Star Wars Fans Are Cranky. But Star Wars Fanfic Writers Are Having A Blast

For three blissful weeks, Star Wars: Zero Company was poised to deliver me from my worst fears about the franchise. I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars fan for 20 years, but the spark that fueled my fire at age 10 has long since dimmed. Sometimes I can’t even remember what about this saga captivated me in the first place. At best, I’ve been ambivalent to Star Wars; at worst, outright antagonistic. But this tactical role-playing game, of all things, offered me a path back to a wonder I haven’t felt since my early days as a fan, back when Star Wars lived as much in my own imagination — maybe even more — as it did in George Lucas’.

I’ve written and read countless fan fiction about the Clone Wars era, and the second I booted up Zero Company, I projected as much of it into the game as I could. I spent hours in the character creator bringing my OCs (“original characters”) to life: Whoever you create, you have the option to recruit them into your squad later on, and you’d better believe I conscripted a small army of my own glup shittos when the time came. I pored over every conceivable facial preset until I got spots in my eyes. I meticulously crafted my character’s backstory based on the trove of costume options at my fingertips. I played mission after mission for days — after work and into the late night, on weekends, on my lunch break — pouring my own canon into the pockets of this world. It felt about as exhilarating as stumbling onto my first “what if?” one-shot on LiveJournal, which taught me at a laughably young age that Star Wars is totally customizable if you think about it hard enough.

Zero Company reminded me of the hours I’ve spent crafting full-on retellings of Star Wars stories I just didn’t feel personally satisfied with: Rogue One and the fact that (spoiler alert) they literally all die at the end, the sequels and their neglect of characters like Finn and Jannah, et al. Until, of course, the inevitable happened: The game got too hard; it forced my character into a storyline I didn’t personally feel was right for her. At that point, I remembered that parts of this saga are fixtures in time no matter how many AUs (short for “alternate universes”) I anonymously publish. And that maybe, if I don’t like those canon events, I probably don’t like Star Wars at all.

This prospect is harrowing given the amount of hours I’ve logged affirming my ostensible love for the franchise. Would a person who hates Star Wars spend so much money on figures, on vintage memorabilia, on trips to Galaxy’s Edge that begin and end with wistful tears? Would a Star Wars hater throw on Attack of the Clones at the end of a very bad day to cheer themselves up? …Maybe, yeah — at least, according to writer Adam Summers, who penned a somewhat satirical-yet-painfully-accurate treatise on fandom hypocrisies back in 2005.

“Star Wars fans hate Star Wars,” Summers argued. “We hate the fact that George Lucas got it wrong from the beginning, creating incest between Luke and Leia. We hate the fact that he wrenched Return of the Jedi off of Kashyyyk and set it on Endor with those tiny, furry Hobbit b*tches he called ‘Ewoks’ … We despise the entire existence of literally half of the Star Wars movies, blaming George Lucas’ greed and flawed ‘vision’ for everything.”

It’s been decades since Summers fired this shot across the bow, but it’s never been truer about the fandom. We’re spoiled. We complain and nitpick, and we always have and likely always will. So why do we stay within a franchise that makes us so miserable?

Summers’ theory: Fans never fell out of love with the idea of Star Wars. Perhaps that’s why we think we can tell this story better than Lucas and the proteges selected to carry the torch, be it Timothy Zahn or Dave Filoni or J.J. Abrams or, soon (again), Jon Watts. Maybe that’s why a lot of us actually have.

Fix it, Obi-Wan Kenobi

It’s not an exact science, but fix-it fiction has become a perfect compromise for fans in desperate need of a coping device. If you’ve never heard of such a phenomenon, journalist Rachel Leishman describes it succinctly. “Imagine you’re watching something that you really love, like a movie or a TV show, but you don’t like the ending, or [which] couple ends up together,” she tells Inverse. “We can write our own stories and allow characters that you love to get a different [ending] — whatever you want.”

Don’t like how Padmé essentially dies of heartbreak in Revenge of the Sith? Dive into an AU in which our good senator survives Vader’s Force-choke but becomes his reluctant Sith consort. Or one in which she fakes her death and spearheads the Rebel Alliance with her children, Luke and Leia, by her side. Or another in which Anakin falls to the dark side but immediately turns back to the light, pledging to somehow win Padmé back. Everybody’s got the primal wound that turned them off of a Star Wars story — Padmé’s plight is mine, if you couldn’t tell — but there are nearly 50 years’ worth of what-ifs waiting to soothe anyone’s biggest grievances.

