Fandom pt 3: Fandom is a creation, too
ICYMI
Hey, it’s me again. It wasn’t exactly my plan to take my time with this one, but as we are all witnessing now, life sometimes has something else in store for us than what we expect.
This is the third installment of a series exploring different facets of fandom. Don’t worry if you didn’t read the first two, but they’re there if you want to catch up: Part One, Part Two.
This one’s going to be about the different ways fanbases can activate, using the examples of Star Wars and Harry Potter. It also touches on generational divides and how fans can continue a story or try to thwart it.
There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get to it. Also, I couldn’t resist a few end notes, so when you see numbers in square brackets that’s what they are.
Chapter One: Star Wars
It became clear that George Lucas’ “Star Wars” was no longer his; it was ours. (Joel Eisenberg)
A new hope in a dark decade
I’m not going to explain what Star Wars is, but I will situate its emergence in a time and place. The late 70’s and early 80’s were a weird, scary time to grow up in America. The Cold War was well underway and many of us were practicing nuclear sheltering drills at school (ok, they were called tornado drills where I grew up, but we all knew. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail, right?). It was a decade of energy crisis triggered by geopolitical happenings, which led to recession.
Adults were freaking out about the price of gas and goods (caused by hyperinflation) and interest rates that were getting out of control - the average interest rate for a 30 year fixed mortgage reached almost 17% [1] in 1981 (currently, it’s about 3%). And President Nixon… well, you’ve probably heard.
So the economy sucked, we had no confidence in our political leadership, and thought we would all die in a nuclear holocaust - so why care at all? Into this sense of hopelessness came Star Wars, originally released in 1977. For an entire generation who were growing up through a pretty dark decade, it fulfilled a sense of yearning for adventure if you grew up in the middle of nowhere in a very ordinary, Earth-bound life. The story of its hero, Luke Skywalker, would continue over a trilogy of movies and end with 1983’s Return of the Jedi.
Personally, I connected deeply with Skywalker’s sense of restlessness and would go on to spend most of my adolescence dreaming of how I’d escape my suburban existence. In a way, maybe the journeys I’d take to places through music (the London of punk; the New York City of Lou Reed and Public Enemy; the rural south of R.E.M) were all tied to that world of possibility mirrored in Star Wars.
A tough act to follow
The initial trilogy was a huge success that changed movies forever. Its creator, George Lucas, had hinted that it was intended as part of a larger arc of nine movies, but the idea never seemed to go anywhere - until the mid 90’s, when he announced that the next trilogy of movies in the saga were being developed. They would form a prequel to the events we had known and loved.
It was a lot to live up to and several directors declined the opportunity to direct. It became clear why, when the first prequel (directed by Lucas himself) came out in 1999. The anticipation was crazy, especially for those of us who grew up with the original Star Wars.
That anticipation created huge profits - the film is still one of the highest grossing Star Wars movies of all time - but it also created a backlash. Part of the negative reaction is understandable - watching now, I find it hard to stay engaged with its leaden pacing and awful dialogue. It feels like only the special effects have aged particularly well. But at the time, a lot of the backlash centered around a character known as Jar Jar Binks, a representative of the humanoid amphibious species called the Gungan.
In his debut, Binks is a floppy, clumsy, sidekick who mostly provides a kind of desperate comic relief. According to Lucas, he was directly based on the hapless Disney dog, Goofy. Unfortunately, he was also given an accent that reminded a lot of people of Jamaican patois.
Lucas was accused of pandering, and worse. One way in which the prequel does not really age well is that it can come off as childish rather than child-friendly. I think it has to do with Lucas having lost touch with the way kids were. It didn’t really help the matter, but Lucas explained the movies were always pitched towards children:
The movies are for children but [some fans] don't want to admit that. In the first film they absolutely hated R2 and C3-PO. In the second film they didn't like Yoda and in the third one they hated the Ewoks... and now Jar Jar is getting accused of the same thing.
These fans’ reaction though, was out of hand. The guy who built Star Wars was now a target for being out of step with some of his fans’ idea of what it was. “George Lucas Raped My Childhood” (yup) became a thing. These fans’ vitriol caused the actor who played Binks, Ahmed Best, to consider suicide in an age before social media existed. That’s how toxic it was.
An ugly ending
That Best is Black and Binks is so obviously encoded as non-white invites a more problematic reading [2], which is underscored by the reaction to the latest trilogy of movies, which were released between 2015-2019 after Disney acquired rights to the whole Star Wars franchise.
This final trilogy had a diverse cast, including the actors playing the three main protagonists: Daisy Ridley as the saga’s (female) Skywalker-esque moral center, John Boyega (a Black British born actor of Nigerian descent born as John Adedayo Bamidele Adegboyega) as a Stormtrooper turned good, and Oscar Isaac (a French-Guatemalan actor who grew up in the US and was born as Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada) as an impetuous ace pilot. And not least, Kelly Marie Tran (a female Vietnamese American actor who was given an American name at birth and is also known as Trần Loan) as a mechanic who gains a more prominent role in the Resistance.
