Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception 9781609386436, 1609386434

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From the House That George Builtto the House of Mouse • William Proctor and Richard McCulloch
Part I: Production and Promotion
1 Rebuilding Transmedia Star Wars: Strategies of Branding and Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away • Matthew Freeman
2 Transmedia Spectacle and Transownership Storytelling as Seen on TV: Star Wars from the Holiday Special to Rebels • Matt Hills
3 Rebuilding the Force, Brick by Brick: Canon Reformation and Brand Synergy in LEGO Star Wars • Lincoln Geraghty
4 Selling The Force Awakens: Fan Labor and Brand Management • Dan Hassler-Forest
5 Rebellions Are Built on Realism: The Aesthetics of Special and Visual Effects in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story • Joshua Wucher
6 Binding the Galaxy Together: Subjective, Collective, and Connective Memory in Star Wars • Colin B. Harvey
7 The Mandalorian Variation: Gender, Institutionality, and Discursive Constraints in Star Wars Rebels • Ross Garner
8 To Disney Infinity and Beyond: Star Wars Video Games Before and After the LucasArts Acquisition • Douglas Brown
9 From Star Tours to Galaxy’s Edge: Immersion, Transmediality, and “Haptic Fandom” in Disney’s Theme Parks • Rebecca Williams
Part II: Reception and Participation
10 “Always Two There Are”: Repetition, Originality, and The Force Awakens • Jonathan Gray
11 “Real Life Is Rubbish”: The Subcultural Branding and Inhabitable Appeal of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back • Emma Pett
12 Disney’s Princess Leia • Paul Booth
13 Rey, Mary Sue, and Phasma Too: Feminism and Fan Reponses to The Force Awakens Merchandise • Lorna Jowett
14 Jafar Wars: Fan-Created Paratexts in Alderaan Places • Bethan Jones
15 “You Die! You Know That, Right? You Don’t Come Back!”: Fans Negotiating Disney’s (De)Stabilized Star Wars Canon • Michelle Kent
16 Fear of a #BlackStormtrooper: Hashtag Publics, Canonical Fidelity, and the Star Wars Platonic • William Proctor
17 Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying: Reacting to the Force Awakens Trailer • Tom Phillips
18 “I Should Have Seen It Coming”: Spoiler Culture, Marathon Screenings, and Affective Responses to The Force Awakens • Bridget Kies
19 “Someone Is Someone’s Father!”: An Autoethnography of a Non–Star Wars Viewer • Lucy Bennett
20 Beyond Vader: The Franchise Reawakens • Mark J. P. Wolf
21 A New Hate? The War for Disney’s Star Wars • William Proctor
Contributors
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Disney’s Star Wars

Fandom & Culture Paul Booth and Katherine Larsen, series editors

disney’s star wars

William Proctor and Richard McCulloch editors

U n i v e r s i t y of Iowa Pr e s s  |  Iowa C i t y

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2019 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Text design by April Leidig No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-­f ree paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Proctor, William 1974– editor. | McCulloch, Richard, 1984– editor. Title: Disney’s Star Wars : forces of production, promotion, and reception / edited by William Proctor and Richard McCulloch. Description: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2019] | Series: Fandom & culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018049257 (print) | LCCN 2018059869 (ebook) | ISBN 978-­1-­60938-­644-­3 (ebook) | ISBN 978-­1-­60938-­643-­6 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Star Wars films— History and criticism. | Star Wars films—Marketing. | Fans (Persons) Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S695 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.S695 D57 2019 (print) | DDC 791.43/75—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049257

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction | Willia m Proctor and R ichar d McCulloch

From the House That George Built to the House of Mouse 1

Part I Production and Promotion 1 | Matthew Fr eeman

Rebuilding Transmedia Star Wars: Strategies of  Branding and Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away 23 2 | Matt Hills

Transmedia Spectacle and Transownership Storytelling as Seen on TV: Star Wars from the Holiday Special to Rebels 39 3 | Lincoln Ger aghty

Rebuilding the Force, Brick by Brick: Canon Reformation and Brand Synergy in LEGO Star Wars 53

4 | Dan Hassler-­F or est

Selling The Force Awakens: Fan Labor and Brand Management 68 5 | Joshua Wucher

Rebellions Are Built on Realism: The Aesthetics of Special and Visual Effects in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 82 6  |  Colin B. Harvey

Binding the Galaxy Together: Subjective, Collective, and Connective Memory in Star Wars 97 7 | Ross Gar ner

The Mandalorian Variation: Gender, Institutionality, and Discursive Constraints in Star Wars Rebels 109 8 | Douglas Brow n

To Disney Infinity and Beyond: Star Wars Video Games Before and After the LucasArts Acquisition 123 9 | R ebecca Willia ms

From Star Tours to Galaxy’s Edge: Immersion, Transmediality, and “Haptic Fandom” in Disney’s Theme Parks 136

Part Ii Reception and Participation 10 | Jonathan Gr ay

“Always Two There Are”: Repetition, Originality, and The Force Awakens 153 11 | Emma Pett

“Real Life Is Rubbish”: The Subcultural Branding and Inhabitable Appeal of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back 166 12 | Paul Booth

Disney’s Princess Leia 179 13 | Lor na Jowett

Rey, Mary Sue, and Phasma Too: Feminism and Fan Reponses to The Force Awakens Merchandise 192 14 | Bethan Jones

Jafar Wars: Fan-­Created Paratexts in Alderaan Places 206 15 | Michelle Kent

“You Die! You Know That, Right? You Don’t Come Back!”: Fans Negotiating Disney’s (De)Stabilized Star Wars Canon 221 16 | Willia m Proctor

Fear of a #BlackStormtrooper: Hashtag Publics, Canonical Fidelity, and the Star Wars Platonic 237

17 | Tom Phillips

Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying: Reacting to the Force Awakens Trailer 254 18 | Br idget Kies

“I Should Have Seen It Coming”: Spoiler Culture, Marathon Screenings, and Affective Responses to The Force Awakens 267 19 | Lucy Bennett

“Someone Is Someone’s Father!”: An Autoethnography of a Non–Star Wars Viewer 278 20  |  Mar k J. P. Wolf

Beyond Vader: The Franchise Reawakens 289 21 | Willia m Proctor

A New Hate? The War for Disney’s Star Wars 301 Contributors 323 Notes 329 Bibliography 333 Index 377

Acknowledgments

This book is the first major output of the World Star Wars Project—initially conceived and launched by William Proctor at the 2014 Fan Studies Network Conference, University of East Anglia. The project stemmed in the first instance from some earlier research conducted by Proctor in 2013 (and published in Participations), which sought to capture audience responses in the immediate aftermath of Disney’s Lucasfilm purchase. As a clearer picture of the scale of Disney’s plans came into view, however, it soon became obvious that understanding the significance of the Lucasfilm purchase represented a far more complex task than it may have first appeared. Audiences and fans were at first the primary focus for the project, but Disney’s Star Wars also has huge implications for the texts themselves (potentially affecting existing texts as well as forthcoming ones), technologies, and an ever-­expanding roster of industries, and so a broader spread of analyses was required. Each of these is constantly in a state of flux, moving along their own trajectories as well as being dialectically entwined with one another. The solution to handling and understanding this complexity, inevitably, was to recruit a team of rebels with a range of expertise, skills, and experience, all of whom we would like to thank for having helped lay the foundations for both this book project and the future of the larger project. McCulloch joined as project codirector, and our terrific primary research team was then assembled, consisting of Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin, Ruth Deller, Lincoln Geraghty, Bethan Jones, Tom Phillips, and Jason Scott. We also owe a great debt to our advisory board of Professors Martin Barker, Matt Hills, and Clarissa Smith for helping to shape the methodology for “The Force Re-­Awakens” online survey (stay tuned for publications on that subject). Martin was especially helpful, not only in the sense that we were hugely inspired by his enormously ambitious and impressive research projects on the audiences for The Lord of Rings and The Hobbit (projects that together gathered an incredible 60,000 responses), but also because his advice and support with the questionnaire design went above and beyond the call of duty. We would also like to sincerely thank the University of Iowa Press for their help at all stages of the book’s gestation, especially Catherine Cocks for her enthusiasm and useful comments in the early stages and Ranjit Arab for his support, encouragement, and diligence as we progressed toward manuscript

x | Acknowledgments

submission and publication. Thanks also go to our two readers, Dr. Rebecca Harrison and Dr. Kevin Wetmore, both of whom provided detailed and constructive feedback that helped us to tighten key arguments and ensure that the book’s overall quality was as high as it possibly could be. William is especially grateful to his partner, Dr. Ann Luce, for her continuing support and patience, especially when he tends to become obsessed while in the throes of research. Thanks also to Professors Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins for discussing and debating elements of the franchise’s new life under Disney— it’s a tough job sometimes. Special thanks and gratitude go to Professor Will Brooker for the many varied and impassioned conversations about Star Wars over a number of years. Richard would also like to mention some personalized acknowledgments, first to all of his current and former colleagues in Media, Journalism, and Film at the University of Huddersfield, but particularly to Alistair Billam, Matt Hills, Ben “Benjamin” Litherland, Amir “I Love Star Wars More Than Celtic” Saeed, and Cornel Sandvoss. Closer to home, none of this could have happened without the unwavering support of his family: partner, all-­round life superstar, and singer of terrible improvised songs, Caroline Tomes; young Padawan, Felix Tomes McCulloch, whose latest contribution was to administer a supportive cuddle and then immediately cry because he wasn’t allowed to take his dad’s Force Awakens Blu-­ray outside in the rain; and beloved woofball Laika, whose insistence on deep-­cleaning human ears continues to be simultaneously disgusting and endearing. Most importantly, both editors are of course indebted to the marvelous, knowledgeable, opinionated, and insightful colleagues and friends who contributed their research and writing to the book. Thank you so much for all your hard work and diligence, not to mention your belief in the project’s wider goals. Finally, thank you, dear reader, for picking up, downloading, reading, or other­w ise showing an interest in this book. We have but one request of you: “Pass on what you have learned.”

Disney’s Star Wars

introduction

William Proctor and Richard Mc Culloch

From the House That George Built to the House of  Mouse

I

n 2005, the release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith officially marked the end of the Star Wars phenomenon—as a live-­action film series at least. Spin-­offs and tie-­in narratives would, however, continue to exploit gaps in “hyperdiegetic” (Hills 2002) continuity and chronology, such as CGI animated film and TV series The Clone Wars (2008–2015) and the continuation of the Expanded Universe (EU) of novels, comics, video games, as well as new merchandise, toys, and action figurines. Plans for a live-­action TV series set between Episode III and Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), with the working title of Star Wars: Underworld, remained in the early stages of planning and preproduction, principally due to budgetary concerns and constraints. In 2010, at a screening of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in Chicago, George Lucas said that the TV series was “on hold” for the time being, “because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do them. Because, they literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them [at] a tenth of the cost. And it’s a huge challenge . . . [a] lot bigger than we thought it was gonna be” (quoted in Rosenberg 2010). At the same event, fans reportedly questioned Lucas about the possibility of a new live-­action film, which he clearly rebuked. The Star Wars film series as the saga of the Skywalker family, it seemed, was over with, done and dusted. As David Brin (2006: 1) announced, “The sci-­fi legend of our generation is now complete.” The fans’ clamor for more Star Wars films was, arguably, fueled by the mythological status of the sequel trilogy, set after the events of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983). Notoriously self-­contradictory, Lucas has, at different historical moments, claimed that he always planned for the Skywalker saga to continue and that this would feature the return of Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher as older veterans passing off light-­sabers and laser guns to a new

2 | Introduction

generation of characters. At other times, however, Lucas denied that the saga would continue post–Return of the Jedi, claiming that the story began and ended with the rise and fall of Darth Vader: “The movies were the story of Anakin Skywalker and Luke Skywalker, and when Luke saves the galaxy and redeems his father, that’s where that story ends” (Boucher 2008). In 2002, Lucas said that the sequel trilogy was only a tease: “Basically what I said as a joke was, ‘Maybe when Harrison and Carrie are in their 70s, we’ll come back and do another version’ ” (Spelling 2002). Indeed, Lucas insisted that “it was all a fabrication of the media,” and nothing but “urban legend” (Kaminski 2008: 487), with the sequel trilogy described as those “mysterious other Star Wars movies.” This, however, was a puzzling accusation due to the plethora of counterfactual discourses employed by Lucas that testify to the contrary (Kaminski 2008: 487). For example, on March 6, 1978, Time reported that Lucas intended for another ten films to follow The Empire Strikes Back, which would suggest that four trilogies were planned, not three—and certainly not two, as Lucas would come to insist had always been the case (“George Lucas’ Galactic Empire” 1978). As Kaminski (2008: 489) emphasizes, “Lucas revealed to the public around this very same time that the series was to be twelve films long, with the projected date of completion 2001.” In 1979, Lucas said that “there are essentially nine films in a series of three trilogies” (Arnold 1980: 248), again directly contravening himself. The third trilogy was to center “around the gimmick of re-­uniting the aged original cast” (Kaminski 2008: 495). “Luke, who will then be the age Obi-­Wan Kenobi is now, some place in his 60s, will reappear,” explained Clarke (1983), writing for Time in 1983. In an interview with Jim Steranko for Prevue magazine in late 1980, Lucas said: So, I took the screenplay [for Star Wars] and divided it into three stories, and rewrote the first one. As I was writing, I came up with some ideas for a film about robots, with no humans in it. When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else. So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters. Then, I had the other two films, which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies. When the smoke cleared, I said, ‘This is really great. I’ll do another trilogy that takes place after this.’ I had three trilogies of nine films, and then another couple of odd films. Essentially, there were twelve films. (Quoted in Steranko 1980) In 1989, publisher Bantam Spectre approached Lucas with a proposal: to license and develop a series of Star Wars novels. By this time, the Star Wars phenomenon had well and truly faded into cultural memory. With no new film on

Introduction | 3

the horizon and, in 1985, the cancellation of a new wave of toys and action figures, Star Wars was no longer the cultural leviathan it had been during the heyday of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Proctor and Freeman 2016). Lucas agreed to Bantam’s request, although he had little faith in the project, with one caveat: “Do sequels, because I’ll probably never do sequels” (quoted in Parisi 1999). The first novel to be published under the aegis of the new licensing arrangement between Lucasfilm and Bantam was Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire (1991), the first installment of what would become known as The Thrawn Trilogy and the first story to continue the saga after the fall of the Empire in Return of the Jedi. Lucas partially vetoed Zahn’s early outlines, however, with the mandate that the period before the original trilogy, especially the era of the Clone Wars—which at that point had only been briefly mentioned in A New Hope during a conversation between Luke Skywalker and Obi-­Wan Kenobi—was verboten and only to be referenced “in the vaguest of terms” (Zahn quoted in Proctor and Freeman 2016: 226). Lucas may have changed his mind about the sequel trilogy, but he had his sights firmly set on a series of prequel films, thus permitting Bantam to begin scribbling in the vacant post–Return of the Jedi timeline. In doing so, this could be viewed as a statement of intent; that is to say, that the EU transmedia megaseries of novels, comics, video games, and so forth had effectively rendered any further films a moot point. But such a perspective would wholly rely on Lucas’s opinion of the EU as a legitimate extension of the Star Wars saga, as canonical and constitutive of narrative “fact”—or, as the case may be, as counterfactual apocrypha (Brooker 2002: 101–14; Proctor and Freeman 2016). However, the canonical status of the EU had initiated one of the most provocative and fiery debates within Star Wars fandom, “an exchange of very different, often contradictory fan opinions with no resolution” (Brooker 2002: 113). Given that Lucas claimed that “the movies are gospel, the rest is just gossip” (Hayes 1980: 45)—effectively disavowing the EU as noncanonical— then the argument that Lucas simply would not make the sequel trilogy for fear of writing over extant material may be too far a stretch. Again, Lucas would often change his mind about the status of the EU at different times (see Proctor and Freeman 2016). Over time, Lucas’s relationship with the Star Wars fan culture would often mushroom into hostility and abuse, especially following the advent of the internet and the rise of domestic computer usage that “alerted Hollywood to the influence, baleful or otherwise, of the chat room nerd” (Brooker 2012: 56). Fans indeed utilized the growing organs of digitization as a bullhorn with which to provide feedback to Lucas and to argue and quarrel with other members of the online community.

4 | Introduction

In 1997, Lucasfilm released the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition in cinemas to test-­pilot the enormous gains in digital production and special effects before moving into preproduction on the prequels. Lucas, however, failed to predict a backlash from waves of diehard first-­generation fans who balked at the way in which Lucas tinkered with the original films and added new CGI elements on top of the preexisting material, even going so far as to insert a new scene into A New Hope, doctored to include a CGI Jabba the Hutt talking to Han Solo. More seriously, however, Lucas also revised the legendary confrontation between Solo and Greedo in the Mos Eisley Cantina in which the former assassinated the latter. Directly contradicting the original version of the film, Lucas amended the confrontation to portray Greedo as “the one who shot first,” rather than Solo, and this flagrant abuse of extant canonical information had some fans up in arms. Even today, two decades after Lucas’s revisionism, fans proudly adorn T-­shirts with the words “Han Shot First,” as if to disavow Lucas’s status as author and creator. But Lucas would stand firm by invoking his own authority and creative vision as not beholden to the whims of fandom: “On the Internet, all those same guys that are complaining I made a change are completely changing the movie. . . . I’m saying: ‘Fine. But my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it’ ” (Child 2012). In the years since, fans have repeatedly requested that the original version of the original trilogy be made available through official channels and released on DVD and Blu-­ray. At the time of writing, however, Star Wars’s new gatekeeper, Disney, has yet to address the unavailability of the original versions, except to hint that their release may be imminent (Anderton 2017). The release of the first prequel film in 1999, The Phantom Menace, was, in many ways, viewed as a canker on the Star Wars saga, especially by first-­generation fans that grew up with the original trilogy, and Lucas often bore the brunt of audience discontentment. Unhappy with Lucas’s first efforts in sixteen years, some fans took it upon themselves to edit The Phantom Menace and release the result online for free. If Lucas didn’t intend “doing it right,” then the fans would have to take the reins themselves—or as Henry Jenkins put it, fans will “have to pry Star Wars from George Lucas’s cold dead hands” (quoted in Phillipe 2011). That being said, fans of the prequel trilogy did (and still do) exist, and a series of online flame wars between “bashers”(those that criticized the prequels) and “gushers” (usually those of a new generation of fans for whom the prequel films were testaments to Lucas’s genius) unfurled on discussion boards, especially on theforce.net, the central hub for Star Wars fans online (Brooker 2002; Proctor 2013). The first digital character in film history, Jar Jar Binks, was singled out for considerable opprobrium and invective, eloquently captured by Simon Pegg’s

Introduction | 5

character in the British sit-­com, Spaced (1999–2001), where in one scene he aggressively admonishes a child for wanting to purchase a Jar Jar Binks toy: “You so do not understand! You weren’t there at the beginning! You don’t know how good it was, how important! This is it for you! This jumped up firework display of a toy advert! People like you make me sick! What’s wrong with you? Now, I don’t care if you’ve saved up all your fifty pee’s, take your pocket money, and GET OUT!” (2.2 “Change”). The Phantom Menace was heavily criticized for a variety of reasons, including bad writing, poor script and story, “wooden” acting, an assault of CGI cartoon aesthetics (“this jumped up firework display of a toy advert”), and questionable racial politics. Jar Jar Binks has been viewed as a particularly egregious example of the latter, as “a racially offensive” stereotype of Caribbean or African American culture (Brooker 2001: 16; see also Hills 2003a), but he was not the only source of displeasure. Other galactic races, such as the Neimoidians (“Orientalist,” “caricatured Japanese accents”) or the Toydarian character Watto (stereotypes of both Jewish and Italian identities) were vilified by both audiences and the popular press (Brooker 2001: 17). The galaxy far, far away was nothing if not a site of vim and vigor during the period. (One particular fan edit of The Phantom Menace removed Binks altogether.) The next two films, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, were received in much the same way, although reviewers and commentators generally agreed that the final installment was much improved (although hardly warranting “classic” status). Yet despite these shifting sands of audience and professional criticism, the prequel trilogy demonstrated the economic buoyancy of the Star Wars brand at the close of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. Lucas would return to oversee The Clone Wars animated TV series, but he frequently claimed that he was leaving the life of blockbuster entertainment to focus on personal, experimental films that nobody would ever see. The criticism Lucas had faced over the prequels had arguably taken its toll. When asked in 2012 if any new Star Wars films were on the way, Lucas responded: “Why would I make anymore . . . when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?” (Carlson 2010). Backlash from fan quarters effectively ensured that Lucas would lay the Star Wars film franchise in a coffin and nail shut the lid. In 2008, five years before the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Lucas explicitly said that there would definitely not be any new Star Wars cinematic material, explained that he had “left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features,” and signaled that the extant EU did not constitute Star Wars “fact” at all, regardless of his frequent shifts in opinion:

6 | Introduction

There will definitely be no Episodes VII–IX. That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything. And now there have been novels about the events after Episode VI, which isn’t at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn’t come back to life, the Emperor doesn’t get cloned, and Luke doesn’t get married. (Lambie 2014) On April 5, 2012, Lucas changed his mind once again and agreed to sell Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion. The studio that had housed Star Wars’s vast dramatis personae for more than three decades—and not forgetting Indiana Jones, technological wizards, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the computer game division LucasArts, among other holdings—was to be subsumed into the massive entertainment industrial complex of Disney, affectionately known worldwide as “the house of mouse.”

Rebranding Star Wars Why, then, did Lucas forgo his own instructions—“there will definitely be no Episodes VII–IX”—and shift toward selling the whole kit and caboodle to the Disney empire? Given Lucas’s penchant for revisionist histories, it is difficult to determine, without speculation, the precise reasons for such a volte-­face. But in some ways, Lucas’s decision is hardly surprising. Many Disney fans and employees sensed that Lucas was somehow connected to Walt Disney, even if they couldn’t put their collective finger on the precise relationship. It would not be until Michael Eisner and Fran Wells assumed management of Walt Disney Productions in September of 1984 that an actual business connection between Disney and Lucas would be forged, resulting in popular Lucas-­themed rides and 3-­D films, Captain EO, Star Tours, and the Indiana Jones Adventure, opening at Disneyland and other Disney theme parks around the world. (Svonkin 2012: 21) Besides a corporate relationship, however, Disney could certainly be viewed as Lucas’s—and fellow filmmaker and friend Steven Spielberg’s—“spiritual father” (Svonkin 2012: 21). The prominent film critic, Pauline Kael, would criticize Lucas for being “hooked on the crap of his childhood” (quoted in Svonkin 2012: 21) and for creating nothing but a “nostalgia film,” a pejorative description that Fredric Jameson, among other scholars such as Robin Wood, view in highly negative ways. Lucas seemed to be well aware that the first Star Wars film would bring comparisons with Disney, that it was “a children’s movie” and that he had decided to

Introduction | 7

“go the Disney route” (Lucas quoted in Svonkin 2012: 24). Yet Lucas also wanted to be taken seriously as a filmmaker and tried to maintain a safe distance between his work and that of the house of mouse. Craig Svonkin (2012: 25) argues that “Lucas may have felt anxiety about being associated with Disney because Walt Disney Productions was at its commercial and critical nadir as a studio in the late 1970s, and because his director friends thought he should be making serious, important films.” So, while Lucas certainly “demonstrated an anxiety about Disney influence early in his filmmaking career, he also acknowledged his debt” (26). It is not too far of a stretch to see that “Lucas’s persona, filmmaking style, and business and marketing practices paralleled Walt [Disney’s]” (26) by exploiting “the widespread recognition of something magical in each of these [transmedia satellites], with toys, comics, and even branded foodstuffs.” Indeed, “Lucasfilm similarly embraced Disney’s careful control of intellectual property to exploit characters, images, and stories through licensing, developing trademark characters and titles within films [as well as] for cross-­promotion, which contributed to a similar shift of emphasis more broadly in the New Hollywood” (J. Scott 2013b: 12). Like Walt Disney, then, Lucas would steadily grow into the absolute ruler of his entertainment kingdom, forgoing his highly publicized anxieties about working within the dictates of Hollywood’s industrial complex. Over time, Lucas would become the very thing that he despised most about the studio system: a Cromwellian Protector of the Star Wars Commonwealth; or, perhaps more appositely, a Sith Lord ruling over his entertainment Empire with a cast-­iron, dictatorial grip. Lucas is well aware of this irony: “What I was trying to do was stay independent . . . but at the same time I was sort of fighting the corporate system, which I didn’t like. And I’m not happy with the fact that corporations have taken over the film industry. But now I find myself being the head of a corporation. So there’s a certain irony there, in that I’ve become the very thing I was trying to, uh, avoid” (quoted in Brooker 2009: 83). Still, it remains somewhat puzzling that Lucas’s independent spirit would dissolve completely. Handing Lucasfilm over to Disney’s corporate executives lock, stock, and barrel hardly qualifies as resistance to the studio hegemony of the twenty-­ first century—indeed, Lucas has relinquished his total control and seems to have given up on the franchise. But perhaps that is the point. It would be easy to believe that Lucas sold his Empire for more obvious reasons: that is, profit. But Lucas actually donated the vast majority of his windfall to the educational charity Edutopia. For Disney, on the other hand, purchasing Lucasfilm makes excellent commercial sense. Given that the franchise has accumulated global grosses for the films amounting to $4 billion and, more attractively, $15 billion in retail sales

8 | Introduction

of merchandising (J. Scott 2013b: 13), then the principal reason for subsuming Lucasfilm within the Disney empire must surely be the cash nexus. As CEO Roger “Bob” Iger explained: “The Star Wars universe now has more than 17,000 characters inhabiting several thousand planets and spanning 20,000 years, and this gives Disney infinite inspiration and opportunities to continue the epic Star Wars story. [In addition to Episode VII] there will be more feature films, as well as consumer products, television products, games, and theme park attractions” (quoted in Proctor 2013). It certainly seems clear that Iger intends to exploit the Star Wars brand for all it is worth by extending the universe transmedially (and, as we would come to learn in April 2014, canonically) and with “infinite” potential. As worldwide news outlets reported on the Disney-­Lucasfilm sale—with many claiming that fans were again up in arms, this time with concerns about a potential “Disney-­fication” of the Star Wars galaxy (Proctor 2013; see also S. Scott 2017)—George Lucas and newly appointed president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, released a short video on the same day, addressing the sale in optimistic terms and explaining what this would mean for Star Wars going forward (Star Wars 2012). Here, Lucas began by, once again, signaling his intention to retire from the movie business, explaining, “[I am] getting to another stage of life where I don’t have to run a corporation. And it came to me one day that the perfect person to take over the company was Kathy [Kennedy].” Lucas explained that he “wanted to put the company in a larger entity which would protect it . . . with all kinds of capabilities and facilities so that there’s a lot of strength that is gained by this.” The use of words such as “strength,” “capability,” “facility,” and “protection” is what Pierre Bourdieu might well describe as a discursive bid for consecration; an attempt to rubber-­stamp the sale as authentic—not to impoverish the franchise brand but to open it up to new vistas of exploration and expansion, to new possibilities and new horizons of narrative storytelling. Comprising only six films over three decades, although furnished with a steady proliferation of transmedia satellites, the Star Wars franchise is viewed as containing enormous potential for imaginary world architecture and extension, most notably with cinematic material (and the parallel merchandising that comes packaged with such endeavors). It is not that audiences should be worried about the Lucasfilm purchase but that the corporate marriage between dual leviathans of popular culture is one of healthy necessity: “The great thing about Disney . . . between the parks and all the things they have got going, it’s great that we probably have a chance to expand that. There are lots of opportunities at Disney that we wouldn’t have at any other studio” (Star Wars 2012). Kennedy echoes Lucas’s optimism and begins the process of rebranding Star

Introduction | 9

Wars in line with the successes of Disney’s other intellectual property holdings: “There’s huge opportunity, given the tremendous success Disney has had with Marvel, and with Pixar, and now adding Lucasfilm to that, I think we couldn’t be at a better home.” Evoking the commercial and critical successes of Disney’s subsidiary IP holdings (which also include the relaunch of The Muppets in film and TV, as well as the recent acquisition of Fox Entertainment, including The X-­Files and the Alien franchise) swiftly became prevalent in official discursive arenas. Indeed, the box office popularity of the Marvel Studios films and the way in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would grow into a transmedia leviathan—spreading across the organs of contemporary media, including television, Netflix, comics and video games, and film (Proctor 2014a)—has provided Disney (and, by extension, other media conglomerates) with a working template for franchise production in the twenty-­fi rst century. As DC continues to build its own cinematic universe (which, unlike Marvel, is medium-­specific and not transmedial: DC’s film and TV universe are separate entities, incongruent story-­systems each with its own distinct continuities) other studios have started to draw upon the “Marvel Studio Method” of transmedia cross-­ pollination and serial world-­building: the “Dark Universe” cinematic universe, for example, which aimed to “adapt” the MCU model as a way to reboot classic Universal monsters such as the Mummy, Frankenstein, and Dracula. Although plans have since been scuppered due to the relative failure of the intended blockbuster The Mummy (2017), starring Tom Cruise, the template proffered by Marvel—a kind of narrative adaptation of superhero comic continuity— has arguably become an industrial wish-­f ulfillment. On the same day that the news of the acquisition reached mainstream media outlets, on StarWars.com J. W. Rinzler (2012) turned history on its head in classic Lucas fashion by confidently announcing that the sequel trilogy films have “existed as gossamer spirits for nearly 40 years.” And while Rinzler certainly recognizes that over time Lucas “consistently clouded the picture” about future Star Wars film installments, this is retroactively viewed as an essential part of the creative process: “Given the difficulties associated with the birth of Star Wars in 1977, it’s no wonder that Lucas’s ideas kaleidoscoped. When trying to get such a big undertaking up and running and out the door, visions of the future are understandably hazy” (Rinzler 2012). Ignoring Lucas’s comments regarding “explicit instructions” being left to discontinue the franchise in light of his passing on his ownership—which certainly seems to be an “un-­hazy” exclamation point—Rinzler marshals (para)textual evidence from the archives to demonstrate that the sequel trilogy was, in actual fact, always part of the original plans. Evidence includes a conversation between Lucas and franchise novel

10 | Introduction

author Alan Dean Foster (who had ghostwritten the novelization of the first film, released a year before the film), a Time magazine article from 1978 emphasizing that there would be “ten planned sequels” to the forthcoming Empire Strikes Back, and a statement from Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, who recalled: You know, when I first did this, it was four trilogies. . . . Twelve movies! Out on the desert, any time between setups . . . lots of free time. And George was talking about this whole thing . . . “Um, how’d you like to be in Epi­sode IX?” “When is that going to be?” “2011.” . . . I said, “Well, what do you want me to do?” He said, “You’ll just be like a cameo. You’ll be like Obi-­ Wan handing the lightsaber down to the next new hope.” (Rinzler 2012) During the late 1970s, then, “Lucas consistently mentioned twelve films and even created a barebones outline to that effect” (Rinzler 2012). Summoning historical paratexts that explicitly signal that the myth of the sequel trilogy is not, and has never been, mythological at all but a key part of the author’s original vision functions to rebrand Disney’s Star Wars as fulfilling the divine commandments of Lucas-­the-­author-­God. Even at this historical juncture, it seems as if Lucas’s “vision” and “author-­f unction” is a requirement, a form of authorial sponsorship that (re)brands and ratifies the Disney era of Star Wars as legitimate and necessary if the brand is to survive and thrive in the twenty-­ first century media environment. Lucas’s new position within the echelons of Disney-­Lucasfilm as “creative consultant” functions similarly. In the video, Lucas is asked about his role as creative consultant and what that entails, to which he responds: “I said I would back her [Kennedy] up, that I would be there . . . and especially helping with the script, and making sure the scripts sort of . . . there’s a lot of blank spots in the story treatment that we can fill in” (Star Wars 2012). Lucas’s involvement in the future of Star Wars storytelling was at this point most certainly guaranteed—the Star Wars universe “[is] essentially all in George’s head,” claimed Kennedy—but this relationship would effectively sour when the studio decided not to use Lucas’s story treatments for what would become known as The Force Awakens (2015), a point of contention that would later see Lucas denounce Disney as a group of “white slavers” who had stolen his “children” (Touil-­Tartour 2016). In this video, however, Lucas’s official status is as overseer and collaborator (which would eventually turn out not to be the case at all). “The beauty of the collaboration that can continue,” says Kennedy in the video, “is as we work our way through these scripts, we might go, ‘I wonder if this character can do this, or does this make sense within the

Introduction | 11

rules of Star Wars’—really he [Lucas] is the keeper of the flame” (emphasis added). “That’s all my job is,” replies Lucas, “to be the keeper of the flame.” So, then, on the day that the sale was announced, official paratexts, including the short video (swiftly uploaded to YouTube) and articles on StarWars.com (like Rinzler’s and others), collectively formed a prophylactic response to the Star Wars faithful, to cushion the blow, as it were, and stave off negative criticisms— possibly due to Lucas’s own experiences with fans following the release of The Phantom Menace and its sequels, but also to reify Disney’s corporate acquisition as good news for Star Wars. Put differently, these types of promotional narratives operate not to rebrand Star Wars by constructing a binary between Lucasfilm and Disney but, rather, by unifying them in order to instill trust and belief. In doing so, Disney’s Star Wars began its transitional journey by announcing itself as a collaborative activity between old and new masters.

Aims and Structure of the Book Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception features twenty-­ one chapters, each of which critically examines core aspects of the franchise, from the Disney acquisition in 2012 to the release of Episode VII: The Force Awakens and, to a lesser extent, Rogue One (2016). Analyses of The Last Jedi (2017) and Solo (2018) are not included in the essays that follow—the films were released after the commissioning of chapters—except in Mark Wolf’s chapter, which touches on The Last Jedi and Solo in world-­building terms, and in the final chapter of the book, by William Proctor. The aim of the book is to introduce readers to a series of perspectives and analytical frameworks centered on the Disney era of Star Wars, while also drawing upon the forty-­year history of the intellectual property in order to distinguish key shifts that have occurred at the level of industry, narrative, and reception. After the prequel trilogy’s infamous trashing by first-­generation fans (Brooker 2002: 79–100), what strategies would Star Wars’s new corporate masters utilize to resurrect and repair that galaxy far, far away? How would Disney manage this transitional period of heightened fan emotion, expectation, anticipation, and anxiety and attempt to prepare the world for the release of The Force Awakens? And what of the audiences themselves? For many people, Star Wars is “the single most important cultural text of [their] lives” (Brooker 2002: xii): How did prospective audiences anticipate, speculate on, interpret, and respond to the gradual release of production stories and gossip, marketing materials, merchandise, and other paratexts surrounding The Force Awakens?

