The Last Jedi and the Dark Side of the Fandom

I first saw Star Wars at the age of four. I was at my grandparents’ house, and my uncle had a VHS copy. My sister, two years older, was super excited to see it for the third time, and she was at the age where messing with me wasn’t just a pastime, but part of the natural order of siblings. She turned up the volume loud enough to hear outside, and started it, wanting to recreate that movie theater bombast of sound to blast away the rest of the world and leave only the movie in its place.

When the Stormtroopers first blasted through the hatch onto Leia’s ship, I was hiding behind a chair, afraid of how loud the explosion was because, again, I was four. She still brings it up, even today, if I come close to rivaling her fandom to take me down a peg.

When Return of the Jedi debuted, my uncle saw it five times in one week, and took my sister every time. It was determined that I was too young to go, as it got out three hours past my bedtime. She left every time with a grin on her face, and kept “the big spoiler” secret until I finally saw it myself once it was acquired on VHS.

I loved Star Wars, even if I didn’t get to mainline it like a lot of people. The lone action figure I had was one of the nobodies, the also-rans, and being under the age of ten I wasn’t thinking to keep it mint in box and sell it later to pay for three years of college.

When The Phantom Menace premiered I attended a midnight showing with friends, and we showed up an hour early to get a parking spot. A pizza place stayed open, wisely calling it that early-birds would load up on slices to avoid buying $17 popcorns in cheap plastic collectible bins. I got to join in with the cheers when the Lucasfilm logo appeared, the eruption of applause, hoots, and hollers when that iconic main title started, some people jumping to their feet and waving their plastic lightsabers in the air.

It was a theater full of college kids and high-schoolers, people like me who were too young to have seen the original trilogy in the theaters, but it was okay. This was going to be our trilogy, after all. The prequels we’d share with our friends and eventually our own kids.

So yeah, I was disappointed, but not to the levels that some people were. Jar Jar was kinda lame, but I wasn’t about to grab a torch and pitchfork. Jake Lloyd was… a kid working with not-awesome writing, and made “Yippie!” one of Darth Vader’s immortal lines, but I still cringe at the shit that the “fans” put that poor kid through afterward. It’s also where I learned about toxic fandom.

Sidestepping into education for a moment, as a professor I make it a point to consult Beloit College’s infamous “Mindset List”, an annual release to familiarize educators with what incoming students will be familiar with, and what they won’t be familiar with. It’s often shared as a means to mock people older than us, until we reach the year where the list starts to make us feel old, to imply two words that aren’t just a revived series on Netflix: arrested development.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the Star Wars cinematic universe, a setting that has endured since 1977, over 40 years, a setting that has taught the basic morality of good and evil, Light Side and Dark Side, to Baby Busters, Generation X, Echo Boomers/Generation Y, Millennials, and iGen/Generation Z. It’s not a zeitgeist, it’s considered to be a cultural institution, a common ground for millions to start from. It gave us films, cartoons, TV specials, dozens of books, hundreds of comics, tabletop roleplaying games and countless computer and video games that gave an extra peek, another story, something else to color in the lines.

As a result, some people are protective, some a little too much, some entirely too much, when any change or addition is proposed or inserted or made canon, set in stone. When the new trilogy debuted, there was understandably pushback as it wasn’t being shepherded by George Lucas, meaning that Star Wars would have to survive without his lazy writing, unnecessary angst, and broad-painted stereotypes. (Remember, this is a guy who told Carrie Fisher she couldn’t wear underwear in space because it would strangle her.) But also, the leads changed.

The primary leads of the original trilogy? Luke, Han, Leia. Two white straight guys (one late teens, the other in his 30s), one white straight girl under the age of 21 in a generally supporting role. Prequels? Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme. Two white straight guys (one late teens, one in his 30s), one white straight girl under the age of 21 in a generally supporting role. The new trilogy? Finn, Poe, Rey. Probably straight black man (early 20s), possibly bi/pansexual Latinx man (early 20s), possibly asexual white girl (early 20s). In the era of the alt-right, Gamergate, and toxic masculinity being called out, the screeching backlash to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi is by no means justified, but it’s understandable why it’s there.

