Science fiction has long been considered the genre where anything can happen and everyone is welcome. For all the possibilities inherent in that brief, though, it’s taken a while for the biggest names in the game to catch up.
Star Wars is just one franchise that’s made major strides in the past 10 years, slowly but surely filling its galaxy with more meaningful diversity. Its efforts reached a new high in 2024 with The Acolyte — the first live-action Star Wars project to focus on a Black female protagonist. Amandla Stenberg starred as twin siblings on opposite sides of the battle between light and dark, and the cast surrounding the actor was the most diverse in franchise history. It was just one of a handful of sci-fi projects championing a new kind of hero — given the genre’s propensity to mishandle, sideline, or outright erase Black femme characters, it felt like the beginning of a new era.
