I pretty much entirely disagree with his stances on diversity and romance.
With Diversity, as far as I'm concerned, Star Wars did it right. One major blocking point of diversity is when you suggest a minority of some kind be in a role that isn't usually the role they fill, the immediate question is "Why make them X then?" Like, why is Phasma a woman? Plinkett suggested they should have her helmet off and humanize her. Why? She's clearly the Boba Fett of the series, having a cool armor and not much else to her character. No one ever asked to see Boba Fett's face in the original trilogy (atleast not for the sake of humanizing him), he was just a guy in badass armor. Why can't a woman fill that role? And the series does a lot of that. It puts women and people of color in roles and doesn't explain it any further than that. And I hope films do that enough where people just get used to that. Because I do disagree with him that kids don't care about this stuff. Seeing a black kid play with star wars doesn't change that. Of course, people of color and women aren't going to not like a well made series just because it doesn't have minority. But probably is damaging to be unable to see themselves in that universe. And it is also damaging to white boys to be unable to see girls and people of color in that universe. It doesn't make them racist, but there is a thing like implicit bias and not having diversity probably feeds into that.
The other point is the romance aspect, which is kind of mixed in with the diversity angle. He's right that "Get the girl" has traditionally been part of the adventure. I have wanted to see that aspect removed long before star wars. The phrasing of it is literally treating the female character as the prize. Romance, obviously, can happily be part of any story and fits within the theme of adventure, but I don't like how this has become the default role of the female character in any given adventure movie. And if not including that makes them asexual....well, that's really stretching the definition here. Finn is clearly attracted to Rey. He's just awkward about shit, and I don't see how that can be made any more clear. Rey, on the other hand, just doesn't seem interested. And that should be okay. We don't really know why Rey doesn't like Finn that way, but why are we entitled to a reason at all? Some people just don't like each other or it's not the right time or whatever. Hell, maybe she actually is asexual. There are people who aren't interested in sex. And Rey defying being the prize this way is a good way to break away from the "Get the Girl" stereotype that would detract from her status as a hero. It would have been perfectly fine if she fell in love with Finn, but it should also be perfectly fine for her not to. There isn't anything to be gained, from what I can tell except dinging off another adventure trope.
And as for sexuality, while the first SW films were more sexual than the new ones, that's because of 2 things: I feel we're smarter about how we handle sexuality now than we were back then, so just throwing in stuff like Leia in a bikini isn't going to happen, and that's a good thing. Now, our romances, atleast in SW, are focused more on affection and emotional closeness. This is evident in how Finn tries to court Rey. He's trying to be a gallant knight figure, while Han gave off a bad boy, flirtatious sort of vibe. It's a different way of depicting intimacy, and it's definitely cleaner, but it's certainly not sterile.
