Amilyn Holdo is a human female Vice Admiral of the Resistance and, per the StarWars.com Databank, "an unconventional Resistance officer" and one of Leia Organa's closest companions since their youth in Coruscant's Apprentice Legislature. She was introduced on screen in Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi (2017), played by Laura Dern; Claudia Gray's Leia, Princess of Alderaan, published the same year, dramatises the Apprentice Legislature friendship at length.
The argument the film is actually having
She takes command of the fleet when Leia is injured, refuses to brief Poe Dameron on her plan, and is mutinied against for it. The film's position — restated by Leia's stun bolt — is that Poe's demand to be told was itself the problem. Audiences have never fully accepted this, and the resulting argument is one of the more interesting things any Star Wars film has provoked.
The Holdo manoeuvre
She rams the Raddus through the First Order flagship at lightspeed, in a shot that drops the sound out entirely. It is the most beautiful image in the sequel trilogy and immediately created a continuity headache the franchise has been managing ever since: if this works, why has nobody else ever done it? The Rise of Skywalker answers with a single line calling it a one-in-a-million chance, which is a patch rather than a fix.
Read the novel first
Leia, Princess of Alderaan makes her a teenager with an unplaceable dress sense and an oblique way of speaking, and it retroactively turns her scenes with Leia in the film into forty years of shorthand. It is the single best example of the current publishing programme improving a film in retrospect.