12 | Introduction

Since 2012, Star Wars–related products, paratexts, and paraphernalia have multiplied no end. In particular, numerous narrative extensions have continued to be written, illustrated, published, programmed, and molded in the form of Expanded Universe material (novels, comics, short stories, video games, The Clone Wars TV series, toy ranges, and so on). Moreover, each new Star Wars film has historically been marked by an influx of merchandising elements—branded items that have often been said to signal the genesis of a remarkable shift in twentieth-­century culture—that is, toward discourses of branding, synergy, marketing forces, and buzz words such as “toyetic” and “total merchandising” (McMahan 2006). Star Wars’s influence on popular culture has not gone unnoticed, of course (Brooker 2002). However, this latest phase in the franchise’s history is hitherto unexplored, and so this book intervenes in a highly charged cultural moment to examine the ways in which ownership, conglomeration, and branding operate within the postmillennial mediascape. The book is split into two sections. Part I, “Production and Promotion,” investigates the industrial regime change from multiple perspectives. Part II, “Reception and Participation,” turns to reception and audience practices. At times the two sections overlap considerably, but each essay offers unique perspectives on the transition between the house that George built and the house of mouse, perspectives that aim to capture snapshots of a franchise-­in-­transition. The first section starts with Matthew Freeman’s “Rebuilding Transmedia Star Wars: Strategies of Branding and Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” which examines the way in which Disney rendered the Star Wars Expanded Universe of novels, comics, and video games “noncanonical” and “counterfactual” in 2014. By interrogating “the discourses of inauthenticity that became associated with the Expanded Universe of old, and indeed how Disney’s transmedia branding strategy has evolved in line with the corporation’s larger brand identity,” Freeman illustrates how Disney first “unbranded” the EU from hyperdiegetic legitimacy prior to a “rebranding” initiative as Star Wars Legends. In so doing, Freeman addresses key shifts in the “transmedia economy” (Proctor and Freeman 2016) between George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and Disney’s Star Wars. In chapter 2, Matt Hills exploits a substantial blind spot in academic literature by turning to televisual Star Wars in “Transmedia Spectacle and Transownership Storytelling as Seen on TV: Star Wars from the Holiday Special to Rebels” to televisual Star Wars. Beginning with the much-­maligned Holiday Special from 1978, Hills shows how “pre-­transmedia storytelling norms in film and TV could generate licensing that didn’t coherently extend a franchise’s narrative world.” However, rather than cleaving off pre-­transmedia storytelling frameworks from the integrated approach more commonly associated with the current historical

Introduction | 13

moment, Hills argues that Disney’s hierarchical flattening of hyperdiegetic continuity—whereby all texts exist in a state of “factual” canonicity—is not as clear-­cut as Disney is keen on projecting, and “that there are commonalities shared by the first Lucasfilm live-­action TV Star Wars and Disney’s first CGI-­ animated Star Wars for television.” Instead, Hills extends and complicates existing transmedia storytelling concepts by theorizing and distinguishing a form of transownership storytelling, “where markers of Lucasfilm’s practices are reflexively incorporated (in terms of major original trilogy characters, likenesses, and even film grain) . . . alongside Disney’s branding priorities.” Viewing canon as a discursive practice telegraphed by industry creators rather than as a concrete world with impenetrable borders is also taken up in chapter 3, “Rebuilding the Force, Brick by Brick: Canon Reformation and Brand Synergy in LEGO Star Wars,” by Lincoln Geraghty. By considering how Dorling Kindersley’s series of LEGO Star Wars books function in transmedia terms, Geraghty illustrates that LEGO Star Wars should not be simply viewed as an illegitimate, noncanonical adaptation primarily for children, but that it, instead, exists both in tension and in concert with imaginary world materials. Geraghty shows that Dorling Kindersley’s LEGO books may indeed “set limits” on what is possible or permitted within the narrative, but that they also operate to expand the Star Wars hyperdiegesis. This chapter illustrates the shifting transmedia relationship between Disney, LEGO, and Dorling Kindersley as integral brand partners “and part of the transmedia story that is Disney’s Star Wars in the twenty-­fi rst century.” In chapter 4, “Selling The Force Awakens: Fan Labor and Brand Management,” Dan Hassler-­Forest critically examines three “industrial texts” centered on promotional discourses for The Force Awakens, beginning with the Comic-­Con reel that “set the tone for the way in which Star Wars fans would be addressed and involved in the campaign leading up to the new film’s release,” and including a musical segment from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and the Star Wars–themed sketch from Saturday Night Live, “Undercover Boss.” As the fallout from the prequel trilogy is certainly a dark shadow that threatened to engulf any new Star Wars film with doubt, insecurity, and anxiety, so the (paratextual) road to The Force Awakens required laying paving stones that would lead away from the prequels while illuminating the original trilogy as nostalgic template. In doing so, Disney attempted to disassociate “the new era of Star Wars feature films from the less popular prequel cycle and its cultural legacy.” Hassler-­Forest also considers the shifting relations between fan audiences and producers in the Disney era of Star Wars and the way in which fans’ immaterial labor becomes a vital complement in promotional narratives and offers “vivid illustrations of

14 | Introduction

the forms of collaborative brand management that now surround, shape, and preconstitute commercial entertainment franchises.” In chapter 5, “Rebellions Are Built on Realism: The Aesthetics of Special and Visual Effects in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” Joshua Wucher analyzes the promotional discourses surrounding the release of the first Star Wars film in history to move beyond the parameters of the episodic Skywalker saga. In the lead-­up to the release of Rogue One—subtitled “A Star Wars Story” to signal its status as an anthology film—the release of the “sizzle reel,” like the Comic-­Con reel discussed by Hassler-­Forest, effectively created “an episteme of practical realism that simultaneously promotes a notion of authenticity inherent in Rogue One’s vintage look and serves Hollywood’s economic interests of promoting notions of realism as an aesthetic tradition that appeals to fans wary of bloated, CGI-­spectacle blockbusters,” a “discursive sentiment” that is “echoed” across the films various paratextual instantiations—including behind-­the-­scenes footage and accounts “from effects practitioners and filmmakers, as well as studio promotional material.” In Wucher’s account, a variety of promotional narratives serve an ontological function based in “the realism of the material, tactile, and practical,” which also symptomatically redresses public criticisms of the prequel trilogy by “distancing itself from a portion of the cinematic canon that relied on substantial computer-­generated effects.” Colin B. Harvey investigates the role of memory in the formation of transmedia Star Wars in chapter 6, “Binding the Galaxy Together: Subjective, Collective, and Connective Memory in Star Wars.” Drawing upon Jan Assmann’s (2011) concept of “foundational memory” and Andrew Hoskins’s (2009) theory of “new memory,” Harvey examines the tensions “between officially sanctioned collective memory and the often intensely personal, emotional relationship individual fans feel for the franchise,” arguing that such tensions illustrate a dialogue between analog technologies and the way in which “digital technologies have increasingly supplanted analog modes of engagement.” Next, Ross Garner turns to the animated TV series character Sabine Wren in chapter 7, “The Mandalorian Variation: Gender, Institutionality, and Discursive Constraints in Star Wars Rebels,” arguing that overlapping institutional discourses of branding, narrative, genre, and “industry lore” (Havens 2007) place limitations on the way in which an action heroine is constructed for the series. Beginning with historical production contexts, Garner considers Sabine Wren as bound to “institutionally located discourses,” discourses that “have consequences for gender representation . . . by excluding female-­coded characters from a core aspect of the Star Wars brand,” that is, “the Jedi and the Force.”

Introduction | 15

In so doing, Garner demonstrates how Wren “continually comes off as inferior when juxtaposed against the [masculinized, patriarchal] Force” and becomes constrained by traditional gender politics and binaries. In chapter 8, “To Disney Infinity and Beyond: Star Wars Video Games Before and After the LucasArts Acquisition,” Douglas Brown investigates the impact that the Lucasfilm purchase has had on the production of Star Wars video games. Considering the way in which Disney’s new transmedia strategies influenced the decision to close down LucasArts, itself a highly respected games developer, and instead choosing to share—to franchise—the Star Wars IP with licensing partners so as to “reduce the financial risk of developing games in-­house,” Brown provides a comparative analysis between classic Star Wars titles and three new releases developed since the buyout: Battlefront, Disney Infinity 3.0, and LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Here, Brown shows a stark contrast in how video games were treated between the Lucas and Disney eras. In the final chapter of part I, “From Star Tours to Galaxy’s Edge: Immersion, Transmediality, and ‘Haptic Fandom’ in Disney’s Theme Parks,” Rebecca Williams explores the relationship between Lucasfilm and Disney in the mid-­ 1980s, outlining the trajectory of the franchise from the original Star Tours ride (1987–2010) to the immersive replacement, Star Tours: The Adventures Continue (2011–present), thus demonstrating that the relationship between Disney and George Lucas goes back further than the 2012 acquisition (as this introduction has also discussed). Williams also considers Disney’s plans for a themed “land” in both California’s Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s Hollywood studios, announced in 2017 as “Star Wars: The Galaxy’s Edge” and promising a “completely immersive theme park experience.” In addition, Williams develops an insightful theory of “haptic fandom,” whereby theme park attractions serve an immersive function of pleasure and play by which fans “move their fandom from the textual into the bodily and the spatial.” In addition, Williams suggests that it is not only Star Wars fans that should be on scholars’ radar when they explore Disney theme park spaces, but “also the fans of the places that the property spatially operates within.” Williams proposes that the relationship between transmedia franchises and embodied spaces, such as theme park rides and attractions, is a vital academic pursuit when looking at branded imaginary worlds. The volume’s second part, beginning with chapter 10, “ ‘Always There are Two’: Repetition, Originality, and The Force Awakens,” by Jonathan Gray, focuses on reception. Gray examines negative criticisms of the first Star Wars film beneath Disney’s aegis as little more than a remake of Lucas’s A New Hope. Gray takes issue with criticisms that “regularly rest upon weak and ultimately

16 | Introduction

unfeasible notions of originality that merely stand in the way of a more powerful, more interesting critical approach.” For Gray, The Force Awakens should perhaps be better understood as part of a “mythic frame,” where “repetition sets up the capacity for difference, for new valances and meanings.” In doing so, Gray’s chapter redresses the commonsense wisdom regarding the thorny issue of “originality” not as a defense of The Force Awakens but as a way to intervene in popular discourses centered on myopic denunciations by critically engaging with difference as well as repetition. In chapter 11, “ ‘Real Life Is Rubbish’: The Subcultural Branding and Inhabitable Appeal of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back,” Emma Pett explores the promotion and reception of Secret Cinema’s immersive screening of The Empire Strikes Back, which ran from May to September in 2015 at London’s Canary Wharf. Secret Cinema is a United Kingdom–based events company that specializes in producing participatory screenings of classic or cult film properties (previous screenings have included Back to the Future in 2014 and, more recently, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in 2018). In this chapter, Pett discusses the “subcultural branding” initiatives developed by Secret Cinema, a marketing strategy that largely eschewed the corporate logos of both Star Wars and Disney, instead mirroring “the secretive ethos of Star Wars’s Rebel Alliance,” and that inflected the design of posters, costumes, and merchandise with “a subversive, cult aesthetic” more suggestive of modes of “transformational fannish activities” than corporate branding mechanisms. Pett’s study of reception and production practices shows that Secret Cinema “was successful in marketing their production to a broad and diverse audience: an early adopter hipster elite, devoted Star Wars fans, casual audiences, and newcomers to the franchise.” Next up, we have Paul Booth’s analysis of “Disney’s Princess Leia” in chapter 12, with a specific focus on fan discourses and responses. Posing a series of questions, Booth asks: “How, exactly, does Leia fit into the Star Wars franchise, given that Disney owns Lucasfilm? What does it mean that Leia ceases to be a princess when her text becomes a Disney film? Is Leia, as fans have questioned since the merger in 2012, a Disney Princess? Or is she something else?” Using the figure of Princess Leia as case study, Booth examines the “corporate gendering” of the character and the way in which fans responded through the use of transformational works, including “art, comics, videos, fiction, GIFs, and a multitude of other online works to highlight the interaction between Disney Princesses and Lucasfilm.” Booth then explores the four-­part Marvel comic book series Princess Leia, considering the way that the series “can serve a dual purpose of both reflecting on aspects of Star Wars” while also “augmenting the Star Wars

Introduction | 17

universe” insofar as characterizations of Leia “mean that the authors . . . can use the comic to both comment on and also to justify the positioning of Leia as princess and general.” In many ways, chapter 13 by Lorna Jowett, “Rey, Mary Sue, and Phasma Too: Feminism and Fan Reponses to The Force Awakens Merchandise,” is in conversation with Booth. Jowett looks at the controversy centered on the lack of merchandise relating to the character Rey. By examining the discourse of the hashtag protest #WheresRey and “the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in promotion for the film and related merchandise,” Jowett taps into the gender politics surrounding The Force Awakens and explores “the complexities of merchandising and consumption, highlighting how commercial productions and fan responses to them might appear to challenge conventional gender binaries while at times maintaining heteronormative structures.” Although rallying cries for diversity are rapidly becoming de rigueur in the contemporary moment, Jowett highlights a series of exchanges between the forces of industry and the consumption activities of fan cultures, demonstrating the way in which heteronormative gender roles “still have a firm grasp on the cultural imagination of producers and consumers.” Sticking with transformational fan practices in chapter 14, “Jafar Wars: Fan-­ Created Paratexts in Alderaan Places,” Bethan Jones considers the role that fan fiction, art, and videos played “in framing and anticipating the narrative surrounding Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise.” Focusing on fan texts that involve intertextually crossing over various Disney properties and characters with the Star Wars megatext, Jones illustrates how such texts operate discursively by speaking back to Disney about the buyout. In this chapter, Jones focuses exclusively on fan-­generated texts that were created after Lucasfilm was sold as a way of understanding how fans were talking about, understanding, critiquing, and celebrating both Disney and Disney’s Star Wars. In 2014, Disney announced that the Star Wars Expanded Universe would no longer be recognized as canonical, thus relegating hundreds of novels and comics in fans’ collections to the status of apocryphal “legends,” meaning that, in textual terms, these stories “never truly happened.” In chapter 15, “ ‘You Die! You Know That, Right? You Don’t Come Back!’: Fans Negotiating Disney’s (De)Stabilized Star Wars Canon,” Michelle Kent examines fan reactions to both the EU purge and The Force Awakens by drawing on interviews conducted with Australian members of the Star Wars costuming fan clubs, the 501st Legion and the Rebel Legion. Here, Kent illustrates the way in which fans express anxiety and (ontological) insecurity in relation to Disney’s treatment of the franchise,

18 | Introduction

reflecting “a deeper concern about how changes to the structure of the franchise threaten their ability to participate meaningfully in their fandom as members of these global fan communities.” Disney’s Star Wars has often been a lightning rod for political and ideological conflict, with some audiences critiquing the shift toward multicultural and gender diversity as nothing less than social justice propaganda. In chapter 16, “Fear of a #BlackStormtrooper: Hashtag Publics, Canonical Fidelity, and the Star Wars Platonic,” William Proctor explores the press discourse that emerged following the debut of the first teaser trailer for The Force Awakens in November 2014, which saw John Boyega’s “Black Stormtrooper” come under fire for ostensibly breaking established canon. Many news stories focused on the Twitter hashtag #BlackStormtrooper as the central spoke of online fan racism. In this chapter, Proctor conducts a discourse analysis by scraping the contents from #BlackStormtrooper, showing that the hashtag was in no way a container for racism but instead a series of exchanges regarding “canonical fidelity” and fan cultural capital. Proctor’s findings demonstrate that methodological vigilance is necessary when testing the claims of journalists and bloggers. In chapter 17, “Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying: Reacting to The Force Awakens Trailer,” Tom Phillips explores the phenomenon of trailer reaction videos, a participatory activity that has become widespread since the launch of YouTube over a decade ago. Phillips addresses “the ways in which fans of contemporary media can demonstrate a number of viewing and anticipatory strategies” as well as “the extent to which fannish discourses were used in the promotion of The Force Awakens as an act of reassurance for audiences and a perpetuation of the film’s culture of anticipation.” In this chapter, Phillips illustrates the potential for theorizing reaction videos as providing insights into the online construction of community, whereby “the productivity on display in all of the reactions functions to strengthen a notion of Star Wars fan culture as a whole.” In the next two chapters, we turn to the concept of autoethnography, whereby scholars turn the analytical lens onto themselves as members of media audiences. First, in chapter 18, “ ‘I Should Have Seen It Coming’: Spoiler Culture, Marathon Screenings, and Affective Responses to The Force Awakens,” Bridget Kies explores her own highly emotional and intensely personal reaction to the film, especially (spoiler alert!) the death of Han Solo. By using her own fannish activities as a lens—in close proximity to the release of The Force Awakens in December 2015—Kies provides an account of the way that “fans can attempt to engineer their experiences through access to or avoidance of spoilers and behind-­the-­scenes information, the time commitment of a screening marathon, and the shared collective energy of group events.”

Introduction | 19

Lucy Bennett’s autoethnography in chapter 19, “ ‘Someone Is Someone’s Father!’: An Autoethnography of a Non–Star Wars Viewer,” explores her status as both a nonfan and a nonviewer of any of the Star Wars films to date (quite the unicorn, some might say). Bennett examines her journey watching the Star Wars film series in release order from the original trilogy to the prequel trilogy and through to her first viewing of The Force Awakens. Through personal testimony based in autoethnographic research protocols, Bennett provides a series of theoretical insights, such as the concept of “out-­of-­sync canonical viewing” and the idea that (self-­)narratives of shame can become powerful elements in performances and mechanisms of “the self.” In conclusion, Bennett argues that “the silences in research surrounding nonfandom or complicated relations with texts should be contested so that a wider range of voices and experiences can be heard.” In the penultimate chapter, “Beyond Vader: The Franchise Reawakens,” Mark J. P. Wolf explores theories of world-­building in The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, and Solo: A Star Wars Story, asking valid questions about Disney’s Star Wars following the death of key franchise figure Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Wolf argues that Disney has yet to wrestle with expanding the imaginary world in new and innovative ways, choosing instead to rely on formula and derivation rather than expansive world-­building per se (pace Gray’s claims in chapter 10). In doing so, Wolf argues that Disney has not yet given us “a good dose of new world-­building,” and, as a result, the films produced hitherto are mainly disappointing at the level of world architecture. In the final chapter, “A New Hate? The War for Disney’s Star Wars,” William Proctor brings the book up to date, summarizing the “regime of truth” circulating in mainstream entertainment news media in relation to “the new culture wars,” the emergence of the so-­called “alt-­right,” and what is now commonly described as “toxic fandom.” Taken together, then, Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception provides valuable insights into a new era of media franchising in the twenty-­fi rst century, considering the interplay among industry, audiences, and text that cuts across a broad range of discourses, texts, and practices.

Part I

1 Matthew Freeman

Rebuilding Transmedia Star Wars Strategies of  Branding and Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I

n reference to the Batman brand, William Uricchio (2010: 119) argues that its fictional world—the gothic streets of Gotham City, the dark neon-­lit skylines, Wayne Manor, etc.—is as much a valued brand asset to the corporate entities of DC Comics and Warner Bros. as the character of Batman himself. Since Uricchio’s remark, much has been written about the enduring appeal of fictional worlds (Saler 2012; Wolf 2012; Harvey 2015), with scholars theorizing worlds of science fiction and fantasy, in particular, as spaces of magic, joy, and escapist possibility that fans wish to get lost in. The Star Wars universe serves as one such example, a storyworld that has thrived across multiple decades, generations, and media. Even after the climactic events of Return of the Jedi (1983), Star Wars lived on, telling new adventures, continuing to make a brand asset by expanding the microelements of the Star Wars film series into a transmedia macrosystem. Scholars such as Carlos A. Scolari (2009: 599) have explored conceptions of “transmedia narrative worlds as brands,” but the Star Wars world paints a particularly complex picture. Since the dawn of George Lucas’s original film trilogy in the 1970s, Star Wars has spawned countless stories, eventually forming an Expanded Universe (EU, in fan vernacular) across comics, video games, novels, and so on, each the product of licensing agreements under the stewardship of many different writers, artists, illustrators, and so on. And with Disney’s takeover of the Star Wars brand in 2012—purchasing Lucasfilm and in turn rebranding the EU as Star Wars Legends, expelling its stories from official narrative continuity (Proctor and Freeman 2016)—the transmedia branding of the continuing Star Wars universe has become a complex blend of branding,

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rebranding—and even unbranding—mechanisms and strategies, each fusing to form audiences’ expectations. This chapter will serve to outline and categorize those complex branding mechanisms and strategies, revealing the different modes and nuances of  branding, rebranding, and unbranding employed in the rebuilding of Star Wars’s transmedia product extensions pre– and post–Disney takeover. I will both build on and complicate Henry Jenkins’s (2011) assertion that in Hollywood’s contemporary fiction factory, transmedia branding models tend to follow one of two formulas—either forming a consistent continuity across multiple media (that is to say, the same world with the same incarnation of its various characters, etc.), or a multiplicity in each media iteration (that is, creating multiple, very different versions of a storyworld and its characters). Conversely, I consider in this chapter that transmedia branding models operate more of a dialectic relationship than as a binary logic. To do so, I explore how Disney has employed a unique brand strategy that makes strategic use of a “legends and myths” motif in order to cast out seemingly unwanted narrative components of the existing Star Wars universe while simultaneously repromoting them as narratively valuable additions to the brand. The chapter interrogates the discourses of inauthenticity that became associated with the Expanded Universe of old, and indeed how Disney’s transmedia branding strategy has evolved in line with the corporation’s larger brand identity. Finally, I go on to examine the function of “possible worlds” as a specific branding technique in the Disney era that works to complicate Jenkins’s aforementioned continuity-­multiplicity model, exploring links between the branding of Disney’s transmedia Star Wars adventures, their chosen narrative trajectories, and the meanings of the larger Disney brand image. In doing so, the chapter shows how the Star Wars universe can serve as a useful lens through which to study multifaceted models of branding in the age of media convergence.

Branding in the Age of  Media Convergence Exploring the branding strategies that have come to characterize the transmedia Star Wars universe means first understanding the changing role of branding in the contemporary media industries. This means situating my argument inside the context of media convergence, itself “the coming together of things that were previously separate” (Meikle and Young 2012: 2). Convergence has now come to dominate contemporary understandings of the models through which culture is produced industrially. Entire media industries, along with their technologies and practices, have become increasingly aligned, branded, and networked. As Henry Jenkins (2003) writes, “media convergence makes the flow

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of content across multiple media inevitable.” Convergence has accelerated the ways in which fictional creations are developed as media brands. Television, a medium founded upon the delivery of audiences to advertisers, is central to this acceleration. In turn, as Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz (2014: 5–6) adds, “the rise of transmedia platforms—alternative reality games, websites, mobile games, e-­books, e-­comics, web-­series, etc. provides a new range of possibilities to boost brand recognition.” Transmedia storytelling has been defined as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple [media] channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2011). For Jenkins, this process of unfolding stories across multiple media platforms serves to make “distinctive contributions to our understanding of the storyworld,” a fictional space that is constructed in and across these multiple media sources (2006a: 334). World-­making, then, itself the art of  transmedia storytelling, argues Jenkins, is “the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others” (2006b: 335). In other words, transmedia storytelling has become a means of understanding the flow of content and fictional storyworlds across media, with this flow initiating a slippage between practices of transmedia storytelling and media branding. John Caldwell (2004: 305) argues that branding, much like transmedia, has emerged as “a central concern of the media industry in the age of digital convergence.” And as Catherine Johnson (2012: 1) says, “programmes are now being constructed as brands designed to encourage audience loyalty and engagement with the text beyond the act of television viewing.” Considerations of branding in this context work to evoke what Jenkins (2006a: 69) also calls brand extension, “the idea that successful brands are built by exploiting multiple contacts between the brand and the consumer.” For Jenkins, this too “should not be contained within a single media platform, but should instead extend across as many media as possible. Brand extension builds on audience interest in particular content to bring them into contact again and again with an associated brand” (2006a: 69). Following this logic, it is important to emphasize the distinct slippage between concepts such as brand extension and transmedia storytelling. In fact, the precise industrial means through which transmedia storytelling (or world-­building) occurs has considerable overlap with the concept of  branding; for to maintain brand recognition across a range of media texts itself requires a sense of textual or visual coherence and expansion across these texts so as to ensure that each “feels” like it fits with the others. In other words, both

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transmedia and world-­building can be conceptualized in terms of extensions of branded content across multiple media, working together via textual and paratextual factors to “produce a discourse, give it meaning, and communicate it to audiences” (Scolari 2009: 599). And yet there are clearly different strategies of transmedia branding, especially as more digital marketing and storytelling tools become available. As indicated in the introduction to this chapter, Jenkins (2011) identifies a binary approach to how fictional storyworlds tend to be extended across media in today’s industrially and technologically converged media industries. The first approach places ample emphasis on continuity, where “all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative world”; the second model, meanwhile, “cele­ brates the multiplicity which emerges from seeing multiple versions of the same stories.” Transmedia branding formations in Hollywood have often come to exemplify the binary continuity-­multiplicity model. Whereas Marvel’s highly coordinated Cinematic Universe (MCU)—more accurately a transmedia universe, as William Proctor emphasizes (Proctor 2014a)—demonstrates the former model, in which the stories and characters of cinema’s Iron Man (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Avengers Assemble (2012) and of television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Daredevil (2015–) all intertwine together within a single storyworld; the comparatively inconsistent Batman storyworld typifies the latter model, in which multiple, often contradictory iterations of the character work to engage different audiences in new ways. So, what characterized the branding of the transmedia Star Wars universe pre–Disney takeover?

Branding a Galaxy Far, Far Away Part of the job of the director is to keep everything in line, and I can do that in the movies—but I cannot do it on the whole Star Wars universe. —George Lucas (quoted in “Canon” n.d.)

In 2008, Howard Roffman, Vice President of Licensing at Lucasfilm, said on the subject of Lucasfilm’s marketing plan for the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series: “We have stuck to a very clear branding strategy for the past decade. . . . In the end it is one saga and that saga is called Star Wars. We have wanted to send a clear message to our fans that everything we do is part of that overall saga” (quoted in Parisien 2016). Hoffman’s comments imply that understanding the branding of the Star Wars universe is straightforward, indicating

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that as a brand approach, Star Wars clearly exemplifies Jenkins’s aforementioned continuity model. And yet close examination of the long-­standing transmedia Star Wars universe paints a far less simple picture. Since its cinematic genesis in 1977, Star Wars has grown into a vast licensing enterprise, spread out across multiple media platforms including novels, magazines, comic books, video games, radio plays, and so on. Luke Skywalker’s heroic journey may have reached a natural conclusion upon defeating the Empire come the end of Return of the Jedi, but the world of Star Wars lived on for a new wave of future adventures—albeit following a fallow period between 1985 and 1991, a “dark age” when the brand retreated into the cultural wilderness after the climactic Return of the Jedi, primarily because “there was no new film to keep audiences excited and engaged” (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 223). Importantly, what characterized the adventures of what became known as the EU was their tendency to move the larger Star Wars story forward in time. Though there are examples of  EU stories that went back in time—such as Brian Daley’s The Han Solo Adventures trilogy from 1979, which were published between the release of A New Hope (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and told the stories of Solo’s smuggling days prior to the events of A New Hope—for the most part, the EU was a place for the future of the Star Wars universe, telling new stories that took place after the events of Return of the Jedi. This tendency to use the EU to depict the future adventures in the Star Wars world is perhaps best exemplified by Timothy Zahn’s novels from the 1990s. When Lucasfilm granted Bantam Books the license to publish Star Wars novels, the publishing marathon that followed continued to weld additive scaffolding onto the Star Wars saga’s narrative architecture. The first novel written and released for Bantam Books was Zahn’s Heir to the Empire in 1991, which Zahn then followed up with Dark Force Rising (1992) and The Last Command (1993). The Thrawn Trilogy, as it became known, is set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, chronicling a future story canvas that had yet to be marked by the Star Wars film trilogy (Proctor and Freeman 2016; Guynes 2017). Moving the storyworld into the future was as much a necessity of the EU’s authorial circumstances as it was a creative strategy. Zahn’s outline for Heir to the Empire had planned to include a history of the Clone Wars, which had been mentioned in the first film but never explored. Says Zahn: “I had a history of it all worked up, but Lucasfilm told me, ‘You are not to reference this anywhere, except in the most vague of terms’ ” (Kelly 2015). In other words, Lucasfilm’s authorial grip on the Star Wars universe imposed a number of firm restrictions, especially when it came to the story events already a part of the Star Wars saga.

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Moving the story forward in time provided Zahn—along with a large number of other licensed authors, creators, illustrators, designers, etc.—a more unmarked territory to explore. Incidentally, Disney has since reintroduced the character of Thrawn into its transmedia storyworld via appearances in Star Wars Rebels (2014–), thus further reinforcing the sense of brand slippage between Lucas’s Star Wars world and Disney’s (see also Hills in this volume). As William Proctor and I (2016) have discussed elsewhere, “the EU tells us what happened to principal characters, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca and so on. . . . Han and Leia get married and have children, Luke begins rebuilding the Jedi Order as part of the New Republic . . . and fan-­favourite, Boba Fett, is resurrected following his unceremonious death in Return of the Jedi.” If I were to return, then, to Jenkins’s binary conception—continuity versus multiplicity—of transmedia models, there is a clear sense that, at least on a textual level, the Star Wars EU of old demonstrates the continuity approach, where all of the narrative pieces cohere into a consistent storyworld. Promotional materials sought to accentuate this continuity approach to transmedia branding discursively. Consider, for example, a newspaper advertisement promoting Star Wars audio books, published in the Times UK) in 1999. The advert reads: “The Star Wars double cassettes are the only authorised continuations of the Star Wars saga and include Star Wars music and sound effects” (“Star Wars Audio Books” 1999: 36). Much effort is made here to convince readers of the close relationship between Lucas’s Star Wars films and the adventures available in audio formats, promoting connective textuality via paratextual communication. And yet on this same paratextual level, the Star Wars EU came to be associated with discourses of inauthenticity, market logics, and even brand formations more befitting of Jenkins’s multiplicity model, where multiple versions of the storyworld emerge. For example, the Zahn novels outlined may be referred to as “franchise novels” (a piece in the Guardian newspaper, in fact, even feels the need to justify “the shameful pleasures” of reading such “spin-­off books,” implying a hierarchy of cultural capital between the works of film and those of literature [Walter 2014]). This cultural capital can manifest as a commercial stigma in fan circles. As Tech Times reporter Jason Serafino (2015) asserts, “Star Wars novels stir a range of emotions for fans: Some view them as natural extensions of the movies . . . but others just view these novels as a way for Lucasfilm to make a quick buck.” Daniel Worden (2016) agrees: “Licensed property comics, games, etc. . . . are notoriously hit or miss for readers and gamers. Mostly they miss, plagued by lackluster writing and awkward art.” Moreover, this stigma surrounding the licensed products of the Star Wars EU goes as far as academic circles. Jenkins (2006a: 105), for instance, argues that “the licensing system

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typically generates works that are ‘redundant’ . . . watered down, or riddled with sloppy contradictions.” For Jenkins, “franchise products are governed too much by economic logic and not enough by artistic vision” (2006a: 105). While it is problematic to privilege new transmedia versus old-­style licensing in this way, as Matt Hills (2012c: 412) has argued, in some sense the very acknowledgment of a hierarchal tier system between one medium and another indicates a separation between Star Wars and the Star Wars Expanded Universe that problematizes any understanding of this era’s transmedia Star Wars world as one of absolute brand continuity. Such a discourse of separation and division surrounding the EU was even reinforced paratextually by George Lucas himself. In an interview for Cinescape, Lucas once remarked: “There are two worlds here. There is my world, which is the movies, and there is this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They do not intrude on my world, which is a select period of time. . . . I do not get too involved in the parallel universe” (quoted in Young 2001). For another interview, this time for Starlog magazine in 2005, Lucas reinforced this division of a “parallel world,” stating bluntly of the array of licensed EU stories that had since come to flood the larger Star Wars universe: “I do not read that stuff. That is a different world than my world. . . . They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and go off in other directions” (“Canon” n.d.). Lucas’s public positioning of the licensing enterprises of the EU as the creation of a separate universe, stripping the EU products of Lucas’s author-­branding in paratextual contexts, thus communicated a message that the branding approach of the transmedia Star Wars world was in fact one of multiplicity. Clearly, then, there exists a tension within Jenkins’s binary logic of continuity-­multiplicity and one that is difficult to separate cleanly into bifurcated compartments. And this brand message of multiplicity being communicated around the texts seems tied to the forward-­narrative trajectory that characterized much EU material in-­text. Moving the storyworld forward in time may have allowed its licensed writers to carve new niches and explore new worlds in the wider galaxy, but it also created stories that were fundamentally different and unfamiliar to audiences. This difference altogether enabled the Star Wars brand universe to both expand and to fragment as it migrated across multiple media platforms, potentially threatening “both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of fans’ lived experience” (Pearson and Uricchio 1991: 184). How, then, would the branding of the EU compare to that of Disney’s transmedia Star Wars in the contemporary era?

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Rebranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away Disney’s parades are a constant triumph of its classics. —Bruce Jones (2010)

One of the key reasons why the Star Wars universe serves as such a useful case study for illuminating models and strategies of transmedia branding in the media convergence age is because its ownership and authorship patterns have shifted so rapidly in recent years. In 2012, Lucas sold the rights to the entirety of the Lucasfilm holdings to Disney, which included not only Star Wars but also Indiana Jones as well as other properties and subsidiaries (see Proctor 2013 for an account of fan reactions to the sale). After passing the proverbial keys to the galaxy far, far away to the house of mouse, a new Lucasfilm Story Group has since been established in light of the Lucasfilm-­Disney corporate takeover to steward a decisive rationale and cohesive transmedia continuity. But what characterizes Disney’s branding of Star Wars and, in particular, its newly produced transmedia extensions? One of the most notable differences between the EU of old and the Disney extensions has been the shift in narrative trajectory. Whereas the EU had opted, at least for the most part, to move the storyworld forward in time, Disney’s approach has been to return it to the past, to tell stories that take place in the interstices between the original or prequel film trilogies and that are ratified as official and canonically factual. The Marvel Star Wars comic book series, which commenced publication in 2015, perhaps best exemplifies this approach. Marvel’s Star Wars comic is set between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, focusing once again on core characters such as Luke, Leia, Han, and so forth. Alongside the flagship comic book are spin-­off miniseries based around the characters from the original trilogy, including Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Lando, Han Solo, and Chewbacca. Disney’s other Star Wars comics also travel back even further in time to the days of the prequel trilogy, such as in Obi-­Wan and Anakin (2016), which is set between The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002), essentially blending Disney’s Star Wars into the original Star Wars brand by intertwining narrative events. That being said, Marvel has also started publishing miniseries set in the post-­Return universe, such as Poe Dameron, the stand-­alone C-­3PO comic, wherein fans learn how the protocol droid ended up with the red cybernetic arm seen in The Force Awakens, and a miniseries adaptation of the film. Comic adaptations of Rogue One and The Last Jedi have since been published as well.

