Three Reasons The Fandom Menace Played Themselves With ‘The Acolyte’ Cancellation

The “f— around and find out” energy of 2024 has entered the Star Wars fandom.

After an explosive season that challenged fans’ opinions about the Jedi and the Dark Side., Disney canceled The Acolyte, Lucasfilm’s latest Star Wars series.

What Disney and Lucasfilm probably didn’t expect, however, was the onslaught of fans, the stars of the series, and even other notables like Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller and Marvel star Simu Liu chiming in on their heartbreak over Disney’s decision. Several petition campaigns are happening, with the largest garnering over 40,000 signatures as of this post. On top of that, many writers have published articles on:

• ScreenRant (several times, actually)
• Forbes (also several times, including this article asserting the series was solely canceled for financial reasons, an assertion I don’t wholeheartedly agree with)
• IndieWire (more than once)
• Rolling Stone
• The Mary Sue

There are other outlets writing stories about how Disney’s decision could cost the studio in the long run regarding fan loyalty and creative output.

I’m firmly in the #SaveTheAcolyte camp because I liked the show. Just as necessary, I saw how the series expanded Star Wars to include all us fans, not just those who look like Luke Skywalker. With The Acolyte dead (for now, at least), the toxic group of fans who hate-bombed the series–described by others as “the fandom menace”–have blocked themselves from a chance to grow, not just as Star Wars fans but as people who have to share the world with the people the characters of The Acolyte represent.

Here are three reasons why the fandom menace has shot itself in the foot by trying to destroy The Acolyte.

1. It robs toxic fans of a chance to question their worldview

Leslye Headland is the first queer creator to helm a Star Wars property, and on the surface, her goals with the series are very straightforward (forgive the pun). She told Vulture she wanted to write a story that explored the dynamics of father and daughter after her real-life relationship with her father.

“My dad died in September. As we moved forward with the story, I got sucked into my own feelings about his illness and our history together,” she said, as reported by ComicBasics. “[Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy] said, ‘George [Lucas] wrote about his father. You need to write about your sister. You need to write about your father.’ Luke felt betrayed by his father in the way that George didn’t want to take over his father’s hardware store. My father made so many promises to me, and I felt like I failed because I couldn’t live up to those expectations. Of course I’m going to lean toward the other side, the dark side, the otherness. That system has its own societal expectations, but I’m more comfortable there than when I was trying to live up to what you wanted for me.”

It’s a story that Star Wars fans should have been able to embrace since so much of the franchise’s lore is about the sins of the father passing down to the offspring and what the offspring do with those personal demons. But there’s another aspect to Headland’s worldview. Despite Headland telling The Hollywood Reporter that she didn’t set out to create a “capital Q” queer show, she still did provide Star Wars the most queer series yet, from queer actors (Amandla Stenberg, who is nonbinary and gay, Charlie Barnett, who is gay, and Rebecca Henderson, who is Headland’s wife) to queer characters, queer family structures and a non-male gaze that resonated with almost everyone who loves attractive men (we have not had a Sith lord portrayed like how Manny Jacinto portrayed his character. His Sith lord was simultaneously virile, dangerous, sensitive, and, even after committing atrocities, didn’t feel like a creep you’d have to guard your drink around).

Storytelling-wise, The Acolyte‘s biggest positive was that it challenged viewers’ worldview of the Jedi and the Sith. As the film The Last Jedi tried to do, The Acolyte proposed that the Jedi aren’t as infallible as has been portrayed, especially in light of how rosy nostalgia has smoothed over the organization’s imperial leanings.

Consequently, the Sith might include Darth Vader, but, like Vader himself, the Sith are a collection of people harmed by the Jedi’s strict, impossible dedication to living above human emotions. The Jedi’s decision to erase their feelings is also their fatal flaw- by not embracing love, anger, desire, and other heavy emotions, the Jedi accidentally created the Sith itself by casting out those who couldn’t separate themselves from their humanity.

Even within the Jedi, practitioners who inevitably encounter their own emotions are not equipped to deal with them, and the masters they seek for help also leave them in a lurch because they have no idea how to counsel what they feel shouldn’t exist.

However, like with the reception for The Last Jedi, a particular sect of fans felt threatened by the alternative perspective The Acolyte offered. Instead of allowing the show to open their eyes to another, more complex way of looking at the Jedi, they defaulted to how they’re used to seeing the Jedi–as forever righteous.

