Tags: blog, film, animation, sci-fi, 2026

Date: Tuesday January 27th, 2026

Emo's in Space

A film poster done in the Star Wars style but as a cartoon. The characters, all women with a variety of hair colours, standing heroically in the centre of the page as a space ship zooms past.

OK, let's start with a controversial opinion/hill I will die on: Luke Skywalker is a bland, boring, uninteresting and unlikeable character who only works because the rest of the movie(s) is so spectacular. It's not until Rian Johnson turns up that he actually gets a personality.

Sadly, Lesbian Space Princess steals Luke's personality traits for it's main character, Saira, and then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with it.

She is terminally dull. She starts the film with no personality beyond 'Sad she's been dumped' and ends with no personality beyond 'Is OK to have been dumped'.

The main villains of the piece though, the Straight White Malians, actually are kind of fun. They look out for each other, role play through their feelings, try to build for a better future. They're arseholes, obviously, but they're still more rounded, lively characters than Saira. They even have a multiplayer Daytona cabinet.

I really don't think that the film was aiming for a message that being a straight white male is more interesting and fun than being a lesbian, but it accidentally implies it all the same.

Does the film get away with such a dour character by making the surrounding world vibrant and interesting? No. There's less plot and less comedy here than a ten minute episode of Pinky and the Brain. Everything is so incredibly slow and obvious. The jokes are good but when you can see all of them coming round the corner they lose their shine.

If you want an hour and a half of knockabout screwball animated comedy, just go watch The Day the Earth Blew Up, it's great.

You could edit this down to a decent half hour episode of a tv series, especially if it took it's cues from the other great tv show about lesbian princesses in space¹ instead of the film it's actually riffing off, what's it called? You know... the one about the space hairdresser and the cowboy… he’s got a tin foil pal and a pedal bin.

Spaceballs! That's the one. Just go watch Spaceballs again.

A cartoon depicting the interior of a rundown, grubby little space craft. Two women with brightly coloured hair and noodly legs are cuddling on the pilots chair.

Poster Credit Where to Watch

1. The actual hill I will die on is that She-Ra and the Princesses of power is one of the truly great modern tv sagas. If it was a re-booted He-Man, N.D.Stephenson would be lauded alongside Genndy Tartakovsky as one of animated tv's current heroes.
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