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Furthermore, consider Star Wars: Dark Disciple (2015), a novel written by Christie Golden. The story of the novel unfolds between the events of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (2005), lending much added insight into and detail on the events of the Clone Wars and on Sith Lord Count Dooku’s political role as separatist commander. Rather than telling a story set in the far-­off future of the Star Wars landscape, like the EU adventures of old, Dark Disciple crafts a story that pervades and intersects the narrative architecture of the old Star Wars films—and even the non-­Disney-­produced The Clone Wars television series (2008–2015)—which, as Serafino (2015) argues, “shifts the focus of the Star Wars novels entirely, tying events more closely into the saga’s original, overall mythology.” More than a narrative choice, then, the crafting of a relationship between transmedia platforms and the narrativized revisiting of Star Wars’s past and most familiar adventures—telling stories that, as Daniel Worden (2016) describes them, “all dwell in pockets of time previously unrepresented in the films”—is a strategic branding choice that is crucial to uniting Disney’s own iterations of the Star Wars universe with those under the stewardship of George Lucas. While the licensed EU era had become closely associated with market logics and perceptions of brand splintering, the Disney era has very quickly established a discourse of legitimacy and canon. Consider a newspaper article published in the Guardian about the release of Star Wars: Uprising, a free mobile game. Like Zahn’s aforementioned EU novels, Star Wars: Uprising takes place within a previously untapped narrative time frame, in this case, “between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, making it an official addition to the Star Wars canon” (Dredge 2015). Much of this official discourse stems from the vast corporate structure of Disney itself: “The new game is the product of Kabam, who has been positioning itself as a creative partner—rather than simply as a licensing partner—for film studios for several years now” (Dredge 2015). Such discursive positioning as “creative partner” is becoming increasingly common across contemporary transmedia franchises, likely because licensing-­based products are traditionally viewed with derision, as discussed previously. As the game maker’s chief executive Kevin Chou elaborates: “In the past, these films would have $100m marketing budgets, and they would carve out $500,000 to make a low-­quality game . . . . But the kind of games we are making with Disney become massive revenue generators that engage people 365 days a year” (quoted in Dredge 2015). Chou may continue to make a forceful argument here that this model of transmedia storytelling under the Disney umbrella is defined by its equal

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prioritization of market and nonmarket logics (i.e., commerce and storytelling)— which Proctor and I (2016) describe as the “transmedia economy” of Disney’s Star Wars—insisting that “we are trying to create a parallel track that fits within the overall function of what the movie is trying to do . . . and thereby being the first canon thing that was worked on at all post–Return of the Jedi” (quoted in Dredge 2015). Surely, however, the exact same claim could be made of the EU stories of old. In fact, aside from discourses of collaboration and partnership, the key difference between the transmedia branding formations of the pre-­and post-­Disney Star Wars universe, at least in part, stems once again from the basic narrative trajectory—i.e., forward versus backward—of the stories themselves. In one sense, it is tempting to understand Disney’s transmedia Star Wars adventures simply as works aimed at reengaging fans of the original trilogy. In another sense, it may be possible to detect the direct influence of  Disney’s ownership of Marvel on its branding of the Star Wars world, in particular the use of Marvel’s coordinated universe, where new texts go back and forth in time, adding insight, context, and perspective to the storyworld. Derek Johnson (2007b: 85) reinforces such coordination as crucial to the building of media brands, arguing that the sustained commercial success often “depend[s] on the . . . unity of texts.” But, in fact, there are much deeper overlaps between the backward-­ narrative trajectories discussed in many of Disney’s transmedia Star Wars stories and the larger Disney brand identity. In the broadest sense, Disney—which Betsy Francoeur (2004: 1) calls “one of the most visible and successful examples of corporate and brand image building”—has created and sustained a global brand identity built on a few core ingredients. For Bruce Jones (2010), director at the Disney Institute, “the overriding theme of Disney is magic.” Indeed, when a focus group was asked to list the words that came to mind when thinking of Disney, by far the most frequently mentioned words were “fun,” “magic/al,” and “family” (Winsor 2015: 24). Each of these three descriptions apply equally to Star Wars, with its brand identity built from the fun of the matinee film serials of the 1930s and 1940s, the magic of the world’s mythological Force, and the narrative emphasis on family relationships and conflicts derived from its soap opera heritage (see also Krämer 1998). Disney’s stories have also characteristically focused on heroic journeys, à la Joseph Campbell’s (1949) monomyth template, like the Star Wars saga foregrounding hope, courage, and friendship as the keys to lost, isolated people gradually finding their place in the world— whether Cinderella, Aladdin, or Luke Skywalker. Looking even closer, there is a clear emphasis on tradition, nostalgia, and familiarity at the heart of the Disney brand identity, characteristics that aim to construct ideas of authenticity and thus explain Disney’s decision to utilize

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many of their transmedia Star Wars extensions to return to the story’s past. Tom Boyles, vice president at Disney Parks, for example, says that “Disney’s core promise, the simple idea on which it was launched, has not changed since Walt Disney made clear that it was to create happiness through magical experiences” (quoted in Adamson 2014). In other words, nostalgia is crucial to Disney’s brand, a fact that has manifested itself in the Star Wars transmedia universe as a narrative focus on what Star Wars once was, not what it could be (McCulloch 2018). Nostalgia is about conveying a knowing relationship with the past, a yearning for an irretrievable past (Grainge 2003). In effect, both the Disneyland theme park and the aforementioned Marvel-­published Star Wars comic books—with the latter described by reviewer Tracy Brown (2015) as “a series very much for fans of the original trilogy by reuniting Luke, Han, Leia, R2-­D2, C3-­PO and Chewbacca”—are places where “age relives fond memories of the past” (Bruce Jones 2010). In this light, Disney has effectively tied the future of their own Star Wars to nostalgic ideals of its past, rebranding the Star Wars of  Lucasfilm and the Star Wars of Disney as a single brand package. Still, how would Disney go about unbranding unwanted strands of the Star Wars universe?

Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away? Disney exists to make magical experiences come alive. —Rachel Mary Winsor (2015: 19)

So far in this chapter, I have explored some of the fundamental differences between the brand strategies of Lucasfilm and Disney’s transmedia Star Wars universe, demonstrating how the latter has reconciled the works of the past and the present by reinforcing nostalgic pleasures. But Disney’s approach to branding the transmedia Star Wars universe is about much more than mere familiarity, nostalgia, and crafting stories set in the (hyperdiegetic) past. On top of this, Disney’s branding strategy can be understood to greatly complicate Jenkins’s dichotomy between continuity and multiplicity models of transmedia branding, which Matt Hills (2012c) explores elsewhere. I will now move on to examine how it is perhaps less useful to discuss Disney’s Star Wars as a single world or even as multiple worlds than it is to consider the form and function of Star Wars as a set of “possible worlds,” each complete with a sense of myth. A shift to understandings of mystical “possible worlds” as brand strategies stems initially from Disney’s decision in 2014 to decanonize and repackage the entire corpus of the Star Wars EU, rebranding the EU stories as Star Wars Legends in a way that seemingly unbrands them from official Star Wars continuity

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forever—or at least until the next overhaul. Specifically, the many EU novels, comics, video games, and so on, would all continue to be made, as they always had been, but over 260 novels, six collections of short stories, 180 video games, and more than 1,000 comic books became forcibly removed from continuity and reconstituted as noncanonical (C. Taylor 2014: 286; Proctor and Freeman 2016). In other words, they never really “happened.” Or did they? As was indicated earlier in this chapter, the EU had clearly been a financial success for Lucasfilm, and so as Proctor and Freeman (2016: 233) observe, “The primary rationale for Disney to de-­canonise the already-­existing narrative continuity of the EU seems to have been to carve out an unmarked pathway for The Force Awakens film and prevent a collision of continuities.” After all, given that much of the EU takes place in a post–Return of the Jedi world, it was important for the Disney films to forge their own path. And yet the unbranding of the old EU adventures into noncanonical “legends” is far from the simple case of brand detachment that it first appears (see also Hills in this volume). While Disney’s strategy is certainly not to incorporate the EU as part of continuity, the Legends branding represents something more complex than just a shift to a multiplicity model, in which multiple versions of the storyworld emerge. In its place, it is important to our understanding of multifaceted brand models in the age of media convergence to discuss Disney’s Star Wars less as a product of Marvel’s single universe (or even the Marvel comics–inflected idea of multiple worlds and multiverses) and more as a logical extension of Disney’s privileging of possibility as a brand message. As I shall now demonstrate, Disney’s branding strategy has been to promote the idea that all of the various interpretations of the Star Wars world could have happened, might have happened—all serving as possible, borderline imaginary interpretations that may or may not be true. This emphasis on potential imagination as a specific world-­building approach is partly established paratextually. In 2014, for example, Shelly Shapiro, editor at large at Del Rey Publishing, explained the relevance of the EU to Disney’s Star Wars universe as follows: We do not want to just disappear stuff that everybody read and loved— including myself. Legends are things that are often told over generations. . . . They change constantly with the telling, so you cannot actually attrib­ ute an author to any particular one. Often it was not someone who was actually there. . . . They are pretty sure there was a “King Arthur,” but most of the stories probably did not happen. But there are likely to be kernels of truth in them. (Quoted in Dyce 2014)

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Editor Chris Cerasi also reinforced this same notion of stories as myths: “Every piece of Star Wars fiction is a window into the Star Wars universe. Some windows are a bit foggier than others, but each contains a nugget of truth to them” (“Canon” n.d.). Much like Obi-­Wan Kenobi once said: “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.” In other words, there is a focus on point of view in Disney’s branding of its transmedia Star Wars world, with the slight distortions and subtle differences that may emerge from characters’ points of view opening up new possibilities for Disney’s transmedia Star Wars storytelling. Consider the Marvel-­published Star Wars comics discussed above, for example. With its stories set between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, one edition revolves around a mysterious woman who announces herself as Han Solo’s wife and disrupts his romantic affiliation with Leia. Or as a piece of promotion for said comic book stressed to readers: “Han may have been married the whole time he was flirting with main character Princess Leia Organa throughout Star Wars: Episode IV. Then again, the whole thing could be a ruse, a shakedown. . . . Only time, and this new comic, will tell” (Woerner 2015a). Though the comic series eventually revealed that Han’s marriage was in fact a ruse, at the time of promotion, and given what audiences knew about Han’s scoundrel-­like, womanizing past, such a tale could have been a possibility, or it might just as easily have been the result of a misconstrued point of view. Characterizing the brand intentions of the Star Wars comic books of the Disney era is thus a complicated task: its stories seem to occupy the same storyworld and timeline as those of the films, at least for now. But other comics in the series venture further abroad, narrating side missions, origin stories, and adventure tales that do not necessarily tie into the events of the original films. As Daniel Worden (2016) writes, Disney’s Star Wars comics specialize in the “suspension of the characters, relationships, and environments so beloved in childhood, removed from any permanent developments that would harm their endless recombination.” Perhaps it is more accurate, then, to suggest that Disney’s branding of its transmedia Star Wars world is like the brand equivalent of  Heath Ledger’s Joker, who spins multiple accounts of how he got his facial scars in The Dark Knight (2008), with the details varying depending on his audience: the point is that we do not necessarily know for absolute certain which story, if any, is the “real” one, since “real” is only ever a matter of perspective. Using point of view as the driving creative rationale for transmedia storytelling also brings questions of memory into play, with any single version of the Star Wars saga now presented to audiences as one (potentially mistaken) memory of a character or an event that may or may not be a distorted account. And the

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practice of storytelling as memory takes us not to a point of narrative closure, but to even more complications that open up further possible worlds. In another iconic reference to The Empire Strikes Back in Marvel’s Star Wars comic book series, for instance, there is a moment where Luke confronts Darth Vader and declares, “You killed my father.” Vader replies in the comic differently than he does in the film; the response, “I have killed very many fathers. You will have to be more specific,” rather playfully replaces, “I am your father.” As Worden (2016) writes of this comic, “It plays with the dialogue and characters that we already know, and as Vader’s unexpected rejoinder to Luke makes clear, the point of these comics is to multiply narrative trajectories, to avoid the kind of permanent resolutions that we know have already happened, are already coming, and will have always been the case.” Like much of Disney’s transmedia Star Wars universe, Marvel’s Star Wars comics are a place where the past folds in on itself, where memory quickly transforms into myth, and where the difference between continuity and multiplicity branding blurs in a postmodern haze. So, then, Disney’s approach to branding its transmedia Star Wars universe may be to make use of concepts such as point of view, memory, myth, and so on to fold its own iterations of the storyworld back into those originally produced by Lucas, in turn blurring the simple continuity-­multiplicity branding models into a more playful, postmodern dialectic of possible worlds based around legends. But such a characterization could also equally be applied to the larger Disney brand identity. Mixing the present with the past in playful ways, forging postmodern twists on old fairy-­tale legends, and doing so in the name of generation-­spanning storytelling is nothing if not the brand epitome of the Disney way, especially in the twenty-­fi rst century. Many of Disney’s more recent cinema successes, such as Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010), Frozen (2013), Into the Woods (2014), and Maleficent (2014), all share the commonality of being postmodern fairy tales with a twist, essentially capturing the nostalgia and familiarity of Disney’s past while peppering that past with a taste of the new. It might well be “once upon a time” as usual, but it is always “once upon a time once again” ad infinitum (and, perhaps, ad nauseam). Elsewhere, it is this playful blending of the old and new that builds postmodern fairy tales where distorted perspectives transform formerly known stories into myths and possible worlds. Maleficent, for example, is a version of  Disney’s classic Sleeping Beauty (1959), told from the perspective of the story’s villain rather than its hero, Princess Aurora. Maleficent is partly a continuation of that Disney classic, adding a previously unknown backstory for the character of Maleficent. And yet Maleficent also distorts the known ending to the animated film of 1959, with the villain of the piece revealed to have been the one who

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woke Aurora from her spell—not Prince Phillip. But like Disney’s approach to Star Wars, the story of Sleeping Beauty is akin to legend: told over generations, changing with the telling, with each telling like a new memory with kernels of truth buried within the myth. We know that the various stories cannot all be true, though they could be. And so Disney’s widespread conception of possible worlds is now part of the fabric of Star Wars, both on the paratextual level of branding and on the textual level of storytelling. Ideas of myth and legend are themselves central to the story of The Force Awakens, with lead character Rey acknowledging that, from her point of view, Luke Skywalker is essentially a myth, no more than a bedtime story. From Rey’s standpoint, the events of the original films are literally legends— tales that likely originate from some place of possible truth but that remain ultimately without authentication. Disney has thus altogether applied the exact same myths-­and-­legends concept to their transmedia branding strategy, intricately tying the economics of its branding techniques to the perspectives and memories of fictional characters within the storyworld.

Conclusion Carlos Scolari (2009: 599) notes that “from a semiotic perspective, the brand is a device that can produce a discourse, give it meaning, and communicate it to audiences.” Such a definition sounds simple enough, and yet this chapter has only begun to show just how complex media branding can be, especially in the age of media convergence, where multiple media platforms and shifts in production, agency, and, in the case of Star Wars, ownership patterns collide. Throughout this chapter I have explored and theorized the branding mechanisms of the Star Wars universe across time, media, and production cultures, showing how Disney has made use of complex branding, rebranding, and unbranding strategies to craft new stories of the galaxy. In particular, this chapter highlights how much there is still to understand and unravel about how a large corporation like Disney goes about branding its stories and storyworlds across multiple media. Specific brand tactics are always likely to vary depending on period, context, ownership, and so on, but the case of Star Wars, at least, complicates Jenkins’s binary distinction between continuity and multiplicity models of transmedia branding, emphasizing instead that models of storyworld branding are indeed best conceptualized as a thematic and even narrative-­driven dialectic rather than as a binary logic. Disney’s own brand emphasis on magic, family, and nostalgia, not to mention its playful postmodern uses of point of view and memory, have fused to re-­form a Star

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Wars of “quasi-­historical moments” where one world or multiple worlds are now replaced by “possible worlds” (Bruce Jones 2010). Colin Harvey (2015) argues that memory is itself always important to transmedia storytelling, given that audiences are required to remember the specificities of characters and events as they migrate across media. But in this instance, memory is equally involved in the brand strategy of casting out the tales of the old EU—unbranding and rebranding them—while simultaneously holding onto them as myths of hope and legend. As Bruce Jones (2010) concludes, “Stories are the manifestation of the Disney brand.” And in Disney’s manifestation of the Star Wars world, all stories are perpetuated by myth.

2 Matt Hills

Transmedia Spectacle and Transownership Storytelling as Seen on TV Star Wars from the Holiday Special to Rebels

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eplacing the Clone Wars TV series (Cartoon Network, 2008–2014), Rebels (2014–2018) became the first moving-­image Star Wars content under Disney’s command. Premiering on Disney XD, a “microcast” channel targeted at tween boys (Gillan 2015: 172), Rebels emerged while a vast array of Expanded Universe (EU) storytelling was being rendered noncanonical by Disney (Proctor 2013: 220). “T-­canon” (television-­canon) and “G-­canon” (George Lucas–canon, as developed in the pre-­Disney Star Wars films) were amalgamated into one nonhierarchical canon, aligning Star Wars with norms of seamless transmedia storytelling. Star Wars possesses a much longer history on television, however, than the new canon of 3-­D CGI-­animated series, Clone Wars and Rebels. The franchise’s uneasy relationship with television goes back to the predominantly live-­action Holiday Special (1978), a variety “spectacular” in which Star Wars characters intermingle with comedians and rock bands of the day while we visit the Wookiee homeworld and meet Chewbacca’s family. The Holiday Special, made for U.S. network television, potentially offers an example of how pre-­transmedia storytelling norms in film and TV could generate licensing that didn’t coherently extend a franchise’s narrative world (Jenkins 2006a: 105). George Lucas’s dismissive writing-­out of the Holiday Special from Star Wars’s history has typically been followed by scholars: “Featuring Imperial Stormtroopers listening to Jefferson Starship and original cast members juggling high adventure with comedy skits, the Star Wars Holiday Special was a catastrophic collision of tones” (A. Ross 2016). Even in a chapter dedicated to Star Wars on television, Eric Charles (2012: 127) has little to say about the Holiday Special. As Colin Harvey

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(2015: 97) has noted, transmedia storytelling involves processes of “non-­memory,” as rights-­owners “un-­remember” material deemed problematic, and one might say that the Holiday Special has been officially and academically “un-­remembered,” reduced to circulating via YouTube uploads and pirated copies. I want to somewhat reclaim the Holiday Special here, however, viewing it not simply as the dark side of pre-­transmedia licensing (versus an allegedly more enlightened era of branding). Instead, I am interested in how the Holiday Special represents a form of “television spectacle” (Wheatley 2016: 5). Coming at the end of the 1970s, the Holiday Special does not fit into theories of “televisuality” whereby TV became supposedly more “filmic,” using single-­camera filming rather than multicamera coverage, for instance. Yet in its hybridization of early videographic effects, with footage drawn from the first Star Wars film (1977) and a filming style that represents Chewbacca’s home as if it is part of a conventional 1970s sitcom, the Holiday Special suggests that we need to think more carefully about how Star Wars’s branded blend of spectacle and narrative (Turnock 2015: 176) has moved from film to television. After examining the Holiday Special, I will carry my analysis of Star Wars’s television spectacle into a reading of Disney’s Rebels series, arguing that there are commonalities shared by the first Lucasfilm live-­action TV Star Wars and Disney’s first CGI-­animated Star Wars for television and considering how both draw on the franchise’s production design. In the second half of this chapter I will then address a different level of commonality, arguing that Disney has sought to revisit Lucasfilm’s prior canon in a way that focuses on “transownership storytelling” as much as on transmedia harmonization. First, though, how have the brand-­defining, spectacular special effects of Star Wars authentically crossed over (or not) into the realms of TV?

Transmedia Spectacle: Star Wars’s “Overdesign” on Television and the “Digital Backlot” Star Wars has, of course, been widely appreciated as a marker of revolutionary special effects in movie history (J. Wyatt 1994: 22). In Plastic Reality, Julie Tur­ nock examines how a planar approach to visual effects, often based on forced perspective, miniatures, and the use of matte paintings, was displaced in Star Wars (1977) by a new conceptualization of model work and optical compositing: “Special effects artists of the 1970s understood the screen space as global and spherical rather than planar. The combination of multiplane animation techniques and motion-­control, computerized camera[s] . . . created a possibility for more kinds of movements across different axes” (2015: 170). This “spherical” screen and diegetic space was combined with tight, partial framings—

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for example, close-­ups of the Death Star’s trenches: “The overall effect is to . . . give the impression there is too much to see . . . in the awe-­inspiring, complex and fully formed world presented on screen” (176). And although Star Wars’s textual (and paratextual) emphasis on startling special effects has aligned it with “a brand of spectacle that is hyperkinetic, flashy and bright . . . [:] an aesthetic of the ‘zap’ ” (King 2000: 75), Turnock argues that Star Wars’s “narrative and spectacle interpenetrate one another” (2015: 176), with principal photography needing to look fantastical as well as special effects needing to “look like live-­ action photography. Star Wars’ world-­building novelty resulted in large part from the interpenetration of those previously separate spheres” (149, emphasis added). Such extensive blending of visual effects (VFX) and pro-­fi lmic narrative, to the extent that Star Wars’s “zap aesthetic” is a crucial part of its world-­building, has posed problems for live-­action Star Wars on television, and although an ongoing live-­action TV series has long been in gestation, it has not yet materialized.1 The sheer expense of accurately reproducing Star Wars’s reliance on effects work to convey its narrative world has arguably proved prohibitive (as well as taking up far more postproduction time than would usually be available for a TV show, possibly even a “high-­end” one). Any live-­action TV Star Wars runs the risk of being seen as a watered-­down remediation of costly, cutting-­edge cinematic work; the shift from VFX-­heavy cinema to television hence calls for a transmedia strategy aimed at conserving brand authenticity, as I will go on to demonstrate. This issue led Lucasfilm to utilize 3-­D CGI animation for Clone Wars, as well as to CGI-­animate Rebels. And yet despite being made in the era before transmedia storytelling and brand management were dominant discursive practices in film and TV industries, the Holiday Special of 1978 displays related strategies of textual authentication and re-­creation, at the same time as it disrupts any sense that it could actually form a coherent part of the Star Wars universe. Writing about media franchises, Derek Johnson (2013: 115) focuses on a vital point: they are distinguished by “overdesign.” This means that production design and art direction have become increasingly important to franchises, with Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings all being demarcated by their “persistent visual design tradition[s]” (Johnson 2013: 117). With overdesigning, an entire world or universe can be implied “beneath the surface [of a text] with creative potential waiting to be elaborated upon . . . . Dormant, overdesigned detail [can] serve . . . as a resource for later systemic elaboration” (Johnson 2013: 119). And Star Wars was nothing if not overdesigned from its very beginnings in 1977; its zap aesthetic was aligned with a “plastic reality” not only in terms of being physically and profilmically constructed within production (Turnock 2015), but also by being rendered tactile outside the text, in the arena of merchandising

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(J. Wyatt 1994: 152–53). Overdesign means that key objects in the diegesis (e.g., lightsabers) tend to become fetishized across entries in the franchise as points of connection, while functioning in merchandized terms as precisely tooled objects that can be owned and appropriated by fans (Wetmore 2007). Such material practices of fannish play become ways of remediating Star Wars as well as forms of branded authenticity (Banet-­Weiser 2012). The Holiday Special respects multiple elements of Star Wars’s overdesign and undoubtedly aims for aspects of what would today be thought of as brand authenticity. It makes use of a Millennium Falcon cockpit set, for example, which although it is shown fleetingly and tightly framed, nevertheless approximates to that of the filmic Star Wars. It also emulates the zap aesthetic of the Falcon’s jump to hyperspace; incorporates a kind of Star Wars clip show into its closing moments, featuring the first film’s lead actors (Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill); and makes use of screen-­accurate Stormtrooper, droid, and Wookiee costumes from what would become known as A New Hope. Indeed, the highly regarded Hollywood craftsman Stan Winston also worked on new Wookiee costumes for Chewbacca’s family. Additionally, the Holiday Special opens with film footage of Star Wars’s spacecraft, only beginning to diverge from cinematic-­style special effects and single-­camera “spherical” screen spaces in its focus on Chewbacca’s family home. Despite featuring lead actors and authentic redeployments of costumes and vehicles that have characterized Star Wars’s overdesign, the Holiday Special does not sustain an integration of narrative and special effects (SFX), as the films’ zap aesthetic gives way to representing a thinly science-­fictionalized version of 1970s domestic space. This conveys the distinct impression that Chewbacca’s family are appearing in a TV sitcom, shot in a planar and multicamera “zero-­degree studio style” (Caldwell 1995: 56), rather than featuring in a visually dynamic and multiaxis space opera. Establishing shots of the Wookiee homeworld using mattes as special effects consist “of an immobile perspectival series of planes” (Turnock 2015: 170) and are flat or predominantly static instead of representing spherical diegetic space as in A New Hope. The SFX techniques of the Holiday Special thus return Star Wars to exactly the kind of dated effects that it had so notably superseded on the big screen. The form of television spectacle that’s chiefly conveyed here is thus not one of filmic “televisuality” (Caldwell 1995: 5) but rather one that is aligned with historical notions of the televized “variety” spectacular. At one point, Jefferson Starship perform (diegetically, on a kind of holographic device), while comedians and performers such as Bea Arthur are somewhat unconvincingly incorporated into Star Wars’s mise-­en-­scène. This tension between a light entertainment

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“spectacular” and brand-­authentic overdesign is captured very well by the fact that at the climax of the show Carrie Fisher, ostensibly playing Princess Leia (and accurately in costume as such), sings a seasonal ballad about peace set to Star Wars’s musical theme. Thus the problems of the Holiday Special are not simply that it fails to approximate to Star Wars’s cinematic level of special effects’ integration with world-­building, or that it fails to be shot in a single-­camera style linked to cinematic codes, but instead that it fuses authentic franchise over­ design with an alien mode of “variety” television spectacle (Wheatley 2016: 13) that antedates the 1980s rise of “televisuality.” Given such issues, it is unsurprising that TV Star Wars would subsequently tend to be CGI-­animated. Such an approach means that Lucasfilm’s Clone Wars and Disney’s Rebels can achieve the films’ zap aesthetic, and an integration of what would otherwise be construed as “special effects” and profilmic narrative, without unsustainable budgets or lengthy postproduction timescales. Computer-­ generated animation is also well-­suited to emulating the kinds of camera moves and shots used in Star Wars’s space battles and can be combined with sound design to strongly resonate with brand-­based world-­building. However, there is no seamless transmedia integration of live-­action film and TV animation here, regardless of corporate hype, as actors previously seen in live-­action formats still need to be represented and recontextualized within CG art styles. What CGI animation does allow for, however, is the fact that extremely diegetically accurate vehicles and props can be re-­created: the “overdesign” of Star Wars is hence powerfully imprinted on Rebels. Along with spacecraft models and props such as lightsabers, Star Wars’s masked characters and droids can also be precisely reproduced: “Lucasfilm is creating . . . [a] ‘digital backlot.’ . . . ‘It should feel authentically Star Wars,’ says . . . Lucasfilm’s general manager. . . . ‘That led us to develop pipelines so we’re actually able to take the film assets and put them into games or immersive entertainment . . . so in that way you truly recognise and feel that the environment, the characters and the ships are all authentically designed by our art department’ ” (Franklin-­Wallis 2017: 129). The “fetishization of objects” that Kevin Wetmore (2007) has identified in relation to Star Wars’s narratives (and fandom) thus becomes a significant part of this industrial remediation, as digital scans of physical props, or digitally originated content, can be shared across Star Wars on film and TV. To give one example, Rebels’s executive producer Dave Filoni notes, “If they’re building a ship in Rogue One that we have in Rebels but we’ve never been inside it, I can get [production designer] Doug Chiang on email and say, ‘Hey, are you doing a cockpit for that thing? I want to make sure ours and yours are the same’ ” (Franklin-­Wallis 2017: 129). The “digital backlot” promises seamless repurposing of digital assets, so that Darth

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Vader in Rebels is identical to a chosen physical costume and mask, and so that Stormtroopers are likewise accurately re-­created digitally. However, this digital extension of franchise overdesign—something already present in the Holiday Special via its reuse of costumes—continues to have limitations. Human faces still cannot be CGI-­animated entirely convincingly in the way that, say, molded plastic realities can be: re-­creations of Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher in Rogue One (2016), despite according with Star Wars’s discursive history of cutting-­edge special effects, have remained divisive for audiences and critics alike. Consequently, Star Wars’s film-­to-­T V remediation favors masked characters (J. Scott 2013a; J. Scott 2013b) as its markers of authenticity: Darth Vader is optimal for transmedia spectacle and authentication as his physical form can be digitally reproduced while the original voice actor, James Earl Jones, can also be utilized. Set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Rebels has re-­created human characters and actors within its CGI TV narrative, prefiguring Rogue One by featuring Governor Tarkin and Princess Leia. In each case, these characters are stylized in keeping with the Disney series’ overall aesthetic, described as a “Ralph McQuarrie look” (Wilkins 2016a) to articulate its stylization with McQuarrie’s production designs for the original trilogy. Such stylization of human faces avoids making CGI animation work unduly onerous, time-­ consuming, and expensive, as well as evading the “uncanny valley” that can afflict “synthespians” when CGI work is very close to being lifelike yet still perceptibly off (North 2008: 154). But though it avoids technological, economic, and production problems, such stylization of well-­k nown characters does result in a lack of physical resemblance (as well as imitative voice actors being used, given that Peter Cushing, who played Tarkin, passed away in 1994 and that Carrie Fisher’s voice had aged perceptibly since her 1977 turn as Princess Leia). The move from live-­action actors to CGI remediations is therefore far from seamless and cannot (yet) be technologically resolved via promises of a “digital backlot.” Instead, it is the fact that Star Wars is populated by characters-­as-­objects possessing physically plastic forms (e.g., droids and masked figures) that tends to carry franchise overdesign successfully into TV, along with props and other scenic, material elements of the original production design—and this is a visual pattern that is in fact shared across the Holiday Special, Clone Wars, and Rebels. Although “live-­action” cinema and CGI animation blur together in Rogue One, “cartoonish” remains a term of abuse when applied to (allegedly) excessive CGI within a live-­action film—this accusation having been directed at Lucas’s digital aesthetic in the Special Edition and the prequel trilogy (Pierson 2002: 154). The modality of animation would appear to be viewed as somehow less

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“real” within the franchise, with live action being discursively separated out as a marker of authenticity despite the fact that postproduction SFX and profilmic visuals are thoroughly blended in A New Hope; the live-­action components of the Holiday Special are not enough to overcome its critical and fan receptions as inauthentic, given that it is the wrong kind of “spectacular” (one rooted in TV variety or sitcom protocols rather than the zap aesthetic of lightsabers and blaster fire). Dave Filoni has suggested that the unusual move of Saw Gerrera, an animated character from Clone Wars, into Rogue One’s live action (played by Forest Whitaker) and then back into Rebels series three—with Whitaker now a voice actor—“validates the belief that Clone Wars fans have shown” in the character (quoted in Wilkins 2016a: 19). Filoni immediately backtracks to emphasize that Star Wars characters aren’t any less real to him when they’ve only existed as animations, but the implication remains that inclusion as live action in a live-­ action film is the gold-­standard authenticity marker of being “a real part of the saga,” even though Clone Wars and Rebels are officially part of Disney’s “new canon” (Wilkins 2016a: 19). That assets move from a CGI-­animated figure on TV to a human actor in film once more demonstrates that the digital backlot is no guarantor of perfectly transmediated overdesign: the Saw Gerrera of Rogue One is an older version of the Rebel extremist seen in Clone Wars, as if to sidestep issues of imperfect reproducibility. And although Star Wars’s moves to (and from) TV have tended to hinge on re-­creating aspects of production and art design, making transmedia spectacle a matter of reproducing the films’ “look,” it can be argued that the development of transmedia spectacle has simultaneously driven an increased notion of screen-­accuracy in merchandising. Action figures have become more poseable over time (Geraghty 2006: 216), while LEGO playsets have offered detailed spaces in order to facilitate imaginative reenactments of film sequences (Wolf 2014: 21). Perfectly and visually re-­creating the filmic universe of Star Wars across media has become a general aim for Lucasfilm and Disney, albeit one that remains imperfect on television now, just as it was in 1978. This aim cannot currently be perfected across moving-­image media, largely as a result of the ageing, changing, and mortality of human faces, voices, and bodies, all of which have to be imagined away in order for the digital backlot concept to have efficacy. So far, I have focused on how the look of Star Wars has been re-­created on television, with stylized CGI animation offering a way out of the economic and production difficulties posed by seeking to authentically re-­create Star Wars as a live-­action TV series. I have highlighted these issues by taking seriously the Holiday Special’s efforts to properly re-­create Star Wars. I want to move on to

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address how the move from Lucasfilm to Disney has not represented a definitive break or rupture in Star Wars’s canon and film-­T V relationships so much as a progressive mining of different levels of the Lucasfilm canon for television, from the films to prior TV series such as Clone Wars and on into the Expanded Universe. Indeed, I would say that Rebels currently aims to be transmedially inclusive, using its status as an ongoing TV show to draw in fans of the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, Clone Wars, and Rogue One and to therefore diegetically smooth out the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm.

