My Strange Love Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ride

^{Still image from Mandalorian and Grogu, from Lucasfilm and Walt Disney Studios}

There’s a funny dance that I have undertaken lately whenever I encounter a Star Wars fan out in the world who I haven’t met before. Often, it begins with friendly nods toward each other’s Star Wars t-shirt (or hat…or jacket…or tattoo) and then the small talk begins with the slow circumspection of prizefighters circling the ring before exchanging their first blows, or maybe that of the elementary school dodgeball captain walking down the line of skinned kneed prospects before making that first selection.

It starts slow…a test to see just what kind of Star Wars fan I am dealing with. Maybe a mention of the newest Disney+ project (“Have you checked out Maul: Shadow Lord?”) or just a bit of a stretch into once dangerous but now safe terrain (“What’s your favorite of the prequels?”). Like the Jurassic Park velociraptors, I slowly, systematically, check the fences, trying to determine what territory is safe.

When the signs come back positive, I can may go for the important stuff, “Wasn’t Andor a masterpiece?” “That first season of Mandalorian was soooo good right?” And only well into the dance, if I’ve found a good kindred spirit, can I finally admit my most controversial stance of all: “I really love The Last Jedi.”

I imagine other Star Wars fans reading this have their own similar but uniquely different version of this dance and equally have beautiful stories of when it goes right and awkward confessions of when it has gone terribly wrong. My favorite of the latter is when a fan bro crossed a Subway sandwich shop to engage me because he saw my Last Jedi t-shirt, and he wanted to tell me all about the weaknesses he saw in the film and convince me that it sucked. The sentences repeatedly began with a variation on “What you people don’t understand about story is…” and I got a firehouse of mansplaining about why Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern’s man-boy challenging leader) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran’s unjustly derided Star Wars every man, or every woman, which may be the real problem) broke the franchise. After lecturing a bit, he paused and asked me what I do for a living. In a bit of smugness I have really never indulged in elsewhere, I dropped “Oh, I’m a Literature PhD who researched story and character” and took my five-dollar footlong elsewhere as a ham and cheese-infused mic drop.

But what I want to focus on here is just how strange it all is. While I think it’s hard to know the inner workings of fandoms you aren’t in, I feel confident asserting that modern Star Wars fandom is particularly perilous in these regards. Why are there such strong factions present within Star Wars fandom, and why does it feel so dangerous to engage with strangers about silly space fantasy? How can a fandom so focused on something that (presumably) brings us great joy concentrate so much on our differences and the tribalism of what “Real” fandom entails?

I don’t want to go a moment further without also acknowledging that these dangers I feel as a fan are compounded for women, people of color, and queer folk in the fan space. Too often, white cis male fans bring a dangerous edge toward those that don’t identify the same way, getting quickly to charges that others aren’t “real” fans often because they weren’t there in the “good old days” (they were), they don’t have the same depth of knowledge (they do), or especially that they don’t have the right opinions (there are no right opinions). While I want to interrogate what I perceive in fandom, which doesn’t have that same edge, I encourage fans who think I’m not representing intersectional fandom and identities to seek out the many wonderful creators out there who speak from their experiences better than how I could ever do so on their behalf.

So, my question here is really: Why is it that the Star Wars fandom concerns itself so much with the factions within it and relations between these groups?

In many ways this is an extension/update of the thinking I offered in my post on Star Wars Generations. As I noted there, I am a member of the “dark times” generation who came to my fandom between the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, a time when mainly books and comics were being produced. As such, I’m seemingly the fan equivalent of Gen X: we don’t really understand why the generations around us fight so much, and would very much like to be left out of it.

However, there’s no getting left out of it. Any time a new project rolls out from Lucasfilm, I find myself enjoying and reacting to whatever the film, show, book, or videogame is presenting, but I also find myself tempering that reaction through the lens of all the fandom battles that have scarred and strained my aching body. If I say this videogame starring a female protagonist isn’t that fun, am I accidentally suggesting only men can be Star Wars heroes? If I praise how good the careful clockwork plotting of season two of Andor is, am I implying that the Acolyte was poorly written? Does my enthusiasm about the character Rey place me more with the Rise of Skywalker fans, or can I still argue that it was a mistake to undo the character beats of Last Jedi?

To be quite clear: this is madness. It seems crazy to me that the hyper-divisive world of internet citizenship has made it so every reaction or interpretation offered gets inflected with these conflicts as if any such distinction matters. In a world defined by difference and othering, it seems like art should be the last true bastion for healthy and productive disagreement. But any Star Wars fan can tell you, it’s not long in any online space before you get charged with being a “woke snowflake,” a Nazi, or perhaps the worst the internet fan bros can throw at you: “A Disney shill.”