So let’s go back to two terms mentioned earlier that often go hand in hand: toxic fandom and arrested development. Science-fiction and fantasy were learned and gendered early on from the baby boomers all the way to Generation Y to be white, heterosexual, and male. However, as time passed and the diversity of readers and consumers in American markets increased, diversity of leads and characters emerged from niche markets to establish themselves as feasible choices for publishing, playwriting, and screenwriting. (It doesn’t mean that it’s a given, unfortunately. Writers and artists are often encouraged or given notes to Anglicize names and concepts “to increase marketability”, or they self-censor/edit for fear of rejection from mainstream houses.) The concept of arrested development is that while a person’s body may grow and mature, emotional growth and maturity is not a given, hence some feeling even on a good day to think like they’re still fifteen, even if in their forties. Popular culture has been assigned some of the blame, providing validation for arrested development by marketing subjects typical aimed at adolescents and those in their twenties to those who aren’t that age but still think like they are.

As a result, this section of the fandom often has more time invested by virtue of age, and therefore equates that time invested to degree of entitlement over the direction of a specific franchise, and discounting new targets of marketing. If the concept seems off-putting regarding Star Wars, it can easily be applied to the backlash to making Doctor Who a woman, even if it was established in the canon that the titular Doctor could regenerate as anything, he always returned as a pasty white Englishman. (Articles have been written to describe that the Doctor would always return as a white male to ensure privilege would allow and forgive his shenanigans, and only with the recent social progress would the Doctor return as a woman to ensure they’re be taken seriously in a crisis.)

However, the same arguments return with Star Wars when the Force Sensitive lead is written as a woman. “Mary Sue” is the most common insult thrown out regarding Rey, the term often meaning a self-based character with zero to very few flaws who is immediately an expert at everything they do, and serendipity follows them about like an attention-starved puppy, and the veracity of that charge is a whole ‘nother essay unto itself, but it does beg the question of why the same label was never applied to Luke. If the response is that Mary Sue is only applied to women, it must be asked why the term was freely applied to Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG. Luke is not charged with being a Mary Sue by the more toxic wings of the fandom being 1) he’s a white, implied to be straight” male, and 2) he’s the hero that they grew up with, that they wanted to be like, and applying that trait to him would be in a sense applying it to themselves.

The Last Jedi received much of the “fan”-rage for shutting the door on Rey being connected to any of the major bloodlines in the SWU: the Skywalkers… and that’s pretty much it. By connecting her to the Skywalkers, she would share blood with Anakin, Luke, and Kylo (Leia, too, but we all saw how the toxic wing took Leia having the gall to use the Force to save her own life.), and therefore, her strength and power would be tied to, and owed to, powerful men, instead of coming from nothing.

The film also complicated the rather simple morality that had existed in Star Wars and most traditional fantasy. Rebellion good, Sith/Empire/First Order bad, and that was all there was to it. The scene on Canto Bight (the casino planet) was to establish that the only real winners were the arms dealers, selling to both sides, glutting themselves off a war that had been raging for years. While the First Order was still clearly evil, the Rebellion’s luster was tarnished slightly, introducing moral questions that typically aren’t expected in a Star Wars movie, but questions that 15-30 year-olds have to handle in 2018 that they didn’t have to handle in 1977. Until The Last Jedi the most vicious Star Wars morality debate was about whether or not Han shot first.

Returning to arrested development, part of the complexities of the new Star Wars trilogy lies both in a more established canon (which now includes two animated series, which brought a disavowed villain out of the cold of the former Expanded Universe, the most sinister art history major ever), and in its marketing, in that it’s no longer targeted at aging white men, but a wider, more diverse audience to reflect a wider and more diverse fandom. One only has to look at the box office to tell the tale. The key is that as the fandom expands, more diverse and younger voices will be the basis of that expansion, who not only want stories that feature them too, but also have the disposable income to support it.

If Disney is, as planned, going to keep releasing Star Wars movies until long after the fans of the original trilogy are dead, then the older factions of the fandom must accept that, as the new trilogy has shown, Star Wars isn’t just for them anymore, that POC and LGBTIQAP+ people are fans too, and would like to see people like them being the hero and saving the galaxy. They need to see that other people can have their stories in the Star Wars universe as well, to not fear it. Because, well, fear has led to anger. That anger has led to hatred. That hatred has led to suffering. And suffering… well… I think Star Wars fans know what that leads to.

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