Although journalists usually mention that the incendiary and invidious activities of a select cadre of fans and trolls represent a minority of the broader fan culture, the frequency and force of these news stories have nevertheless skewed the overarching narrative to one of the Star Wars fandom as a toxic soup of ‘man-boys’ generating hate speech and death-threats across the social media terrain. It is disproportionately “the sludge at the bottom of the Star Wars fan bucket [that] makes the news,” as media outlets cherry-pick quotes from platforms like Twitter that produce and circulate a biased portraiture of the Star Wars fan culture.
Nor is Star Wars fan culture even a singular culture, some homogenous group of like-minded individuals. Indeed, Star Wars fandom is seen to be “broken,” splintered into factions, segregated across ideological battle-lines, bifurcated into left- and right-wing polarities. Yet fan cultures, generally speaking, have never been a “community,” no matter how much that goal is laudable. Fan Studies has been an academic discipline for nearly thirty years, and one thing it’s taught us is that fan cultures are always-already fractured along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, and so forth. In other words, there is no such thing as a unified, utopian fan-base that can be “broken.” As Brandon Katz writes:
Something is deeply broken among the Star Wars faithful. Respectable discourse has deteriorated completely as a small but determined minority of “fans” turn to the Dark Side—hate-spewing assholes looking to ruin the party for everyone, and often succeeding.
To be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting that there are no racist, sexist, homophobic Star Wars fans (or fans of that nature in any other fan culture, for that matter). They are easy to find if one goes looking. Neither am I suggesting that people have not been harmed by hateful language and actions on social media. Rather, I am arguing that mainstream journalists have been complicit in constructing a narrative by leading with “emotive headlines freighted with sensation and bias.”
For example, Matt Kamen’s 2015 piece for Wired, published two months before the release of The Force Awakens, announced that “racists want to #BoyCottStarWarsVII because it’s ‘anti-white.'” while in the article itself, the author admits that “the vocal minority sincerely using #BoycottStarWarsVII is just that—a minority.” The wealth of news stories focused on this hashtag campaign, as well as other campaigns of this sort, however, do not spend significant time discussing the significant pushback these boycotts receive from the vast majority of commenters. In one case, Josh Dickey from Mashable employed social analytics firm Fizzology to scrape, quantify, and examine data from #BoycottStarWarsVII, finding that 94% of tweeters “were merely expressing outrage over its existence.”