- Pronouns
- He, him, etc.
I'm fairly certain we're not supposed to like her. Or rather, we're not supposed to like her at first.
If I had to guess (and I'm hardly alone in this, others have said the same thing), Admiral Holdo's character is intentionally designed to provoke a certain reaction from the audience, and then to subvert expectations and (ideally) cause a reevaluation as more information is revealed. As initially presented, Admiral Holdo is basically the "Tyrannical, possibly evil new boss who gets in the way of Our Hero(es)" character; she takes actions that our familiar hero Poe thinks are wrong, and refuses to trust him or explain her actions to him. Simultaneously, and further reinforcing the previous, she's also a woman who is heavily coded as both nontraditional (the purple hair, wearing a dress while being an admiral), and feminine (the aforementioned dress). Hopefully I do not have to explain the unfair, nearly impossibly contradictory challenges and negative impressions that women authority figures very often have to deal with, nor the negative reactions that women who don't look or act traditional enough often receive. So the initial reaction of most of the audience is going to be to not like her at alll, to expect Poe to be proven correct and for her to get a comeuppance, possibly including her being revealed as a traitor all along.
This of course does not happen. We learn that Holdo's actions are justified and sensible, or at least are presented as such to us by the narrative through Leia, a character the audience is expected to know and trust thanks to her longtime history with the Star Wars stories, and that Poe is the one in the wrong, and has jeopardized the entire Resistance by his actions. Ultimately, Holdo proves herself a hero by sacrificing herself to provide a chance that the remains of the Resistance can escape. The audience is then expected to reevaluate not only their appraisal of the character, but to take a look at why their biases gave them the initial impression it did. Unfortunately, this also largely did not happen.
Why didn't it? Well, that's long and complicated and you could probably write an entire essay about it. The most common reason many will give is that the filmmakers messed up somehow. Frankly, I don't particularly agree with most of those types of arguments. The most I might say is that there might be dissonance in tone with how the film treats "grand spectacular strikes" and "heroic sacrifice", where it lauds them in Holdo's example, but is critical of them in Poe's and Finn's. But most of the examples people give are in-universe analyses of why Poe was right to send the bombers, or that Holdo's plan is bad and won't work. Which I have to roll my eyes at, because Star Wars has never been particularly good at rigorous, logical, or competent military planning.
So we're left with the fact that many in the audience refused to accept it because it subverted their expectations, that it told them their initial intutions were wrong. In other words, it's not because the message was poorly expessed, but because they didn't like the message itself and rejected it. They're not interested in reevaluating their biases about protagonist centered morality or women in authority, thank you very much, and they're going to react with hostility to any one (or any story) that tells them to.
And to be fair to them (fairer than many of them deserve), it's somewhat understandable why many would react this way. Star Wars movies have historically very rarely challenged the worldviews of mainstream Western (or at least American) audiences. In fact, the only time I can think of that they kind of have in the past is vague, unclear, and also provoked strong negative reactions; specifically it's the prequels' (inadvertent?) message of "Romantic relationships, marriage, and being connected and concerned for your family members and spouse = bad; Vaguely compassionate but detached cloistered religious living from infancy = good".
But beyond that there's little if anything else that really strikes me as challenging to the worldviews of mainstream audiences in Star Wars movies, so when confronted with something that does (and this is only one of the ways The Last Jedi does this), it's going to be unexpected, and thus unwelcome. Then combine that with the fact a large percentage of the American audience, particularly white Americans, and even more particularly white American men, have been conditioned by all but ubiquitous conservative propaganda to reject anything that makes them uncomfortable and to take it as an attack on everything they hold dear by an enemy that must be destroyed, and, well, you're left with a no win scenario. Your choices basically amount to either don't try to do it because a lot of people are unreachable and will reject it, or bite the bullet and do it anyway. Frankly, I'm very happy that Rian Johnson chose to bite the bullet, whether he realized it at the time or not.
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