While it’s true Star Trek fans go into the fanfic game a decade ahead, Star Wars fans have been exploring just as many strange new worlds — and rewriting the ones Lucas created — since 1977. The three-year wait between Star Wars and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, downright demanded fans make up their own stories to pass the time. Kids played with their vast library of action figures and toys and devised new adventures. They played RPGs and speculated endlessly about how the saga would come to an end. Though Empire more than met their expectations, Return of the Jedi really, really did not. Neither did Timothy Zahn’s extended universe of novels. Neither did the prequels. By then, though, fans had their own imaginations to fall back on: they were free to “fix” the story as long as it suited them.

What began with physical zines eventually migrated to online forums and sites dedicated entirely to fic. Fan fiction held many a Star Warrior down through a decade-long drought after Revenge of the Sith; when The Force Awakens hit theaters in 2015, the amount of Star Wars stories on sites like Archive of Our Own doubled, according to The Atlantic. The bulk of them capitalized on the romantic potential between characters like John Boyega’s Finn and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron — but you can’t talk about the fan fiction boom without the infamous romantic pairing (or “ship”) that launched a thousand fics: Reylo.

A powerful tool, thirst is

A portmanteau for the loaded “will they, won’t they” between the scrappy Rey Skywalker and the wayward Kylo Ren (fka Ben Solo), Reylo gave the franchise a new life few could have ever dreamed of. Their every encounter in The Force Awakens smacked of toxicity and maybe, just maybe, some sexual tension — but like sharks catching a whiff of blood in the ocean, shippers of a certain persuasion immediately latched onto the latter.

“I started writing fan fiction pretty much as soon as I left the theater,” one author, Ricca, told The Atlantic. What began as a one-shot exploring the sensual potential of Rey and Kylo’s Force connection eventually snowballed into a 55-chapter saga that guessed where their paths would next cross after The Force Awakens. It also predicted quite a few story elements we’d eventually see in The Last Jedi — give or take, y’know, all the erotica that conflated intergalactic telepathy with phone sex.

It’s here that the disparities between what fans want to see and what Star Wars actually delivers feel the most pronounced. Lucas has always described the saga as a story made for children, and that stubborn commitment to his audience has its merits… but it also leaves a lot of potential on the table. Star Wars’ view of sex and sensuality is downright myopic: the former is basically just a means to have children and keep the Skywalker legacy alive, while the latter is hardly a blip on the franchise’s radar. (Solo: A Star Wars Story and Andor tried valiantly to defy that mandate, until they failed.)

Per Inverse’s own Ryan Britt, any intimacy, sexual or otherwise, in Star Wars “only occurs in the mind of the super-fan’s headcanon.” Maybe it takes a super-fan to read between the lines and pull on the threads that Lucas never seemed interested in, unspooling a far more interesting order of events along the way.

“There’s always been this quality to Star Wars, this sort of potential undercurrent of sexiness or horniness,” Kate Goldbeck — whose debut novel, You, Again, began as Reylo fan fiction — told Rolling Stone. “Reylo was the perfect storm… the way it was portrayed in the movie gave us just enough to go off of, but not quite enough that the story was [already] written.”

Reylo authors have taken off running with the crumbs they picked up in the sequels, and (much as it pains me to admit, as a veteran of sequels-era social media) delivered fic after fic with endings far better than the slapdash kiss-and-croak Rey and Kylo got in The Rise of Skywalker. This doesn’t mean that every Star Wars story could be magically fixed with a generous helping of smut... but it doesn’t always hurt. For years now, the top Star Wars fic on AO3 has been “Rough Day,” a self-insert fic set between seasons of The Mandalorian that — while not a fix-it fic in the most literal sense — vastly improves the title character’s scant personality with the help of an impossibly steamy relationship.