Transownership Storytelling: (Ghosted) Hierarchies of Canon in Rebels and Levels of Fan Service When the intellectual property of Star Wars was sold in 2012, it rapidly became apparent that for such an investment to be recouped, Disney would need to continue the filmic saga. Clone Wars, running on the Cartoon Network when the Disney deal went through, found itself wound down within six months of the acquisition, with a truncated series six running on Netflix. As William Proctor and Matthew Freeman have argued, Disney implemented a radical overhaul of Lucasfilm’s approach by overseeing “a shift in the transmedia economy of . . . Star Wars . . . which . . . [did] away with multiple levels of authenticity to begin rebuilding the universe as unified, cohesive and ‘canonically integrated’ ” (2016: 234). The previously hierarchical stance of Lucasfilm—distinguishing between levels of canon, with television-­or T-­canon subordinated to film’s (G-­canon’s) primary canonical status—was thus replaced by a new, flattened system of continuity in which tie-­in novels and comics could fit perfectly into the new world of filmic Star Wars. G-­canon and T-­canon were hence to be dissolved together, and the speedy cancellation of Clone Wars suggested that its storylines would be swept out of canon just as the post–Return of the Jedi EU books and comics, operating at a tertiary level of C-­canon, had been wiped away by a new storytelling authority, the Lucasfilm Story Group (Cocca 2016: 114). When Rebels was announced for Disney XD, it seemed likely that pre-­Disney Star Wars storytelling activity on television was also going to be overwritten. However, between the initial press announcement of Rebels on March 11, 2013, and its premiere on October 3, 2014, “Lucasfilm announced that the ‘immovable objects’ of Star Wars canon would be, as before, the film series, but now the Clone Wars TV series would be included, perhaps because of Lucas’s involvement” (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 235). Even more important than Lucas’s work on Clone Wars, I would argue, is the strategic timing of this statement. As a result, whereas fans had vocally opposed the dissolution of the Expanded

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Universe—eventually rebranded as the noncanonical product line Star Wars Legends (see Freeman in this volume)—fan opposition to Rebels, Disney’s first significant Star Wars venture in a costly medium and one that they keenly needed to be successful rather than getting bogged down in fan resistance, was far more muted. Television Star Wars was effectively promoted in textual importance via Disney’s strategy of transmedia flattening: rather than being secondary to film, it was now ostensibly placed on the same hierarchical level (something that has been reinforced by Saw Gerrera’s movement from TV animation to live-­action film and back again, and by references to Rebels in Rogue One). Rather than displacing Clone Wars, then, Rebels pursued two key agendas across its initial series: first, it developed its own identity by establishing lead characters such as former Jedi Kanan Jarrus and apprentice Ezra Bridger (this name also perhaps connotes Rebels’s ultimate position as a bridging of older Lucasfilm Star Wars and Disney’s new canon). Second, and in line with Ezra’s surname, Rebels took care to insert itself into the established continuity and filmic canon of A New Hope by prominently featuring a CGI-­animated likeness of Peter Cushing as Tarkin, voiced by Stephen Stanton. Occupying a position in the overarching Star Wars timeline after Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith but before Rogue One and A New Hope, Rebels initially intertextually positioned itself most strongly in relation to what would have been G-­canon: in short, it worked hard to be seen by fans as brand-­authentic Star Wars at the level of transmedia and transownership storytelling. Primary core elements of George Lucas’s Star Wars were emphasized, as if to assuage established fandom’s suspicions of the newly installed Disney regime. “Droids in Distress,” Rebels’s first regular episode after the TV movie, featured C-­3PO and R2-­D2, again bidding to be viewed as proper Star Wars, wholly of a piece with Lucasfilm’s ownership and core canon. Even at the level of Rebels’s CGI-­animated look, paratextual material reveals a near hysterical pursuit of emulative authenticity between Disney and Lucasfilm. Rebels’s lighting and VFX Supervisor, Joel Aron, has discussed the fact that the series’ digital grading imitates “how film grain reacts with the Kodak-­made film stock . . . originally used to shoot A New Hope” (quoted in Wilkins 2016a: 15). Rebels is therefore visually linked to the original Star Wars trilogy at a cinephilic level, with its colors polluting green in shadow and red or yellow at the high end “like you [would] see if you were to watch an original print of Star Wars. Then we apply that grain on top of the fully rendered image” (15). And yet this trans­ ownership storytelling, where markers of Lucasfilm’s practices are reflexively incorporated (in terms of major original trilogy characters, likenesses, and even film grain), sits alongside Disney’s branding priorities: for example, the fact “that

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Disney wants to see things light and bright—Rebels airs on Disney XD . . . [so] in post we go ahead and lift everything up to make it brighter” (15). This is not the only way in which Disney hybridizes an “imitation” (Charles 2012: 135) of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars with its own brand-­oriented agenda. Rebels’s insistence across series one on referencing G-­canon is evident in the manner in which it replays John Williams’s music cues, reuses sound effects, and directly remediates filmic sequences such as TIE fighter battles, exactly reproducing tightly framed camera shots of fighter pilots that are utilized as inserts within spaceship dogfights. It also playfully reworks infamous dialogue belonging to Yoda, having Ezra and Kanan question what “There is no try” actually means in Spark of Rebellion, and it further draws on Ralph McQuarrie’s Star Wars concept art for the character of Zeb, who resembles one of McQuarrie’s early designs for Chewbacca. Additionally, Darth Vader’s appearance in the series one finale concludes with his infamous hissing breath playing over the initial end credits and series logo, as if suggesting that Vader’s overarching presence in Star Wars is so powerful that he cannot be contained by Rebels’s diegesis and thus forcefully enters what would be normally be a paratextual airlock around the text. Much of Rebels’s Lucasfilm-­oriented authenticity is hence based around its use of sound design, given that this dimension can be freely (and perfectly) digitally sampled and dubbed over the animation. If series one of Rebels is, at least in part, about establishing the show’s original characters and setup, then the introduction of Vader at its conclusion radically shifts the balance between discrete series-­based and overflowing franchise-­ based narratives. Vader’s dramatic emergence is paralleled by the reveal of a character named only, at this point, Fulcrum, the mysterious rebel figure who has previously only been heard as a disembodied voice. Fulcrum, we learn, is an older Ahsoka Tano, a leading character from the Clone Wars TV series where she had been Anakin Skywalker’s Jedi apprentice. Introducing Darth Vader (the villain into which Anakin Skywalker is transformed at the end of Episode III) means that series two of Rebels reorients itself intertextually in relation to Clone Wars and what had been Lucasfilm’s television T-­canon. It poses the question of how Anakin’s former student will interact with what Anakin has become, or indeed whether she even knows who Vader is behind his mask. Derek Sweet (2016: 85) has argued that the Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars represented Anakin Skywalker as a Jedi who would resort to torture in the war against the Empire, with his actions frequently saving lives and aiding the Rebel cause. “In this sense, then,” Sweet observes, “Clone Wars appears to offer a positive assessment of torture. . . . What should not be forgotten, however, is Anakin’s longer character arc.” And Crystal White (2012: 105) has similarly noted how “the fate of

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Ahsoka [in Clone Wars] . . . most certainly changes the character of Anakin in terms of continuity, despite not being part of the live-­action films.” That is, both scholars move from TV series–level assessments of narrative to the implications for wider Star Wars continuity, or how (fan) audiences might newly understand Anakin’s turn to the dark side in Revenge of the Sith. Series two of Rebels continues to play with this aspect of prior T-­canon and its relationship to G-­canon, with Ahsoka learning of Vader’s identity in “Shroud of Darkness” before confronting him in a lightsaber duel in “Twilight of the Apprentice.” By invoking Clone Wars’s continuity so centrally in its second series, Rebels directs audiences to seek out the earlier TV show (confirmed as part of the “new canon” under Disney, of course) as well as stressing what had previously been T-­canon. Ahsoka’s presence acts as a kind of organic invitation to what Sharon Marie Ross (2008: 8) calls “tele-­participation,” presuming that viewers are already extending the Disney TV text through knowledge of Lucasfilm’s television series. Thus, Ahsoka’s involvement is relatively simple and legible on the surface of Rebels, allowing the tween audience who are not knowledgeable about the entire Star Wars universe to consume narratives at the series level, while longer-­term or more diegetically tutored fans can also read Rebels at a franchise level, placing it in relation to Episodes II, III, and IV (Mittell 2015: 303). As Peter Krämer (2004: 367) has argued, although the “Star Wars saga addresses ‘the kid’ in adult spectators and takes them back to their childhood,” it typically combines this with “a challenging vision of childhood, family life and the difficult process of growing up,” and consequently one “might therefore say that Star Wars . . . invite[s] spectators to regress to maturity.” Rebels, with its exploration of Ezra’s maturation along with a continuation of the Ahsoka-­Vader relationship, very much fits into this pattern of targeting younger TV viewers as a demographic (Charles 2012: 128) while also engaging with less age-­specific issues of character betrayal and loss (and with franchise-­level implications for Anakin/ Vader). Rebels also recognizes that younger or less knowledgeable Star Wars viewers can be directed from series-­level to franchise-­level readings: indeed, a series two Blu-­ray/DVD paratext that aims to do this is Connecting the Galaxy, a guide to intertextual Star Wars references in the show. Fan knowledge is not merely assumed by Rebels, then: it is also explicitly and paratextually transmitted to new tween viewers (with such know-­how having a commercial value for Disney if it leads to wider Star Wars consumption). And where stylized CGI versions of performers such as Rebels’s series two rendering of a pre–New Hope Princess Leia potentially jar with the live-­action original (contra Cocca 2016: 96), they can instead form a new point of origin to be digitally reproduced in paratextual toy form; a Rebels Leia Organa figure was released as part of the

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Rogue One wave of 3.75-­inch action figures, hyperaccurately reproducing the TV show’s CGI-­animated likeness rather than resembling the actress Carrie Fisher as she appeared in Star Wars: A New Hope (or the CGI version of Fisher featured in Rogue One). Where series one of Rebels draws most strongly on G-­canon from the original trilogy, series two diversifies into pre-­Disney T-­canon, and series three continues this descent through the Lucasfilm “old” canon by drawing on C-­canon (i.e., the comics and books of the Expanded Universe). It does this by reintroducing a major Imperial villain from Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire EU novel, now rebranded as a Legends title: “Thrawn was one of the most beloved characters in the original Expanded Universe of books . . . before it became the Legends timeline. . . . [W]hen Disney took over the Star Wars franchise in 2012, it erased all of the continuity outside of the six core films. That meant that works like Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, the series of books responsible for continuing the Star Wars story after Return of the Jedi took its bow in 1983, were no longer canon” (Crouse 2016). As journalist-­fan Megan Crouse (2016) points out, this restoration of a major character from the EU “is a big deal”; it was teased by Dave Filoni in the Rebels Recon behind-­the-­scenes extra for the final episode of series two before being trailed at the Star Wars Celebration 2016 fan convention. However, Thrawn’s reappearance doesn’t simply reinstate Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy of EU novels within official canon. Rather, this act of restoration draws on Thrawn’s status as a character beloved by long-­term fans and therefore fits readily into Star Wars’s overall strategy as a “character-­oriented franchise”— an orientation it has shared with Disney’s output since the early Lucasfilm days (J. Scott 2013b: 12; Krämer 2004: 365). As Dave Filoni has remarked of the focus on Thrawn as a character: We’ve gone to a lot of care to make sure our version of Thrawn is . . . accurate to what people liked about him in the book. . . . We’ve talked with Timothy Zahn, the author who created Thrawn. Obviously at Celebration people went nuts, because he was in the trailer, and it was like a standing ovation for this character. Just a validation. He became real to them again, because now he’s back in the canon, I suppose. That’s . . . a big deal. (Quoted in Gross 2016) Celebrated as a major event for Disney’s Star Wars in fan and production discourse alike, Thrawn’s reappearance in the new canon looks a lot like fan service, using Rebels to address the faction of established fans who were invested in EU novels just as Rebels had previously targeted fans of Clone Wars with its Ahsoka-­Vader storyline. However, what Rebels’s progressive mining of

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previously separate hierarchical levels of canon demonstrates is that fan service doesn’t correspond to one monolithic mode of address. Fan service can be multiple, heterogeneous, and stratified. And while Disney may have replaced a hierarchical “transmedia economy” with a flattened, integrated model of transmedia storytelling overseen by the Lucasfilm Story Group (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 234), Rebels shows how the older hierarchy of canon levels can be remembered and recast. It displays a form of unfolding transmedia memory (Harvey 2015: 39) that not only strategically re-­creates aspects of Lucasfilm Star Wars from film, television, and novels but also recalls fans’ affective investments in differing levels and layers of G-­, T-­, and C-canons. Old hierarchies that have ostensibly been done away with thus ghost across the text of Rebels, with new fans and the tween audience of  Disney XD thereby being tutored and guided into the worlds of previous TV series and what are now termed Legends novels. This strategy represents an acute form of transownership storytelling; that is, the pre-­Disney Expanded Universe is selectively mined by its new owners in a way that simultaneously rewards long-­term fan audiences by offering a validation of their fan affect and connects the galaxy in a way that can incite newer, younger TV audiences to engage with layers of canon, both old and new. Such unfolding transmedia memory thus produces different levels of fan service for varied fan audiences. Rebels series three has also featured Darth Maul, an older Obi-­wan Kenobi, and a Forest Whitaker–voiced Saw Gerrera in addition to Thrawn, making it transmedially and intertextually inclusive in terms of cueing fan memories of the prequel trilogy, the original trilogy, Rogue One, and the EU. Disney has thus retooled TV Star Wars not as an uneasy site of multicamera, planar “television spectacle” at odds with A New Hope’s revolutionary SFX spectacle, despite attempts at re-­creating authentic production design and franchise “overdesign,” but rather as a space of transmedia spectacle and transownership storytelling that unifies aspects of old George Lucas–canon with new Lucasfilm Story Group oversight. Rebels ranges fluidly across G-­canon, T-­canon, and C-­canon in a bid to convey multiple versions of brand-­authentic Star Wars to multiple groups of established and emergent fans. Perhaps you can’t please all of fandom all the time, but Disney is evidently determined to ignore Yoda’s maxim that “there is no try.” In following Lucasfilm’s Clone Wars by using CGI animation on television once more, Disney is able to digitally re-­create the “look,” sound, and camera framings and movements of live-­action cinematic Star Wars spectacle, succeeding in perfectly reproducing the narrative objects and plastic character objects of the franchise. However, Disney’s Rebels and the big-­screen Rogue One both have to make do

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with recoded CGI representations of human likenesses, which can be jarring in animated and live-­action contexts. Whereas Rogue One can paratextually pre­ sent its efforts, however much they fall into the uncanny valley, as an authentic part of Star Wars’s revolutionary SFX brand discourses, Rebels is left with the fact that its nonphotorealist renderings of Peter Cushing or Carrie Fisher are distinctive artistic renderings rather than seamlessly integrating into one visual and digital Star Wars universe.

3 Lincoln Geraghty

Rebuilding the Force, Brick by Brick Canon Reformation and Brand Synergy in LEGO Star Wars

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opular LEGO author Daniel Lipkowitz has written several reference titles for the publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), the majority of which are specifically about the LEGO Star Wars brand. In 2015, three years after Disney bought Lucasfilm, his illustrated LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes became the latest volume in the DK range of LEGO books. Indeed, since 2012 DK has also published a character encyclopedia by Dolan and Last (2015; the updated and expanded edition), a visual dictionary by Beecroft and Fry (2014; also updated and expanded), a guide to the dark side by Lipko­ witz (2014; revealing secrets of the Sith in cute LEGO form), and a history of the Star Wars galaxy (Bray et al. 2015), including events from The Force Awakens (2015), told through existing and new LEGO sets. All the reference texts come with exclusive Star Wars minifigures. Both LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes and Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy by Vesa Lehtimäki (2015) use pictures of minifigures to re-­create and expand upon the movies: in the former, famous scenes from Episodes I through VI are parodied and enhanced with new bits of dialogue and fun facts; and in the latter, photographer Lehtimäki creates vignettes of what-­if scenarios drawn from across the fictional narrative. In the vein of  Dan Fleming’s (1996) and Jonathan Gray’s (2010) discussion of toys as paratextual objects of new meaning-­making, the authors of these LEGO books create new interpretations of the Star Wars text, adapting the narrative and feeding back into the storyworld of the live-­action original. Such developments within the LEGO universe chime with Disney’s own efforts to reform preexisting Star Wars canon established in books, games, and comics over the past thirty years. Disney’s announcement in 2014 that the canon was to be reset—in order to make the six movies and The Clone Wars and Rebels

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television series “immoveable objects” in the narrative universe (Star Wars 2014) from which new stories and texts would originate—underscores their strategy to rebuild Star Wars wholesale for a new generation (see chapters by Freeman, Hills, and Kent in this volume; see also Proctor and Freeman 2016). I argue in this chapter that LEGO and Dorling Kindersley are important partners in this Disney canon reformation and brand synergy across transmedia platforms. The toys, associated merchandise like books and guides, and video games all contribute to a complex narrative network of Star Wars texts, working in tandem to underscore the preeminence of the new Disney strategy: television and online episodes “reimagine” classic scenes from the movies; reference books fill in backstories to ancillary characters from The Clone Wars and Rebels; and the toys and video games allow players, gamers, and fans to adapt and control characters in self-­created narratives and spaces. While Robert Buerkle (2014: 148) suggests that “LEGO acts as a signifier for childhood and toy play,” creating nostalgia for past texts within a framework of “toydom,” I would take this further and argue that LEGO’s books, toys, and textual creations are very much part of  Disney’s strategy for Star Wars brand synergy, reforming the canon in order to create new audiences as well as reeducating existing fans in preparation for new movies and spin-­offs yet to come. Using the work of Derek Johnson (2013) on media franchises, intellectual property, and negotiated creativity, Jason Mittell (2015) on narrative and orienting paratexts, and Paul Booth (2015) on fan parody and production, I analyze LEGO’s partnership with Disney and its reimagining of the Star Wars canon through DK’s LEGO publications. These publications are aimed at new and existing fanbases where LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes and Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy clearly accentuate established narrative using bricks and minifigures, while at the same time engaging readers’ imaginations with new possibilities of storytelling enhanced by LEGO Star Wars and the unique features offered by the physicality of the toys. Building on Colin B. Harvey’s (2015) concept of “nostalgia-­play,” my own work on branding nostalgia in the LEGO universe, and Robert Buerkle’s (2014) analysis of LEGO as a “signifier for childhood,” I argue that DK’s LEGO books set limits on, yet help to expand, the Star Wars text. Disney’s new canon is legitimized and established over preexisting narrative history, while older stories get remade using LEGO sets. These new takes on classic scenes are differentiated through the playful parodying of well-­k nown characters in minifigure form. Abstracted yet familiar, parodic but also serious, reverent as well as irreverent, LEGO Star Wars and DK have become integral brand partners and part of the transmedia story that is Disney’s Star Wars in the twenty-­fi rst century.

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Synergy and Brand Convergence In the age of media convergence “old and new media collide,” and once forgotten icons, symbols, images, sounds, and series from music, comics, film, and television are reborn, attracting new fans to share and indulge in this rebirth. As Henry Jenkins (2006a: 2) asserts, convergence allows for the archiving of, and searching for, new forms of entertainment where “the flow of content across multiple media platforms” links the web with older media forms such as film and television. Star Wars as a long-­standing movie franchise is clearly subject to such flow across media and, through Disney’s own network of conglomerated outlets (television channels, movie studio, theme parks, and so on), its audience is potentially infinite. Yet Disney cannot do this alone. To spread its newly acquired intellectual property as far and wide as possible in different forms and formats, it has undertaken a series of partnerships so as to benefit from the creative talent and energy offered by toy manufacturers and publishers. For Jennifer Holt (2011: 3), “integration” results in synergy which drives production, and thus we can see how the integrated strategies of Disney working with LEGO and DK on Star Wars diversify potential markets and increase the dissemination and circulation of Star Wars as a media franchise. Modern media conglomerates, such as Disney, seek to maintain their brands through strategies epitomized by the media franchise. Branded lines rely on corporate ownership, management, and protection of culture as intellectual property. In the case of Star Wars, this means Disney protects its asset through copyright and manages it so as not to dilute the brand or risk alienating the target audience. The realignment of the Star Wars canon after 2014 signals their intention to assert their rights as owner of the franchise and protect the brand from alternative versions, such as the Expanded Universe (EU) of Star Wars as depicted in novels and comics starting with Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye in 1978 and published continuously since Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire in 1991 (see Hidalgo 2012b: 227–28, 303–8; Proctor and Freeman 2016). It is worth noting that Titan Books published a companion to the EU novels and comics in the same year that Disney bought Lucasfilm. A book intended to survey the vast back catalogue of EU stories, bringing them into the public eye for new fans to enjoy, became almost like the apocrypha. Disney’s intention was to draw a line around the so-­called noncanonical material, deemed now to be just “legends” in their reformed chronology, and thus separate it from the main text. Franchises exploit these strategies in service of consolidation and conglomeration, bringing the property under tighter control so as to prevent the brand from fading or its message from becoming confused. This affords the promise of synergy, where

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the same content can dominate across markets and generate more income. For Kristin Thompson (2003: 82), synergy is about “selling the same narrative over and over in different media.” For Disney, this means continuing to produce new films and supporting television series but also promoting Star Wars on its ABC network of channels, in its theme parks, and through its chain of high street stores. However, according to Derek Johnson (2013), this reduces the franchise to a selling machine, where business structures are purely about the marketing of the same product regardless of form and content. Star Wars is mythic narrative, evidently very marketable, but the story in its various incarnations and media-­specific formats requires careful consideration and development. As a transmedia narrative, Star Wars requires Disney to look outside of its own corporate structures to enlist creative talent who can drive and extend the property beyond Disney’s established network reach. This is in contrast to another of Disney’s most lucrative franchises, the Princess Line, which combines some of the more famous fictional female protagonists from various Disney films (see Booth in this volume). Launched in 2000, the subsidiary company Disney Consumer Products has complete control of associated spin-­offs and merchandise. The Princess Line was followed in 2006 with Disney Fairies. Franchises are built to reflect the corporate structure that bore them, but they are also influenced by changes in the wider media and entertainment industries. Derek Johnson (2013: 68–69) argues that the decline of mass production in the Hollywood of the 1970s and 1980s meant that studios had to search for niche markets to promote their movies. The blockbuster-­fi lm-­turned-­franchise thus grew out of the need to stimulate renewed interest in film as a form of entertainment. As media conglomerates formed during the “merger movement” of the 1980s (Balio 1998: 61) due to the relaxing of laws that prevented large-­scale corporate ownership, synergy became one way of utilizing new networks of production and dissemination. However, as those avenues became exhausted and media franchises became fragmented through corporate realignment in the early twenty-­fi rst century, new partners had to be found so that franchises could maintain momentum. It is within these contexts that I want to place Disney’s relationship with LEGO and DK with regard to reforming the canon and extending the Star Wars franchise. In his examination of Disney and Time Warner as “monolithic conglomerates,” Johnson (2013: 43) argues that both entered into agreements with Mattel and Electronic Arts to produce toys and games for their respective High School Musical and Batman franchises. These partnerships “speak to the persistence of social relations within industrial models understood through franchising” (43), relying on the expertise of Mattell and EA to develop products based on

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the High School Musical and Batman brands beyond what would have been possible within the existing corporate structure. One way a social partnership could work for Disney and LEGO, Disney and DK, was to use transmedia strategies to exploit story and characters to spread the narrative across different media texts (i.e., reference books and LEGO cartoons) by building parallel and interrelated storylines in toy form and creating a mirror version of established canon told through LEGO bricks.

The Journey toward The Force Awakens: Star Wars as Transmedia Franchise The transference of characters and narratives across different media platforms is emblematic of what media scholars call transmediality or transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins (2006a: 334) defines the latter as “stories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world.” In the context of the LEGO Star Wars books from DK, each revision of story adds another level of meaning, enhances the original, and makes a distinctive contribution to the Star Wars universe. While LEGO does not affect the same story (canonized in the films and animated TV series)—and thus might not strictly fit with Jenkin’s model—I would argue that through its toys, video games, and books and its own animated stories, LEGO creates its own transmedia iteration of Star Wars: less a continuation of the story, but also not “only” an adaptation. Where fan-­created media, such as fan fiction and vidding, act like transmedia texts circulating alongside the original, LEGO Star Wars exists both separately from canon (e.g., when minifigure characters mix and merge regardless of timeline) and in conjunction with established story (e.g., with the release of new sets based on studio concept designs and models). Transmedia storytelling is part of a franchise strategy, not the franchise itself. We might also include other strategies such as adaptations (which can overlap with transmedia storytelling), spin-­offs, licensed merchandise, toys, sequels, prequels, and sidequels, promos, tie-­ins and give-­aways, advertising, and more. For Marsha Kinder (1991: 38), media franchises are “commercial transmedia supersystems,” where “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation” (119). With Star Wars as one of the most recognizable media franchises, it is hardly surprising that Lucasfilm, and then Disney, partnered with the likes of LEGO to extend the property beyond simple licensed products drawn straight from the movies. Going beyond just reproduced images on lunchboxes, LEGO’s contribution, as will be outlined later, was to bring creativity and levity to the universe,

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combining the mythic story with a certain sense of scale that allowed for its re-­creation in brick and minifigure form. For Jenkins (2009), “the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia works are world building and seriality.” This statement describes Star Wars very well, before and after Disney. But what defines Disney’s transmedia strategy following the acquisition is how it strove to rebrand and reestablish movie canon in the lead-­up to The Force Awakens in 2015. With publishing social partner DK, owned by global publisher Penguin Random House, Disney was able to capitalize on their already popular reference book format to reaffirm well-­k nown Star Wars history. Along with this, both Disney and DK promoted new titles and new “histories” that had to be read before seeing the movie, thus preparing audiences and making them more familiar with characters and plot points that would soon be revealed when The Force Awakens hit movie theaters. Applying Jenkins’s definition here, Disney recycled the world built by George Lucas and added to it through the serialization of new spin-­off novels and reference works I briefly outline. They even branded this strategy itself as “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” labeling new book titles with the tag on the front and back covers, signaling to readers that the stories and information contained within the book would link directly with what had come before and offering hints and clues to what is yet to come in the continuing narrative tendered by Disney (see Proctor and Freeman 2016). For example, in Bray et al. (2015) readers are presented with the key moments, characters, alien creatures, planets, weapons, and vehicles drawn from the six movies and two animated television series. Described on the cover as “Absolutely Everything You Need to Know” about Star Wars, this book doesn’t offer much to fans who probably have several other reference works on their shelf informing them that Yoda is a Jedi Grand Master. However, that the book contains information or teasers about new characters and vehicles from the then upcoming film made it more attractive to keen readers as an “entryway paratext” (J. Gray 2010: 23). While Rey and BB-­8 are not discussed in the book, they are pictured in a double page spread alongside a list of the top five “organic-­droid relationships”—the clue here being that Rey and BB-­8 will be sharing a strong bond in The Force Awakens, with both characters playing a central role in the action. Similarly, in a range of new tie-­in novels and comics published by Disney-­ Lucasfilm Press and Marvel (both part of the Disney conglomerate), a collection of stories centered on the characters Rey, Poe, and Finn. Another three books filled in the backstory of what happened to lead characters Luke, Leia, Solo, and Chewbacca in between the previous three films, Episodes IV, V,

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and VI. Luke’s story, The Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure (2015), dwells on the importance of his lightsaber training and thus hints at the centrality of the object in The Force Awakens (its loss and Rey’s mission at the end of the film to find Luke and return it to him). The comic Star Wars: Shattered Empire (2015) introduces Poe Dameron’s parents as members of the Rebel Alliance that defeated the Empire at the Battle of Endor, providing clues to the importance of Poe’s character in the formation of the new Resistance seen in The Force Awakens. The revelation of such small but interlinked information in published material before the film’s release resembles the use of “Easter eggs” in DVD box sets: hidden features that enhance the reader’s enjoyment of the story and their anticipation for the movie. As Chuck Tryon (2009: 25) asserts about this phenomenon: “While this process no doubt provides viewers with new knowledge about the processes of making a film, it also, arguably, has other ideological functions as well by shaping how audiences interact with the movies they watch.” In the case of Disney’s “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens” strategy, we have multiple transmedia paratexts aligning to introduce readers to small but important elements of story and character that will inform their understanding of the narrative universe and increase their familiarity with new and canonical material once they see the film. Breeding familiarity with the Star Wars story, both old and new, was a key concern for Disney’s other major franchise social partner, LEGO.

Rebuilding the Force, with LEGO Danish toy company LEGO has been a perennial favorite with children and adults since its mass marketing rebirth in the 1950s and 1960s. The attraction of being able to build almost anything a child can imagine from a pile of colorful interlocking bricks proved a valuable selling point for parents concerned that their children should learn something as they played (see Cross 1997). However, following developments in the American toy industry in the 1970s and 1980s, where fantasy and action toys became central components of movie merchandise and licensing agreements, LEGO turned to creating its own ranges of themed building sets and minifigure characters as opposed to the traditional model whereby children built what they wanted (limited only by their own imagination). Now, consumers and fans could follow architectural blueprints and build within prescribed “systems”: city, space, medieval, pirates, and so on (see Kline 1993). Beyond this, AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) use bricks and minifigures to produce and modify their own creations, displaying and building at conventions around the world. Often working in unsanctioned ways, adult enthusiasts

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can turn the children’s toy into a playful and subversive medium, which spirit characterizes their subcultural identity as fans. In 1999, LEGO decided to buy into the merchandising market starting with tying its range of very popular Star Wars–themed sets into the release of the first prequel film, The Phantom Menace (Lipkowitz 2009: 29). For Maaike Lauwaert, LEGO’s attempts at diversifying its product—partnering with other companies to produce themed sets—was emblematic of its shift toward emphasizing narrative over construction: “Toys that centered on stories and themes allowed both for the development of more diverse products that did not necessarily have the brick and construction play at its basis (product differentiation) and the integration of the product with other media and other areas of the child’s world (brand integration)” (2008: 227). By the mid-­1990s, LEGO was producing more sets that allowed children to play with characters from established media franchises, rather than construct new objects from generic bricks. Despite lucrative deals with Disney, LEGO underwent corporate restructuring in the early 2000s due to high production costs and brand overextension. Lauwaert further argues that having to rethink what lines and other media relationships LEGO wanted to continue meant it could refocus on the “system” as brand and concentrate on developing toys that emphasized narrative as well as construction (2008: 228). We see this most vividly in the products and publications released for Disney’s Star Wars that I discuss in the next section. LEGO’s shift to producing licensed movie tie-­ins has been supported by a very popular range of video games (e.g., LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars) and the creation of online fan clubs aimed at both children and adults. This convergence of popular fandom, narrative, nostalgia, and contemporary toy culture suggests that the lines between past and present, technology and culture, childhood and adulthood are increasingly porous. Memory is an important component of being a fan, and the retelling of the Star Wars story through LEGO bricks and the remediation of childhood toys through video games helps to reconstruct memories of youth that are subsequently used to negotiate digital collaborative spaces shared by other fans. LEGO, a children’s toy originally based on the physicality of construction, has taken on new significance in contemporary media culture as it allows adult collectors and fans to reconnect with their past and define a fan identity through more ephemeral and digital interaction. David Buckingham (2011: 95) argues that in a risky and flooded toy marketplace, “integrated marketing, strong branding and the incessant recycling of past successes (particularly those that capitalize on parents’ nostalgia for the toys of their own childhood) have become crucial in the attempt to manage the market.” Now that the LEGO system incorporates global franchises like Star

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Wars—but also Marvel and DC superheroes, Minecraft, and historical titles such as Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, and even Disney’s own The Lone Ranger, as well as the properties in Fox’s portfolio, which includes X-­Men and The X-­Files—it means that the collectors and fans of one brand cross over to become collectors and fans of the other. Therefore, LEGO’s shift from educational children’s toy to transmedia adult collectible is characteristic of contemporary convergence culture. It highlights the importance of nostalgia in the influencing of which childhood media and commodities get remembered, but also how nostalgia acts to expand the original potentials of those remediated texts and commodities. In Cult Collectors (2014), I argue that LEGO minifigures have become popular articles of collecting, trading, and fan work because they can be so easily manipulated, a characteristic that represents LEGO’s universal playability and versatility. The minifigure literally embodies the player’s actions in the LEGO world either as part of a set or as a standalone item (Geraghty 2014: 170). Described as “fascinating and highly collectible” by the authors of the Character Encyclopedia, “minifigures bring the LEGO Star Wars galaxy to life” (Dolan and Last 2011: 2). They are small enough to fit into the built environment the builder has created and thus become the physical avatar of the master who controls their domain. The Star Wars universe is continually unfolding yet the LEGO minifigure becomes a transformative extension of the self and the character it portrays that can be inserted into the physical re-­creation of the fictional narrative: that is, the play set. They allow fans to become part of, and own, the very texts they adore. Minifigures combine the physical elements of toydom, play, and adaptability with the familiar visual characteristics of the Star Wars characters as seen on screen. Their use in retelling the saga or elaborating on specific in-­between moments from the movies highlights their important transmedia qualities as they take the story from screen to page to play, and from text to paratext.

LEGO Star Wars: Same but Different Fans make sense of complex narrative forms through practices of orientation and mapping. They create and seek out what Jason Mittell (2015) terms “orienting paratexts” to help decipher the original and primary text. Such paratexts could include lists, maps, guides, reference works, and encyclopedias. These are not always transmedia, but they help to make sense of the storyworld from a distance: “Orientation is not necessary to discover the canonical truth of a storyworld but rather is used to create a layer atop the program to help figure out how the pieces fit together or to propose alternative ways of seeing the story

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that might not be suggested by or contained within the original narrative design” (Mittell 2015: 262). I would describe LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes as an orienting paratext, designed specifically to help guide both fans and nonfans in making sense of and remembering the important facts and history of the Star Wars narrative. In the context of Disney’s “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens” strategy, such an orienting paratext also served an additional purpose by reframing the new Star Wars as canon and relegating the old Expanded Universe to the status of apocryphal legend and myth. Through LEGO play and design, the canon is given greater primacy as the essential parts of the story are emphasized in the simplest of forms. These essential parts (iconic scenes such as Luke’s encounter with the Rancor or the Battle of Hoth) are the one hundred key scenes that define Star Wars, boiled down and simplified through LEGO minifigures and bricks but still recognizable—they symbolize the core mythos, making physical the narrative thread that ties all movies together. But while the book provides “a layer atop” the movies, orienting fans within the canon, it can also be seen as a text that works outside the established narrative, creating an alternate version of Star Wars more susceptible to fan interpretation and revision. As I will discuss, these types of sanctioned paratexts parody the original just as much as they simply recycle it. Modern media franchises built on social partnerships between big corporations and creative companies strike a balance between “sameness and difference,” between source and elaboration. Johnson argues that differences between the two allow for creative input, negotiating production identities in using intellectual property shared across multiple networks. Modern franchises work where texts and paratexts, resources and ideas, cross between franchisor and franchisee—in this case, Disney and LEGO: “The world in play in franchised production offers a shared creative context in which many different individuals and communities can draw resources and contribute in kind” (D. Johnson 2013: 109). Thus, while transmedia narratives are based on Jenkins’s concept of “world building,” franchises that develop through creative social partnerships partake in “world-­sharing”: “worlds once built, become shared among creative stakeholders working in and across multiple production sites” (108–9). This dialectic of sameness and difference is emphasized also in the nature of the LEGO toy itself: minifigure versions of Star Wars characters largely look the same as the original, but key differences and changes in tone or color make them part of a shared world based on Star Wars rather than the actual world we see on screen. For example, in LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes, we see sameness and difference working hand in hand to produce a book that accurately translates the key moments from the movies; but the book is clearly pitched at a knowing audience

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who are not necessarily reading to learn about what happens in the story. Indeed, spoilers are clearly not an issue, as the book reveals the endings to all six films, but it also makes transmedia connections across other Star Wars texts. Pages 26 and 27 depict the final standoff between Obi-­Wan and Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, with the former striking down his enemy—titled “The Fall of Maul” in the DK book. Minifigure Maul, pictured falling down the exhaust shaft on Naboo, has a speech bubble stating: “You’ll see! I’m totally gonna come back in a TV show with big metal spider legs!” The boxed text explaining details about the shaft further elaborates: “A seemingly bottomless pit in the heart of the Theed generator complex. No one could possibly fall down it and survive . . . could they?” Both statements point to the televisual canon established in The Clone Wars series, that Darth Maul apparently survived being cut in half by Obi-­Wan and returns to seek his revenge with the aid of  bionic legs. So, not only is the book a reference book for the movies, it is an “orienting paratext”—guiding the reader to other important elements of the Star Wars story seen in other media platforms—although it is framed as self-­reflexive parody about Maul’s survival and return in The Clone Wars and, later, Rebels. Overall, the book plays with the established Star Wars narrative. Scenes and characters are familiar, but the look and humorous comments made by the minifigure characters make them slightly different from what we see on screen. The example of Darth Maul’s warning to Obi-­Wan as he fell to his presumed death stands in stark contrast to the actual character of Maul in the film; indeed, his lack of dialogue throughout made him less of a threat and less villainous than his Sith counterpart, Darth Vader. The LEGO Maul, and even the Maul we see in the animated television series, is far more of an antagonist because he is given voice (or words, in the case of the LEGO book). Moreover, the way in which the book is structured and what scenes are reimagined through bricks and minifigures is noteworthy. Each of the six movies gets a section, containing (in chronological order, for Episodes I through VI) 14, 14, 21, 15, 18, and 25 double-­page spreads, respectively, with the third and sixth movies clearly warranting more pages to depict the relative complexity of each standalone trilogy’s conclusion. The scenes achieve balance through economy of design and the recognizability of salient features, as is the case with how large LEGO sets—such as those for building the Millennium Falcon and the Death Star—transform important movie details into buildable and playable forms, as Mark J. P. Wolf (2014: 20) explains: “Instead of merely adapting a narrative, a playset will be designed to provide its user all the elements needed to re-­enact a particular narrative, without requiring that the narrative be reenacted.” The popularity of Star Wars minifigures in toy, print, and video game form is due in large part to “character abstraction,” in

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which the conflict inherent in the figure of the “doubled avatar” (the character in a video game compared to its source material original for example) is alleviated through the “winsome, if somewhat mocking, representations of their cinematic selves” (Aldred 2014: 106). Minifigures represent important characters in the Star Wars narrative “built” from LEGO, but they are also “figurative” characters in their own right. Thus, the book’s humor is more appropriate and acceptable in LEGO form. In another scene, titled “Lure of the Dark Side,” from Revenge of the Sith (2005), LEGO Palpatine and Anakin are depicted sitting at the opera on Corus­cant. A quite menacing and revealing scene within the movie, where the soon-­to-­be Emperor tells Anakin the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise to try and turn him to the dark side, becomes markedly different yet amusingly story-­ affirming at the same time. Almost playing up the fact that Anakin still does not seem to realize that he is being used as a pawn in the Chancellor’s game to eradicate the Jedi, minifigure Palpatine says: “Did I mention that the Jedi like kicking puppies, too?” The fact that Anakin is so gullible—he replies “I knew it!”—is underscored by boxed text with C-­3PO testifying to his maker being taken in by “poisonous words. . . . If only I had known, perhaps I could have helped to steer him away from his rash course” (66–67). This statement itself could be seen as a Star Wars in-­joke since C-­3PO is continually mocked for being supercilious in all six movies. Such lampooning of both story and characters through this LEGO retelling resembles fans’ own creative work and use of parody in celebrating the primary text. Specifically, I would apply the term “pragmatic parody” to this example and to the book as a whole. In Playing Fans, Paul Booth (2015: 102) argues “pragmatic parody invocates both subculture and culture by commodifying and appropriating simultaneously.” As an appropriation strategy employed by LEGO, this form of parody follows in the “reproduction of specific fan practices” (Booth 2015: 21). Like many fan videos and much fan fiction, it is both mocking and subversive while also reveling in the characterization of Anakin as naive and Palpatine as the epitome of evil. Again, while not strictly part of the transmedia storyworld of Star Wars, it fits within LEGO’s own transmedia narrative where characters are abstracted and higher levels of humor and parody work to create new meanings and new interpretations. Like fan-­made videos on YouTube or self-­published artwork, Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy combines preestablished elements (in this case the LEGO Star Wars minifigures) with original contributions (the photography and captions) to create a mash-­up that speaks to fans (of  both LEGO and Star Wars). As a self-­confessed fan, Vesa Lehtimäki treats the subject with both levity and respect. Recreating scenes and designing new ones using LEGO sets, minifigures,

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and props like sand, baking powder, and dead leaves to resemble the terrain of Tatooine, Hoth, and Endor. For one double-­page scene, he photographed a minifigure Snowtrooper ski-­jumping on Hoth, somersaulting through the air across a valley, while the caption reads, “The planet Hoth is the only ski resort for the serious skier” (2015: 110–11). In homage to classical Hollywood horror in another image, he pictures LEGO Jabba the Hutt lit from below, the shadows only allowing the mouth and eyes to be seen: “I’m ready for my close-­up,” reads the caption (38–39). These vignettes both add to and reaffirm the Star Wars story, yet they are also evidence of a fannish desire to assert creative control over the franchise text and a will to participate in the construction of new narratives outside the series’ canonicity. Playful and intuitive, Lehtimäki’s work does not simply add one element to another to make a new whole but forms what Shaun Wilson (2009: 192) calls “a rupture of narrative” in which “the weighted memory” of the original characters from the Star Wars universe is “repositioned through its facsimile.” For Joanne Garde-­Hansen (2011: 116), the “repositioning of the memory of the original is important because we see the mediated past in a new light” (and in this case a totally new form, LEGO). Therefore, this book, like LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes, plays an important part in the retelling of the Star Wars story. As orientating paratexts they sit both inside and outside the narrative universe. As Barbara Klinger (2011: 210) argues, “Once ephemeral productions are given exposure through mediatisation, their status as texts with some endurance amplifies their capacity to signify.” In this case, then, they create new meanings and new beginnings for the Star Wars franchise. They are evidence of hard work and enjoyable play on behalf of the author-­photographer, visual reminders of the almost limitless potential of using LEGO in reconstructing the transmedia story and the use of nostalgia in promoting a well-­k nown toy brand.

