady Character, look look we’re Doing the Thing you want us to do with having Womens in our Boy Stuff.”

No. It was, here’s a Rebel soldier. Here’s an assassin. Here’s a Mandalorian exile.  Here’s a Jedi. Here’s a magistrate. They have functions to perform and stories to tell in this narrative. Those functions and stories happen while these characters are women, not because they are women.

And it’s so, so subtle, the difference. It’s hard to put your finger on how it’s usually done wrong until you see it done right. It’s not just the writing although that’s a big part of it. It’s in how they were filmed, framed, shot, costumed, and lit. It’s in how they were directed, how the camera treated them - i.e. no differently than the male characters. None of these women were sexified, either. Not that they weren’t being portrayed by attractive women, but that wasn’t remotely played up or displayed in how they were styled, costumed, and made up.