I bet you know where this is going - these casting choices did not play well with everyone. A minority of Star Wars fans had strong opinions and voiced them in awful ways that are probably familiar to anyone who knows the depths of darkness of which the modern internet is capable. Tran deleted her Instagram history and retired from the platform while some of the trilogy’s stars deleted their accounts in solidarity. I don’t have the heart to go into the details, but Joel Eisenberg wrote a sobering summary of those events in the second half of a two-part recounting of Star Wars’ toxic fandom.
A more hopeful note
Out of this ugliness came cause for hope. John Boyega took an impromptu public stand at a Black Lives Matter rally last year (even though he’s legitimately concerned he may have harmed his career.
Kelly Marie Tran spoke out against harassment, presaging the way in which other Asian Americans have shared their experiences recently. And with her starring turn in last year’s Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, became that storied studio’s first Southeast Asian princess.
While some groups of online fans have shown themselves to not only be toxic and abusive - others rally together for the greater good. Which brings us to…
Chapter Two: Harry Potter
The Harry Potter Alliance turns fans into heroes. We use the power of story and popular culture to make activism accessible and sustainable. Through experiential training and real life campaigns, we develop compassionate, skillful leaders who learn to approach our world’s problems with joy, creativity, and commitment to equity. (The Harry Potter Alliance Mission Statement)
While there are several examples of what is now called fan activism, the ones that stand out to me relate to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter - both the series of novels (1997-2007) and its subsequent film adaptations (2001-2011).
Like Star Wars, Harry Potter enjoyed a huge commercial success - if you might recall, there was a hope that the best-selling novels might just keep books alive for children in a time when that seemed very much in doubt. That seems a little dubious, but it turns out the world Rowling built may have had a more profound and enduring effect.
A very brief history of fan activism
Histories of fan activism often cite the significance of efforts by fans of the original Star Trek TV show, who mobilized to prevent it from cancellation in 1969. While their efforts were only temporarily successful, they gave the science fiction community a cause to rally around and also a playbook for activation in the future. Fans of both the SF and fantasy genres have used a similar approach to support embattled shows and advocate for causes related to LBGTQ and racial representation on shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The Harry Potter fanbase made use of these techniques in response to efforts by the religious right to ban the novels from schools and public libraries. It also came in useful when defending themselves from Warner Brothers, the films’ studio, who issued takedown notices to fan sites for alleged violation of intellectual property. A group mobilized against these efforts, Defense Against Dark Arts (named after a wizarding class in the series), ultimately helped work with WB to update their own policies for handling fan participation [3].
This latter part feels significant because the current form of the Internet enabled a level of fan participation that franchises were ill-suited to cope with. Harry Potter’s fans helped pioneer the use of blogs and podcasts, and there is an inextricable link between Harry Potter’s fandom and the digital toolbox available to its fans. It’s worth noting here that the timing of the Harry Potter phenomenon landed squarely in the childhood for basically the entire millennial generation.
Putting fans at the center
In terms of using concepts from Harry Potter to effect real-world change, Defense Against Dark Arts was only the beginning. In 2005, a comedian named Andrew Slack co-founded an organization called the Harry Potter Alliance (now known as Fandom Forward, partly in recognition that the group’s efforts had not been limited to the Potter universe). Early activities including collecting donations for Amnesty International (where Rowling previously worked) at live shows by “wizard rock” band Harry and the Potters, partnering with Walmart Watch on a series of videos educating viewers on Walmart’s labor practices (the series’ villain, Lord Voldemort, appears as “Lord Waldemart”), and various campaigns to take a stand against genocide in Darfur.
The model for Fandom Forward is simple - it maps real world causes to fictional universes with large followings, and uses that connection to drive tangible action by its members, usually for causes linked to human rights and social justice that are aligned with the themes of the source material. For instance, an ongoing book drive (called Accio Books!, after a summoning spell in Harry Potter) has led to the donation of 400,000 books to those in need to date.
Fandom Forward currently has chapters in 30 countries and its membership is reported to have reached 100,000. As with the Walmart campaign, they are not afraid to leverage characters, locations, and other assets from the world of Harry Potter and other popular culture assets to further their causes.
Fandom Forward capitalizes on what has become an almost universal facet of fan culture - it’s grounded in someone’s creation but lives independently from it. It’s why there was such a disconnect between the original Star Wars trilogy and the way George Lucas (and later, Disney) continued the story - along the way, its fans had already gone off on their own.
That separation is probably a good thing for Harry Potter, given the statements Rowling has been making about transgender people. But generally, when done well, it works to everyone’s advantage - the studio benefits from positive publicity, and Fandom Forward’s model allows it to capitalize on the publicity machinery that goes along with large franchises - grabbing media attention with well-timed actions coinciding with movie releases and such.