Accepting others can be either scary or enlightening

There can be fear in being presented with new knowledge about the world, especially if that knowledge threatens everything you thought you knew. But there can also be liberation in learning. You can open yourself up to other perspectives, and you might integrate some of those perspectives into your new worldview.

The Acolyte‘s fandom response presents a microcosm of how our fear of the unknown can limit our understanding of others and ourselves. Watching a show or a film about how the other side lives doesn’t invalidate our experiences. Instead, entertainment that seeks to cause discussion implores us to think more critically about how we view the systems around us and how those systems affect our lives. In The Acolyte‘s case, the show wanted to challenge how viewers thought about power–if the saying “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is true, then why does it not apply to the Jedi, who did have absolute power in the High Republic? How could their methods, such as enlisting child soldiers under the guise of training younglings in the Jedi arts, be above critique, especially since the Empire is (rightly) labeled corrupt for doing the same thing?

These questions about power and corruption are safe to explore in a world like Star Wars because there are no repercussions in having these types of arguments since everything’s fake. But it also serves as practice for discussions about the real systems governing our lives. Are the people and organizations we believe to be infallible actually above reproach? Are we utilizing double standards in certain situations? Asking these questions is media literacy in action–the ability to dissect and analyze the topics from a piece of content and discuss the perspectives raised from that content.

Through media literacy, we can become more aware of the world. We can grow the muscle to consume other people’s perspectives and decide what fits within or expands our worldview. In a sense, we become more enlightened as we validate other perspectives. In other words, media literacy can bring people together and validate our experiences as we listen with open ears and hearts. You don’t have to agree with someone else, but you can allow yourself to listen.

By choosing not to listen, fans intent on destroying The Acolyte rob themselves of the chance to practice creating a tolerant community of conflicting ideals. These fans–which, unfortunately, are generally white and male–are cashing in on the divisiveness that has ruled social media in the past decade, spearheaded by small men (including Donald Trump) who see differences of any type, including difference of thought, as a threat to their illusion of power. However, by waging war against anything different, they have robbed themselves of understanding Headland’s life story.

As The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “[E]ver since Star Wars: The Force Awakens refocused the episodic film franchise on Daisy Ridley’s female Jedi Rey, scrutinizing Star Wars for any hint of progressivism has become an online cottage industry for combative fans who yearn for the type of representation that was pro forma in the 1970s and ’80s. Inevitably, this contingent of the audience has eagerly put The Acolyte in the crosshairs and made a meal out of the aforementioned junket interaction. ‘Honestly, I feel sad that people would think that if something were gay, that that would be bad,’ Headland says. ‘It makes me feel sad that a bunch of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”

Star Wars could showcase other stories like Headland’s, but only if the audience is ready to hear something other than race-based nostalgia.

2. It keeps them from finding common humanity with others who don’t look like them

The series positioned people of color, queer people, and women at the center of a Star Wars story. Some might argue that Rogue One and Andor centered on a Latinx character, which is true – we can’t overlook Diego Luna’s portrayal as the title character when talking about people of color in Star Wars. However, Luna is more accepted than Oscar Isaac because, by optics alone, Luna appears more Eurocentric than Isaac. On top of that, Isaac, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley were supposed to lead the future of Star Wars, a future that was supposed to be more inclusive for all fans. But for some white male fans, that inclusivity felt like their Star Wars, which had white men at its center, was going away.

The original trilogy had Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher. But while Leia is a strong protagonist in her own right, some fans still have the tendency to connect her strength to her proximity to the two men in her life, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Also, despite the fact that she could helm her own film, Star Wars is still seen as Luke’s hero’s journey. Rey, on the other hand, had no connection to anyone, making her even more powerful as female representation in Star Wars. Rey’s power was also a threat, so much so that she was written to become an honorary Skywalker, connecting her to Luke, and weirdly romantically linked to Kylo Ren, connecting her to Han. The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t a film interested in expanding Rey’s story as much as it was placating fans who felt like her worth as a female character only mattered if she was defined by powerful men.

The Acolyte was the first Star Wars story showing what life was like outside of the Skywalker Saga, and it utilized that privilege by giving us a world led by women–including queer women and queer women of color. Men of color also have more say on either side of the Force. For the first time, these people’s stories became part of the iconic galaxy far, far away. But, as shown by The Last Jedi, change is seen as a threat, especially if that change can be stereotyped as “woke.”

There’s nothing “woke” about wanting to see someone who looks like you have adventures in space. It’s not an area meant to be solely occupied by white men. Yet, that’s what the glory days of Star Wars have come to represent in the minds of these fans. Even those who oppose the fandom menace recognize that the nostalgia of Star Wars has been hijacked to become shorthand for days when white men were at the center of the universe.

