Qi’ra already had the skills and qualities needed to succeed in Crimson Dawn’s ranks when she had been part of the White Worms gang, but those scenes in the film, instead of showing her cunning, fighting skills, or intelligence (skills which helped her become the Head Girl of the gang), focus on Han’s bravado and flying skills. Her appearances in the rest of the film as a Crimson Dawn lieutenant show the product of her training and her honing of her skills and personal qualities in the time skip between scenes (further explored in Crimson Climb). She gets to demonstrate these skills when negotiating with Lando (Glover), the Pykes on Kessel as a cover for the heist and in their escape, the final fight with Vos, and her conversation with Maul as the new leader of Crimson Dawn. She is instead at the top of her power (or just about) in these scenes and knows how to manipulate others’ perceptions of her (particularly Vos and Han, who both think they know her very well) to ensure her plans succeed. As a complex female character and certainly the best-developed female antihero in the films, Qi’ra’s character development subverts men’s expectations throughout the film. Where Vos sees her as loyal and grateful to him for “rescuing” her from Corellia and Han sees her as a girlfriend who must have missed him as much as he missed her, Qi’ra sees blind spots; Vos will not believe that she wants to usurp him until it is already happening, and Han will not see that she has moved on from him and Corellia in ways that he has not. A future film, show, or project focusing on Crimson Dawn under Qi’ra would make her the center of the story and much more independent (in terms of clearly having her own storyline). While she does eventually  have her own storyline, it is well-hidden by both the character and by the film’s focus on Han Solo’s narrative arc.

Played by Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame, Qi’ra gets to have fight scenes in the film where she can be angry and violent; in Crimson Daw, ruthlessness and ambition are good attributes, and Qi’ra is the most ambitious female character to appear in a Star Wars film given the nature of her organizational affiliation. She has the ambition to usurp her male boss while also appearing to be happy with her current status in Crimson Dawn, but he has no idea about this, showing how well she knows how to play the game in Crimson Dawn and use his teachings against him (as articulated in the final act of the film). She has a wide range of emotions and shifts between several masks based on the situation and who she interacts with, behaving differently with Han, Lando and Beckett (Harrelson), and Vos and Maul. Clarke, in interviews, has noted that she intentionally played Qi’ra as tough and strong while also having these humanizing moments and scenes with Han revealing cracks in the mask she wears for Crimson Dawn; creating this internal conflict in very few scenes is a testament to Clarke’s acting skills and the character’s realistic multifacetedness. Since she is not the token female character in the film, Qi’ra does not have to represent many different female archetypes the way that Leia (Carrie Fisher), Padmé (Natalie Portman), Jyn (Felicity Jones), and Rey (Daisy Ridley) have to in their respective films; Qi’ra solely acts as a love interest/ally and a femme fatale without having to be a mother, daughter, or sister figure (like Padmé, Jyn, and Leia), a Chosen One or goddess figure (like Rey and Padmé), or the lead character who carries the plot forward (like Rey and Jyn). As such, she has more flexibility in her storyline that allows her to focus on two identities (love interest and femme fatale antihero) over the entire film and at the same time in her scenes.

As a femme fatale character, Qi’ra is more sexual than Leia (Fisher), Rey ( Ridley), and Jyn (Jones) but probably around the same as Padmé (Portman) (considering the fireside dress and the lake dress from Attack of the Clones). Though the film is still PG-13 in terms of kissing and romantic scenes, Solo implies sexual activity occurs between Han and Qi’ra, particularly in their scene in Lando’s closet on the Falcon. The black dress Qi’ra wears in her first scene on the Crimson Dawn yacht is straight out of the femme fatale playbook, as is her Crimson Dawn mask and new attitude. Very different from her White Worms lifestyle, the upscale nature of Crimson Dawn, Qi’ra uses her physical appearance and persona to convey elite femininity and play on male expectations so she can subvert said expectations and succeed. 

Beyond introducing droids’ rights activism to Star Wars, L3’s most interesting scene is her conversation with Qi’ra (Clarke) in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon where they talk about the respective men in their lives; by no means a scene which passes the Bechdel test, L3 reveals that she knows that pansexual Lando Calrissian (Glover) has romantic feelings for her (as indicated by him calling her “m’lady”) that she does not reciprocate -- but human-droid physical intimacy works between them. A massive bombshell to drop in Star Wars, a franchise which shies away from references to sex, nudity, or physical intimacy besides kissing until this point (and again ignored until The Acolyte (2024)), the discussions of sexuality and the portrayal of Lando, the second major officially openly LGBTQ+ character in the films (the first being Amilyn Holdo, played by Laura Dern in The Last Jedi) adds something new to the films. By including new kinds of relationships and confirming that an original trilogy character is LGBTQ+, the film provides the groundwork for future LGBTQ+  relationships and inter-species relationships elsewhere in the franchise. Unfortunately, this scene breaks the Bechdel test’s rules when it had the potential to be something else entirely, as the two named female characters (L3 and Qi’ra) are explicitly discussing their love lives (which partly inspired the test). 

