The death of Carrie Fisher was a big cultural loss in a year seemingly full of them. It was a shock, and ultra-fans of Star Wars like myself didn’t even think about what would happen with the future films because of it. When we eventually did consider this, it seemed trivial especially because (no matter how much we love her for it) Carrie Fisher was more than just Princess Leia.

However, it’s not just us fans worried about the future of the character. The Hollywood Reporter revealed today that Lucasfilm will bring together its braintrust, including Episode IX director Colin Treverrow, to talk about their options for this character. The conventional wisdom is three things can happen: 1) They can kill-off the character. 2) They can recast the character. 3)They can use CGI witchcraft to put her in the film.

While this is a problem with no good solutions, it is my hope that the Lucasfilm story folks don’t go with option number one. It was a tragedy to lose Fisher, an author and advocate so full of life and wit. It just seems unfair that we also have to lose this latest iteration of the Leia Organa character as well.

The reports suggest that General Organa was to have an ever-larger role in the successive installments of this new trilogy. This means that the story would have to be reworked extensively, with Leia’s role going to a new character or being divided up amongst existing characters. Or, her role would be reduced to simply being in the background, featured in select scenes like CGI Tarkin in Rogue One.

Whichever direction Lucasfilm decides to go, I personally hope whatever they do keeps Leia alive in the universe. The actors in these first films, specifically Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill, are near-inseparable from their characters. With Ford and Fisher especially, these actors helped shape their characters, with Fisher fixing up scripts and Ford improvising classic dialogue.

But are these characters forever tied to these actors? Or, are they like Shakespearean characters who live on forever with different actors giving them voice? I’d like to think it was the latter.

Now, should they re-cast Leia for Episode IX? They could, but it would cause probably the most outrage of any of the choices they could make. People would accuse Disney and Lucasfilm of wanting to “milk all the money they could” out of these characters and will “dishonor” Fisher by doing so.

Frankly, as long as she’s left alive, I don’t really care how they handle this problem in the final movie of this new trilogy. The main reason I want Leia left alive is for the Expanded Universe, the novels, comic books, and cartoons also set in this universe. Most people fell in love with Star Wars through the movies, but its in the EU where this love becomes a wonderful obsession. General Organa deserves to grow old in this galaxy and, for once, find some fucking peace.

Leia Organa is, without question, the most impressive and heroic character in all of the Star Wars film canon. She is born a child of privilege — a literal princess — and could have easily ended up as just rich, spoiled space-trash. However, as early as age 16 (while Luke was bulls-eye-ing womp rats with his T16), Leia was both actively involved in the Imperial government and the rebellion.

In the first film, she is captured and tortured and then watches her home planet get annihilated. Hours later, she’s salvaging the inept plan of her rescuers, saving their skins by getting them out of an impossible blaster battle. As they make their escape, she is the only one who knows it was a plot by the Empire to follow them home and even has the impressive depth of compassion to comfort Luke after the death of Ben Kenobi. (Though it’s possible she’s using this to avoid facing her own sadness about her planet, because every great character has a flaw.)

She doesn’t see much action in the Battle of Yavin, but she is there with the leaders of the Rebellion commanding the assault. In the next film, she is willing to let everyone else escape the arrival of the Empire and, her torturer Darth Vader, on Hoth. Later, when Han Solo is captured, she allows herself to be captured, enslaved, and humiliated by Jabba the Hutt in order to free her friends. She’s also the person who, as Carrie Fisher said, “sawed his fucking head off.”

After all that, she volunteers to join the assault on Endor, and later advises her brother to do the one thing she could never do: run away to save his own life.

When we meet up with these heroes in the latest film, Leia, now General Organa, is the only one of them doing anything worth a damn. After the betrayal of “Ben Ren,” Luke goes off to live in isolation on an island planet despite being a literal superhero. Han, grieving his son, bails on his wife and goes back to swindling and smuggling.

But what does Leia, whose just lost everyone for the second time in her life, decide to do? She decides to form an alliance of fighters and try to prevent what happened to her home from happening again. In the EU, the brilliant Leia-centric novel Bloodline only adds to the depth of the loss that that princess-turned-warrior-turned-Senator-turned-General faced.

Her political career (and, it’s implied, her relationship with her son) is ruined after it’s revealed that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker and she was his daughter. Other pre-Force Awakens EU books reveal that the Republic is essentially ignoring the First Order, with Leia the only one sounding the alarm.

Image via internet meme-genius (memius?)

In her later years, Fisher reluctantly admitted that she was the “custodian” of Princess Leia. It’s unclear how Fisher would feel about this dilemma, and as official custodian her opinion would have carried weight. Once she half-joked that she wanted to see Leia and Han “grow old” together in retirement. While Han’s fate makes good story-sense, allowing Leia to exist off-screen but alive in these final movies would be much more preferable to killing her off.

She is the most purely heroic character in the entire series of films, and she should live a long life in the Star Wars universe, if only as a middle finger to death. You can’t have all of Carrie Fisher, because no matter how we next see Leia in this world (and we will) it will always be Fisher’s soul at her core.

Perhaps it’s just the six-year-old in me who remains delighted that no one I liked died in Return of the Jedi, but Leia should live.

What do you think? Tell me in the comments below.

UPDATE: John Boyega seems to reveal that Lucasfilm took my advice (or independently came to the conclusion themselves, but does that seem likely?)