Conclusion: Filling the Gaps, Brick by Brick As Louisa Ellen Stein (2006: 247) asserts, “Within the many diverse forms of fan creativity online, we can identify a central tension between two defining fannish concerns: expansiveness and limitation.” Expansiveness refers to the nature of the metatext that allows for open readings due to the multiplicity of characters and narratives. Limitation, as a consequence, refers to the restrictive nature of the relationship between original source text and those fan stories on which it is based. With this in mind, we might consider Disney’s plans to reorder the Star Wars universe and LEGO’s attempts at reinterpreting Star Wars canon through bricks and minifigures as evidence of this tension: that the fictional universe and associated characters offer fans an expansive metanarrative that prompts

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them to play with and transform a well-­loved text either to enhance their own understanding of it or to make it their own through abstraction. However, at the same time, there are certain limitations that prevent LEGO Star Wars replacing the original because new movies and characters created by Disney canonically supersede those brick-­based reimaginings and reinterpretations—thus reasserting the primacy of Disney’s franchise vision and influence over how fans should engage with the Star Wars text. However, LEGO has been instrumental in creating paratextual additions to the franchise, working with Disney to create animated shorts for the LEGO Star Wars website. Following The Force Awakens, a series of shorts entitled Star Wars: The Resistance Rises (2016) focuses on moments preceding the action of the movie: for example, Poe Dameron’s rescue of Admiral Ackbar from Kylo Ren and the First Order. Shown on Disney’s XD channel, this was another example of an orientating paratext—same characters, new scenarios. Similarly, in a new series entitled Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures (2016), also on XD, viewers are introduced to a new group of Rebel heroes in LEGO form; and these are the only versions of those characters. Therefore, in terms of the shared Star Wars universe I discussed earlier, Disney appears to be happy that its social partner can take the reins and create new material that works within the canon (the action takes place between Episodes V and VI), making such material perhaps not officially canonical, but perhaps a variation on transownership storytelling like that theorized by Matt Hills in this volume. The transmedia storyworld was built by Lucas, streamlined by Disney, and shared with LEGO, who is able to add their whimsical perspective to a well-­k nown and established text. Where there are gaps in the story that can or need to be filled, Disney uses LEGO to literally brick them up. Both LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes and Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy are emblematic of how contemporary media conglomerates like Disney work to open up and share their intellectual property through franchise strategies such as transmedia storytelling—or, again, through what Hills calls transownership storytelling. Yet they also mark how franchises increasingly rely on mechanisms and practices associated with fandom, such as parody and appropriation. That Disney worked with social partners such as LEGO and DK to retell the Star Wars story, reworking the brand for new audiences in the run-­up to The Force Awakens, highlights the importance of canon in maintaining and sustaining the franchise as it adapts to changes within the entertainment industries. Canon is crucial in determining story in the Star Wars universe—clearly one reason Disney cut off the Expanded Universe. However, canon is important to many fans, too. While the reaction to Disney’s decision within some fan quarters was

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negative, it could be seen that taking the risk of alienating some fans worked for Disney in the long run. LEGO continues to produce sets and minifigures that fans continue to buy and collect; the DK books are bestsellers and attract new fans to the franchise. Recent declarations from Disney about how they intend to bring some Expanded Universe characters back into official canon—for example, Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Heir to the Empire trilogy of novels appearing in Rebels (McCabe 2016a)—suggests they are proactive as well as protective of the franchise. This reordering of the canon, with LEGO and DK bringing Star Wars to the printed page, may in fact work to bring about a Thrawn minifigure—something that fans would no doubt welcome with glee. Therefore, we can see how the integrated strategies of  Disney working with social partners on the reimagining the Star Wars canon diversifies potential markets and increases the dissemination and circulation of Star Wars as media franchise. While some elements of the canon were lost following the takeover, the overall narrative was no doubt reinforced.

4 Dan Hassler-­Forest

Selling The Force Awakens Fan Labor and Brand Management Real sets. Practical effects. You’ve been here, but you don’t know this story. Nothing’s changed, really. I mean: everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed. And that’s the way you want it to be, really.

W

ith these carefully phrased words, Mark Hamill’s voice rang out through Hall H at San Diego Comic-­Con on July 10, 2015. As part of an hour-­long session in which all the principal cast members and key creative crew joined together onstage, the short reel of exclusive behind-­the-­scenes footage underlined the panel’s resounding message of determined reassurance: Star Wars: The Force Awakens offered the explicit promise of a nostalgic return to everything fans loved most about the original trilogy. In the four-­minute video (Star Wars 2014), the fans in Hall H were treated to a selection of exclusive images of sets, costume design, creature make-­up, new characters, and returning cast members from the original trilogy. The reel’s first sixty seconds were dedicated entirely to establishing the new film’s old-­ fashioned authenticity, as Hamill’s voice guides us to recognize in the imagery not only the storyworld’s iconic visual style and familiar locations, but also the traditional craftsmanship of old-­school “movie magic”—culminating in a close­up shot of a 35mm camera, its characteristic rattling sound underlining the new team’s commitment to old-­school filmmaking. As the reel then transitions from locations and set designs to actors and crew members, we hear multiple voices from cast and crew geek out excitedly over their involvement in the production: a grinning extra in a Stormtrooper costume blissfully confesses that he “could die now,” Chewbacca performer Peter Mayhew says they’re “bringing back the

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old ways,” while the out-­of-­costume cameo performer and world-­famous Star Wars fan Simon Pegg whispers, “I’m in heaven.” As a defining moment in the revived film franchise’s publicity campaign, the Comic-­Con reel set the tone for the way in which Star Wars fans would be addressed and involved in the campaign leading up to the new film’s release. It structurally foregrounded two aspects of the new film that seemed designed to appeal directly to the global fan culture that surrounds the franchise: the construction of a discursive authenticity of a deep pop-­cultural and media-­ industrial nostalgia and the adoption of an emphatically fannish sensibility by those involved in its production and distribution. When Hamill said, “That’s the way you want it to be,” his voice is intended to speak on behalf of true Star Wars fans and their enduring but ambiguous relationship with the popular franchise. At the same time, it confidently absorbs and appropriates fans’ participatory energy, demonstrating that media-­industrial producers understand what fans want and can therefore address them not just as allies but as peers. It is also worth noting that these two strategic movements not only strengthen each other in a positive sense, but also serve to distance the film franchise from its own recent past. While the three prequel films that appeared between 1999 and 2005 amid a wide variety of transmedia spin-­offs and storyworld extensions were enormous commercial hits, they are commonly ridiculed by fans and are often compared unfavorably to the much more beloved original trilogy. Those prequels had been positioned as cutting-­edge in their use of hypermodern technology, both in their use of CGI within the film and in their adoption of groundbreaking digital tools for shooting, editing, distributing, and projecting the films. The preview reel’s emphasis on old-­fashioned production practices thus also dissociates the Disney era of Star Wars feature films from the less popular prequel cycle and its cultural legacy. The preview reel for The Force Awakens, which was released online directly after premiering to the 6,500 fans packed into Comic-­Con’s Hall H, is a potent illustration of the changing relationship between powerful transnational media conglomerates and fandom. While the marketing and promotion of massive media properties like Star Wars traditionally operated in a top-­down manner, the twenty-­fi rst-­century context of media convergence and participatory culture offers an environment in which fans’ active involvement has become a vital component in the publicity campaigns for commercial media properties (see also Hassler-­Forest 2016). Disney’s elaborate efforts to court, reassure, and activate fans as collaborative ambassadors for the franchise resulted in a successful campaign to create invaluable online buzz for the new film. By addressing and representing fans not as passive consumers but as active and valued participants

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in the process, media industries have succeeded spectacularly at transforming fandom’s subcultural practices into forms of immaterial labor that contribute directly to brand value. In this chapter, I will develop a critical analysis of the changing relationship between the cultural industries and fandom’s immaterial labor. Bringing together perspectives derived from cultural theory with critical media industry studies (see Havens, Lotz, and Tinic 2009), this chapter illustrates the increasingly common ways in which highly spreadable industrial texts have approached fans as valuable participants and brand ambassadors. While previous studies of Star Wars fandom have chiefly focused on the many ways in which fans have transformed, expanded, and subverted the franchise’s storyworld (see Jenkins 1992; Brooker 2002), I approach fandom here as a complex set of cultural practices that has become vital to transnational media corporations—not only for the free labor fans produce but also for the cultural work of legitimation and promotion they provide. Fandom’s legitimizing function has evolved in the context of an increasingly volatile media landscape, where textual production has become a flexible and collaborative industrial practice. In order to understand how franchises like Star Wars operate in terms of political and ideological power, it isn’t enough to map out the corporate hierarchy of the Disney empire; one must also acknowledge the central role played by what John T. Caldwell (2006: 103) has termed “industrial textual practice”: It is difficult to explain the current world of conglomeration, deregulation, repurposing, and globalization without fully acknowledging the extent to which textual production—and the analysis of texts by industry—stand simultaneously as corporate strategies, as forms of cultural and economic capital integral to media professional communities, and as the means by which contemporary media industries work to rationalize their operations in an era of great institutional instability. Accounting for these functions means looking at . . . texts that circulate beyond and below the on-­screen programs that many textual critics isolate for analysis. I will therefore illustrate this process through an analysis of three industrial texts that accompanied and shaped the release of The Force Awakens: the aforementioned Comic-­Con reel, which appeared several months ahead of the film’s premiere; a musical segment from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which was broadcast two days before the film’s international release; and the Star Wars–themed “Undercover Boss” sketch from Saturday Night Live, which “spoke back” to fans in acknowledgment of their response to The Force Awakens.

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These short video segments, all produced for different contexts and audiences, offer vivid illustrations of the forms of collaborative brand management that now surround, shape, and preconstitute commercial entertainment franchises. Above all, they demonstrate the successful incorporation of fandom’s cultural practices and sensibilities, reframed within a context where participation’s key function has become that of collaborative immaterial labor. My approach combines the interdisciplinary perspective of critical media industry studies with the theoretical vocabulary of postautonomist Marxist theory (Hardt and Negri 2000; Vercellone 2007; Lazzarato 2014) and seeks to illuminate the media-­industrial negotiation of the audiences surrounding the Star Wars franchise—but to do so from a theoretical perspective that sees these negotiations first and foremost as expressions of the contradictory cultural and economic logic of global capitalism. Without seeking to deny or belittle the important cultural work that has been done by transformative fan culture, it seems more appropriate and indeed more urgent in the current context to emphasize the role of “collaborationist” fandom (S. Scott 2008: 210–11). This is not only because it has come to play such a prominent role in the current media landscape, but also because it operates at a vastly larger scale than fan culture’s traditional subcultural niches.

Participatory Culture and Collaborative Fandom The grand ideal of participatory culture has been one that transforms the exploitative and grossly asymmetrical relationship between mass media producers and their audiences. In his hugely influential work on the topic, Henry Jenkins has long been one of the main champions of digital culture’s utopian potential, positioning the fan as a model for a more diverse, inclusive, and democratic form of contemporary “folk culture” (2006a: 141). And indeed, much of the work being done in the growing field of fan studies has described, analyzed, and celebrated fans’ many appropriations and transformations of mass media. But this framework depends strongly on increasingly antiquated ways of imagining the complex and unstable relationship between media industries, ideology, and political power, the most basic notion of which is clearly that of “dominant ideology,” as mass media prescribe normative behaviors and identities against which niche fandom heroically produces Foucauldian “sites of resistance” (Foucault 1981: 95–96). But in the neoliberal age, the ideological coordinates have shifted away from the relative stability of industrial capitalism, and concepts such as “mainstream culture” and “mass media” no longer operate as they used to. Carlo Vercellone has described the dominant logic of global

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capitalism’s productive forms as “cognitive capitalism”: a term that helps us understand the nature of a phase in capitalism in which “the relation of capital to labor is marked by the hegemony of knowledges, by a diffuse intellectuality, and by the driving role of the production of knowledges by means of knowledges connected to the increasingly immaterial and cognitive character of labour” (2007: 16). To put it in simpler terms: the dominant logic of labor in the post-­Fordist economies of cognitive capitalism is not one of production in the traditional sense. In the advanced capitalist nations, the focus has shifted from industrial production to immaterial labor, bringing with it a cultural and economic logic that perfectly suits the participatory logic of “multiplatformed media properties” such as Star Wars (Caldwell 2006: 102). This obviously affects our understanding of the very concept of mass culture: just as the development of twentieth-­ century industrial capitalism was accompanied by commodities, fashions, and media whose massive production scales made their cultural effects relatively homogeneous, the far more flexible “just-­in-­time” or “on-­demand” production systems of the neoliberal era have by now transformed the very nature of mass culture. Or, as Jeremy Gilbert (2008: 116) so aptly described the way in which this affects our understanding of mass media: “The era of mass culture is over, and it is now clear that it was only ever typical of one specific form of industrial capitalism, adapted to the technological capacities and limitations of the early twentieth century.” It therefore no longer makes much sense to think of media-­industrial textual production as being some kind of monolithic enterprise, in the way that Adorno (1991), for instance, once described it; that is, as a unified and machinic “culture industry.” Instead, the multiple economic and political reorganizations associated with global capitalism have strongly affected the workings of popular culture. In this context, audiences involved in participatory cultures of transmedia world-­building should also no longer be viewed primarily as textual poachers “operating from a position of marginality and social weakness” (Jenkins 1992: 27); nor is it very helpful to automatically categorize fans’ practices as the resurrection of a romanticized preindustrial folk culture, “accelerated and expanded for the digital age” (Jenkins 2006a: 141). Instead, I place the recent growth of this phenomenon in the context of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: vi) have described as a new age of empire, where political alternatives to capitalism have become increasingly difficult to imagine. This process illustrates how sub-­and countercultural activities that emerged and developed as subversive appropriations of commercially produced enter-

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tainment franchises can be reterritorialized as valuable forms of immaterial labor. In the context of global capitalism, immaterial labor has become the hegemonic form of work, where it has been able to intertwine the production of subjectivity with the production of things (Hardt and Negri 2000: 29). Unlike the physical products that result from industrial processes, immaterial labor “involves the less-­tangible symbolic and social dimensions of commodities” (Dyer-­ Witheford and De Peuter 2009: 4). In this sense, fandom’s labor in creating valuable buzz around a transmedia franchise, like Star Wars, typifies capital’s new reliance on participatory audiences in the age of media convergence. No longer considered a marginal group of excessively devoted irritants, fans have become vital brand ambassadors whose influence has only increased as media industries have come to rely more and more on networked cultures and “spreadable media” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013). But this form of collaboration is ultimately much less participatory than the fan cultures from which these practices were derived. The grossly asymmetrical relationship between media producers and fans results in a continuous negotiation of questions of ownership, as media corporations attempt to maintain control over what they consider their intellectual property (D. Johnson 2013: 25). Franchises like Star Wars are first and most obviously highly profitable global entertainment brands made up of a wide range of commodities, most of which are dependent upon fans’ affective and immaterial labor to achieve their desired commercial value: “what gives these commodities value beyond their initial sales price is what fans add to them—the new uses to which fans put old things and the emotional landscapes that fans construct around them” (De Kosnik 2013: 104). The irony is that as the successful incorporation of fandom’s affective energy hereby changes its direction from “transformative” to “affirmational” (S. Scott 2013: 321), the emotional landscapes constructed around storyworlds like Star Wars have been absorbed and rearticulated by corporate forces that have incorporated the cultural logic and affective spirit of fan culture into its industrial forms of textual production. A new generation of self-­proclaimed “geek directors,” like Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird, Guillermo del Toro, and James Gunn has rapidly become a defining force in twenty-­fi rst-­ century Hollywood. Much of their success seems to derive not only from their repeated self-­identification as members of the fan community, but also from their successful incorporation of fan discourse, both in their films and in the voluminous paratexts (trailers, interviews, posters, toys, and so on) that frame them (Genette 1997: 1–5).

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Constructing Legitimacy through Fandom As one of the world’s most profitable transmedia franchises, the revival of the Star Wars film series obviously represented a crucial strategic move for parent corporation Disney after its acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. And without the involvement of author figure George Lucas (see the editors’ introduction in this volume), the establishment of legitimacy for The Force Awakens in relation to the original trilogy was obviously a key challenge. This made the highly public rumors, discussions, and official announcements about the involvement of key creative personnel especially vital in the period leading up to the first new Star Wars film’s release. Closely following the successful strategy deployed in the development of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (D. Johnson 2014), Disney’s prerelease strategy for The Force Awakens involved the construction of a clear sense of authorship, cultural legitimacy, and the acknowledgment of fan voices. Deep industrial texts produced as promotional material for the new installment therefore combined nostalgia for the original trilogy and its predigital era of physical effects and “hand-­crafted” Hollywood blockbusters with a thoroughly fannish sensibility. The industrial production of appropriate paratexts was particularly important, as they provided the frames through which this highly anticipated “legacyquel” would be perceived (Singer 2015). It is worth quoting Jonathan Gray (2010: 17) at length on the importance of the paratext as a way of framing a text or franchise in relation to fandom: Paratexts are the greeters, gatekeepers, and cheerleaders for and of the media, filters through which we must pass on our way to “the text itself,” but some will only greet certain audiences. Many fan-­made paratexts, in particular, address only those within the fandom. Other paratexts will scare away potential audiences, as the semblance of being a “fan text” is often enough to detract some. In such cases, though, the paratexts create the text for the fleeing would-­be audience, suggesting a “geek factor” or an undesired depth that may turn them away. In other instances, paratexts will insist that a text is more mainstream, less niche or fannish. In the case of the fine-­honed promotional campaign building up to the December 2015 release of The Force Awakens, the key concern was clearly the production of paratexts that would appeal equally to “real” fans and to a more mainstream, “less fannish” audience. The Comic-­Con reel I discussed in this chapter’s opening section is a good example of just such a textual gatekeeper: it reassured fans that the new film would honor the legacy of the first films in the

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franchise, while communicating explicitly that it was being made not just for fans, but also by fans: from director J. J. Abrams’s repeated acknowledgments of his own fandom to the lowliest extras expressing their excitement to be involved in the production, the footage strongly emphasized the notion of fandom’s legitimizing function.1 But at the same time, the campaign for The Force Awakens had to find ways of communicating fans’ growing excitement and involvement to a much larger, less dedicated audience. While Gray’s comments about paratexts’ roles as “greeters, gatekeepers, and cheerleaders” presupposes a spectrum with mainstream on one end and cult on the other, the current media landscape all too often allows these positions to coincide. As so-­called “geek culture” becomes a more widely shared phenomenon, seemingly fannish paratexts like the Comic-­Con reel are also accessible to a much wider audience—as the video’s millions of views on YouTube clearly indicate (Star Wars 2015). The reel strongly plays into a media-­industrial logic that Matt Hills (2006: 169) has described as the “cult blockbuster,” in reference to the ways in which Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films leveraged fandom’s legitimizing processes to create invaluable buzz among a much larger audience. This logic is even more evident in the numerous promotional paratexts that started appearing closer to the film’s release. An especially vivid example can be recognized in a musical segment that appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2015b), which served to promote the film while simultaneously rebranding the Star Wars franchise and legitimizing its fandom as fun, accessible, ethnically diverse, and media-­savvy. In the segment, the talk show’s house band The Roots repeats a format previously explored on the show, giving an a capella rendition of a familiar song together with prominently featured guest appearances. As with the previous tunes, the faces of Fallon and the seven band members appear in a nine-­panel grid across the screen in the style of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, the brightly colored backgrounds forming a choral mosaic humming out a medley of iconic Star Wars themes. The segment’s structure follows the same basic progressive movement as The Force Awakens panel at Comic-­Con: shortly after the main Star Wars theme is introduced by Fallon and the eight Roots members, the new film’s fresh cast members are introduced one by one: first the “good guys” (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac) each take turns singing the main theme, followed by “bad guys” (Adam Driver and Gwendoline Christie) taking over as the medley segues into the “Imperial March” theme. Then, after a brief “Cantina Theme” intermezzo joins together the franchise’s most familiar droids C-­3PO and R2-­ D2 with the new film’s mechanical sidekick BB-­8, Lupita Nyong’o is joined by

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a surprise appearance from original-­trilogy star Carrie Fisher in the rousing “Force Theme.” Then, finally, Harrison Ford comes in at the very end in a climactic “Main Theme” reprise that expands the onscreen grid from nine squares to twenty-­five, as Fallon, the Roots, new and familiar Star Wars faces, and even original-­trilogy fan favorite Admiral Akbar join together in harmony to bring the medley to a visual and musical climax. In the last shot, the medley’s closing notes return us to the original nine-­frame grid, elegantly uniting classic franchise stalwarts Fisher, Ford, Chewbacca, and C-­3PO with the “new generation” heroes Ridley, Boyega, Isaac, and BB-­8. Like the Comic-­Con panel and video reel, the Tonight Show segment thoroughly and quite obviously constitutes a paratextual gesture of reassurance toward the franchise’s many fans, as the new cast is emphatically aligned with the original trilogy’s iconic faces. References to the prequel films, whether visual or musical, are notably absent, while the nostalgic atmosphere is strengthened by the playful appropriation of the Brady Bunch iconography. At the same time, the dressed-­down simplicity and unembellished craftsmanship of the a capella performance resonates with the back-­to-­basics register also employed in the effects reel, demonstrating yet again that those involved with the production have fully embraced a predigital aesthetic that effectively dissociates itself from the prequel cycle and the perceived artificiality of digital production practices. At the same time, the segment’s playful spirit, handmade style, and mash­up sensibility correspond perfectly with fan culture’s dominant register, effortlessly demonstrating a comfortable familiarity with the points of reference and modes of production fans are most at home with. This adds a second level of reassurance to the publicity campaign’s structural foregrounding of the original trilogy as the main point of reference for this new, allegedly back-­to-­basics film franchise reboot: not only does it demonstrate the industry’s understanding of fandom’s discursive registers and cultural practices, but it positions media-­ industrial production itself as a form of fan labor. Just as carpenters, set designers, extras, and creative personnel all express their profoundly fannish delight about being part of this production, the musical medley similarly foregrounds fan culture’s infectious spontaneity, creative appropriation, and DIY sensibility. But as much as this quite irresistible musical segment plays up this fannish attitude, it does so in ways that help redefine the Star Wars brand as a viable, up-­ to-­date, and even woke twenty-­fi rst-­century franchise. Thus, its fannish spirit notwithstanding, the segment clearly isn’t transformational in the sense that it subverts or critiques the canonical source text. Instead, it merely offers a playful performance of the franchise’s most familiar musical motifs as part of a widely shared cultural vocabulary: something to celebrate and share, not something to

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criticize or reflect upon. If we choose to label this ambiguous industrial text as a kind of fan video, it must therefore in any case be categorized at the very least as a form of collaborationist fandom that strengthens the brand and the franchise’s commercial imperatives. Moreover, the segment contributes strongly to the ways in which the revived film franchise also constituted a deliberate rebranding in terms of its identity politics. This explicit repositioning paradoxically complements the publicity campaign’s strategy of reassurance by celebrating the original trilogy as the nostalgic pinnacle of Star Wars–ness, while also integrating a response to fans’ years-­long pushback to the original trilogy’s lack of diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity (see Brooker 1999). Casting a young woman as The Force Awakens’s main protagonist and black and Hispanic performers (Boyega and Isaac) in the two most notable new supporting roles marks a discursive repositioning that corresponds perfectly with the Disney corporation’s recent strategy of moving away from its overwhelmingly white, patriarchal, and heteronormative representational traditions (Wasko 2001: 108–52). Indeed, the media industries’ twenty-­first-­century shift toward more progressive forms of representation is perfectly at home within the larger context of global capitalism, as neoliberalism’s focus on the individual allows for enormous freedom of choice—if only for consumers with abundant disposable income. Thus, the corporate strategy for Disney’s newly acquired Star Wars franchise offers an uncanny reflection of a cultural and economic system in which this impressive freedom of choice is ultimately constrained by the simultaneous absence of political and economic alternatives to capitalism. And while fan culture has a long and well-­documented tradition of appropriation and subversion, fans are at the same time also notorious hyperconsumers who have been all too happy to adopt a more collaborative stance, especially once media producers start addressing them as participants rather than as irritants (Hills 2002: 36). The musical medley is therefore a perfect expression of the contemporary media industries’ logic, especially when it comes to branding and promotion. The segment functions not only as a celebration of a fannish and seemingly spontaneous love for the franchise, but also as an explicit endorsement of the returning film franchise’s newfound commitment to diversity. Playing on the minor controversy that followed the release of the first trailer,2 one of the segment’s most striking moments is the screen’s grid full of Stormtroopers surrounding Adam Driver, all of whom then remove their helmets simultaneously to reveal the faces of the black members of the Roots. And for a popular franchise so often criticized for its glaring absence of women and people of color, the climactic mosaic of smiling, singing faces is indeed a somewhat staggering

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expression of diversity. It therefore effectively contributes to the two key elements of the deep industrial texts of The Force Awakens and their legitimization-­ by-­fandom: reassuring fans that it marks a return to the original Star Wars films while also confirming that the Disney-­era franchise would take into account fandom’s pushback to its outdated representational politics and confirming that the new films would therefore be attuned to more progressive sensibilities. The strategy to combine all of these elements in a short musical segment was obviously successful: the medley was widely shared via social media and had attracted nearly fifty million views at the time of writing (The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon 2015b)—a number that doesn’t include the original airing’s four million viewers, the more than fifteen million views on the TV show’s Facebook page, or the uncounted number of shares via other video platforms. But the active role played by fan labor in the wide reach of these industrial texts is illustrated even more vividly by the Star Wars–themed industrial text that appeared on a comedy show a month after the film was released.

Spreadable Fandom: Self-­Parody and Brand Management Each week, we follow the boss of a major organization as they go undercover to find out what’s really going on in their company. This is Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base.

My third example of the industrial logic informing the Star Wars franchise revival opens with a pitch-­perfect re-­creation of the opening of a popular reality show. Premiering on the January 17, 2016, episode of long-­r unning comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL), the five-­minute sketch became yet another Star Wars–themed social media sensation, quickly attracting millions of views on YouTube and several other video sharing platforms (Saturday Night Live 2016). In the segment, Adam Driver reprises his The Force Awakens character Kylo Ren in a cleverly conceived mash-­up of the Star Wars universe and the reality TV show Undercover Boss. On this show, hidden cameras follow the CEOs of  big companies while they masquerade as lowly employees to find out what it’s like to work for their own businesses and how their own blue-­collar workers perceive them. In the SNL segment, new Star Wars villain Kylo Ren is the eponymous undercover boss, disguising himself as radar technician “Matt” and attempting— with a comedic lack of subtlety or tact—to find out what his employees think of him. The joke in this sketch first revolves around the collision of styles and genres, as the fantastic Star Wars storyworld intersects with the vacuous and petty sensationalism of contemporary reality TV. This kind of collision in many

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ways typifies the appeal of fandom’s tradition of the mash-­up: creating something new by interweaving two seemingly incompatible modes, styles, or registers (Schäfer 2011: 77–78). The SNL sketch cleverly combines fandom’s proclivity for mash-­ups with its traditions of speculative storyworld expansion, fan fiction, and transmedia intersections while also responding to perceptions of the character as expressed by fans on social media in the weeks since The Force Awakens’s release. Its comedy plays on at least two levels: first, it finds humor in the idea that there is also a mundane and banal life of everyday labor, tedium, and petty conflicts within the expansive and exciting Star Wars universe.3 And second, the sketch’s portrayal of Kylo Ren plays up those aspects of the character that were criticized and derided by fans after seeing the film: his manic temper tantrums, his rampant narcissism, and his obvious insecurity were quickly commented on and widely ridiculed by fans on social media, leading to many satirical responses in a similar vein, such as the popular Twitter parody account for “Emo Kylo Ren.” By incorporating both mash-­up culture’s irreverent and playful spirit and fandom’s specific criticism of one of the principal new characters, the SNL sketch absorbed and legitimized fans’ responses to the film. Thus, if the Comic-­Con reel served as an effective paratextual frame that gave audiences a specific set of expectations, and the Tonight Show medley contributed to the celebratory and inclusive tone for the film’s release, the SNL sketch illustrates the ongoing process of brand management.4 It allows media industries to “talk back” to the fans with a strong investment in the storyworld and in the franchise by providing what Matt Hills (2012c) has described as “fanagement,” thus contributing strongly to the legitimization of their response to the film and to their established traditions of creative storyworld expansion and mash-­up culture. But like the other two examples I have discussed in this chapter, the sketch also relies heavily on fans’ willingness to participate in their distribution. While the latter two examples were originally broadcast as part of popular American TV programs, the vast majority of these videos’ actual viewership has come from being shared, blogged, retweeted, and liked across a variety of commercial digital platforms. SNL has grown particularly adept at using its official YouTube channel to make individual sketches available for free online circulation, thus strengthening their own brand as a cutting-­edge producer of  “participatory comedy” (Gurney 2013: 270). But of course, the kind of participation that these fan-­friendly industrial texts allow for is highly constrained. The dominant collaborationist dynamic hinges on a form of flexible and decentered textual production that negotiates successfully with various fan cultures, resulting in mutual processes of  legitimization:

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fans in turn are legitimized by media industries’ willingness to accommodate their responses, criticisms, and desires, as their position in the digital media landscape shifts from marginal subcultures to invaluable influencers and brand ambassadors whose unpaid and immaterial labor allows for viral videos like these to reach millions of viewers. The fact that neither the industrial texts’ ideo­ logical contents nor their industrial practices are top-­down processes clearly strengthens this dynamic: that these videos aren’t perceived as bland, banal advertising but as playful and fun bearers of valuable cultural and social capital ultimately benefits the copyright holders with tremendous financial interests in the brand’s longevity. It is therefore noteworthy that even the SNL sketch isn’t particularly satirical, let alone transgressive, subversive, or transformative. It might poke some fun at fans’ least favorite new character in the franchise, but it does so in a thoroughly toothless way that refuses to launch any satirical barbs at the Star Wars franchise as a whole.5 And by the same token, if an SNL takeoff of Undercover Boss clearly offers an easy and obvious opportunity to reflect critically on the reality TV show’s obnoxious glorification of upper management, this send-­up again never fails to pull its punches. As has been typical of SNL’s popular impersonations of political figures, the show again remains curiously apolitical—even when taking on irreducibly political topics and characters (J. Jones 2013: 90).

Conclusion Reviving, repopularizing, and rebranding Star Wars in the age of cognitive capitalism has required a much more delicate, multifaceted, and flexible approach to media-­industrial production. While there has obviously been no shortage of the merchandising, cross-­promotional activity, and saturation marketing that has long typified the postclassical Hollywood blockbuster, the rebranding effort involved in the promotional activities surrounding The Force Awakens also relied heavily on the incorporation of fan labor. On the one hand, this involved fans’ immaterial labor in the most literal sense, as deep industrial texts were designed to resonate specifically among Star Wars fans, counting on their willingness to distribute them using the commercial platforms of social media. On the other, it involved the adoption of specifically fannish attitudes and sensibilities, thus bestowing a degree of legitimacy on these innovative media-­industrial practices. But as fandom’s sensibilities and cultural practices are absorbed and appropriated by media conglomerates like Disney, fan culture’s transformative creative work is itself transformed into something that can be used to rebrand not only the Star Wars franchise but also the conglomerate of which it is a part. To

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quote Caldwell (2006: 123) once more, “The new conglomerates must counter the ever-­fragmenting effects of new technologies and competitors by quickly ‘morphing’ corporate identities to attract (and to contract with) new affiliates and consumers.” Or, in other words, media industries have responded to the utopian democratic potential of digital culture by appropriating its practices and using them to legitimize their own brands. Thus, industrial texts like the Star Wars–themed segments on The Tonight Show and SNL benefit all the many brands and corporate identities involved while at the same time legitimizing fans’ affective responses and participatory activity. All three of these industrial texts thus offer vivid illustrations of the industrial logic of transmedia franchising and branding in the age of global capitalism. They demonstrate the flexible, decentered, and seemingly effortless ways in which media-­industrial production has fostered and increased fans’ collaborationist attitudes before, during, and after a major franchise revival like The Force Awakens.

5 Joshua Wucher

Rebellions Are Built on Realism The Aesthetics of Special and Visual Effects in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

I

n the summer of 2016, Disney premiered its behind-­the-­scenes “sizzle reel” for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) at Lucasfilm’s annual Star Wars Celebration fan convention. The three-­minute video (Star Wars 2016b) highlighted the practical nature of principal production, showcasing the materiality of on-­set stunts and pyrotechnics, mechanical droids, aliens, and familiar Star Wars iconography such as Stormtroopers and Rebel X-­w ing pilots. What was missing from this material offers the first indication of Disney’s conflicted rhetorical strategy toward promoting Rogue One, the first stand-­alone Star Wars anthology film not dedicated to the Skywalker saga. There is a lack of emphasis on the role of digital visual effects, which played a significant part in all levels of the film’s production: no footage is shown of animators tirelessly working on previsualizations or modelers designing character or ship rigs, and only minimal bluescreen set pieces are presented. The video functions to nostalgically re­ introduce viewers to a recognizable Star Wars universe—one that is ontologically based in the realism of the material, tactile, and practical—while simultaneously limiting its association with the digital and distancing itself from a portion of the cinematic canon that relied on substantial computer-­generated effects. Though not invoked by name, when a crewmember stresses the advantages of forgoing the digital backlot saying, “You’ll actually compose shots that—if we were on a greenscreen set—you just wouldn’t have known were available,” coupled with footage shot at London’s Canary Wharf train station set-­dressed as an Imperial base, there is a strong insinuation that Rogue One will not aesthetically or technologically resemble the critically and fan-­maligned digitally augmented Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition (1997) and the CGI-­heavy prequel

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trilogy. Instead, following the same approach as J. J. Abrams, who favored an aesthetic continuity with the original Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983) for The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One’s advance marketing material promotes a production strategy that underscores director Gareth Edwards’s missive to limit the use of bluescreens and greenscreens and capture as many in-­camera effects as possible to better emulate a 1970s aesthetic. Rogue One’s visual effects supervisor John Knoll recalled that “Gareth had previous experiences where he felt like there was too much greenscreen on set . . . . I’ve experienced that, too, and it results in awkward compositions and poor lighting choices” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 54). The reverential discourse about and display of the profilmic mimics part of The Force Awakens’s 2015 Comic-­Con promotional reel, as the first voice heard is that of Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) saying, “Real sets, practical effects” (see Hassler-­Forest in this collection). The discursive sentiment toward the handmade and practical as more real and less artificial is echoed across Rogue One’s various paratextual discourses spanning behind-­the-­scenes accounts from effects practitioners and filmmakers, as well as studio promotional material, which serve as a means for viewers to discover how effects sequences are produced. These discourses can effectively create an episteme of practical realism that simultaneously promotes a notion of authenticity inherent in Rogue One’s vintage look and serves Hollywood’s economic interests of promoting notions of realism as an aesthetic tradition that appeals to fans wary of bloated, CGI-­spectacle blockbusters. However, a competing discourse is also present in Rogue One’s paratexts, which reveals a more nuanced relationship between the rhetoric and use of practical special effects and digital visual effects during the production process, one that is paradoxically complementary and conflictual. As I will argue, Rogue One’s filmmakers subscribe to notions of realism that attempt to strike a delicate balance between Star Wars’s technological aesthetic history of analog and digital effects. Julie Turnock (2016: 121) argues that George Lucas’s “historically specific brand of realism” for A New Hope’s (1977) effects aesthetic was emulating the gritty and rough photographic look of New Hollywood directors and the French New Wave, “as if it were a 1970s road film or documentary, but shot in space.” While replicating stylistic traits of experimental and auteur cinematography such as lens flare, handheld cameras, and rack focus, Lucas and the Star Wars effects team also repurposed studio-­era effects techniques such as postproduction optical printing and developed new computer-­assisted technology, such as the Dykstraflex motion control camera system “to realize their ideal of a photorealistic, multilayered cinematic environment” (Turnock 2015: 23).