L3 is also introduced by her relationship to Lando as his first mate, and she treats him as her equal, even going so far as to sarcastically call him her organic overlord in one scene. Unfortunately, she too dies in the film during the Act Two battle on Kessel; after starting a droid revolution, she is on her way back to the Falcon when she is repeatedly shot by the Pykes and their guards. L3 eventually dies in Lando’s arms; he drags her head, but not the rest of her body, back to the Falcon (because he was shot in the arm) to escape and mourn, but Han suggests uploading her memory banks and neural core to the Millennium Falcon, keeping her alive, helping them escape Kessel, and giving the Falcon the best navigation system in the galaxy. Retconning the Falcon’s “peculiar dialect” as remarked upon by C-3PO in the original trilogy, L3 is also fridged and killed off to further the Falcon’s (and therefore Han and Lando’s) storylines, as the film explains their attachment to the ship, the Falcon’s quirks and personality, and, partly, their use of female pronouns for the Falcon. While other modes of transportation like boats, planes, and tanks in the real world are gendered female, starships in Star Wars are occasionally gendered as female; granted, the Falcon was gendered female before the introduction of L3 to the franchise, but Solo provides some context to the ship’s pronouns. 

Also mostly limited to her film appearance (with other appearances in other texts within the franchise), L3-37 is a very interesting character whose time in the film was unfortunately cut short in a semi-necessary retcon. She also has limited character development; this could be perhaps explained as her programming limiting her personality, but she has clearly bypassed her standard programming by rebuilding herself, exerting her personality and free will, and taking up droids’ rights, therefore this potential explanation does not work in the context of the film. Her fridging is particularly unfortunate, though her linkage to Lando is not as much of an issue because she repeatedly reasserts her independence and separate identity throughout the film; if anything, Lando needs her, so she chooses to stay with him. The most explicitly activist character in the franchise to date, L3’s activism toes the line between reasonable steps to free other droids and accusations of “woke Disney” and “SJW Star Wars” by other parts of the fan base. Regardless of the connotations of her activism, L3’s character is an interesting and important step forward for droids within the franchise and raises interesting questions about droids in the context of the Star Wars universe. 

Unlike the other female characters, Enfys Nest is not defined by the male characters’ storylines nor does she depend on these other characters for character development (though she, like the other female characters, does not go through much character development). She too has a small role in the film, appearing in two major scenes, and the final scene where she works with Han, Qi’ra (Clarke), and Beckett (Harrelson) to double-cross Vos (Bettany) further emphasizes the armor being a title passed down to others; when no one knows who is under the helmet, these sorts of tricks can happen more easily. In this scene in particular, Enfys Nest and Qi’ra both go along with Han’s plan; how much the women contributed to the plan, if anything at all, is unknown and not shown during the execution of the plan. She does have a brief conversation with Qi’ra before the final act of the film and the triple-cross occurs, but it does not cleanly pass the Bechdel test; in talking about the plan to split the coaxium, Qi’ra says that Han will help the Cloud-Riders. Had Qi’ra not mentioned Han, the short exchange would have passed the Bechdel test. Like Val and L3-37, Enfys Nest has not reappeared in other media since her film debut, shutting her character development down and limiting her to her two major scenes in the film. Enfys Nest has serious potential for major character development as a woman in the early Rebel Alliance, a woman pirate and criminal, and as a woman of color in the Star Wars universe. Like the other female characters in this movie, the centering of Han Solo’s storyline (as well as those of Dryden Vos and Tobias Beckett) pushed incredibly capable, new, and powerful female characters to the side, did not give them complex character development, or satisfactorily resolve their narrative arcs.

