How Toxic 'Star Wars' Fans Are Hurting 'Star Wars'

'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'

Walt Disney and Lucasfilm

Today is Ghostbusters Day, which supposedly celebrates Ivan Reitman's 1984 sci-fi comedy smash that was rebooted two years ago with Paul Feig's gender-swapped remake. I need not remind you of how that was received from the moment of its announcement, although we should remember that Leslie Jones was temporarily driven off social media after a coordinated troll attack bombarded her feeds with various racist and misogynistic messages. History repeated itself this week after Last Jedi co-star Kelly Marie Tran was driven off Instagram after months of racist and misogynistic comments that coincidentally never seem to be directed at Mark Hamill or Adam Driver.

The Star Wars fans have always had their rotten apples. There are folks who are still mad, 21 years later, that George Lucas inserted CGI into the Star Wars trilogy and made Han Solo “shoot second.” I do not know if these are the same folks who graduated to racism and sexism once the new Star Wars movies began putting women and minorities in more front-and-center roles. I tend to believe that these are just garden-variety racists and misogynistic trolls who use Star Wars fandom as a cover, but the clickbait and a reaction-friendly media is helping to turn their assaults into mainstream news and inflating their voice and their numbers.

Yes, you can dislike a Star Wars movie or a Ghostbusters reboot without being an alt-right troll or an incel schmuck. For that matter, you can enjoy “problematic” movies without necessarily being part of the problem. There is a difference between panning a movie or even passionately discussing a movie you disliked, and verbally assaulting an artist over that movie. You should know the difference between not wanting a gender-swapping remake like (the mostly enjoyable) Ocean’s 8 because you’d prefer original female-driven stories and making a point to refer to its three minority actresses as “swamp donkeys.” If this isn’t you, then this isn’t about you.

If those engaging in this manbaby behavior keep getting the media to pay enough attention that they become part of the narrative, they will keep winning. Toxic fandom is nothing new. Alicia Silverstone paid a career-killing price for Batman & Robin that George Clooney did not. Syndrome, the baddie in Pixar’s The Incredibles, was a toxic fan rejected by his idols who become the enemy of the thing he once loved. But now they have a megaphone. I do think we need to figure out a happy medium between outright ignoring them and essentially elevating their voices by turning their every utterance and action into a news story.

You can’t entirely ignore evil. But giving them the attention they so desire partially so you can clap back or offer a perfect response doesn’t help either. If it’s news when men and boys protest an all-women screening of Wonder Woman, it will keep happening. Moreover, their bigotry risks being given a standard “two sides to every story” analysis. It (unintentionally?) gives credence to old-school misogyny and racism under the guise of the geek culture equivalent of “economic anxiety.” But in a media run on clicks and shares, there is zero incentive not to write up every moronic online action and/or “perfect response” as if it’s a news story.

If it’s considered a story, it’ll elevate the voices of those who don’t deserve to be heard. It will partially mitigate the value of onscreen representation. It’s complicated to, for example, be a young Asian woman who otherwise is thrilled to see Rose being cool in The Last Jedi while also reading about the actress being chased off social media for appearing in a movie. The value of onscreen representation is mitigated when those participants (and fans) risk being drowned in verbal and online abuse. The geek fandom has always had its bad apples, but the media has given them a megaphone and a place in the debate.

I do think we need to make a concerted effort to either exclude these folks from the conversation or heavily qualify their inclusion as a mere possible demographic sampling. Yes, there are folks that disliked The Last Jedi for artistic reasons. Hell, I didn’t like The Force Awakens. But when a film that gets mostly rave reviews, a near-record opening weekend, an A grade from Cinemascore among polled moviegoers and $1.33 billion worldwide is discussed in “What went wrong?” terms and is put on the defensive because a few online polls got gamed by folks with potentially less-than-pure intentions, that’s a problem.

With $4.8 billion worldwide after four movies on a combined budget and production spend of around $1.6b, Star Wars as a movie series will be fine. I’m presuming that Star Wars IX will work as popcorn entertainment. Lucasfilm will make some choices about how often to release a new movie and what those movies should be. The biggest danger to Star Wars is the specific strain of (mostly white and male) Star Wars fans who evolved from accusing Lucas of ruining Star Wars to begging Lucas to save it from Kathleen Kennedy and the folks at Disney and Lucasfilm who dared make Star Wars more racially and culturally diverse.

The financial success of the new batch of Star Wars movies speaks for itself. Voting with your wallet is the best and easiest way to show the trolls that their opinions are a vocal minority and a statistical irrelevancy. Yet, there may be a price if this kind of fan defines Star Wars fandom. If these voices skew the narrative whenever we get a new Star Wars, especially among young people who see their new heroes being targeted by “manbabies” who are upset that the Star Wars movies are no longer targeted mostly at them, it won’t be much fun to talk about Star Wars anymore.

If the legacy of these new Star Wars movies becomes not defined by their financial success, their critical acclaim or their breakthrough rebuttals to conventional wisdom about who can star in what kinds of movies, but rather by the horrific online behavior of their worst and most entitled would-be fans, then the modern-day Syndromes will have truly hurt the thing they once loved. Because a brand where the so-called fans themselves actively root for the failure and destruction of that property will soon be defined by the demographics that root for its failure rather than those who cheer for its successes.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website.
