Rose Tico is a human female maintenance technician of the Resistance. The StarWars.com Databank describes her as "a maintenance tech with a talent for tinkering" who joined after the First Order devastated her home system, Otomok, and who served as a flight engineer alongside her sister Paige, a bomber gunner. She was introduced in Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi (2017), played by Kelly Marie Tran.
The war from below decks
She is the sequel trilogy's only significant character with no command, no lineage and no Force sensitivity — a person who fixes things while other people make decisions. That vantage point is the most valuable thing she brings, and the Canto Bight sequence exists precisely to let her explain who pays for the war and who profits from it.
Grief, then function
Her introduction follows Paige's death in the film's opening minutes. What is unusual is that the film gives her the grief and then puts her straight back to work; she is not a mourner who becomes a fighter, she is a technician who keeps working while mourning, which is a far less common shape for a Star Wars character.
The reception, and after
The Last Jedi gave her a substantial role and The Rise of Skywalker gave her almost none, a reduction that took place against a well-documented harassment campaign aimed at Tran. Whatever one thinks of the Canto Bight subplot as filmmaking, the two films together are a case study in a franchise flinching.
Where to read her
Jason Fry's novelisation gives her interior life the film leaves implicit, and Rebecca Roanhorse's Resistance Reborn is the best treatment of her as a working member of a wrecked organisation.
