It Doesn't Matter if Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Is Good Or Bad—Toxic Fans Will Try to Destroy It
The finale of a four-decade-long saga ends next week. And it's going to be ugly.
Shutterstock/Disney
In late November, a stranger tweeted at me to share how the movie Knives Out ended. This tweet revealed the answer of the whodunnit in Rian Johnson's new movie, with the hashtag #spoilknivesout. I had already seen this movie, so no harm done to me, personally, but the tweet was a pretty good example of the classically moronic tactics employed by toxic Star Wars fans to annoy (and sometimes even harass) the people they disagree with. Because this person believed Rian Johnson had ruined Star Wars—a sci-fi property that this fan seemed to feel he had sole ownership of—he must ruin Johnson's new movie for everyone else.
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Tweeting spoilers just to be rude is one of the more tame tactics I've seen Star Wars trolls use over the years. In reaction to my writing about Star Wars, I've been on the receiving end of calls for me to be fired, hour-long videos breaking down my articles, homophobic slurs, racist slurs, intimidation of my partner who appeared in images on my Instagram, and even death threats.
Last year I wrote a series of articles critical of what I called toxic Star Wars fandom, and in the months since, my mentions have been a bizarre hellscape. These trolls have accused me of being a shill who works for Disney to get money, access, and tickets. They've written entire blogs about it. In reality I only make a sad journalist's salary, and have often been critical of the Disney Star wars.
I don't particularly mind the attacks, the threats, and accusations. If anything, the tweets provide me with some bleak entertainment—I enjoy laughing at some of the depraved twitter eggs who think threatening me will change literally anything about the modern Star Wars movies. (Plus, my experience pales in comparison to the constant harassment that stars Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley have endured from this crowd.) But, the tweets picked up last week in response to an interview I did with J.J. Abrams. I had asked him about the fan response to the modern Star Wars movies—the backlash to diverse casting and progressive themes. His response, which I found both fair and tame:
The reaction to Star Wars, the increased attacks, the increased negativity, the Fandom Menace as they call it, you know, that is not unique to Star Wars, obviously. And I think we live in a time where if you're not being divisive, if you're not creating something that's aversive click-bait, sometimes you don't quite feel like you're playing the game. I always loved Star Wars because it's got a huge heart. Did I always believe in and agree with every single thing that happened in every movie, whether it was the prequels or the original trilogy? No. But do I love Star Wars? Yes. So, for me, I hope -- and I'm sure naively -- we can return to a time where we give things a bit more latitude. We don't have to agree with every single thing to love something. I don't know anyone who has a spouse or a partner or any family member or any friend, who loves and agrees with every single thing that that person is and does. We have to return, I think, to nuance and acceptance. And so I feel like, as a Star Wars fan, do I love every single thing about each of the movies? No. But do I love Star Wars? Hell yes, I do.
But it didn't matter that Abrams gave these fans the benefit of the doubt. It didn't matter that he refrained from calling them out for their deranged behavior. It didn't matter that he even admitted there were things he also didn't like about some of the movies. The quote sent the so-called Fandom Menace into a frenzy. In response, they tweeted at me: everything from lengthy manifestos on the declining quality of Star Wars to poorly photoshopped, antisemitic depictions of J.J. Abrams. To me, the message was clear: there is nothing that J.J. Abrams, that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, that Disney, or any one of the actors can do to change these peoples' minds about the modern era of Star Wars.
The people with problems with the Disney Star Wars films fall, as far as I can tell, primarily into four main camps: those who think the films are too similar to the originals; those who say the new films (specifically The Last Jedi) deviate too far from the world of the originals; those who think the inclusion of storylines about women characters and characters of color is done at the expense of stories about white, male characters; and those who have legitimate criticisms with the writing and technical filmmaking of the new trilogy. Sometimes fans are pissed off at all of these things at once—making it unclear what it is that would make this particular breed of Star Wars fans happy at all. In an interesting report on the Disney era of Star Wars, the Wall Street Journal reported that the films have become so polarizing that Russian troll farms are capitalizing on the discord to encourage the appearance of division in the U.S. more broadly. And with that Disney seems to have no idea what, if anything, would make fans happy. As the WSJ wrote:
The disinformation campaign has made it hard for Lucasfilm executives and members of a story group charged with plotting the franchise's trajectory to understand fans' true concerns, one former story-group member said. Did racism spurred by online trolls drive their rejection of Ms. Tran's character, or was it a broader issue of how her character's arc was developed in the film? "What's the note behind the note?" the person said. Often, the person added, fan responses boil down to "Don't change a thing I love."
There is a distinction between those who hate Star Wars for political reasons and those who just think the new movies are bad. The refrain goes something like, they are not racist—they just don't like what Disney did with Star Wars. It's okay to not enjoy these movies, and it's great to be critical of content from a massive media conglomerate that pretty much has a monopoly on every major beloved Hollywood property that's popular today. But more often than not, critical fans are responding to something much bigger than dissatisfaction with Luke Skywalker becoming a reclusive, bitter hermit. But if you read the subtext of many of these critiques, these people have very clear opinions about these stories because they focus on women or people of color.
The phrase I read a lot when it comes to criticism of Disney Star Wars, is that these movies should keep SJW (social justice warrior) politics out of Star Wars. The idea is that including diverse voices is some sort of political agenda. They're responding to an industry (and Disney specifically) that's finally attempting to make strides in on-screen representation after years of ignoring most voices. They're responding to a frustration that heroes in Star Wars—and in other massive properties—are no longer exclusively straight, white, and male. It's gotten so intense that I'm beginning to think that nothing that could happen in The Rise of Skywalker—short of an opening crawl that established "nothing in the previous films was actually real and this is a story about a white man again"—that would change any minds so set on destroying the franchise.
Just look at the conversation already going on among this segment of fans. They've only seen minutes of trailer footage—most of which might not appear in the final film—and they're writing The Rise of Skywalker off as a failure. Others are outraged at the rumor that there might be an LGBTQ character who appears for the first time in a Star Wars film. Some are just spreading misinformation to fit into a ridiculous narrative about a movie they haven't even seen. There is no pleasing people who have made up their minds. These are the people who will be review-bombing The Rise of Skywalker on Rotten Tomatoes. These are the people who will tweet at me, who will start delusional campaigns to remake the movies. These are the people who will harass actors and directors (and who will maybe try to spoil their next movies).
In one week we'll finally see the conclusion of a story four decades in the making. A lot has changed since audiences first saw Luke Skywalker gaze off into that binary sunset. Hollywood is slowly, too slowly, becoming a place that embraces performers and stories of all genders, sexual orientations, and races. There's still a lot of work to do, but progress will not be halted no matter how passionately, how loudly trolls cry online. Abrams's The Rise of Skywalker will not reverse the progress Disney made when it put a lightsaber in Daisy Ridley's hands. And for that, fans will still be mad online. They're not angry with Star Wars in particular, they're angry at a changing world—one in which their perspective isn't the only one that matters. I say let them yell, let them whine. Abrams is pissing off the right people.
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