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This chapter will explore how this intertextual and intermedial straddling across special effects traditions is also reflected in Rogue One through a variety of production approaches that concurrently attempt to maintain visual continuity—what I term “aesthetic fidelity”—with the original trilogy while also relying on traditional special effects and digital advancements to formally and aesthetically differentiate it from the larger Star Wars canon. I will rely on paratexts and promotional materials including press interviews, convention panels, trade journals, behind-­the-­scenes videos, and Blu-­ray special features to better understand the aesthetic and technological decisions at work in Rogue’s production. The benefit of using paratexts is to historically contextualize the contingencies of realism in the making of Rogue One and avoid a transhistorical approach that inherently assumes that there exists an unchanging vernacular of realism in which spectators’ and filmmakers’ notions of realism do not evolve. I suggest that there exists a continuum of realism between the more realistic and the more fantastic in Rogue, with some effects associated with tactile notions of realism and others designed to make the impossible seem realistic. From this perspective, the teleology of these realisms remains consistent, as filmmakers work toward achieving greater verisimilitude and precision of the manufactured filmic illusion; however, both the production processes and the filmmakers’ aesthetic aims can differ, resulting in overtly conspicuous or concealed spectacles, whether obtained in-­camera or with a computer. Instead, it is important to ask: what are commercial and artistic models of cinematic realism based on at any given historical period? How do paratextual materials shape, define, or reframe our understanding of Rogue One’s production and promotional processes, as well as potentially influence our viewing experience? And what technologies and production methods contribute to Rogue One’s desired realistic and authentic aesthetics? My analysis begins by examining a return to the “profilmic,” highlighted in the film’s early promotion of a grittier realism based on physical special effects— such as animatronic creatures, full body make-­ups and prosthetics, and practical on-­set stunt work—as well as its emphasis on nostalgic re-­creations and stylistic quotations of familiar locations and narrative events, such as the Rebel Alliance convening at its base on Yavin 4. The analysis continues by examining how the spirit of practical, kitbashing, model-­building aesthetics guide Rogue’s digital modeling team, who draw inspiration from the analog miniature design techniques used by Industrial Light and Magic’s (ILM) model shop during the filming of the original Star Wars trilogy. I then detail how digital effects techniques were used to mimic the material properties of analog production, such

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as photochemical stock and film grain, for nostalgic aesthetic ends. I follow this by arguing that the technological innovation of interactive real-­time lighting, provided by enormous LED screens projecting previsualized CG animations, illustrates a further blending and interaction between analog and digital modes. Finally, I argue that the productive marrying of practical and visual effects in the service of realism—a realism that references a 1970s look and is attuned to the anxieties around contemporary CGI—underscores the challenging task of digitally re-­creating a realistic human likeness of two iconic Star Wars characters, Princess Leia and Governor Tarkin. My argument here is not to attribute realism solely to the materiality of practical special effects and fakeness to digital visual effects but rather to illustrate how notions of cinematic realism develop as a particular aesthetic—executed with particular filmmaking methods—which is affected by economic, cultural, and artistic influences. It is an understanding of cinematic realism that follows Turnock’s (2015: 12) imperative to “understand neither realism nor photo­realism as an end-­point or goal, but a historical discourse and series of practices.” Ultimately, Rogue One integrates and presents a diversity of techniques and practices that illustratively address the competing stakes and multiple logics of realism around current Hollywood blockbuster practice, primarily questions about the realistic nature and believability of aesthetics imaged through digital and practical effects.

Promoting a Used Tactile World In the British Film Institute monograph on Star Wars, Will Brooker (2009: 32) contends that thirty-­plus years of fan speculation, expanded universe spin-­offs, and three prequels have oversaturated Star Wars and “filled the gaps . . . reducing all its pleasurable memories to a dense but somehow uninspiring background.” Brooker suggests that a “film centered on the Star Destroyer and Death Star . . . would offer far fewer hooks for further imagining,” as opposed to one centered on the “bustling world of Tatooine, where a vehicle’s damage and a character’s accessories—or a minor figure walking past the camera—suggest a wealth of other stories” (33). Written eight years before Rogue One’s release in December 2016, Brooker correctly speculated that more Star Wars films could originate from elements that initially received only a cursory glance; however, the idea for Rogue One relied on the Death Star as the impetus for a feature-­length exploration of two sentences in A New Hope’s opening crawl: “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the

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Empire’s ultimate weapon, the Death Star.” With regard to narrative, Rogue One sits between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope and so represents what Mark J. P. Wolf (2012: 378) terms an “intraquel”—that is, “a narrative sequence element which fills in a narrative gap within an already-­existing narrative sequence.” The film focuses on Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones)— the estranged daughter of the scientist who had been coerced into developing the Death Star—who leads a group of Rebel soldiers on a suicide mission to provide the Rebel Alliance with the battle station schematics that Leia inserts into R2-­D2 in the opening of Episode IV. The film eventually answers the forty-­ year-­old question—or plot hole, to some—of how something as massive and powerful as the Death Star could have such an egregious design flaw that would allow Luke Skywalker to destroy it in A New Hope’s conclusion. It is revealed that Jyn’s father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), intentionally added an exhaust port leading to the Death Star’s main reactor. Although John Knoll, who was digital visual effects supervisor for the Special Edition and the prequel trilogy, developed the film’s narrative, accounts of the Rebellion stealing the Death Star plans have been retold across numerous stories in the decanonized Expanded Universe (EU), rebranded in 2014 as Star Wars Legends (see Freeman in this volume; see also Proctor and Freeman 2016). Details of the theft are recounted in a 1981 NPR radio drama, the “choose your own adventure” book Jedi Dawn (1993), computer games Star Wars: X-­Wing (1993) and Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995), console games Battlefield II (2005) and The Force Unleashed (2008), and the novel Death Star (2007). This intertextual legacy presented a tricky problem for those involved in Rogue One’s production: the need to create imagery that seamlessly dovetailed with Episode IV while also remaining distinctively original. Edwards described this balancing act as “an incredibly difficult fine line that you have to navigate the entire way [through] making the film, [wherein] if you go a little bit to the left, it’s not Star Wars, [and] if you go a little bit to the right, you’re just copying Star Wars and not doing anything new” (“Visions of Hope” 2017). Part of Rogue’s preproduction design strategy attempted to maintain aesthetic fidelity to Star Wars by channeling George Lucas. Production designer Doug Chiang described the production philosophy: “How about if we approach the film as if these were sets and designs that George Lucas had built back in the late-­Seventies but never shot on?” (quoted in Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 44). Chiang also stressed the influence of Episode IV illustrators Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie, whose conceptual designs served as the basis for new Stormtrooper uniforms and Rebel spaceships (44–45). Footage of this recognizable yet altered Star Wars cinematic universe premiered in the first teaser trailer eight months before Rogue One’s release in

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December 2016. Familiar iconography appears, such as Episode IV–style white-­ and-­black-­clad Stormtroopers, a modified All Terrain-­A rmored Transport vehicle (AT-­AT) first revealed in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Mon Mothma, the leader of the Rebel Alliance, who first appeared in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983). Rogue’s muted colors are in line with the subtle naturalism of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, emulated by Lucas in A New Hope, as opposed to the glossy plasmaticness and perceived weightlessness of the prequel trilogy’s extensively previsualized, computer-­generated environments. At the 2016 Star Wars Celebration, director Gareth Edwards stressed Rogue One’s investment in shooting outside of a bluescreen backlot: “We were going for realism in the film, so we had to go to real locations” (Star Wars 2016c). (Although Pinewood Studios in London was used for various artificial sets on soundstages, as were two backlots for aid in postproduction compositing.) The film’s prologue on the planet Wobani, which has a bleak, blue-­grayish tone, comes from filming in Mýrdalssandur, Iceland, with ILM providing digital environmental extensions around the Erso homestead. Aerial and scenic live-­ action plate shots were filmed in Wadi Rum, Jordan, for Jedha City, an ancient, stone city atop a desert mountain where Jyn and her partner Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) search a marketplace that resembles the sandy reds and oranges of the Mos Eisley spaceport on Tatooine in Episode IV. Rogue One’s creature and special makeup effects supervisor Neal Scanlan reiterated Edwards’s notion of material realism, promoting the idea of the handmade integrity and authenticity attributed to practical effects over digital effects: “there’s something deceitful about [CGI]. And I think there’s just a natural—something just deep inside us that knows when something is real. It may not be that it’s as perfect or fantastical or mind-­blowing as the CG version may be, but it’s something that you allow into your heart and into your soul, and it allows your imagination to make up some of the little spots” (Newbold 2016). Scanlan’s view of the hands-­on approach to practical effects is illustrative of Gregory Zinman’s (2015: 236) contention that the “handmade recurs as both a protest against the perceived artificiality of digital imagery and as an attempt to reinscribe the human amid (or within) a field of machines.” While Scanlan puts stock in the realism of practical effects, his assertion also runs counter to discourses of visual effects history, practice, and aesthetics that assume effects are forever progressing toward stronger realism and immersion, chiefly through digital technology. North, Rehak, and Duffy (2015) persuasively challenge these prevailing teleological arguments about newer effects being inherently “better.” Scanlan’s team created a series of animatronic puppets, masks, and full-­ costumed suits with mechanical understructures and foam latex skins to

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recapture a 1970s Star Wars aesthetic through practical technology and techniques. Just as the Chewbecca costume that Stuart Freeman built for A New Hope makes use of an internally controlled face mask, many of Rogue One’s creatures, such as a Talpini warrior named Weeteef CyuBee and the Mon Calamarian Admiral Raddus (who resembles the squid-­like Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi), can articulate expressions. The short video “Creature Featurette,” posted on the Star Wars YouTube channel weeks before the release, highlighted the complexity of mechanical effects, the extensive detail, and the laborious efforts to achieve realistic masked characters that can emote lifelike movements (Star Wars 2016a). Scanlan’s team is shown working on molds and sculpting clay as costumed performers rehearse scenes. A performer fitted with prosthetic stilts wears the bottom half of a furry costume for the large creature named Moroff, which resembles a Wampa of Hoth from Empire. In another shot, a close-­up displays Weeteef’s eyes opening and closing, then the mask’s lips moving up and down and pursing in the middle as actor Alan Tudyk, who plays the droid K-­2SO, authenticates the legitimacy of effects labor: “The creatures are amazing. Their eyes blink and move, and their lips have very subtle expression” (Star Wars 2016a). Most of Scanlan’s creatures were background characters that featured heavily in scenes within Jedha City’s marketplace, a Mos Eisley–type setting populated with intergalactic citizens, droids, and animals. Their realism is partly dependent on visually connecting to a Star Wars aesthetic and on the ability to seamlessly blend into the diegesis, which Scanlan notes “required a naturalistic approach to the way they moved and reacted, and also the ways we created them, the ways we textured and painted them” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 57). However, some of the creatures are a creative middle ground, or continuum, between practical and digital effects, particularly characters that are more central to the narrative, such as Bor Gullet, a large amorphous creature with telepathic powers. Bor Gullet is a massive animatronic puppet with large, fleshy tentacles, lidless octopus-­like eyes, sparkly skin, and a transparent cavity that reveals a brain with pulsating veins. The creature belongs to the rogue Clone Wars fighter Saw Gerrara (Forest Whitaker), who uses Bor Gullet to extract information from an Imperial pilot-­turned-­spy Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed). Bor Gullet was molded from two and a half tons of silicone and required sixteen puppeteers located under an elevated set to mechanize the body and control the silicone skin with handles fixed to the creature’s inner fiberglass structure (Fordham 2017: 57). Scanlan’s team provided samples to digital animators for re-­creating skin and tone for the CGI addition of Bor Gullet’s appendages, which closely interact

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with Rook as tentacles wrap around his body and two tips attach to his temples for removing information. The visceral aesthetic dictated by Edwards also underscored the stunt design of terrestrial combat scenes, which were managed by stunt coordinator Rob Inch and special effects supervisor Neil Corbould, who had worked on stunts for Saving Private Ryan (1998), Black Hawk Down (2001), and numerous Bond films. “Gareth wanted a war movie,” Corbould said. “We went with traditional blaster hits, but we mixed it up. When Stormtroopers got hit, we had parts flying around. We used weighted dummies and molded our pieces from Stormtrooper parts borrowed from the wardrobe departments” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 56). Some shots were stylistically arranged to situate the viewer within the action using a camera rigged to a cable set-­up that allowed it to travel through battles at eye level. For action sequences involving heavy artillery blasts from AT-­ATs, special effects and stunt crews wanted to create a stronger level of tactile realism that did not rely on computer-­generated pyro-­effects or digital stunt-­doubles. Customized pneumatic detonations, which are pressurized air explosive devices, were buried underground and triggered around human stunt performers (Fordham 2017: 56–57). Edwards’s interest in a less sanitized depiction of violence and action in the dusty streets of Jedha City’s marketplace further reflects the used-­universe aesthetic established in A New Hope and associated with the Rebels. Brooker (2009: 26) suggests that the opposition between the Rebels and the Empire is signified aesthetically by the contrast between the warm, earthier tones of  Tatooine, and the cold and glossy monochromatic spaces of Imperial power, such as Tan-­ tive IV or the Death Star. Brooker describes the oscillation as a battle of “rough-­ edged versus smooth surface, raw energy versus order, and at its most basic, dirty versus clean” (26). Rogue One emulates this gritty-­versus-­pristine aesthetic in its re-­creations of two legacy sets: the Yavin 4 Rebel base and the Death Star battle station. In A New Hope, Rebel forces gather at a secret base located inside an ancient pyramid on the tropical moon of Yavin 4. Rogue’s design and production team endeavored to inflect interior and exterior shots of the base with such closely referential detail that, according to production designer Neil Lamont, audiences would “be able to feel that [they could] watch Rogue One and Episode IV back to back and feel like they’re from the same period” (“Visions of Hope” 2017). To achieve the impression of aesthetic fidelity to A New Hope, production staged Yavin moon exteriors on a backlot set with ground crew and spacecraft at Pinewood Studios and rebuilt an old aircraft hangar used by George Lucas for exterior shots of the base in the 1997 Special Edition release of Episode IV

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(Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 38). As Jyn enters the Rebel war room, she passes hanging glass plates adorned with teal, linear, perpendicular grid-­patterns that mirror the design of the strategy centers used in each Rebel headquarters location across the original trilogy. For wide exterior shots, effects company Ghost VFX generated virtual environment extensions, adding the planet Yavin looming in the sky along with digital simulations of jungle terrain, layers of drifting mist, and stone pyramids that resemble the ancient Mayan ruins of Guatamala’s Tikal National Park, which were used as visual references for Episode IV (Fordham 2017: 55). Part of physically re-­actualizing McQuarrie’s designs meant maintaining the faithful continuity of distinct geometric shapes and color palettes unique to the Rebels and the Empire. Re-­creating and remodeling the circular, moon-­sized Death Star battle station was a necessity accomplished with a combination of visual effects techniques and using a variety of designs and textures from multiple sources. Industrial Light and Magic did not own the original three-­foot-­diameter model from A New Hope, which had exchanged hands over the years and now sits in a fan’s private collection (Fordham 2017: 56). A year before production, Knoll built the digital asset hoping to accurately re-­create the Death Star’s original model, including its intricate surface paneling, lighting, and textures. Knoll constructed his digital design using visual references pulled from frames of the Death Star from a 4K restoration of the original negative, the Lucasfilm archives, and from amateur photographs taken when the miniature was displayed at Paul Allen’s Science Fiction Museum in Seattle (Fordham 2017: 56). Knoll redrew images of the Death Star in Adobe Photoshop, projected them onto his CG model, and unwrapped them into a textured space: “By doing that with enough pictures, I got pretty complete coverage of the original model, and that became a template upon which to redraw very high-­resolution texture maps” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 56). Though ILM modelers and animators were not building a physical Death Star, the philosophy of practical miniature design guided the creation and blending of original ships and environments with already iconic ships such as the Imperial Star Destroyer and the Rebel X-­w ing. Industrial Light and Magic digitally emulated the practical kitbashing technique used by its own miniature artists during A New Hope’s production, in which a variety of plastic bits from off-­the-­shelf model kits were glued together to create distinctive spaceships. For Rogue, model makers created and assembled a digital library of parts and layers of intricate details for ships’ surfaces after scouring the internet for physical models. Model supervisor Russell Paul of ILM explained that vintage plastic model kits were purchased on eBay, and

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modelers then “went through them, as the old model shop had done, and we scanned those parts” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 55). Accomplishing the effects and production goal of digitally recapturing the feel and look of A New Hope’s photochemical nature was partly dependent on the nostalgic remediation of the analog technique of kitbashing, as well as on reproducing practical miniature model features such as smooth surfaces, stippling, and paneling.

Analog Artifacts Nostalgia also emerges in Rogue One’s technological aesthetic through the digital simulation of photochemical elements such as the grain of film stocks, a feature Barbara Flueckiger (2015: 78) refers to as an “analog artifact” that is added “computationally to CGI and digital compositing” (see also Manovich 1999 and Prince 2012 for a discussion of such “technostalgia”). The cinematic look of filmed images has traditionally been associated with the photochemical composition of film stock, a primary characteristic of which is its grain. Filmmakers choose film stocks to enhance the graininess, which “endows the surface of the film with a specific texture that we associate with the cinematic” (Flueckiger 2015: 81). Part of the rhetoric around the “grit” of Rogue is attributable to its attempt to emulate the look of older film stock, despite being shot digitally. To mimic the “warm texture” of film from A New Hope, a Digital Intermediate (DI) visual effects artist, working on color grading in postproduction, used a computer program algorithm called a Look Up Table (LUT) to approximate what a specific film stock should look like (Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 35). Rogue One’s LUT was based on the Kodak 500T 5230 negative film stock and, according to Knoll, was partially responsible for mimicking the color response of film: “The blacks are milky and creamy; it’s a low-­contrast stock, so when you add a little bit of contrast in the DI, it doesn’t feel digital—it still feels very filmic” (quoted in Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 35). A contributing factor to mimicking the grit and warmth of a cinematic look came from pairing older Ultra Panavision 70mm anamorphic lenses with an Arri Alexa 65 digital camera. Knoll said mixing the analog lenses with a digital camera enabled stronger profilmic compositions, which reduced compositing in the digital workflow, although “adding all-­synthetic terrain with no bluescreens was sometimes tricky” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 54). While the aesthetic choice of limiting bluescreens did cause this compositing issue when using two distinct technological modes for capturing footage, the production

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crew pursued Edwards’s directive of imitating the realism associated with Lucas’s documentary-­style deep focus shots from A New Hope by also filming with a wider aperture, which allowed for greater amounts of light to hit the lens and provided “the benefit of that realistic exposure [that] gave us built-­in authenticity” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 54). Another nostalgic integration of image parts from different sources occurs in the digital insertion of Rebel X-­w ing pilots from unused takes shot forty years earlier for A New Hope. Gareth Edwards discovered the abandoned footage while touring the archives at Skywalker Ranch (Fullerton 2016). The footage contained shots from the climactic Death Star assault at the Battle of  Yavin, including X-­w ing call sign exchanges between Rebel pilots, particularly between Red Leader (Drewe Henley) and Gold Leader (Angus MacInnes), who deliver lines that were never featured in A New Hope. The script was reworked to insert the sequence into the Battle of Scarif, which ILM accomplished by digitally incorporating the analog footage into updated X-­and Y-­w ing cockpits.

Dogfights in Space The chaotic and frenetic aerial dogfights in Star Wars offer another site to explore how Edwards emulates a visual style consistent with Lucas’s approach to an aesthetic of effects realism. Julie Turnock (2016: 121) notes how Lucas used the term “documentary fantasy” to describe the look of Star Wars, “which was meant to suggest a style in which fantastic impossible events take place, and characters and objects appear, in a perfectly credible ‘used future.’ ” Turnock contends that an example of this approach for evoking an “authentic” documentary feel is present in the battle on the icy planet of Hoth in Empire, where special effects sequences were “shot to emphasize photographic ‘mistakes,’ as if captured by a harried battle cameraman, such as a camera wobble suggesting handheld cameras, or rack focus and lens flare” (122). Aesthetically and stylistically, Edwards wanted several effects sequences to match an embedded documentary style (Hall 2016), which was achieved with filming techniques that situated the camera within cockpits and a hydraulic gimbal rig with an X-­w ing attached that was manipulated by the special effects team to simulate the ship flying through space (Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 34). To inflect the impression of a handheld, documentary aesthetic, Edwards composed shots from the pilot’s perspective while operating the camera: “I got inside this X-­w ing, put the camera on top of my shoulder and they closed the cockpit. Then the thing just started flying and we started going through space

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in a space battle. And I was filming it, trying to film everything and trying to get the shots as well as I could” (Breznican 2016). In both Rogue One and A New Hope, lighting played a significant part in re-­creating the movement of light inside the cockpit to evoke an authentic appearance of reflection from the diegetic environment on pilot helmets. Brooker (2009: 58) suggests that Lucas relied on key lights to realistically light spaceship cockpits, noting how in one scene, “within the space of a second, a key light slides up the shoulder of a pilot and over his helmet, dancing across the enclosed space of the cockpit.” However, John Knoll explained that Rogue’s production team felt that traditional spaceship lighting techniques were insufficient for producing their desired sense of authenticity: “The lighting environment around the vehicle should really be changing almost every frame. And that’s really hard to do well on a soundstage with conventional instruments, so it feels a little artificial” (quoted in Benjamin B. and Witmer 2017: 48). Major cockpit interior scenes were filmed on a gimbal rig surrounded by a giant LED screen that surrounded the Rebellion’s U-­w ing starfighter like a horseshoe and projected playback of previsualized 360-­degree animated footage of streaking effects that simulated the jump to light speed, cogenerated by effects house The Third Floor and ILM (Fordham 2017: 72). The setup recalled both earlier studio-­era process photography techniques such as rear projection and the transmedially related Star Tours flight simulator ride at Walt Disney World. The real-­time interactive lighting technique used the LED screen as the source for lighting actors in-­camera rather than the common backlot technique of filming a sequence in front of a bluescreen or greenscreen, which requires separate lighting on set then generating CG footage in postproduction and meticulously emulating the natural and physical behavior of  light in a visually convincing way. Lighting real actors on soundstage sets with virtual landscapes as a means of in-­camera compositing assisted in achieving the crew’s desired aesthetic of photorealistic effects shots that feel more authentically realistic. Knoll emphasized the significance of the subtlety of light interaction created from filming this way “because we had preanimated the whole space battle, you can see a planet or the interactive light from a laser actually reflected in the helmets, and we got that without any additional effort. It’s just a wonderful bit of realism, which makes everything that much better” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 48). While older production methods of in-­camera compositing were updated and reworked to inflect cockpit scenes with more naturalism, ILM similarly sought to inject subtle cues of realism into the CG re-­creations of two iconic Star Wars characters.

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Digitally Resurrected Synthespians Rogue One nostalgically added cameos of familiar Star Wars characters such as Mon Mothma, Rebel General Jan Dodonna, and Captain Antilles, as well as major stars such as Darth Vader, R2-­D2, and C-­3PO.1 But while the former were portrayed by new actors that resembled their earlier onscreen counterparts and the latter performed in suits (though R2 was a mechanical prop), Rogue One’s filmmakers sought stronger aesthetic fidelity to A New Hope. To achieve this, they undertook the technological challenge of re-­creating realistic digital likenesses, or “synthespians,” of Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia (Burston 2006). In 1977, a sixty-­three-­year-­old Peter Cushing (who died in 1994) originally portrayed Tarkin, while a nineteen-­year-­old Carrie Fisher played the Rebel Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan. The decision was made to cast British actor Guy Henry, partly because of his visual likeness to Cushing, who would deliver Tarkin’s performance on set; while Leia, who is played by Norwegian actress Ingvild Deila, appears only briefly in the film’s conclusion accepting the stolen Death Star plans and delivering one line: “Hope.” In the Blu-­ray special feature “The Princess and the Governor” (2017), Edwards discussed the daunting technological task of reproducing a convincing digital Cushing and Fisher: “To do a human where absolutely no one would ever guess that it wasn’t fully CG, it’s a really difficult task. We haven’t got a plan B.” Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy explained that the decision to make the reappearance CG was contingent on John Knoll “assur[ing] us that it was going to be completely believable” (“The Princess and the Governor” 2017). While these views lean toward the quixotic with regard to CGI and the total suspension of disbelief, ILM animation supervisor Hal Hickel suggested that the priority for perceptual veracity began with a believable acting performance in motion capture followed by visual resemblance to Tarkin and Leia: “We felt that it would be okay if we could not quite meet that second bar, but it was absolutely crucial that it not, in any way, feel artificial. The bar of reality had to be met, first, and the bar of likeness second” (“The Princess and the Governor” 2017). Accomplishing the desired aesthetic required a series of demands on the actors in principal photography and visual effects artists in postproduction. The performers needed to physically match the height and build of the originals to assist with digital head replacements, match individual verbal ticks and gestures, and deliver lines with a recognizable cadence (Fordham 2017: 62). For Leia, Deila wore the white robe and iconic hair buns donned by Fisher in A New Hope’s opening, as well as reflective facial capture dots. The final composite was achieved through keyframe animation, camera references, digital facial

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scanning, and texturing. Leia’s entire costume is computer-­simulated, with only Deila’s hands appearing in the final image (Fordham 2017: 62). A digital Cushing was a more deeply challenging task because Tarkin had a larger role in Rogue One’s narrative. Part of creating the digital character consisted of Henry wearing a pair of head-­mounted cameras and infrared facial tracking markers, which reflected infrared performance data that ILM visual effects units used to match Henry’s face and performance to its animated Cushing likeness by integrating layers of skin behavior, blood-­flow, muscle movement, and lighting components (Fordham 2017: 64–65). The Medusa facial scan software developed by Disney Research Zurich is another visual effects technology that aided in developing a digital likeness of Cushing: Henry performed a range of facial motions and dialogue to provide animators with particular performance characteristics. Hickel noted that part of the difficulty of redesigning the facial motion of a digital Cushing was trying to match up a performance from a different actor: “the first time we mapped his [Henry’s] facial performance to our Tarkin face, it suddenly didn’t look like Tarkin anymore. That was because of the way Guy was using his mouth, and how he expressed himself. So we had to pursue the spirit of Guy’s acting choices, re-­interpreting them as Peter Cushing’s expressions and phonemes” (quoted in Fordham 2017: 64). Some deeper philosophical questions arise here regarding the nature of digital performance given that the CG Tarkin has different ontological groundings based in digital animation and a physical form of labor performed by an actual actor hidden behind the digital recreation. Addressing such problems are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the final composite and the film’s final frame of Leia holding the Death Star schematics are apt metaphors for Rogue One’s overall approach to realism, believability, and aesthetic fidelity: the reinterpretation and re-­creation of “authentic” Star Wars visuals, where nostalgic analog elements coexist with digital advancements. The imagery aesthetically, technologically, and ontologically represents the medial interstice and convergence inherent in digital cinema today. Achieved with the combination and interaction of a variety of analog and digital effects technologies utilized across all levels of production, as well an amalgamation of virtual and live-­action performances, the film’s final sequence is inherently intermedial. The spectacular shot, and many of the effects I have analyzed throughout this chapter, provide an example of what Stephen Prince (2012: 225) describes as “the digital toolbox furnish[ing] new capabilities and new aesthetics while maintaining continuity with the past.” The advent of digital technologies offers new possibilities for creating virtual performances like those of synthespian Leia and Tarkin, dynamic computer-­generated dogfights,

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and analog artifacts such as film stock and grain. However, this chapter has also focused on the remedial relationship between analog and digital in an effort to disentangle them by avoiding the tendency to consolidate varied technologies and techniques of practical special effects into the equally disparate digital pipeline or workflow of visual effects production. Differentiating between such technologies can aid our understanding of the relationship between analog and digital effects, with the former not simply providing the blueprint for the latter, but also of the concurrent influence, shaping, and refreshing of contemporary practical effects by digital visual effects. Examples of such intermedial encounters are the profilmic compositing of CG animated space footage projected onto LED panels that surround a mechanized U-­w ing, equipped to create pitching motions, and that provide real-­time lighting in ways similar to an image-­based lighting technique used in computer graphics. While much of Rogue One’s paratextual discourses promoted this— and other techniques and technologies such as animatronic and puppeteered creatures, location shooting, and practical stunts, as a return to the profilmic and the tactile for stronger realism—promotional material also emphasized a greater degree of reality through digital effects. The discrepancies across the various practitioner, filmmaker, and industry discourses are neither entirely contradictory nor congruent. Where differences do exist between the practical, the digital, and the filmed event, I would suggest that these are less significant as incongruities than as evidence of the complex relationship between rhetoric, practice, and aesthetics. By examining how Rogue One’s production is intermedially and intertextually linked to effects and aesthetic traditions found across the Star Wars franchise, I have argued that Rogue One illustrates an example of how contemporary blockbuster filmmakers and effects workers conceive of more realistic spectacles: a nostalgic turn for remediating earlier aesthetics, techniques, and technologies in the pursuit of replicating the presumed visual integrity, naturalism, unpredictability, and spontaneity of analog film.

6 Colin B. Harvey

Binding the Galaxy Together Subjective, Collective, and Connective Memory in Star Wars

I

n this chapter, I look at the role of memory in constructing the Star Wars franchise’s transmedia network. I compare and contrast memory practices in relation to the franchise’s Expanded Universe (EU) era and its current explicitly integrated incarnation following its purchase by Disney. Along the way, I look at the tensions between officially sanctioned collective memory and the often intensely personal, emotional relationship individual fans feel for the franchise. As I show, the ways in which these tensions are interpolated have both changed and stayed the same as digital technologies have increasingly supplanted analog modes of engagement with the franchise. I will begin by outlining competing conceptions of memory, both in terms of subjective and collective remembering. I will then compare and contrast my own developing experience of the Star Wars franchise with that of my eleven-­ year-­old son Zak, exploring the ways in which analog modes of experiencing the franchise have been transformed (or not) by the emergence of manifold, increasingly connective digital practices. I will also examine the extent to which entirely new forms of engagement specific to the digital have emerged. At the root of my approach are Jan Assmann’s (2011) insights into foundational memory, and the work of Andrew Hoskins (2009) in adumbrating the necessity for a theory of “new memory” able to accommodate our sociotechnological engagement with connected, digital media.

Ways of Remembering Central to the field of memory studies is the ongoing tension between individual, personal memory and collective, shared memory (Hamilton 2010: 299).

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Personal memory might be understood as autobiographical, but it might also be seen as biological and embodied; and of course, it might be understood as both simultaneously. By contrast, collective memory might be seen as a set of negotiations between individuals in which a shared, common agreement is reached as to which memories should be considered dominant. Where one begins and the other ends is not always obvious. Collective memory refers to shared memory—that is to say, memory practices undertaken by a group—and as an object of study was pioneered by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs ([1941] 1992). Rather than seeing collective memory as a method for simply retelling events, however, Halbwachs understands it as a means for reconfiguring those events, determined by the exigencies of the moment in which the recounting is happening. By extension, any contemporary idea—what Halbwachs terms “social thought”—is the product of interpolated processes of remembering, of selection and ordering. In other words, collective memory isn’t simply about the things we normally identify with remembering, such as rituals and traditions, but also those ideas that construct the contemporary world in which we live ([1941] 1992: 188–89). After all, as Baruch Spinoza ([1677] 2000: 134, 169, 200) suggested some three hundred years previously, memory is a precondition of all human activity. However, a key, recurrent tension within bodies of work discussing group memory obtains in the relationship between an individual’s subjective memory processes and the broader group memory with which it interacts (Hamilton 2010: 299). Assmann identifies “foundational memory,” a variety of communicative memory in which “fixed objectifications,” such as rituals, dances, paintings, and so forth, interact with “biographical memory” (2011: 36–37). In relation to the Star Wars storyworld, it is easy to see the many ways in which fans of the franchise engage in fixed objectifications, and the operation of biographical memory in terms of how such activities are contextualized. Explicit examples of these range widely, from fans who use their memories of the films for spiritual or therapeutic reasons or to help make choices in life (Brooker 2002: 5–13) to those with military backgrounds who use those experiences to inform their contributions to contextualize the Star Wars storyworld in their online contributions to fan sites (Brooker 2002: 19–27). The inclusion of biographical and autobiographical memory in discussions of collective memory has other implications, particularly in relation to ideas of the body and affect. Jenny Kidd is one of many memory theorists hailing from a diverse range of disciplines who observe the role of the body in remembering, identifying the “physical responses and seemingly tangible feelings” evident in the recounting of narrative memories (2009: 169). The psychologist Endel

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Tulving talks about memory in terms of the dynamics between behavioral, cognitive, and brain systems that enable survival on the basis of acquired information (cited in Cohen 1996: 307). For Spinoza ([1677] 2000: 173–74) the body is never at rest but rather is subject to variations in capacity, and his conception of affectus, the passions that drive our interactions with the wider world, should be understood in this light. Again, this concurs with more contemporary thoughts around memory arising from different disciplines. Rose (2003: 7) argues that the human body— including, of course, the brain—is in an everlasting state of flux thanks to “circulating hormones, physiological processes, the immune system”; while autobiography theorist Paul John Eakin (1999: 98) describes the autobiographical form as relational, arguing that “the self is dynamic, changing, and plural.” Significantly, Eakin reasserts Sidonie Smith’s point that the absence of a discussion of body in previous accounts of autobiography relates to an assumption that the bodies in question are, by default, male (Eakin 1999: 36–37). More recently, memory scholar Andrew Hoskins has suggested that existing concepts of shared and collective memory are ill-­suited to the task of analyzing the contemporary mediascape we now inhabit. Connective digital media can render the past more visible, much more rapidly and with greater accessibility, than the media that preceded it. Crucially, though, the digital characteristics of this new form of memory also render it more “revocable,” more subject to critique and challenge, than that which went before. Halbwachs’s contention that the individual does not necessarily require the actual presence of other group members to participate in “group memory” becomes redundant if the group are, in fact, virtually present thanks to connectivity (though that presence may take myriad forms, especially if the individual in question does not actively participate in forum discussions). As Hoskins (2009: 28–29) observes, this has important ramifications for the relationship between personal and collective remembering and suggests the need for a new conception of memory that can incorporate the particular characteristics of how human beings engage with digital, connected technologies.