Civilians and Smugglers

On Corellia, Savereen, and the town of Fort Ypso on Vandor, several women appear in the background or are briefly mentioned, though only the women of Savareen are of any narrative importance. On Corellia, an unnamed mother in the spaceport (Rona Morison) is arrested by the Empire and is dragged away from her kids and family. In Fort Ypso, a human trainer at The Lodge (Ashley McGuire), a smuggler named Astrid Fenris (uncredited actress), tattoo artist and tech Naley Frifa (L’ain Freefall), and mechanic Sansizia Chreet (uncredited) all appear in the background of the droid fights and Han and Lando’s (Donald Glover) first sabacc game. There are also several unnamed and uncredited bar girls in these scenes, and Lando briefly mentions his mother.

On Savareen, several women live in the coaxium processing Bis Refinery on Savareen and participate in the double-crossing of Dryden Vos (Bettany) and the triple-crossing of Tobias Beckett (Harrelson). The four named women (more than the three named men from these scenes) from the Pnakotic Coast village, Yirpa Garajon, Lanzarota Malco, Taraja Cuttsmay, and Vamasto Maja are all played by uncredited actresses in the film and have important roles within the Bis Refinery and in the town. All of the inhabitants of the village, male and female, are victims of Crimson Dawn, who first began their criminal enterprise by terrorizing Savareen. Pnakotic Coast village, however, refused to give into their demands, and Crimson Dawn removed their tongues as punishment. Here the literal silencing of character reinforces Vos’s power as a criminal lord and as a man; by silencing this community he protects his own voice and chooses to control the narrative, a skill which Qi’ra clearly learned up from him in the final act of the film. In this particular situation, both men and women are silenced, so there is no gendered component to this particular act of violence. With Enfys Nest (Kellyman) telling the story of Pnakotic Coast village, another woman whose planet and family has been oppressed and silenced by Crimson Dawn, tells the story of others who have been forcibly silenced and uses the growing rebellion and her own actions as the leader of the Cloud-Riders to prevent such acts of mob violence and oppression from happening again (by criminal enterprise and the Empire). This scene establishes the Cloud-Riders as the “good guys” with the moral high ground, not as rival smugglers or criminals as the film and Han’s perspective show in the rest of the film. Though supporting Enfys Nest’s narrative and Han’s evolution to solo smuggler with a moral compass, the women in Pnakotic Coast village have their own brief narrative arc and backstory (as well as names and jobs in the community) as some of the first female characters with disabilities in the Star Wars movies. 

Executives and the Empire

Unlike Rogue One and A New Hope (but similarly to other Star Wars content like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Star Wars Rebels, The Bad Batch, Lost Stars, and Tales of the Empire), Solo includes women in the ranks of the Galactic Empire. On Corellia, Han (Ehrenreich) and Qi’ra (Clarke) bribe the lead transport security officer, Falthina Sharest (Anna Francolini) with a vial of coaxium to get through the gate and escape Lady Proxima (Laura Hunt); Sharest’s interest in the bribe adds to the moral dilemmas present throughout the film (which develops the moral ambiguity of smugglers, criminals, and, now, Imperial officers). Receiving a bit more development in the Solo: A Star Wars Story Visual Dictionary, Sharest apparently experiences pay discrimination within the Empire and has a minor black market operation going to supplement her income. While having corrupt officers is not surprising given the scope of the Empire, perhaps there is something to be said about a corrupt (not Rebel sympathizer) Imperial officer being a woman; however, this seems like a bit of a stretch because Sharest has to take the coaxium for Han and Qi’ra story to unfold, and a male transport security officer would likely do the same. Elsewhere in the scene, a woman warrant officer and a woman Imperial Fleet trooper also appear, including more (though unnamed) women in officer and trooper positions within the Empire. Another named woman appears in this part of the film, Truant Officer Waria Junus. Despite these four women (two of which are unnamed and three are played by uncredited actresses) appearing in the same location over the larger sequence, none of them talk to each other; however, Sharest’s interaction with Qi’ra does make this movie a Bechdel test pass as they discuss the coaxium and illegal emigration, not a man (though Han is involved in the scene and gets it started, the two women finish it. 

Elsewhere in the scene, two other named women appear, and both occupy executive positions in corporations in the universe: Ballia Noaddo, an executive at the Corellian Engineering Corporation, and Viceprex Melanah Sal Graeff, a development executive for Sienar Fleet Systems. Neither actress is credited for their brief role in the film, and the characters receive no development and do not speak. While these women Imperial officers and corporate executive characters have no significance to the movie (besides Officer Sharest), they do increase the background diversity of character roles and finally give women a place in the Empire in a Star Wars movie. Like many other background female characters from the other movies, there is potential for character development in novelizations or other media set around the film.