Gatekeeping will shrink the fandom, making it worse

Northeastern University’s Northeastern Global News spoke with Steve Granelli, the university’s associate teaching professor of communication studies. Granelli said that the “anti-woke” backlash will only harm the franchise in the future.

“There’s a section of the fanbase that is limiting the types of stories that are told and the types of characters that the wider fanbase is going to have access to, and I don’t think that bodes well for the [Star Wars] franchise moving forward,” he said.

Granelli’s fellow associate communication studies professor, Joseph Reagle, also said the fandom’s sense of ownership can lead to fans defining who can be a part of the group.

“There’s a sense that ‘These cultural properties are mine. It’s a big part of my identity, and I’m going to control who’s good enough and the access,” Reagle said. “It can become very, very possessive.”

The idea of “who’s good enough” is at the root of the gatekeeping. As we’ve seen in many other fandoms before now, particularly those with white characters at the center, the gatekeeping always revolves around race and gender. Game of Thrones, as did some Marvel properties like Captain Marvel, had this issue. Lord of the Rings has also faced this as it embarks on its second season of The Rings of Power. If a fandom feels like it is a safe space–particularly a safe white space–then fans from different racial and cultural backgrounds are immediately seen as fake fans, not good enough, or mere tokens. Somehow, according to these “fans,” stories from people different from them aren’t worthy enough to be shown to the masses.

Even worse, The Acolyte‘s cancellation doesn’t mean the gatekeeping is just within the fandom. Now, even creators are gatekept, and if someone like Headland isn’t allowed to tell her story, then why would other creators from other backgrounds want to give Disney their best ideas, time, and energy?

As Granelli said, “If you are a young talented screenwriter or filmmaker who grew up a huge Star Wars [fan] and now you have an original idea that takes place in that world, are you going to want to go to Disney? Does that mean we’re going to get boring storytelling?”

That is a real possibility because stories only told from one point of view get boring. We’ve seen Luke, Leia, and Han ad nauseam We’ve seen white male Jedi and white male Sith battle each other for decades at this point. We’ve seen fights for “revolution” and “resistance” without the people who have resisted and fought in the real world at Star Wars‘ center. At this point within the Star Wars fandom, any talk of resistance and community is just cosplay by fans who don’t live by their beloved franchise’s ideals.

3. It traps them in an echo chamber that will only get smaller

IndieWire’s Christian Blauvelt wrote how tired he already is of Star Wars‘ future now that The Acolyte is canceled. In his view, there will be boring, executive-driven content spearheaded by more seasons of the live-action Star Wars: Rebels series Ahsoka (starring Rosario Dawson, who is insulated from fandom wars because they chose her to play the title character) and films like The Mandalorian and Grogu.

“Sigh. The Mandalorian and Grogu. The title alone peddles familiarity and banishes mystery,” he wrote. “This is a franchise that once had titles like The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, which self-consciously embraced pulp while leaving room for multiple interpretations. The Mandalorian and Grogu suggests simply that what you see is what you get[.]”

He also calls Grogu, the cute “baby Yoda” who quickly became an icon of the Disney+ Star Wars era, “the ultimate retrenchment into what’s safe, into what’s replicatable. A franchise interested more in pacification than storytelling. In preempting fan backlash rather than provoking real excitement.”

“Once Andor wraps, it’s easy to imagine the Marvelization of Star Wars will be complete: Each unchallenging new installment of Star Wars being just a building block towards something else. Puzzle pieces instead of stories.”

Indeed, the Marvelization of Star Wars– and of Disney+ as a whole- is one reason why Marvel is to blame for many of Disney’s bad decisions when building exciting properties. Marvel defied the odds when it was new, but now it’s become a tried-and-true business model that prioritizes banality and comic book geek obsessive-compulsiveness over something that can bring in more people, new people, different people. Marvel built its model in a very similar way to the system comic book companies adopted in the 90s–the focus became less on individual stories and more on overarching stories that were told across every title. It’s less about storytelling and more about stretching a story as much as possible to gross as much money as possible, only to repeat the process—puzzle pieces to a bigger, ultimately inconsequential end.

Is this the future Star Wars fans want? If the naysayers are intent on stopping anything new and inventive from finding its footing, it would seem so.

