It’s a weird time to be a Star Wars fan. Friday sees the release of The Rise of Skywalker, bringing an end to the saga George Lucas began all the way back in 1977. Of course, this isn’t really the end. Disney has plans to keep producing Star Wars content until the end of time, just as Return of the Jedi was never the end and numerous books laid down the groundwork for what was then the Extended Universe. Climate change may kill all us humans, but I am confident there will still be new Star Wars content for the cockroaches that survive us.
But The Rise of Skywalker is still significant, because it is an end. If marketing and interviews are to be believed, this is the final chapter of the Skywalker saga, which is the bulk of what Star Wars is for most of us. And it comes at a time when there is much disturbance in the fandom.
The new trilogy, while by any measure is very popular, has been under constant attack from a certain segment of the fan base that refuses to accept them as anything other than pale imitations (The Force Awakens) or blasphemy (The Last Jedi). Not content to just not like them, these fans (or, as we refer to them around the Robot Butt office, CHUDs) will go out of their way to not only voice their displeasure but actively ruin things for the (significantly larger group of) fans who do enjoy the new movies. A lot of it is sad and harmless, but a lot of it includes legitimate and dangerous harassment.
The prequels also generated their share of fan resentment, but this feels different. For one, social media had yet to take hold as a societal picture of Dorian Gray. But the prequels were also heading to a predetermined conclusion. We all knew the basic beats of how it had to end, so at least that aspect of it wasn’t up for debate. Yeah, midichlorians got thrown in the mix and no one liked that, but in the end Anakin Skywalker still became Darth Vader as we knew he would.
There is no roadmap for these new movies, though, and there are no similar restrictions on what could happen or how it could end. This brings with them the potential to upend how we feel about the original trilogy in a way the prequels never could. Nothing that happened in the prequels could really change how we felt about the original trilogy, because everything in them had to line up with events we had already seen. Without those guardrails we are now free to form our own expectations, and because we are not actually making these movies those expectations are likely going to be off from what the final product delivers.
We have already seen this with The Last Jedi. I’m not going to put effort into discussing the reasons the CHUDs hated it (Luke’s “character assasination,” spending time following characters who end up not doing anything, Porgs, etc.) or the reasons I love it (seeing how characters deal with failure in good and bad ways, the humanistic aspects of the Force getting the spotlight, Porgs). What is important, though, is that this is a movie that went off the beaten path in a lot of ways.
After The Force Awakens played it pretty safe, The Last Jedi was intent on upending the expectations of what would happen next. And while it was a success by any measure, a chunk of fans hated it. Not just didn’t like it, but thought it did such a disservice to what they had built up in their minds that they demanded it be scrubbed from existence. That is a Trumpian level of emotional response to simply not liking a movie. And while that segment of the fan base is a minority, it will certainly carry over to Rise of Skywalker.
But the question I keep coming back to is: why? And it’s a question I have been asking a lot lately as I struggle myself with what the end of the Star Wars saga means to me. I grew up with the original trilogy ever since I watched an old Betamax cassette of A New Hope my dad had taped. I absorbed that shit. I read what I could get my hands on of the Extended Universe. I cringed at the prequels, but even there I found elements to enjoy (regardless of the plot it found itself in, I love the world of Kamino). I enjoyed Force Awakens (more than I thought I would when it first came out, to be honest) and I loved The Last Jedi. I think Rogue One is overall pretty good and Solo was just fine. So far The Mandalorian has been a lot of fun.
But what if… what if Rise of Skywalker botches the ending? If it turns out that for whatever reason I hate the ending, what does that change about how I see the rest of Star Wars? One of the things I loved about The Last Jedi was Rey’s parentage being a nothingburger, and the message that you don’t need a storied bloodline to be capable of great things. What if J.J. Abrams comes back in this new movie and says, “Actually, Luke is Rey’s father. And so is Anakin. AND SO IS C-3PO.” Does that change my enjoyment of The Last Jedi, or can I appreciate it as its own thing?
And this is the question at the center of the “fan” backlash to the new movies. They don’t like them. That’s fine. But there is also an insistence that because they don’t like these Star Wars movies, it has ruined their ability to enjoy anything Star Wars. It isn’t just Star Wars, either. Fandom in general has begun to coalesce around this idea that if something isn’t perfect, then it’s garbage. Game of Thrones was a genuine phenomenon and an impressive achievement in television. We loved it. But they rushed and fumbled the final stretch and somehow that rendered the other six seasons of the show worthless. It was all of a sudden a waste of time to have invested time into a show that you had immensely enjoyed for the majority of its run. Which is frankly bizarre when you break it down: Game of Thrones was 63.5 hours worth of TV, so even if you hated the way it ended, that was still a sizable amount of entertainment you got from it.
With this in mind, even if you just absolutely cannot stand the new Star Wars movies you still have a wealth of other Star Wars content to tide you over. Not just the original trilogy or even the prequels, but an entire Extended Universe. Yeah, Disney may have cut them from being canon, but they still exist. Disney could run the franchise into the ground with awful direct-to-DVD Gungan adventures, but the original trilogy and everything else you loved would still be there, and your childhood memories of enjoying them would still be intact. Who cares if the new stuff sucks? There is still literally an entire universe of stories and characters and worlds you can lose yourself in regardless of the SJWs daring to let a girl fly the Millennium Falcon.
There is a prevailing sense of entitlement to the whole endeavor. These are fictional stories after all; they didn’t need to exist in the first place. We liked the originals, so now we expect to always like everything that comes from it. We demand that anything else done with this world be to our standards, or else the whole thing was for naught. And that may be the real reason why there has been so much anger about the new Star Wars movies from that segment of CHUDs. With new movies and new characters being introduced from different filmmakers, Star Wars is being introduced to a whole new generation. A much more diverse generation. And bringing new fans into the mix means the things that appeal to them may not be the same things that appealed to you. It means that the stories being told may end up speaking to a sensibility that isn’t necessarily yours.
That is the underlying complaint when you hear people talk about a movie betraying the “fans” or how it should be for the “fans.” It is a selfish reading of fandom that treats it like a monolith, and substitutes your own preferences as the default setting. The anger in the Star Wars fandom comes from a sense that it is no longer “theirs,” but this assumes a direct ownership that never existed. They identified with it to such a degree that they cannot accept that other fans may not share their exact sensibilities. They do not want to share because that means someone else might disagree. And if someone disagrees, they could argue for something different. It doesn’t matter if that something different is better or worse, or that it doesn’t change the original thing you liked, because now your opinion is no longer the only one that matters.
So if I end up hating Rise of Skywalker? If I find myself let down by the ending of the saga? It would be disappointing for sure, but it would not negate the pretty much literal lifetime of joy Star Wars has brought me. I will still love Star Wars, because despite the tint of nostalgia it has never been perfect, and that never stopped me growing up. I will keep losing myself in the parts of its sprawling universe I like and avoid the aspects I don’t.
And most importantly, I will keep being a fan of the things I actually enjoy.