A good fic has done more for Din Djarin than three seasons of television and a ho-hum blockbuster outing ever could. The same goes for another ill-fated Star Wars story set far earlier in the franchise timeline: The Acolyte. If the sequels tiptoed around their own eroticism, the series dove in headfirst with the rise of the Stranger, a sexy villain who also happened to be the very first Knight of Ren. His hunt for an apprentice in the lapsed Jedi padawan Osha delivered the outright charge that Reylos and Mando-thirsters had to write into existence. Finally, characters projecting desire and performing seduction without withering, wooden dialogue! Osha’s tryst with the Stranger breathed hot, insistent life into corners of the saga that had long gone dormant; that creator Leslye Headland never got the chance to explore that seduction with another season of the show is one of Lucasfilm’s most galling choices.

Kat, a 31-year-old museum worker, is one of countless fans left jaded by The Acolyte’s cancellation. “It found its main audience with women who liked that there was this corruption [angle with] hints at romance,” she tells Inverse. “It was the first time in a really long time that I felt a Star Wars story was actually giving us something new and interesting to play with… I wanted to see what other wild things they would try.”

Alas, that wasn’t to be, which prompted Kat to continue the story on her own terms. Her fix-it fic, “The Power of Two,” is essentially the second season we never got — hell, maybe a little better than anything Disney might have let slide.

“In my personal fiction writing, I write gothic novels, and the more I wrote this fic, the more I leaned into the classic gothic elements of The Acolyte,” Kat continues. “The way love gets warped and twisted, the dark feelings that rot within us… I started having a lot of fun with that, and plan to push it farther than Disney ever would have let it go. So maybe this is for the best.”

You can find that sentiment reflected in so many fix-it fics. The author of “Each of Us Wears A Shadow,” a sprawling story that currently clocks in at over 200,000 words, introduced their fic by addressing “a state of bitterness” that’s followed them since The Acolyte was cancelled. “I figured I could try to channel that bitterness into a creative outlet,” they wrote in their author’s note. “I dedicate this fic to those who salvage what others have forsaken. The story is ours now.”

The dark side of the coin

The instinct to own your own slice of the Star Wars galaxy has never felt more justified than it does now, with Lucasfilm in a creative flux and the saga more stagnant than ever. Still, the realm of fix-it fic is just one outlet for a fandom that’s otherwise grown replete and smug off its own entitlement. Cast your gaze to other corners of the internet, and you’ll find hordes of manbabies on very different missions to rewrite history. YouTubers like Star Wars Theory might have started their careers with harmless lore videos and wholesome(ish) rewritings of the prequels, but a very different kind of bitterness has long reached critical mass.

Think of this as the next evolution of Gamergate: Their fix-it fic looks more like targeted ragebaiting and AI-generated “fan films” that perpetuate the same tired plot points. (Who knew the concept of Mace Windu surviving his battle with Chancellor Palpatine could be so utterly boring?) As a fan who feels more frustration than interest in the latest Star Wars story, who’s dabbled in her own revising, that sense of ownership terrifies me. How do I know I won’t slip down the same dark path? These AI films rack up millions of views; my dad seems to rave about a new one every other week. These are the stories he — a loyal fan since 1977 — gravitates to now. He’ll watch whatever Lucasfilm drops on Disney+, but they don’t bring that spark to his eyes like any of the countless videos conceived to “fix” Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I can see the justification for it all forming in my mind’s eye. The stewards of the saga have been writing their own fan fiction anyway. At least ours is worth the emotional investment. At least we’re taking some power back, expressing our disapproval simply by turning our backs and doing our own thing. A study on the relationship between fic and Shakespeare (who technically wrote a bit of RPF himself) called fan fiction “the beginning of a new kind of criticism.” Maybe this instinct to rewrite the story is less about biting the hand and instead a nobler form of protest.

But where does that mutiny end? I imagine the fandom, already irrevocably splintered, breaking into two halves entirely. If our Star Wars stories are so much better than the canon we’re getting, what’s stopping us from curating the galaxy to our own needs and creating a new franchise in our heads? What’s stopping me from succumbing to my bitterness and joining the dark side?

For Leishman, the answer is love.

“Part of fan fiction that is so important is that there is an established love of the thing,” she tells Inverse. We “fix” these stories, ideally, because we care. We’re protective over these characters and their adventures, and some of us write fan fiction to prove that. Without love, “you’re just trying to put your own story out there,” and that kind of insincerity is hard to ignore.

That’s just one theory, but it’s one I want to believe in — albeit with a big asterisk. Deep down, I know I still love Star Wars; without fix-it fic, though, I’m not sure it can love me back in the way I need it to.