Diversity makes for interesting stories

A binary, black-and-white way of looking at Star Wars- and, by extension, other systems we claim belonging to—feels comforting and safe, and rejecting anything that could harm that feeling is seen as the right thing to do. Rejection, though, blocks original thought and new ways of thinking. It keeps people in an echo chamber that will get smaller and smaller as fans who oppose the binary get kicked out.

As the echo chamber becomes more sacred, there will be increased effort to protect it. That effort is a rejection of media literacy–the ability to learn from other perspectives and fight against stereotyping and misinformation–in action.

Echo chambers are more popular than ever, thanks to how algorithms learn what we like and give us more of the same. As Learning.com states, “feeds are tailored based on a person’s pauses or clicks, which leads to the singularization of content to a person’s pre-held worldview.” As a result, 75 percent of adults could not distinguish between real and fake news, and, in a Stanford study, 82 percent of middle schoolers could not tell if a story on a website was an actual news report or an ad labeled sponsored content.

The echo chambers within Star Wars function similarly to how Trump-backed organizations pumped fake news into social media. Several Star Wars YouTubers and bloggers–many of them white and male–pumped social media with bad-faith videos and articles about how the franchise had become “woke,” how it wasn’t tailoring itself to its self-proclaimed loyal fans. They attacked the show’s focus on women, people of color, queerness, and its female gaze. For example, a Reddit-esque gaming site named NeoGAF peddled the exaggeration that The Acolyte was introducing pronouns. In reality, mentioning pronouns is part of the jokey dialogue when Osha asks if the rodent alien Bazil is coming with her and Sol on their latest excursion. Osha doesn’t know what Bazil’s gender is. The site also credits That Park Place’s erroneous source stating the series would declare the Force–a genderless entity–as female. The series never gendered the Force. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of erroneous information.

Instead of seeking to understand what the show wanted to accomplish, they turned away undecideds (to use voting terminology) before those on the fence could even give the show a chance. What’s important is that while many did call out those bad-faith arguments, just as many trusted those videos because they were run by people who made their fame repping Star Wars to their viewers. On top of that, if you were already a fan who felt alienated by new Star Wars stories coming out, it was all too easy to believe The Acolyte was yet another thing “ruining” the franchise. With that as the toxic foundation for The Acolyte’s debut, no one can rightfully separate the fandom menace’s actions as part of why Disney cut its losses with the new series, especially since it was reportedly expensive to produce.

The frustration regarding The Acolyte‘s cancellation underscores what Yoda said: “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” By fearing The Acolyte as a harbinger of the end of white male dominance in Star Wars, the fandom menace weaponized their anger into hate. But that hate will lead to everyone suffering in the Star Wars fandom, including the fandom menace itself. We know this sect of the fandom loathes anything that isn’t centered around Luke. At one point, they even had some words for Grogu, even though he’s now accepted as if they had never seen him as the dumbing down of Star Wars. Another series hoping to expand on the Star Wars lore, The Skeleton Crew, is already receiving hate for showing what people coined “space suburbs.” No matter the new idea, the fandom menace will hate it. That kind of hate can choke the Star Wars fandom for years if Disney and Lucasfilm feel like they must listen to this loud minority.

The antidote—A movement to love validating and welcoming others into the fandom.

To me, the antidote to all of this would be for Disney and Lucasfilm to reverse their decision and renew The Acolyte after all. It would shut the fandom menace up and stop their belief that they resisted wokeness and won. It would give fans who resonated with The Acolyte renewed hope that Lucasfilm and Disney value them and the characters who represent them. Creators could feel more willing to give Lucasfilm a try.

But if the show isn’t renewed, I hope it can be a learning lesson for those at Disney and Lucasfilm. They didn’t expect to get this much backlash and website coverage. Hopefully, this is causing some of the studio brass to rethink how they approach fandoms, whose voices they amplify, and what projects they decide to greenlight or cancel.

To be clear, people don’t want The Acolyte renewed because they felt it was perfect. There are genuine arguments you could make about the pacing and some of the characterization. However, people wish to have the series renewed because of what it represents. It represents an inclusive Star Wars, a franchise that is willing to investigate itself, showcase new ideas, and welcome new people into the fold. These actions don’t just foster a fun fan community, but they also have reverberations into how we think about our place in society. While George Lucas is the creator, Star Wars is now much bigger than him–it’s part of our pop culture. In a way, it’s owned by all of us; therefore, we all deserve to see ourselves in it. There is no excuse for a group of fans to limit everyone else’s imagination about who can exist, whose stories matter, and who can participate in the giant sandbox of entertainment.