In an announcement that seems to deliberately ignore C-3PO, editor Shelly Shapiro says that the upcoming novel Lords Of The Sith will introduce the first canonical LGBT character to the Star Wars universe. Shapiro recently appeared on the Full Of Sith podcast, where she revealed Paul S. Kemp’s book would introduce an Imperial named Moff Mors, whom Big Shiny Robot describes as someone “who has made some very serious mistakes but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure. She also happens to be a lesbian.” She also happens to have a title that lends itself to cheap jokes, but Moff Mors can’t help the names in the Imperial ranking system.
“This is certainly the first [LGBT] character in canon,” Shapiro said of Mors. “But there was a gay Mandalorian couple, so it’s not brand new.” As io9 explains, Shapiro is referencing Goran Bevlin and Madrit Vasur, who appeared in the Legacy Of The Force novels—stories that, as part of the recently jettisoned Expanded Universe, didn’t make the cut for Disney’s decree that everything from here on out is considered canon. IGN also notes that there was the option to have same-sex relationships in the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, you could only do so on Makeb, “the gay planet,” which followed the Star Wars universe’s decree that all planets have only a single ecosystem, whether they be all-desert or all-homosexual. And, of course, C-3PO has long been forced to pine for R2-D2 in secret, all because of “protocol.”
But the introduction of Moff Mors—who’s a minor character in the timeline between Revenge Of The Sith and Rebels, but significant all the same—suggests that these long, long ago times are changing. “It’s not something I really think about, it just makes sense,” Shapiro says. “There’s a lot of diversity—there should be diversity in Star Wars. You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognize that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.”
In addition to being a step forward for equal representation in Star Wars, the announcement also reveals that Imperial officers somehow find the time to have sex.