Canon In discussions of canon, the tensions between collective memory and subjective memory are frequently rendered explicit. In his exploration of the long-­r unning television science-­fantasy show Doctor Who, writer Lance Parkin (2007) defines canon in a number of related ways. While finding its origins in the Biblical concept of Gospel “truth,” Parkin observes that the contemporary understanding

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of canon uses the template laid down by Sherlock Holmes fandom. For fans of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, canon is constituted by the fifty-­six short stories and four novels written by the author himself. Material written by other creators is excluded, and even some of Conan Doyle’s own work—such as theatrical plays and unfinished material—is not considered canon. Authorship, then, is not necessarily a guarantee of canonicity (Parkin 2007: 246–62). In contemporary, high-­profile franchises, particularly those operating in media that are often massively collaborative and that frequently involve multiple commercial interests, canon is very often a contested item (see Proctor and Freeman 2016; Proctor 2017). The scale and scope of Star Wars as articulated in multiple different media have made ideas of canon a continual source of discussion for fandom in its widest sense—that is, incorporating elements of fandom who have moved into official positions of production, able to exert creative and contextual control over the franchise as it moves forward. Connective digital technologies offer a variety of forums for fandom to debate and critique canon, often taking the shape of highly detailed and passionately argued discussions concerning individual views about what does and what does not “count” with regard to the particular storyworld in question. In this context, it is not unusual to see fans describe their oxymoronic-­sounding “personal canon,” or “head canon,” in which the individual has negotiated their personal, affective experience of the fandom with other fans and official proclamations regarding the “authentic” version of events in the storyworld (see Freeman in this volume). As with other aspects of fan engagement, disagreements and conversations among particular fandoms about what does and does not constitute canon have long been a characteristic of fan engagement, the web serving to render these and comparable interactions with participatory culture more visible (Jenkins 2008a: 141).

Tonal Consistency “Transmedia” in the sense employed in this chapter finds its origins in Marsha Kinder’s (1991) work on children’s engagement with franchised media and toys. Henry Jenkins (2003) built on Kinder’s study to popularize the idea of “transmedia storytelling,” in which a single narrative might be spread across multiple media platforms or in which multiple narratives originate from a single storyworld. Jenkins (2013) has explicitly said that transmedia storytelling is not an exclusively digital phenomenon and frequently draws on analog precedents to offer insights into contemporary franchises, a view reinforced by Matthew Freeman’s (2016) extensive explorations of predigital transmedia franchises.

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Key theorists and practitioners such as Christy Dena (2009) and Andrea Phillips (2012) differentiate larger-­scale transmedia storytelling projects such as the kind typified by Star Wars from independent, smaller-­scale transmedia projects, which utilize approaches rooted in social media and Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Jenkins (2011) has proposed other modes of transmediality such as “trans­ media play” and “transmedia marketing,” which he sees as distinct, though related, processes. In my own work (Harvey 2015), I have advanced the idea of “transmedia memory” to describe the ways in which elements within a transmedia network remember, misremember, forget, and even “non-­remember” (to adapt a term used by memory scholar Anna Reading [2011]) other elements within a transmedia network. Obvious elements that tend to be remembered across Star Wars transmedia networks include the audiovisual appearance of the robots C-­3PO and R2-­D2, John Williams’s music, the font used in the opening crawl of the films, and key plot points such as Order 66, the command from the Emperor that results in the Clone Army turning on, and massacring, the Jedi. We might understand such elements in terms of the ritualized behavior that Assmann (2011: 36–37) describes as “foundational memory,” the fixed points around which other kinds of creativity can occur. For Jenkins, “ideally” every element in a transmedia network makes its own “unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (2011). Jenkins famously examines the Matrix franchise as an example of transmedia storytelling in which a narrative is told across multiple media including films, comics, and video games. He suggests that the poor critical and fan response to later entries in the Matrix franchise resides in the fact that audiences have yet to become attuned to transmedia storytelling to the extent that they can suitably appreciate such cross-­ media narrativizing (Jenkins 2008a: 95–134). However, a useful point of contrast with Jenkins’s “integrated” approach occurs in the work of Emma Beddows, who analyzes the ways in which Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans engage with spin-­off media, such as comics and novels. Beddows (2012: 147) notes that fan expectations derived from the Urtext of the Buffy television series mean that they often expect material in spin-­off media to engage in formal storytelling techniques they recognize from the television show, and they are disappointed when it does not. A similar conclusion is reached by Jason Mittell (2015: 301), who notes that fans of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series see the video game Chaos Bleeds as an “oversimplification” in terms of its representation of beloved characters. This tension between tonal consistency, on the one hand, and Jenkins’s argument that each element in a transmedia network should exploit the medium in

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question to its greatest extent remains an ongoing challenge for those involved in transmedia production. In the context of Star Wars, the fixity of certain pieces of iconography—the visual appearance of key characters, vehicles, or locations, the music, the references to specific events from the films—is not always sufficient to overcome differences in how such media articulate these fixed elements (see Hills in this volume). For instance, Star Wars: Aftermath (2015), a novel by Chuck Wendig set after the events of Return of the Jedi and before A Force Awakens, was published under the auspices of the new Lucasfilm Story Group and articulated explicitly as canon. Some elements of fandom objected to the inclusion of a gay character in Aftermath, for example, as these fans evidently don’t consider that the Star Wars universe might contain anything other than a heteronormative version of sexuality, despite the diversity of organic and robotic species evident in Mos Eisley Cantina in the very first film from 1977 and in a welter of subsequent media. Foundational memory for those of us who see diversity as a key, exciting component of our Star Wars experience is clearly, therefore, different among those fans whose foundational memory is of a fictional universe in which all characters are heterosexual, or at least asexual unless otherwise stated. On this basis we can conclude that foundational memory is therefore also susceptible to flux, which is consistent with an affective understanding of fandom’s engagement with the franchise. Digital connectivities provide a means for individuals to negotiate their own sense of self within the wider collective memory of what Star Wars is or is not, but also to render those negotiations evident in a way which wasn’t always possible (Hoskins 2009: 31).

Analog Skywalker Like a lot of the writers in this collection, I was a first-­generation Star Wars kid. Of course, this didn’t just mean the films. The original Star Wars—in the days when it was just Star Wars (and not A New Hope), before episode titles and numbers came to dominate marketing and fan discourse—was the first film I ever saw at the cinema (I was six years old). But it was a full five years before I’d see the film for a second time, when it was shown on ITV (at that time the United Kingdom’s only national commercial television broadcaster) on Sunday, October 24, 1982, at 7:15 p.m. In an era before the internet—before streaming, Blu-­ rays, DVDs, or VHS videos—the Kenner action figures and vehicles, Marvel comics, Atari video games, and Sphere novel adaptations were the chief ways in which I and many, many others engaged with the franchise. Indeed, Jonathan

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Gray (2010: 181) makes the point that, in this era, the Star Wars toys effectively “kept the trilogy alive” during the three-­year intervals between the release dates of the three original films. In those far off, largely predigital days, the original trilogy of films existed primarily as memories, seen once at the cinema and subsequently articulated and negotiated via this welter of tie-­in media, as well as through magazines and newspaper articles that discussed the films. Some of these tie-­in media were adaptations of the films, modifying the original stories to make them fit the strengths of the new medium or simply making creative decisions because the tie-­in creator in question hadn’t seen the finished movie. These adaptations included novels by Alan Dean Foster, Marvel Comics versions of the three movies, and the radio play adaptations. But other tie-­in media were extensions of the storyworld, telling new stories with familiar characters and creating new ones. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1978) was written by Alan Dean Foster in close collaboration with George Lucas and recounted the further adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han beyond the events of the first movie (see Freeman in this volume). This was a book I borrowed from the school library and devoured as a legitimate sequel to the film I’d seen at the cinema. For me, the novel successfully remembered key elements from the first film while creating plausible original material alongside, a careful articulation of foundational memories enabling Alan Dean Foster’s creativity to flourish. For me, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye remained canon until its displacement by The Empire Strikes Back as the actual sequel in 1980. This was, then, an experience of Star Wars that was predominantly—but not exclusively—analog in nature, and thus tangible and material in very specific ways. Books, comics, action figures, and vehicles all possessed their own particular materiality that evoked the films from which they were derived. When likenesses to particular characters were difficult to grasp or a toy version of the Millennium Falcon seemed out of scale to the action figures it could carry, this deliberate or nondeliberate misremembering of the films carried weight because in other regards this merchandise was similar enough to the films to invite the comparison. Digital engagement with the franchise at this early stage of its history was much more limited and sometimes carried out vicariously. I didn’t possess an Atari 2600 to play the early Star Wars cartridges (though I did pore over magazine articles featuring screenshots and descriptions), but I did play the Star Wars Arcade Game. I did, however, own an Atari 800 home computer and the game Star Raiders (1979), which boasted a game mechanic and iconography redolent

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of the Star Wars films (as well as other franchises like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek). This meant I was able to engage in a digital experience that activated my memories of the Star Wars films. Years later, I interviewed the creator of Star Raiders, Doug Neubauer, who confirmed that this was wholly intentional on his part, even though there was no official licensing agreement in play (Harvey 2004: 144–45). My predominantly analog experience of the franchise differs markedly from that of my eleven-­year-­old son, Zak. Up until Disney’s purchase of Star Wars, the wider transmedia network supporting the original trilogy of films and the subsequent prequel trilogy of films was articulated through the concept of the EU. A complicated level of canon was attributed to the various strata of the EU, in which the six films operated as the primary texts, while other media entries were conceptualized on a sliding scale of importance to the mythology. The Clone Wars, a computer-­generated animated film and subsequent long-­r unning television series, might be regarded as more “authentic” than multiple novels, comics, and video games: as Walter Jon Williams (2009: 29) has observed, anything with “Lucas’s name attached is considered canonical,” whereas other spin-­ off media lacking Lucas’s imprimatur tends to be more open to fan debate. Since Zak originally watched The Clone Wars film and television series on DVD, this aspect of the franchise has for him been almost exclusively digital in terms of both the construction and distribution of this slice of the storyworld. But just as my early, childhood experience of Star Wars was never wholly analogue, Zak has also experienced The Clone Wars through other nondigital, material means, such as comics, toys, books, and other kinds of physical merchandising. Zak’s other key experience of the franchise has been through a smaller transmedia network within the wider Star Wars transmedia network, one that is again predominantly articulated through the digital. LEGO’s association with the Star Wars franchise dates back to 1998, when they first acquired the rights to produce physical construction models of elements from the Star Wars films (Hidalgo 2012a: 197). Subsequently the game developer Traveller’s Tales produced LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game (2005), the first of numerous LEGO-­themed games to be set in the storyworld. The LEGO video games translate the LEGO-­building aesthetic into the realm of the virtual (that is to say, the energetic), remembering key aspects of the materiality of the blocks in terms of how they can be assembled and disassembled (see also Geraghty in this volume). At the same time, of course, the games are also remembering Star Wars iconography from the films and television

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shows, albeit in highly stylized form. In this sense, the LEGO Star Wars video games can be seen as inherently palimpsestic, remembering again foundational memories that have been deliberately misremembered, as well as attuning a material aesthetic to energetic environments that are manipulated via particular kinds of hardware and software. The LEGO Star Wars games are characterized by a particular sense of  humor, often involving the reworking of scenarios familiar from the film series, such as Kylo Ren experiencing difficulties keeping his iconic three-­part lightsaber lit, or a Stormtrooper fainting, and another crying over the death of Han Solo. As I’ve noted elsewhere, repetition and difference are key aspects of video game transmedial expansions and adaptations, affording players a way of experiencing familiar scenarios in ways that have been deliberately misremembered (Harvey 2015: 130–31; see also Gray in this volume). In the case of LEGO Star Wars such techniques may be utilized for comic effect, but in other instances this might be a means of enabling a player to experience something similar to what they have engaged with in another part of a transmedia network while still retaining diegetic consistency with the original version. Indeed, this is not specific to video games, or indeed the digital: film reboots and sequels often repeat motifs, dialogue, and plot elements that an audience has previously encountered. The Star Wars saga is littered with many such instances, and The Force Awakens film is notable in this regard.

Official Integration A key aspect of Disney’s new, overtly integrated approach is that the existing EU material has been rebranded under the heading Star Wars Legends, effectively decanonizing a vast quantity of material from Splinter of the Mind’s Eye through the original Marvel comics to highly regarded novels like Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, the video game Knights of the Old Republic (2003), and the Dark Horse comics series. Separating what was previously EU material into the Legends strand might be seen as an attempt at “non-­remembering,” a process by which all traces of a memory are erased, as distinct from forgetting, in which the possibility for memory traces still exists (Reading 2011). However, given the high esteem in which key elements of the EU are held among fans and the fact that EU elements had already crept into the prequel trilogy of films, it seems unlikely that the Legends range can be completely isolated from the new canon, as the recent announcement that the Thrawn character is to become a recurring villain in Rebels suggests (see also Hills in this volume). A reboot of the

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kind advocated by the Story Group may aim to wipe the slate clean of previous memory traces but will never be wholly successful, as fandom will ensure that such traces endure (Harvey 2015). This speaks to a problem common to many contemporary transmedia franchises: to maintain and increase revenue streams, owners of the intellectual property in question perceive that they must necessarily attempt to control the collective memory of the intellectual property’s hyperdiegesis (Hills 2002: 137– 38). To reiterate Hoskins’s (2009: 29) point about the extent to which the new kinds of connective memory can be revoked, the task of controlling collective memory is rendered challenging by digital processes that give fandom the ability to criticize and oppose such decisions in multiple ways, asserting their own preferred readings through often highly creative methods such as fan fiction, fan films, and video game mods. The launch of the new, explicitly integrated canon, however, is notable in that it continues to employ digital and analog techniques as a means of conveying the transmedia narrative in its various guises. The multiple novels detailing the events following Return of the Jedi, appearing under the banner “Journey to The Force Awakens,” exist as both physical copies and e-­books, while the same is true of the multiple new Marvel Comics titles telling stories from throughout the new canon timeline, from Obi-­Wan and Anakin through Darth Vader to Poe Dameron.

The Digital Now Together with Zak, I watch the Star Wars Holiday Special, a 1978 television show intended to cash in on the success of the original 1977 film (see Hills in this volume). The program features many of the key actors from the film, including Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Anthony Daniels, alongside a number of entertainment celebrities from the period. Our viewing takes place after seeing The Force Awakens at the cinema. Zak and I view the Holiday Special using an iPad in a relaxed fashion lying on a double bed in the master bedroom of our three-­bedroom house in south London. My son Zak expresses his exasperation during the extended early scene on the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk in the home of Chewbacca’s relatives, unable to reconcile this domestic portrayal of Wookiees with his understanding of Chewbacca derived from seeing the various films as well as Chewbacca’s appearances in The Clone Wars television series. Rather than let the scene continue, Zak urges me to skip forward. Doing so brings us to the animated section of the Holiday Special, a cartoon that introduces the key figure of Boba Fett to a wider

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audience following his initial appearance at the San Francisco State Fair alongside Darth Vader in 1978 (Vilmur 2006; Windham 2012: 90). For Zak, the authenticity of the Boba Fett animated segment from the Holiday Special is conveyed tonally through the iconography and thematically through the kinds of activities undertaken by the characters in the segments in question. The Wookiees’ storyline is clearly not consistent with how Zak understands the operation of the Star Wars universe, though it might potentially fit within the humor-­based LEGO infra-­storyworld. The Boba Fett storyline, by contrast, fits with Zak’s understanding of an action-­based universe in which characters behave more or less consistently with their audiovisual equivalents elsewhere in the storyworld. Subsequently, Zak seems able to reconcile the events of the animated segment of the Holiday Special with the events of the Marvel Star Wars comic in which Boba Fett travels to Tatooine to apprehend Luke Skywalker on behalf of Darth Vader following the destruction of the first Death Star (a task in which Boba Fett does not succeed). The Marvel comic, unlike the Boba Fett animated sequence from the Holiday Special, is officially deemed canon. What is interesting, therefore, is Zak’s ability to reconcile the pre– and post–Disney integration versions of the early encounters between two iconographic figures from the Star Wars storyworld. The ability to access the Holiday Special in the first place—a program that was never shown on British television—and the ability to easily skip within the program also clearly play a fundamental role in Zak’s understanding of the Star Wars storyworld. While it’s possible to imagine an analog precursor to Zak’s engagement with the Holiday Special, perhaps achieved by reading about the program in the pages of a magazine, the digital affords a qualitatively different experience. The acceleration and ease of access the digital affords, and the associated affective engagement Zak experiences, means he can quickly and easily dispense with material that explicitly contradicts the fixity of his memories of the franchise, as did the segment with Chewbacca’s family, and instead jump to material that transforms the origin material in an acceptable fashion, as in the case of the animated Boba Fett sequence.

Conclusion Star Wars has always been a galaxy in flux. In the predigital, pre-­Disney era, Marvel could publish comics with a “beef-­cake” version of  Luke Skywalker, the Holiday Special could give us an insight into Chewbacca’s (noncanonical) homelife, and Kenner could produce a version of Snaggletooth, a diminutive character in

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the Mos Eisley Cantina sequence from A New Hope, as a figure equivalent in size to all the others in the action figure range (Sansweet 1992: 68; see also J. Gray 2010: 182). These and many other seemingly foundational memories could be modified by myriad factors and by the dynamics between factors from within a sprawling network of relations. Creative endeavors, both authorized and unauthorized, have continued to challenge foundational memories. LEGO Star Wars, in both its material and energetic versions, continues to palimpsestically misremember iconography and other elements from the films and elsewhere: cosplay, fan fiction, fan films, and fan craft continue to reinvent foundational memories. Indeed, Disney’s more recent attempts at inscribing or reinscribing canonical foundational memories will be subject to even greater pressures brought about by digitality, as both Jenkins and Hoskins have described from their different perspectives. Yet ultimately, for such flux to exist, foundational memory must in turn also exist. Fandom in its myriad guises agrees that Luke Skywalker was a heroic Jedi Knight; that C-­3PO is a golden robot; that R2-­D2 always saves the day; and that Stormtroopers are the coolest baddies ever. We can argue, reimagine, and disagree precisely because, at some level, and despite seemingly insuperable odds, we’ve reached a collective memory of what Star Wars is.

7 Ross Garner

The Mandalorian Variation Gender, Institutionality, and Discursive Constraints in Star Wars Rebels

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ince its acquisition by Disney, there has been much discussion about the Star Wars franchise regarding gender. These conversations are, on the one hand, nothing new: debates concerning Star Wars in terms of female fans and feminist readings are long established (see, e.g., Brooker 2002; K. Ellis 2002; Dominguez 2007; V. Wilson 2007; De Bruin-­Molé 2017). On the other, reactions to Lucasfilm’s acquisition reignited these concerns in and outside of academia. Fan expressions of hostility toward the potential integration of Princess (latterly General) Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) into the Disney Princess brand were observable (Proctor 2013: 216–17; also see Booth’s and Jowett’s chapters in this volume), while the character of Rey (Daisy Ridley) in The Force Awakens was “immediately and widely praised in the media as a breakthrough feminist hero” (J. A. Brown 2018: 340) Such celebratory discourse nevertheless contrasted with marketing strategies for The Force Awakens as Rey’s character was infamously excluded from early waves of licensed merchandise (S. Scott 2017). Alternatively, if approached from an industrial perspective, gender concerns were also alluded to in Disney’s motivations for buying Lucasfilm—CEO Bob Iger “told investors that Star Wars is a perfect property for TV, particularly for the company’s young-­male-­skewing network Disney XD” (Block 2012). Such tele-­centric concerns were less prevalent in the takeover’s press coverage, though, as commercially orientated discourses concerning merchandise sales instead dominated (Graser 2012). Cumulatively, these statements establish two significant points. First, despite recent attempts at change, Star Wars has historically been “industrially and culturally codified as a ‘boy’s brand’ ” (S. Scott 2017: 6), not least by George Lucas himself. Secondly, much of the discussion of gender representation in the

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Disney-­Lucasfilm Star Wars era has focused on the movies at the expense of other aspects of the transmedia franchise, such as television, a curiosity given Iger’s statements concerning televisual Star Wars and Disney XD. Linked to the absence of discussions of “televisual Star Wars,” which Matt Hills also redresses in this volume, this chapter adopts an institutional approach to character construction in the animated series Star Wars Rebels (2014–2018; hereafter “Rebels”) to analyze the female action heroine Sabine Wren (voiced by Tiya Sircar) and to assess what impact an alternative production context has on the franchise’s gender representations. Focusing exclusively on Wren’s character as an assemblage of historically determined “ ‘production strategies’ [that] enable us to understand how that context shaped the ways these programmes look and the kinds of stories they tell” (C. Johnson 2005: 6–7), the chapter complicates existing ideas concerning Disney-­Lucasfilm’s Star Wars and gender representation by developing three arguments. The chapter’s first section locates Rebels within its historical production circumstances, developing knowledge of the motivations behind the Disney-­Lucasfilm merger by highlighting how failings in Disney-­A BC’s reach in television can lead to corporate acquisitions. Recognizing this point moves perceptions of the acquisition beyond commercial motivations to suggest that multiple intracorporate concerns must be considered when attempting a holistic understanding of the merger. Then, by analyzing the character Wren across Rebels’s (at the time of writing) three seasons (totaling fifty-­nine episodes), the chapter argues that overlapping discourses concerning branding, “industry lore” (Havens 2007), narrative, genre, and institutional appropriations of fan affect place limitations on how Rebels constructs an action heroine. In contrast to how the post-­2015 Star Wars movies have “illustrate[d] that a strong and non-­sexualized female protagonist can appeal to . . . a massive audience” (J. A. Brown 2018: 340), this point does not hold for Rebels as a result of the different institutional pressures operating on the series. Moreover, as the chapter’s final section argues, these institutionally located discourses have consequences for gender representation in Rebels by excluding female-­coded characters from a core aspect of the Star Wars brand: the Jedi and the Force. The chapter’s arguments therefore extend previous semiotic studies of television characters (Fiske 1987; Pearson 2009) by updating these to address the contemporary era in which aspects such as branding have become a central industrial concern (C. Johnson 2012). Rebels is an animated children’s series transmitted on Disney XD. Set before Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), the ongoing plots follow the titular group of objectors as they resist the Galactic Empire’s rule and join with other cells to

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establish the Rebel Alliance. The series’ main recurring characters are Twi’lek pilot Hera Syndulla (voiced by Vanessa Marshall), Jedi Knight Kanan Jarrus (voiced by Freddie Prinze, Jr.), former Lasat General Zeb Orrelios (voiced by Steve Blum), teenage orphan and Jedi apprentice Ezra Bridger (voiced by Taylor Gray), idiosyncratic astromech droid Chopper (listed in the credits as “himself”), and Wren—a tomboyish Mandalorian warrior in the vein of Boba Fett— who all inhabit a freighter called The Ghost. This chapter focuses on Wren for multiple reasons. The first concerns narratology as, unlike characters like Rey in The Force Awakens and Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Wren is linked to television’s historical-­institutional contexts rather than those of Hollywood cinema. Some may, however, question the medium-­specific differences between narrative conventions in cinema and television in the current era of convergence (Jenkins 2006a), in which serialized, transmedia film franchises such as Alien and Star Wars proliferate. Nevertheless, Rebels’s “serialized series” (Dunleavy 2009: 157) format, which “combines the commercial advantages of the episodic drama series . . . with the addictive potentials of primetime soap opera” (158), provides the series with a central, irresolvable “problematic” (J. Ellis 1982: 154) characterized by episodic skirmishes with Imperial forces as well as ongoing character-­orientated storylines. With regard to Wren, such storylines include the character’s increasing maturation as part of the Rebellion and her return home to Mandalore to confront her past. The show’s narrative format also provides one example of how production strategies impact character construction. This is because the mode of storytelling remains accessible to occasional viewers and crucially, given that children constitute its primary audience, because it doesn’t confuse younger viewers (Steemers 2010: 120) while the ever-­developing serialized narratives work strategically to attract a returning fan audience of varying ages. Moreover, in terms of differentiating Wren from her cinematic peers, it is television’s “tendency towards serialization” (Allrath, Gymnich, and Surkamp 2005: 5) and its different institutional concerns that provide the significant points for departure. Secondly, unlike Rebels’s other recurring female-­coded characters, Wren is the series’ “strong, no nonsense heroine” (Lucasfilm 2014), which aligns her with Disney-­Lucasfilm’s cinematic representations. Finally, Sabine is also constructed as a Mandalorian—an attribute that aligns her with fan-­favorite characters Jango (Temuera Morrison) and Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch). Boba Fett remains “one of the most popular characters in the Star Wars universe” (Kovach 2015), and Lucasfilm has consistently exploited this status through transmedia properties including books (Moran 1996; Wallace, Windham, and Fry 2013) and comics (Wagner and Gibson 1999). This summary alludes to how Wren

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functions as both a potential locus for preexisting fan affect due to the character’s racial intratextuality (i.e., her status as another Mandalorian within the Star Wars universe) while also providing an opportunity to discuss the construction of an action heroine within the context of niche-­orientated children’s animation. By locating Wren within intersecting discourses of institutionality, narrative, genre, and fan affect, complications of the wider celebratory discourses surrounding Disney-­Lucasfilm’s gender representations are possible.

Rebels in Context Rebels is primarily produced for the U.S. basic cable service Disney XD, which defines its market position as a “multi-­platform brand showcasing a compelling mix of live-­action and animated programming for kids age 6–11, hyper-­targeting boys (while still including girls) and transporting them into worlds full of humor and adventure-­fi lled storytelling” (Disney-­A BC 2018). Disney’s targeting of this clearly defined age and gender niche arose from multiple industrial concerns: the rebranding in 2008 of Toon Disney as Disney XD was partly motivated by “attempt[s] . . . to capture a market that has long eluded it” (Chmielewski 2008) as—in contrast to the Disney Princess brand’s domination in the market for young girls—Disney was unable to achieve such success among boys. Additionally, Disney XD’s launch was part of a consolidation strategy seeking greater cross-­promotion among different subbrands within Disney-­A BC. Regarding Disney XD, this involved “offer[ing] original action-­adventure and comedy series, movies, animation and sports-­themed shows developed with Walt Disney Co.–owned ESPN” (Chmielewski 2008). Developing male-­oriented action brands partly motivated the acquisition of Marvel in 2009, as this allowed Disney XD to launch animated series like Ultimate Spider-­Man (2012–). However, despite Marvel’s recognizable characters, Brook Barnes (2014) argues that in 2014 (when Rebels launched), Disney XD was still searching for its “first true hit.” Nielsen data reveals that in 2014 Disney XD had “a tiny audience. . . . The channel attracted an average of 44,000 viewers each day,” whereas “competitors like Nickelodeon . . . attracted hundreds of thousands more” (Chmielewski 2008). This disconnection between Disney XD and its intended demographic was problematic because the XD rebrand was intended to boost revenues for the organization’s cable division by “draw[ing] more advertising for boy-­focused products like video games and action figure toys” (“Disney Has New Target Audience” 2009). Thus, in recognition of the channel’s stuttering resonance with its core audience, 2013 saw Disney XD narrow its target market by changing its “programming strategy . . . to focus especially on boys 6 to 8” (Barnes

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2014). Focusing on the six-­to-­eight age bracket is noteworthy, as this is understood in the industry as the primary age bracket for selling tangible merchandise such as action figures; what’s more, boys’ consumption habits are seen to progress on to digitized platforms (Steemers 2010: 154) beyond the six to eight age bracket. While it would be an overstatement to argue that Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm was solely attributable to ongoing problems with Disney XD’s inability to attract its target audience, locating the merger within this historical-­ institutional context implies that Rebels was partly commissioned to leverage Star Wars’s brand recognition to provide Disney XD with a ratings success. Thus, despite paying lip service to female audiences, the primary target audience for Rebels is male. Industrial analysts have commented upon pursuing this niche audience as “a tough slog. Boys . . . demand authenticity and appreciate a snarky sense of humor, while at other times, they just want to immerse themselves in fantasy worlds and animation” (“Disney Has New Target Audience” 2009). What these production-­located discourses indicate is that Rebels has been made according to what Timothy Havens (2007) names “industry lore[,] . . . a form of material discourse, which derives from and acts upon other material processes of the television business, including political-­economic forces, industry organization, and day-­to-­day business practices.” Within the globalized children’s media marketplace, industry lore is a shared way of discussing imagined child audiences that carries “significant discursive impact . . . [by] creat[ing] . . . ideas about television, audiences and children . . . and propagat[ing] specific notions regarding what childhood is and how it can be understood in an era of radical globalization” (Hogan and Sienkiewicz 2013: 224). As Disney-­A BC is one of the “three major players” (Hogan and Sienkiewicz 2013: 223) within this field, the organization has an influential role in constructing and supporting dominant meanings concerning producing and marketing children’s television. Consequently, conceiving of Rebels for a channel that aggressively pursues boys of a particular age for the purposes of gaining advertising revenue, the series conforms to constructions of the “universal child” who is “predominantly a Western, middle-­class boy” (Havens 2007). This point is significant for analyzing Wren and further differentiating the series’ production context from that of the Disney-­Lucasfilm Star Wars movies. While industry lore and the figure of the universal child account for the failures that the merger has produced in terms of merchandising The Force Awakens to young girls, adopting a text-­ based approach to this film and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story suggests production strategies designed to adopt a more gender-­inclusive approach for these films. However, given the industrial context outlined in this section, similar assumptions cannot be simply applied to Rebels as the series arises from different

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industrial circumstances. To demonstrate this argument, the discussion turns to analyzing Wren’s discursive construction.

Making a Female Mandalorian Read from a structuralist perspective, where television characters are understood as “a series of textual (and intertextual) relations” (Fiske 1987: 153), Wren’s character forges multiple intratextual links with Star Wars’s previous representations of Mandalorians. For example, echoing the race’s official paratextual framing as “armored warriors” (“Mandalore” n.d.), Wren is constructed as a highly capable fighter who is continually at the forefront of skirmishes with Imperial forces. During these encounters, Wren’s primary weapons are dual Mandalorian blasters, armaments that, at one point, are praised by the team’s occasional ally Hondo Ohnaka (Jim Cummings) for their superiority over Imperial equivalents (3.1 “Steps into Shadow”). Although this comment may seem innocuous, it demonstrates significance because “character is constituted . . . by its oppositional relation to other[s]” (Fiske 1987: 158). One way of marking character differences is through assigning specific skills and knowledges to certain characters but not others (Pearson 2009: 149), and the value bestowed upon Wren’s weapons subtly connotes the character’s capabilities as a fighter and her superior weaponry. This is not an isolated example, as episodic demonstrations of Sabine’s artillery regularly reaffirm her warrior codings. These include her being an explosives expert who uses smoke bombs (1.5 “Rise of the Old Masters”), electrical pulses (1.15 “Fire across the Galaxy”), and other detonating devices; demonstrating hand-­to-­hand combat skills (3.4 “The Antilles Extraction”); and acquiring and deploying additional Mandalorian-­specific weapons like a jet-­pack (3.7 “Imperial Supercommandos”), grappling lines, and poison darts (3.15 “Trials of the Darksaber”). These attributes intratexually echo official paratextual description of Jango Fett: “A proficient marksman and unarmed combatant, Fett[’s] . . . combat gear featured an arsenal of weaponry, including retractable wrist blades, a snare, dual blaster pistols and other more exotic tools of the trade. In combat, Jango used his harnessed jetpack to gain the advantage of speed and height over his enemies” (“Jango Fett” n.d.). Read from a genre perspective (which will be returned to and critiqued shortly), Wren’s coding as Mandalorian challenges arguments that “female heroes [in children’s television] have been defined by their passivity: innocent and selfless in situations of forced submission” (Baker and Raney 2007: 27–28). Alternatively, if Wren’s discursive articulation is located within contemporary industrial-­historical trends, the intratextuality demonstrated indicates how

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production strategies impact character construction. This is because branding requirements—a concept that has become central to contemporary production contexts but remains overlooked in preceding analyses of television characters (such as Fiske 1987 and Pearson 2009)—need addressing. Branding has “emerge[d] as a way of organising the relationship between . . . different products or texts” (C. Johnson 2012: 45) to ensure consistency across different iterations of a transmedia franchise while also “extending and multiplying . . . experiences” for consumers (147). These ideas dovetail with transmedia world-­ building practices because, as Stacey Abbott (2009: 16–19) argues, producers reintroducing returning characters into spin-­off series need to demonstrate continuity with the character’s established traits to ensure their recognition and acceptance by audiences. Combining these points and relating them to Sabine indicates how continuity requirements extend beyond individual characters to include fictionalized races within a transmedia property. In the case of Rebels, Wren is institutionally required to remain “on brand” by drawing from previous franchise representations of Mandalorians as capable and weaponized warriors to ensure consistency with established franchise knowledge. Reflecting on why this continuity is necessary implies an additional strategy implemented by Disney-­Lucasfilm to negotiate the aforementioned contemporary children’s television landscape by harnessing preexisting (adult) fan affect and targeting older fans as a secondary audience for Rebels. Previous work discussing repositioning franchises for contemporary audiences has identified that the “deployment of [intertexual references to] earlier versions [of the storyworld] len[ds] . . . [the] series an authenticity” that helps attract older audiences who are familiar with the property (I. Gordon 2003: 154). This applies to Rebels via its use of cameos from immediately recognizable characters (1.2 “Droids in Distress”) as well as its reintroduction of niche fan favorites like Grand Admiral Thrawn (voiced by Lars Mikkelsen). Regarding Wren’s construction as Mandalorian, racial intratextuality therefore reassures fan audiences in two ways. First, her action codings connote the producers’ knowledge of franchise history. M. J. Clarke (2013: 73) discusses the importance of such displays in relation to writing tie-­in novels for television series by highlighting that demonstrations of “the textual specifics” are expected because “the implied tie-­in reader . . . is one that dissects the details of the tie-­in and gauges them minutely against voluminous knowledge of . . . continuity” (77). As additions to transmedia franchises must also operate as “part of a synergistic whole, with each contributing to the experience of the viewer in different ways” (E. Evans 2011: 28), Clarke’s observations extend to a text like Rebels and necessitate that Wren’s racial alignment must reaffirm existing characteristics of Mandalorians. By doing this,

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transference of preexisting fan affect for characters like the Fetts to Wren is encouraged. Secondly, continuity between Sabine and previous representations of  Mandalorians maintains the hyperdiegesis’s internal consistency. Matt Hills (2002: 137–38) argues that a “vast and detailed” storyworld that can “be trusted by the viewer” is essential to maintaining the appeal of any cult property. Violating established knowledge concerning the Mandalorians via Wren’s character would risk undermining existing affective investments in the Star Wars universe, producing distrust among adult fans toward the Disney-­Lucasfilm merger (Proctor 2013). Thus, although scholars of children’s media such as Máire Messenger Davies (2010: 147–71) argue against projecting adult audience profiles, such as cult, onto child-­targeting products, the continuity that Sabine’s construction utilizes indicates how branding discourses place demands on the character that assist Rebels in targeting adult fans as a secondary audience. This occurs by conforming to established knowledge about this fan-­favorite race. Such historically derived production strategies are not alienating to new and younger viewers, as the character remains readable as simply an “action heroine.” However, given both competition for audiences within the contemporary children’s television, as well as Star Wars’s established intergenerational appeal (Brooker 1997), the discursive constraints produced in creating Wren suggest an additional strategy designed to court adult fans as a secondary audience for Rebels. However, as should be expected in transmedia properties (Jenkins 2006a), Wren’s construction as Mandalorian varies from preceding representations— in this instance, in her gender coding. One way that this divergence is immediately signified is through visual design as, while the iconic Mandalorian armor is maintained, the character’s aesthetic rejects the muted grays, blues, browns, and greens of the Fetts. Instead, Wren is aligned with contemporary discourses of femininity in two ways. First, her armor utilizes a brighter and more varied color palette consisting of reds, oranges, yellows, and purples. These changes are significant because “people are culturally socialized into colour meanings” (Koller 2008: 399) and, “with regard to gender, the relevant taxonomy is a binary one, classifying people into male and female” (403). Thus, while Sabine’s aesthetic rejects postfeminist reclamations of “softer” shades such as pink, the palettes used for her body armor connote culturally feminized “floral” shades (Lazar 2009: 383–85), albeit in darker hues to represent the character’s confidence. Secondly, the customization afforded to Wren’s armor—such as the addition of the Phoenix Squadron logo to the breastplate, or the paint jobs that she gives to acquired craft like TIE fighters (1.15 “Fire Across the Galaxy”) and the Phantom (3.6 “Imperial Supercommandos”)—can also be read in gendered

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terms. An interest in art is culturally gendered as female (Steele and Ambady 2006), while an association with aesthetic and external appearances is understood similarly (Baker and Raney 2007: 29). While Wren is therefore on brand in terms of maintaining attributes associated with Mandalorians, the character’s visual construction in Rebels is adapted to connote her gender. Yet, while aspects of Wren’s visual design align the character with established gender discourses, other aspects—such as the character’s pixie haircut— connote her tomboyish nature. Narrative evidence also further supports this point: she regularly pilots or copilots spacecraft, repairs machinery ranging from old military hardware (2.3 “The Lost Commanders”) to droids (2.19 “The Forgotten Droid”), and both develops and executes attack and defense plans. For example, episode 2.11 “Legacy” utilizes Sabine’s offscreen backstory as a former recruit of the Empire Academy to resolve one of the episode’s hermeneutics (Pearson 2009: 153) by using her knowledge of Imperial attack plans to gain the upper hand in a Rebel assault. These attributes of “leadership, asking questions . . . and expressing interest in task-­related activities” (Aubrey and Harrison 2004: 116) are more typical of male characters in children’s television and, from one perspective, align the character with popular discourses that celebrate the Disney-­Lucasfilm era for offering progressive gender representations (J. A. Brown 2018: 340). Furthermore, extending this analysis to recognize the wider social discourses of this historical moment, Sabine’s technical and maintenance skills could be read as aligning with contemporary concerns regarding “gender disparities in performance and interest in STEM fields” (Shapiro and Williams 2012: 177). By constructing a female character as capable in traditionally masculinized areas such as engineering and piloting as well as creativity and self-­expression, Sabine can potentially be read as another progressive female character who combines present-­day sociocultural discourses with branding concerns to blur traditional gender binaries in children’s television. Such praise must nevertheless be tempered by recognizing how discourses of industry lore and genre constrain the character’s representation. Industry lore posits that “programs with mainly boys have universal appeal, while programming with girls is limited to female viewers” and that this set of beliefs is “particularly pronounced in the United States” (Henteges and Case 2012: 323), where Rebels’s primary distribution market is located. Despite the deep-­rooted prevalence of this logic within the industry, empirical research with child audiences has complicated the one-­sided nature of this patriarchal discourse. Calvert et al. (2003: 160) have argued that “girl characters . . . are well received by boys when they are perceived as non-­traditional in their actions. The implication is that what characters do may be more important than their gender as a gauge of

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audience interest.” The traits discussed throughout this section demonstrate Wren’s intersections with this position—a point further supported by the character’s frequently snarky dialogue. Addressing this position undercuts readings of Wren as singularly “progressive,” as it must instead be recognized that the character dovetails with the exclusionary nature of industry lore that requires female characters in children’s media to adhere to established patriarchal production discourses by demonstrating culturally masculinized traits that appeal to young male audiences. Wren’s construction therefore recalls Beth Hentges and Kim Case’s (2012: 330) argument that, within contemporary children’s television, “male and female characters are behaving more similarly, but generally in the direction of displaying more masculine behaviors. So female characters are acting in more stereotypically masculine ways, but male characters are not displaying feminine behaviors. This likely reflects the privileged status of males, and denigrates the feminine. . . . Given the privileged status of males, programming sends the message that girls should aspire to stereotypically masculine behaviors and roles.” Despite combining branding requirements with fan affect and multiple contemporary sociopolitical discourses to create a positive gender representation, I argue that readings rooted in patriarchal power structures must be recognized, as these undercut Wren’s progressive connotations. To further explore this argument the remainder of the chapter returns to her action codings and analyzes the character’s proximity to the Force.

