If we carry this to the meta level: The same people also decided that Leia kills Jabba in that very outfit and generally break a ton of damsel in distress tropes. Now you could say “But Ellen Ripley is just as if not even more badass, why not do that”, well, then you wouldn’t be messaging that getting demeaned by your captors doesn’t change anything about your capacity to badass, that the outfit, or Jabba’s general grossness, does not need to have power over your mind, just as horror doesn’t have power over Ripley’s mind. And you can’t just turn Star Wars into body horror so it has to have different hero characteristics.
I see nothing wrong with that message.
The same thing gender-swapped, though? Wouldn’t have the same impact as men typically get sexualised differently. It’s certainly been done in a sense, though, e.g. in Pulp Fiction.
If we carry this to the meta level: The same people also decided that Leia kills Jabba in that very outfit and generally break a ton of damsel in distress tropes. Now you could say “But Ellen Ripley is just as if not even more badass, why not do that”, well, then you wouldn’t be messaging that getting demeaned by your captors doesn’t change anything about your capacity to badass, that the outfit, or Jabba’s general grossness, does not need to have power over your mind, just as horror doesn’t have power over Ripley’s mind. And you can’t just turn Star Wars into body horror so it has to have different hero characteristics.
I see nothing wrong with that message.
The same thing gender-swapped, though? Wouldn’t have the same impact as men typically get sexualised differently. It’s certainly been done in a sense, though, e.g. in Pulp Fiction.