Poe Dameron is a human male starfighter pilot, described by the StarWars.com Databank as "a Resistance starfighter ace" and "one of Leia Organa's most-trusted operatives." He was introduced in Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens (2015), played by Oscar Isaac, and by The Rise of Skywalker he is running the Resistance's military.
Born into it
He grew up on Yavin 4, which is not a coincidence the films ever explain and the comics do. His parents are Shara Bey, an A-wing pilot who flew with Green Squadron at Endor, and Kes Dameron, a Rebel sergeant; Greg Rucka and Marco Checchetto introduced both in Star Wars: Shattered Empire (Marvel, 2015), published two months before The Force Awakens reached cinemas. Poe is the sequel trilogy's one clear case of an inherited cause rather than a discovered one.
The arc is a correction
The trilogy is unusually hard on him. He wins the Starkiller Base attack in VII, then in VIII loses a bomber fleet to his own impatience, is demoted, and mutinies against Vice Admiral Holdo — who turns out to have been right, and dies proving it. The Databank is blunt that the turning point is Leia physically stunning him mid-mutiny. What he learns is not courage, which he already had in surplus, but that command is mostly the discipline of not acting.
The spice-runner problem
The Rise of Skywalker retrofits him a criminal past on Kijimi, with Zorii Bliss as the person he walked out on. Opinion splits on whether this deepens him or patches him; it does at least give the film's most likeable scene, and it makes his eventual generalship a choice rather than a birthright.
He is better in prose
Rebecca Roanhorse's Resistance Reborn catches him at his lowest — after Crait, with a wrecked movement to rebuild — and is the most convincing thing anyone has written about him. Rae Carson's novelisation of Episode IX handles the Kijimi backstory with far more room than the film gives it.
BB-8
His astromech, BB-8, is the trilogy's plot engine — the droid, not the pilot, carries the map fragment that starts everything. Poe's willingness to hand a droid the mission and then get captured is a decent summary of how he operates.
Continuity
Canon only, created for the sequel trilogy in 2015.
