Not This B.S. Again: Rey is Absent From Hasbro's FORCE AWAKENS Monopoly Set
How many times are we going to see merchandise for Disney-owned properties completely screw over their female protagonists? I wrote about this before when Black Widow was largely left out of Avengers: Age of Ultron toys and merchandise, and it happened with Gamora when Guardians of the Galaxy came out: there were toys and T-shirts that included every member of the team except for her. So I can't say I'm too surprised that in Hasbro's new officially licensed version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens Monopoly, they've left Rey out of it.
As you can see from the image above, the four tokens players can choose from are John Boyega's Finn, Adam Driver's Kylo Ren, Luke Skywalker (who's in the movie for, what, less than a minute?), and Darth Vader (who isn't even in the movie).
Screencrush also points out that a normal Monopoly game contains eight tokens to choose from (pre-2013, there were seven), and this version of the game only includes four. It's almost as if they're going out of their way to NOT include the female protagonist — and lead character — of the movie! But wait until you hear Hasbro's totally B.S. excuse for not including her:
The Star Wars: Monopoly game was released in September, months before the movie’s release, and Rey was not included to avoid revealing a key plot line that she takes on Kylo Ren and joins the Rebel Alliance.
Riiiiight. Because including a Rey figure would have totally ruined the movie. Sure. Tell that to anything with Rey on it that actually did manage to get released during Force Friday.
Look, I'm not going to sit here and point my finger at anyone specific and call them a sexist or claim any of these kinds of things are actually done on purpose by someone with a specific agenda, but considering articles like this one are being written any time a decision like this is made, you'd think that the execs would at least be aware of the issue and try to go out of their way to INCLUDE more female-geared merch instead of constantly being called out for lack of diversity. It really shouldn't be a difficult thing to incorporate the protagonist of a film into toys, shirts, and games, but here we are.