As Henry Jenkins wrote in “‘Cultural acupuncture’: Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance,” explaining the “cultural acupuncture” metaphor that Slack uses:
Recognizing that the news media was more apt to cover the launch of the next Harry Potter film than the genocide in Darfur, Slack saw the HPA as a way to identify key cultural pressure points, thus redirecting energy toward real-world problems. Pinning political and social causes to Harry Potter works because this content world has a large following, is familiar to an even larger number of people, has its own built-in mechanisms for generating publicity, and is apt to attract many subsequent waves of media interest.
Harry Potter constitutes a form of cultural currency that can carry the group's messages to many who would not otherwise hear them and that channels our emotional investments. Fans' previous attempts to tap the power of source material have been primarily focused on the source's power as a shared reference point within the fan community itself, whereas Slack's notion of cultural acupuncture also recognizes and seeks to deploy the larger public's investments in these popular media to get under people's skin and prod them to political action.
Chapter 3: Writing your own chapter
It’s striking to me, the difference between the negative fan response to the later Star Wars films and how the Harry Potter franchise has managed to extend ideas from the books / films into the real world (in the words of Fandom Forward, “turning fans into heroes”).
I think part of this is generational and linked to the passage of time between the original Star Wars trilogy and its subsequent films - time enough for kids to grow up, find the world hasn’t fulfilled their expectations, or otherwise become less receptive to other perspectives. As timeless as the Star Wars story is, the story of adults losing touch is even more so.
But I think quite a bit more has to do with the enhanced ability for young people to make an impact now - the speed by which a call to action can go out and find a response that feeds back into the call. This most certainly is enabled by the speed of the Internet and specifically the ability of social media to share, in almost real time, how others are joining in - an early example being the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was a viral meme, but also raised $220m for ALS research in 2014.
I contrast this with something like recycling - you know that it’s the right thing to do, but do you know what difference it’s making, really? (spoiler alert: probably not as much as you think)
That’s not to say DIY fan culture didn’t exist or wasn’t effective beforehand. I think back to the punk and zine culture of the 80’s and early 90’s - there were ways to connect with one another, but it was slow and you had to really go out of your way. So the impact was real but limited.
It reminds me of a moment in The Rise of Skywalker, the ninth and final episode of what is now known as the Skywalker Saga, the conclusion to that story that began in 1977 - and one for which many of us had waited 42 years. Up against a new authoritarian threat called the First Order, the Resistance is greatly weakened and fearful their call for help will go unheeded. Poe Dameron tries to rally the leaders’ morale:
We’ve got friends out there. They’ll come if they know there’s hope. They will. The First Order wins by making us think we’re alone.
To me the power of fandom is it lets you know that you’re not alone. Which gives us fans powers we couldn’t dream of. It gives us the chutzpah to try and reshape someone else’s world into what we think it should be, and the impetus to be inspired by someone else’s world to try and reshape ours.
Some end notes
[1] A 17% interest rate is insane. Let’s say you bought a house for the median price that year with a standard deposit and took a mortgage for the balance - $80,000. By the time you paid it off, you would have paid $400,000 - with more than 3x times the loan amount in interest alone (and probably about $1 million today, adjusted for inflation with some loose calculation). As out of reach as home ownership might feel now, I have no idea how people bought houses back then.
[2] To me, the whole Jar Jar Binks thing is a great demonstration of how the Star Wars universe is entangled with colonialist notions of derring-do and adventure that it inherited from the serials (comics, TV shows, etc) - the stories that inspired Lucas and are embedded in its DNA. As a side note, the streaming-only show The Mandalorian takes place after the events of Return of the Jedi and presents an interesting take on the good vs evil dichotomy from the franchise films by re-centering its narrative on the denizens of the “Outer Rim,” the outer space equivalent to the Wild West that gives the series its episodic “space western” feel. The victorious New Republic are presented as a mostly disinterested colonial force more interested in getting rid of the remains of the Empire (in an effort similar to de-Nazification) than actual governing of “uncivilized” planets.
[3] In a way, the fans’ ability to carry a franchise’s story forward is an extension of a larger question of rights holders. An example is with Star Wars - after Disney acquired its rights, they made broad moves to establish which previous Star Wars stories were canonical, resulting in a large part of the previous licensed storytelling becoming rendered unofficial - or dare I say, apocryphal?
More reading
Emma Madden wrote an excellent piece for The Ringer about fan activism making real world change and about the battles within specific fan culture of who the “real fans” are.
There are a couple of pieces about how the Parkland activists were inspired by Harry Potter, specifically how students banded together to fight for their future in the face of adult bureaucracy, incompetency, and indifference. One was by Lisa Miller for The Cut, another by Rachel Sklar for CNN.
Your musical moment of zen
Pavement, “The Unseen Power of a Picket Fence” (1993) - I guess I wasn’t the only person to be at least slightly enthralled by R.E.M., as evidenced by this love letter to the band.