Without excusing one tiny bit of hate speech or othering (Ever. Get out of this fandom, bigots), I also want to acknowledge that I think a lot of this othering is born of the difficulty many older Star Wars fans faced when they were young. Though hard to envision now, there was a time when a ubiquitous monoculture existed and pushed Star Wars fans into the category of other. Though hard to place exactly, seemingly from the late 80’s through the mid-90’s, wearing a Star Wars t-shirt to school wasn’t an acceptable practice. The real social cost of being a nerd in those times (in some spaces) was high, and those that clung to their fandom proudly across those years are, in some small part, often jealous of how big a tent it is now. To me, this is the basis of those incorrect allegations that only long-term fans are real fans. Being a fan had a cost, and it can feel unfair that newer fans haven’t had to pay it, but that should not become a reason to inflict that cost on those new fans.

^{Artist: Matt Ferguson}

The newest battleground, of course, is the much-heralded return of Star Wars to movie theaters with The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Favreau. Despite my high-minded talk above, I have to admit that, as I sat in my first screening of the film, I found myself making the usual internal calculations. And to be fully transparent, it came down to a simple question: Can I permit myself to like this film, or does doing so undermine the fandom identities I claim?

I would say my recent fandom is defined by my love of The Last Jedi, my voracious readership of The High Republic publishing initiative, and my opinion that Andor is possibly the greatest piece of media ever to bear the Star Wars name, if not the single most important television show of all time. I also, amongst those who know me, am known for my strong dislike of the film Solo (documented here), even going so far on the podcast I cohost, The Long Take Review, to place it last in our ranking of the 11 Star Wars theatrical films (listen here…if you want the full three hours of nerdy ranking). These are all parts of the fandom identity I claim, and I found myself processing these far more than I was engaging with what was actually on screen.

That’s what it seems to come down to, at least in part: living our lives as a part of online fandom means having to live with the versions of ourselves that we’ve made public, and that can often mean making sure we can’t be charged with the internet’s favorite epithet: hypocrite.

So, there I was watching the first new Star Wars film in seven years, a moment I had been deeply anticipating for months, far overthinking the moment.

I worried that I had to be extra critical of it in defense of my Last Jedi love (Have I mentioned I love Last Jedi?), and then I worried that I couldn’t celebrate this movie because it had so much in common with Solo. I worried about what fans who hated the third season of The Mandalorian show would say about this movie. I worried about how “voting with my dollars” by buying a ticket to this film might mean I was saying I wanted more Star Wars like this and not as much like Andor or The Acolyte. I worried that seeing Sigourney Weaver on screen with not a lot to do meant I was saying Star Wars needs to keep women in the supporting roles. I worried that recognizing the moments of fan service meant I was endorsing the nostalgia-fueled spiral of Star Wars into references without meaningful mythology. I worried, and worried, and worried.

^{Image from Star Wars News Net}

Then something pretty incredible happened. Even more incredible that a Kenner mini-rig appearing in the opening sequence. I watched the big Dolby screen as a pair of characters from a Disney+ TV show (Mando and Grogu), alongside an adult version of a character introduced in a much-maligned animated film from 2008 (Rotta the Hutt), were slowly surrounded by a menagerie of creatures that debuted as dejarik holochess pieces in the original 1977 film Star Wars, and I immediately recalled every creature’s name thanks to the Decipher Star Wars Customizable Card Game cards I had collected during the dark times of the 1990’s.

There was N’Gok; there was the K’lor slug; there was Houjix ;and there was the Mantellian Savrip, lifting the Kintan Strider up over his head and slamming him down.

Those names had been lodged deep in my brain for thirty years, surviving years of academic study and the general fog of parenthood, and they bubbled up naturally as if remembering the names of countries on a map of Europe. There they were, come to life, fighting it out in all their prequel-era-on-steroids CG glory.

And…I stopped worrying and simply smiled.

That, to me, is the beauty of this strange love I have for Star Wars: the weirder and sillier it gets, the more undeniable it is.

The rest of the movie played out, including a roughly 20-minute stretch dominated by beloved, but absolutely silly puppets. I laughed; I smiled; I gasped once or twice. In the end, it wasn’t at all the type of Star Wars story that I usually enjoyed, and yet I did. I let all of the nonsense of fandom and tribalism and division melt away, and I just let myself smile, live in the moment, and not worry if I ever thought about those moments again.

To try to land this Razorcrest of self-analysis and overly-complicated fan neuroses, let me just offer the simple truth: Star Wars will always fail when we ask too much of it. I have no doubt every reader of this has their own list of what makes up their Star Wars identity and who the others are within fandom that they don’t agree with. You should. The point of art is to escape, to challenge, and to think critically. Don’t accept any art blindly and also don’t filter your views through what others say you need to feel. Just love the ride for what it is. Never excuse the toxic behaviors that poison our fandom, but also be sure that you don’t pollute your own enjoyment.

For better or worse, we won’t ever return to a period where any of us will absolutely love every part of Star Wars. That’s okay. We all still belong and good faith debate and discussion will invigorate us all. Worry less about the dance or making sure you perform your fandom well, and instead simply love that we have this great galaxy that can form our community and bring even strangers a little less far far away.