Excluded from the Force Writing on television action heroines, Lorna Jowett (2017: 10) argues that heroines can be “so effective [they become] problematic for the show’s narrative and positioning of [the heroic male figure]” that they must be contained by being reinserted into patriarchal structures. Similarly, Lisa Purse’s (2011: 84) postfeminist reading of female characters in Hollywood action cinema raises these concerns by arguing that, despite appearing to “have it all” in terms of combining culturally feminized and masculinized traits, it remains that “the narrative containment of the contemporary action heroine often takes the form of a movement into, a return to, the heterosexual couple, to marriage, or to the family unit (or all three), a strategy that gives the lie to the independence these powerful women appear to embody.” Both arguments indicate industrial discourses that constrain representations of action heroines through their reincorporation into traditional gender structures or their implied exclusion from future narratives. Echoing this trend, Rebels demonstrates multiple containment strategies toward Wren. These include being viewed from Ezra’s perspective in early episodes and

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so afforded “the sexualised object/active subject dualism” (Purse 2011: 85) common to representations of action-­orientated females (see 1.5 “Fighter Flight”). Although this lessens in Rebels’s later seasons, Ezra’s flirtatious attitude frequently reappears when Wren demonstrates heroism (3.3 “Ghosts of Geonosis: Part Two”). Alternatively, in common with character ensembles in children’s television, the Ghost crew are coded as a pseudofamily in which Wren becomes assigned the role of the occasionally naive older sister (1.11 “Idiot’s Day”). While these observations generate further avenues for research into Rebels’s gender constructions, the remainder of this section discusses the constraints produced by discourses of industry lore and genre in relation to the show’s patriarchal coding of the Force. Wren’s brand-­necessary action codings foreground the character’s warrior capabilities on an episodic basis. Thus, despite occasionally being captured by the Empire (2.5 “Always Two There Are”) or appearing shaken as a result of momentary defeats (2.13 “The Protector of Concord Dawn”), she cannot be considered a damsel type in the manner that Leia and Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) have been characterized (J. A. Brown 2018: 339). Yet, a continual limitation to Wren’s characterization is when her combat skills are contrasted with Force-­sensitive equivalents. Wren is frequently used to highlight the limitations of armaments against the Force: her technological and mechanical abilities are positioned as inferior to those of The Inquisitor (voiced by Jason Isaacs) in episode 1.5 “Rise of the Old Masters” while, despite demonstrating strategic skills when trying to escape capture by Maul (voiced by Sam Witwer), the momentary advantage Wren gains is overturned by her assailant’s Force powers (3.3 “The Holocrons of Fate”). Similarly, when subject to Force-­derived powers, her unfamiliarity with these results in minor situations of peril (2.20 “The Mystery of Chopper Base”). Notwithstanding her action codings, Wren continually comes off as inferior when juxtaposed against the Force. This hierarchy again relates back to branding practices and the demand for consistency across a transmedia franchise. The mysticism of the Force has been a central concern since the first Star Wars movie and, as Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) destruction of the original Death Star indicates, characters assigned these attributes are frequently purposed with demonstrating the limitations of military might alone. Reversing this trend in Rebels would destabilize brand-­ specific meanings and risk being rejected by its target audiences. What is nevertheless problematic from a gendered perspective is how Rebels consistently codes proximity to the Force as masculine, resulting in the exclusion of female characters. Wren’s serialized arc in series three demonstrates this. Episodes 3.15 “Trials of the Darksaber” and 3.16 “Legacy of Mandalore” position

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her in proximity to the Force after she steals the Darksaber (a black-­bladed lightsaber constructed by the first male Mandalorian Jedi) in 3.11 “Visions and Voices.” However, Sabine is reluctant to wield the Jedi weapon because of its significance to her people, which results in aspects of her backstory—such as her self-­exile from Mandalore—being revealed. Then, as her tutelage with the Darksaber under Kanan indicates, she lacks the Force-­sensitivity of her male counterparts. Furthermore, when Wren momentarily gains an advantage over Kanan during a training battle by combining the Darksaber with Mandalorian weaponry, the male Jedi character reacts angrily by drawing his lightsaber on her. This sequence connotes that the Jedi’s ways are controlled by masculine authority figures and that destabilizing this with demonstrations of feminine agency must be halted. Although this sequence does use an “aesthetic . . . of multiplicity” (S. M. Ross 2008: 22) by showing Kanan’s training methods being critiqued by other characters, the scene underlines the series’ indebtedness to patriarchal industry lore in that male authority pertaining to the Force cannot be usurped. These themes are then reconfigured in “Legacy of Mandalore” because, at the episode’s conclusion, Wren reluctantly agrees to retain control of the Darksaber. Her decision gains approval from Kanan but, rather than initiating new storylines exploring Wren’s proximity to the Force, containment strategies are used as she is reintegrated into the Clan Wren family unit and excluded from the remainder of the season’s plots. When Sabine does reappear in episode 3.22 “Zero Hour: Part Two,” it is to assist Phoenix Squadron against the Empire; references to the Darksaber are absent as the character’s pilot attributes are foregrounded. Then, following the Empire’s retreat, Wren departs once more to Mandalore and her family. From a gendered perspective, these events allude to patriarchal containment strategies and the constraints of industry lore. Kaysee Baker and Arthur A. Raney’s (2007) study of female superheroes in children’s television demonstrates that these characters “were . . . shown working under a mentor at a much higher rate than their male counterparts . . . [and] when a leadership role was portrayed (i.e., team leader or mentor), males filled those roles” (38). Although Ezra is also mentored by Kanan throughout Rebels’s three seasons, the abrupt end to Wren’s Force-­related narrative, combined with the need for her to win approval from a masculine authority figure and remain with her family, suggests that a recurring female Jedi character is problematic for Rebels. Developing Wren in this way would violate industry lore that prioritizes male hero figures in children’s media franchises. Moreover, as trailers for new series work to frame “the next chapter in a continuing narrative” (J. Gray 2010: 50), the first trailer for Rebels’s final season

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suggests that, while Wren will return as a recurring warrior character, exclusionary discourses of industry lore will continue to operate. This is because the clip suggests Wren will struggle to retain the Darksaber as, although some early shots feature her wielding this against Stormtroopers, later sequences see her flanking another (unknown, though potentially female) character that wields the weapon instead. Promotional material for the fourth season therefore suggests Wren’s continuing exclusion from the ways of the Force, connoting how although gender representations in the Disney-­Lucasfilm era may have become more inclusive within the cinema, powerful industrial assumptions concerning female representation in children’s television continue to undercut representations of action heroines who may initially appear “progressive.”

Conclusion This chapter has critiqued dominant discourses concerning gender representations in the Star Wars universe after the Disney-­Lucasfilm merger. Despite continuing problems in marketing the franchise to girls, text-­centric discussions have (rightly) identified characters like Rey and Jyn as indicative of the franchise adopting a more progressive approach toward gender inclusivity. However, analyzing Sabine Wren’s construction as lead action heroine in Rebels by locating the character within overlapping institutionally focused tele-­centric concerns has allowed for both gendered discussions of the Star Wars franchise and dominant accounts of the merger’s motivations to be critiqued. Locating Rebels within its historical-­institutional context identifies that a hitherto overlooked reason for Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm was their struggle to attract preteen boy viewers to Disney XD. As explained above, it would be naive to position this as the sole factor motivating the merger; nevertheless, outlining Disney-­A BC’s struggles in attracting its primary audience to Disney XD requires recognizing that Lucasfilm was acquired for more reasons than to drive merchandise sales. Secondly, this chapter has argued that multiple institutional concerns, including narrative form, genre, and branding, as well as broader cultural discourses and appropriations of preexisting fan affect structure Wren’s construction. On the one hand, these combinations may suggest a continuation of the positive gender representations seen in the Disney-­Lucasfilm Star Wars movies as Wren’s character complicates rigid gender binaries. On the other, however, it is arguable that patriarchal discourses of industry lore structure the character by creating a female heroine who demonstrates culturally masculinized traits to appeal primarily to male audiences. This point is further indicated by Rebels’s handling of

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female characters’ proximity to the Force. As Wren’s narrative trajectory demonstrates, positioning a female character in close proximity to this core aspect of the Star Wars brand results in containment strategies being deployed and ultimately the character’s narrative exclusion. Moreover, this instance of Rebels’s masculine coding of the Jedi and the Force does not exist in isolation. Episode 1.5 “Rise of the Old Masters” reveals that Luminara Unduli, Kanan’s former Jedi Master whom the Ghost crew attempt to rescue, is dead and that her image is being used as a trap by The Inquisitor, while episode 2.22 “Twilight of the Apprentice: Part Two” sees the lightsaber-­ wielding Ahsoka killed by Darth Vader (James Earl Jones). The latter example is, of course, locatable within branding discourses—put simply, no character in Rebels (including Wren) beats Vader (see 2.1 and 2.2 “The Siege of Lothal: Parts One and Two”). Nevertheless, the frequency with which the show’s female characters are excluded from the Force, alongside their representation as either improper (Ahsoka) or treacherous (Luminara, the Seventh Sister [Sarah Michelle Gellar]), suggests that, when it comes to television, females remain excluded from this central area of the Star Wars brand. Thus, when discussing gender representations in transmedia franchises such as Star Wars, it is necessary to reject dominant positions that assume standardized approaches linked to discourses of convergence and transmediality (see Jenkins 2006a; E. Evans 2011: 19–39). Instead, sustained attention should be directed toward how specific institutional contexts continue to generate different opportunities and constraints for constructing gender representations.

8 Douglas Brown

To Disney Infinity and Beyond Star Wars Video Games Before and After the LucasArts Acquisition

D

isney’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 heralded a new direction for Star Wars, while simultaneously representing a continuation of Disney’s character-­led diversification strategy, which CEO Bob Iger had begun with the purchase of Pixar in 2006 (see Miller 2015). The purchase also had some unexpected fallout for the world of video games, as well as entailing a new approach toward transmedial content creation. This involved the integration of Star Wars characters into the macrotransmedial world of the broader Disney metafranchise, which had already expanded beyond the company’s own works with the addition of Marvel Studios. This new approach became apparent, as is explored throughout this volume, through the integration of Star Wars intellectual property (IP) into Disney’s branded content, from movies and TV shows to theme parks, advertisements, and merchandising. For video games in particular, the Disney buyout was greater than the Star Wars franchise alone. The Lucasfilm portfolio also includes Indiana Jones, the special effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and—most importantly for the purposes of this chapter—LucasArts, a respected game development and publishing company with a string of classic video game IPs attached. Trepidation from gamers over how Disney would deploy and monetize the new IP came tempered with hope that classic game series both within and beyond the franchise, including long-­dormant IP such as classic adventure games Maniac Mansion (1987) and Day of the Tentacle (1993), could perhaps be revived or rebooted. After all, compared with other movie rights-­holders’ invariably risk-­averse and unadventurous approaches toward video game adaptations, LucasArts had always been content to experiment with the Star Wars IP, having created video games such

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as Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic (2003) and Star Wars: Republic Commando (2005), both widely considered classics or genre innovators (Brown and Krzywinska 2007). More recently, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (2008) had been considered a flawed but brave game set on the darker side of the franchise’s universe, despite its flagrant revision of canonicity (Sommerfeld 2012). Prior to the buyout, studios had been working on a range of games with the IP, but all projects were canceled when the acquisition occurred; the only exceptions were the long-­r unning massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011—), and the TV series The Clone Wars (see chapters by Hills and Garner in this volume, respectively). One of the casualties was the game 1313, which was canceled quite late in its development and had been set to take the franchise into dark places, allegedly featuring Boba Fett as the lead character. After the acquisition, a new transmedial strategy emerged as Disney redistributed the IP rights to Star Wars video games, both to its own interactive division and to external publishers. In order to reduce the financial risk of developing games in-­house, Disney’s strategy was to allow the publishing company Electronic Arts (EA) exclusive use of the Star Wars IP in the nonmobile game development space, with a single exception granted for the continuation of LEGO’s series of Star Wars games (see Geraghty in this volume). Less expensive mobile app development was handled internally and licensed out by Disney. This led to high-­profile new games being developed for distinct audience segments. Published on multiple platforms, these new games aimed to build hype around the reinvigorated franchise writ large and around The Force Awakens (2015) in particular. Trends toward homogenization of the franchise, and the dangers that might pose in the form of eventual brand fatigue, were uncertain at first, but now that there has been a significant shake-­down in the transmedial games market since the movie’s release (discussed in detail further on in this chapter), it is clear that, for Disney, the franchise served as a litmus test for one of their key approaches to both transmediality and franchise games. The new movie releases and Disney’s selection of licensing partners held the potential for a step forward from the models of adaptation investigated in Brown and Krzywinska (2007), with opportunity to enhance and build the worlds of the franchise as part of a convergent approach centered on characters rather than on “spin-­offery” (Harvey 2014: 284). However, while the property is ripe with transmedial opportunity, in the wake of the release of The Force Awakens, little of this potential has yet to be realized. This chapter compares classic Star Wars games with the three new releases developed since the buyout. The distinct markets targeted by the three games will be investigated alongside the ways the franchise has evolved since the acquisition and its new place within the now heavily character-­focused

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Disney metafranchise. Is this wholesale approach to transmediality strengthening the franchise, or is it simply homogenizing it? Two major video game releases carried the Star Wars brand in the interim period after the Lucasfilm buyout but prior to The Force Awakens release: Star Wars: Battlefront (2015, EA), a special edition of a mainstream first-­person shooter franchise that was announced in 2013, and Disney Infinity 3.0 (2015, Avalanche Software), a bold, expensive experiment in the transmedial “toys-­to-­life” genre that contained a sandbox platform game and was relaunched with Star Wars content as its prime focus in early 2015 (the earlier iterations in versions 1.0 and 2.0 having centered around the Disney and Marvel universes, respectively). The release of Battlefront in November 2015 marked the beginning of a controlled build-­up of game releases on social, mobile, and online platforms as well as of expansions and downloadable content for both major titles. While the approach was not unusual for a blockbuster movie release, the scale was far larger, and the games were released on a far more diverse range of channels than is usual for game releases associated with film properties today. In the 1990s and early twenty-­fi rst century, releases of big-­budget, high-­production-­value games for mainstream consoles (generally known as “AAA” or “triple-­A” games) were commonplace projects, frequently developed alongside movie properties when the two were considered to share a similar target audience. The market for games was also far less diverse than it is now, with gamers (and, by extension, tie-­in audiences) viewed as a specific and clear-­cut demographic. However, since the development of smartphones, so-­called casual games have become ubiquitous (Newzoo 2016), and the market has dramatically expanded to the point where many films for all manner of audiences now have tie-­in mobile promotional games. Meanwhile, releases of big-­budget, AAA console games have not slowed down as such but are fewer today by comparison. Thus, The Force Awakens’s full-­spectrum approach was unusual, and it stood out as a result. This build-­up escalated right up to the day of The Force Awakens’s release and consisted of the release of numerous games bearing the Star Wars brand and generally available for free on mobile devices or online—including a companion app for Battlefront and the experimental Google Chrome browser-­game Star Wars Lightsaber Escape (2015, Unit 9). The latter made players’ phones simulate lightsaber hilts synchronized with a whooshing blade on screen and was released two days before the movie’s global release. This was at the same time that Facebook profile photos were being edited en masse to feature lightsabers, while hype more generally was at fever pitch, and the games therefore were cannily able to connect the aged, establishment brand of Star Wars with broader sci-­fi themes of enduring innovation. The movie’s global release coincided with the release of The

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Force Awakens’s toys and of a gameplay campaign for Disney Infinity 3.0. After the release, games continued to come out, while the major titles were expanded, including the LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens expansion (2016, Traveller’s Tales), which was timed to align with the movie’s DVD/ Blu-­ray release. The sheer diversity of these releases is impressive, some aimed at casual gamers, others at those who make gaming a primary hobby; some at nostalgic adult fans and others squarely at children. The variety of titles was also widely released on platforms running the gamut from established, mainstream consoles to experimental browser games. Comparing the different major and minor releases not only reveals the objectives that Disney was attempting to fulfill through its careful tactics of licensing, adapting, and spinning off the Star Wars brand, but it also demonstrates the crucial role that the studio’s game release strategy played in the franchise’s reestablishment.

Star Wars: Battlefront The license for Star Wars: Battlefront (hereafter “Battlefront”) was granted to one of the biggest and oldest mainstream video game publishers, Electronic Arts. Their studios had previously produced many Star Wars games alongside LucasArts, including a well-­received set of earlier titles in the Battlefront series. In keeping with the rebirth common to much of the other content produced around The Force Awakens, this game reset the battlefront nomenclature back to zero, despite having been developed as the next in the series after Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005, LucasArts). Playing off the franchise’s wide reach and reputation for special effects, Battlefront was trailed two years in advance of its release, almost immediately after the buyout, initially selling itself on the basis of its high-­resolution graphics, which looked almost unbelievably “next-­gen” when they were first revealed. These expensive production values and high-­budget development markers persisted into the game’s eventual release, where it has all the hallmarks of a modern, blue-­chip AAA video game. In fact, it extends these elements, playing off them and uniting them with other signifiers of luxury, quality, and social cachet. This can be seen as part of a greater, overarching strategy of establishing authenticity that paved the way for the revival of Star Wars more generally. No fan would be embarrassed to be either a gamer or a Star Wars fan when presented with Battlefront, which holds its own both as a team-­ based first-­person shooter game and as a game set in the Star Wars universe. In fact, Battlefront’s clear, easily navigable user interface within its clean and opulent aesthetic is designed to pull in fans that may well be unfamiliar with games of this kind, easing their transition into playing first-­person shooters. Loading

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screens present extremely high-­resolution models of ships and droids from the show, suspended in space or walking across stark white backgrounds. The quality and detail of these nonplayable models is such that they appear more perfect than the “real thing,” particularly the graphic renditions of droids R2-­D2 and C-­3PO. The menu screens that present themselves after the loading screens are a myriad of gilt-­edged icons and wedding-­invitation fonts, again set against the confident white background. These items are being showcased. Authenticity is of great importance to Battlefront. This game is a museum of Star Wars, with the player positioned as both attendee and curator. Such confident interface design states clearly that here in Battlefront, Star Wars is a treasured exhibit— canonical, worthy, for the ages. There are very few weapons in this game compared to other first-­person shooters, but each one when unlocked is displayed via another high-­quality model that can be rotated, zoomed, examined, and handled with reverential attention. Fittingly, Han Solo’s blaster is the most powerful sidearm in the game, and the first thing most players will unlock through playing is Princess Leia’s pistol. The genre of multiplayer first-­person shooter and the complete lack of single-­player content marries the title with the other enormous franchises of modern console gaming, while the production values align with flagship game series from first-­party console developers, such as Halo and Uncharted. The genre has a proven track record and the format of the game has been refined through years of iteration. This multiplayer shooter does not break the mold in any way. However, what it does present is scenes from the original trilogy of Star Wars films, rendered in the same painstaking detail as the models and weapons. While no linear story is present, players take part in varied set-­piece battles in locations familiar from earlier film sets, such as the Yeti Cave on Hoth, the Millennium Falcon’s launch pad on Tatooine, and the Ewok tree village on Endor. Encountering these locations suddenly in the heat of battle enhances their nostalgic impact, making spaces at once familiar in terms of mise-­en-­scène and unfamiliar as urgently navigable, contested locations, thus more likely to surprise a player, particularly when the whole game is accompanied by an adaptive, context-­sensitive version of John Williams’s score, a rich signifier of Star Wars authenticity. Battlefront even coopts action from the films, its most popular game mode being “Walker Assault,” which replays the AT-­AT assault sequence from Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) on all the different worlds. This is the reason that the game’s marketing paratexts are dominated by the Hoth sequences rather than focusing on the other locales, and it also has the dual effect of emphasizing the stark white backdrops that also characterize the interface design and are unusual for the genre. Most of the time, players play as either

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Stormtroopers or Rebel soldiers, but they can, on occasion, pilot ships or vehicles or switch to playing characters from the movies. Movie character heroes are extremely powerful and take large numbers of players to stop, so inhabiting one is the pinnacle of the power fantasy this game offers. Domination is assured when playing as Darth Vader or piloting the Millennium Falcon. By completing tasks and achievements in-­game, players gradually reveal portions of what the game describes in one loading screen as its toughest challenge, a diorama of Star Wars icons and figures engaged in battle. The ultimate museum exhibit, or the original trilogy preserved in aspic. With hindsight, Battlefront proved an ideal primer for The Force Awakens, despite originally containing none of the content of the actual film (the Battle of Jakku was added as free downloadable content in the weeks prior to The Force Awakens’s release, thus providing at least some context). The fact that Battlefront lionizes the original Star Wars trilogy, with (initially) no mention whatsoever of the prequel trilogy, chimes with how The Force Awakens would go on to re­ imagine and pay homage to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) (see both Gray and Hassler-­Forest in this volume). While other games of this genre share its production values, the fetishization of weaponry, and the lavish historical and mechanical accuracy of their armories (Payne 2012), Battlefront turns that intense gaze to the re-­creation of movie scenes, to the point where being cut down by another player’s Luke Skywalker when one is playing as a Stormtrooper can still be an enjoyable experience, even when there was no chance of a fair fight. Battlefront was a huge hit for EA and Disney and became the most commercially successful Star Wars game ever, selling over fourteen million copies by March 2016 (“2016 Proxy” 2016) and recouping far in excess of its assumed development and advertising budget of around $100 million. Aimed squarely at the old guard of Star Wars fans nostalgic for the original trilogy of films, Battlefront did the heavy lifting of reimmersing these players in a game-­space that affirmed their fandom, rewarded intense investment both in terms of expensive graphical processing power and dedication of time, and played up the enduring visual and action themes of the franchise.

Disney Infinity If Battlefront was a giant Star Wars museum, then a similar approach was taken in Infinity’s creation of a massive toy box, designed primarily for players whose first encounter with the franchise in movie-­form would be The Force Awakens but presented in a format that could also prove enticing to older Star Wars fans, many of whom might now be parents. This was delivered both through software

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content and novel hardware components, in a format that has become known as “toys-­to-­life.” Disney’s Infinity product line is a hybrid toy and video game system developed by a subsidiary of Disney Interactive, Avalanche Software, which had been working on the idea of using RFID chip–integrated model figures in games since 2013. Not the only player in this marketplace, Infinity’s competitors included Nintendo’s amiibo (2014) and Activision’s Skylanders (2011) systems, which feature characters from these video game publishers’ titles. LEGO’s Dimensions line (2015) came at the market from the opposite direction, as a toy manufacturer rather than a game creator, and licensed a wide array of Warner Bros. IP. The idea is that the figures are used in conjunction with the software and that the toy characters come to life within the game. In all of these systems, the main game is sold with a peripheral scanner and some character figures. When the figures are scanned, they appear as controllable characters in the game, with each character capable of different actions or of accessing unique content. A large array of characters and game content are sold separately as physical objects in stores to supplement the system. This system means bite-­size chunks of content are available for small, regular purchases. Ideally, the system aims to “add value” to toy purchases for children, encouraging continued spending by fueling and rewarding players’ desire for completionism and additional game elements. The increasing competition in the marketplace had already indicated that the sector was potentially lucrative—Nintendo’s amiibo figures in particular have been a major financial success, selling over twenty million units (“Consolidated Financial Highlights” 2016). Long-­term franchise fans, who might buy memorabilia or collectables, thus supplemented the younger target audiences to make this genre economically viable. Toys-­to-­life are an example of media convergence both from the perspective of hardware and the worlds that they create. As early harbingers of the “internet of things,” their evolution presented major game design opportunities (Coulton et al. 2014). The high development budget and steady content release schedule encourages a modular design in which different pieces, which can be bought in any order, can be combined or even overlain on top of one another. Different characters can traverse the worlds that come with the base game or can be packaged with new landscapes or content—that the other characters can then engage with. Ideally, Princess Elsa from Frozen (2013) can end up fighting alongside Rey on Takodana, and both will be able to acknowledge the situation. The overlapping of these radically different worlds or, following Matt Hills (2015), “transbranding,” provided opportunities for characters to talk to one another and explore their different contexts in a free-­form “toy-­box mode,” where players could build or import levels and content for all their characters.

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The Lucasfilm buyout was triumphantly embraced in the release trailer for Disney Infinity 3.0, which showed the Millennium Falcon landing among a range of Disney characters from Rapunzel (Tangled) to Jack Skellington (The Nightmare Before Christmas). “Looks like we have visitors,” says Buzz Lightyear (Toy Story), “Let’s hope they come in peace”—while Frozen’s Olaf tries to hug an AT-­AT walker (MKIceandFire 2015). The video game series Kingdom Hearts also unites Disney characters from multiple franchises together with the popular gaming franchise Final Fantasy, but its development was the result of a chance encounter between corporate executives (Huber and Mandiberg 2009). Infinity 3.0 was much more strategically planned, as evidenced by Disney’s attempts at a similar strategy with the successful ABC television show Once Upon a Time (2011–2018), which brings together characters from all over Disney’s fantasy stable as well as from the public domain, all unfolding in a modern-­day setting and focusing on the relationships that result. In the case of Infinity 3.0, with its focus so squarely on a pantheon of characters as both tactile and agentic objects, crossing between software and hardware is in many ways emblematic of this same renewed approach to franchises taken up more widely by its parent company. It is, I would argue, no accident that the main menu screen, itself an addition to Infinity in its 3.0 incarnation, looks like Main Street, U.S.A., the opening zone of the Disney theme parks. Infinity 3.0 is itself a virtual theme park, much in the manner of DVD intratext “digital theme parks,” which Tom Brown (2007) aligns with the “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 1990), and its embracing of social and configurative play builds upon this concept to create a unique selling point for the product. In early 2016, Disney announced that its intention was to cut its losses on Infinity, cease development of the game and close Avalanche Software, recording a $147 million loss (Walt Disney Company 2016). The final Infinity toys were released in August of 2016, and the game’s servers went offline altogether during 2017. Not even the Star Wars IP was enough to keep Infinity viable in the competitive toys-­to-­life marketplace. Disappointed developer sources reported anonymously to video game journalists (Klepek 2016) that to some extent it was the awkward licensing restrictions between the various IPs that put the brakes on the levels of integration that Infinity was able to contain—despite all the IP being owned by the overarching Disney company—as the Marvel and Lucasfilm arms jostled with Disney’s interactive division to achieve different goals. Ironically, the close control that Marvel asserted over the use of its properties in Infinity 3.0—dictating development in ways similar to the old “spun-­off” transmedia content—may well have stemmed from its own difficult relationship with transmedial gaming (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny 2016). The ideal

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situation of characters sharing worlds and the emphasis on identity central to transmedia strategizing proved hard for Disney to manage from a corporate perspective. Outside of the toy-­box mode, there was a dearth of storyline content that could be accessed by figures from different playsets, and developers’ attempts to create more were made more complex by corporate rules and different agendas functioning within the Disney machine. This reality made a mockery of the game’s advertised ambitions, where the promise of the trailers was rarely realized in the actual games, with characters fenced into limited IP territory. Disney has since clarified that it will no longer make video games at all, preferring instead to franchise game development out to third-­party companies, once again citing risk and the volatility of the games industry as the primary causes. While Infinity 3.0 had seen Disney Interactive making a small profit during 2014, this was the first profit the division had posted since 2008 when it was founded (Sinclair 2014). Ceasing the venture made sense as a business decision, but it is unfortunate to see such a setback for what could have been an exceptional route to enabling transmedial content production—content that could have been ripe for use in a future defined by the internet of things. Even under the same (vast) corporate umbrella, it would seem IP remains jealously guarded and controlled.

LEGO Star Wars Infinity’s The Force Awakens content was the only game that actively attempted to retell the plot of the film until the release of LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a full seven months after the movie’s release. In the Disney Infinity content, many of the actors reprise their roles (albeit only vocally), and the content is polished, faithfully following the movie’s plot through a sequence of hub levels set in the different worlds and locations of The Force Awakens and significantly deepened through flavor text and side missions. There is no new narrative material in Infinity’s content, but it does a good job of following along with the plot and allows for improvization and unlockable characters. The LEGO title does much the same, although the opening is a whistle-­stop tour through the original trilogy’s main dramatic moments. The plot extends and fills in some gaps from The Force Awakens, including the reason why Han Solo was transporting Rathtars and the method by which the Rebels acquired the plans for Starkiller Base. Other content in the film specifically earmarked for transmedia connection is also explored here in the resolution of C-­3PO’s mysterious red arm (which also emphasizes the Marvel canon comic C-­3PO). The movie content is presented in a tongue-­in cheek, often overblown style, typical of the LEGO series, bridging the gap between old and young fans, as Cook (2013: 85) attests: “Importantly to

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the continuity in the appeal of the franchise to different generations, these SW games are not limited only to the more adult players; some of the best selling games bearing the Star Wars name are part of the Star Wars LEGO series.” The LEGO game represents a third toy box more suited to playing collectively than alone. On offer are both chaos and craziness created through the huge roster of characters (far more than Infinity allows, as the production of physical models was not a limiting factor) and the comedic tone supported by LEGO’s other game and TV series, while nostalgia is also indulged in this lighthearted send-­up of the franchise. This 3-­D platformer title takes its place as the latest iteration in a tried-­and-­tested series of LEGO games going back more than a decade. While they appear much more accessible, the LEGO games are no less venerable an institution than Battlefront and just as safe a bet. This game, too, has become an assured financial success. In its construction of these three toy boxes, Disney largely eschewed the game form as a mechanism for telling stories, putting additional story material into only the LEGO game, safe behind strongly noncanonical and playful signifiers. The company did this at the same time as giving fans proven game content with the highly limited amount of innovation typical of AAA game production. The lack of content that directly reflects the narrative may in fact be a strategy born out of transmedia game content’s failings in other brands. As Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny (2016) describe with reference to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), this was an approach also taken in one postbuyout, pre–The Force Awakens mobile game, Star Wars: Insurrection (see Freeman in this volume). With the largely negative critical reception that the Iron Man game had earned, Marvel revisited strategy on MCU-­based video games, adopting a preference to create narratives that occur around the fringes of a film’s plot but avoiding re-­creating the action itself. Thus, the games were meant to come further in line with a “truer” contribution to transmedia story operation (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny 2016). In the main, Disney’s approach regarding Star Wars has been to heed the first part of this lesson but ignore the second. Their major games have often had an awkward relationship to story, taking place in the same world but without moving it forward or driving the narrative, overwhelmingly focusing on recycling and emphasizing brand signifiers: character motivations, blaster and lightsaber action sequences, and franchise core themes. Their decision not to produce future games in-­house solidifies this approach. It seems, then, that the same issues that befell the MCU games now threaten Star Wars: “Having travelled successfully through many portals to different media, videogames are where

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the [transmedia universe’s] expansion has become unstuck by the failure to negotiate medium specificity” (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny 2016: 192). But narrative content is not the only place Star Wars game producers rested on their laurels. Disney has long relied on distribution methods and an approach to commercial strategy that appears retrograde compared to the rest of the games market: boxed products sold in stores rather than distributed digitally and premium prices coupled with add-­ons at extra cost, designed to help recoup the high production costs of these games. All of the games focus upon collectability in different ways, particularly the mobile titles that align it with microtransaction customer payments. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (2015, EA) sees players in Cantina arcades playing the holo-­games featured in the films and buying pieces or upgrades. Star Wars: Force Collection (2015, Konami) is a straight-­up, baseball-­card-­style collection game. The three AAA titles analyzed also involve constant collecting and rely heavily on “achievements,” which, combined with their approach to narrative material, cements the video game elements of the postacquisition Star Wars clearly as merchandise and brand extension rather than fully fledged transmedial content. We can play around in the new Star Wars universe, but adapting or changing it, grappling with its themes in any way other than swinging a lightsaber, is out of bounds for now. Notably, this approach stands in stark contrast to how video games were treated prior to the buyout. There were over 120 Star Wars video games published by LucasArts prior to the acquisition, varying wildly in their attitude toward reproducing or playing with the franchise universe. Some are famously terrible movie tie-­ins, including an indecipherable Japanese take on Star Wars (1987) where Darth Vader turns into a scorpion for no discernible reason. Other, more faithful movie tie-­ins were critically successful. The pod-­racing games connected to Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), for instance, produced their own miniseries of well-­made racing games. The franchise games had hits as well, with games like Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) taking real risks with the IP and seeing it pay off, while adventurous projects like Kinect Star Wars (2012, Terminal Reality), an attempt to use very new console technology to simulate lightsaber fighting, fell afoul of technology not quite matching up to expectations. Grand experiments like Star Wars Galaxies (2003), an ambitious early MMOG where initially only the luckiest gamers’ characters were born with the midi-­chlorians to become Jedis, generated headlines. As is the case with almost all movie franchises that grapple with games, there were far more embarrassing misfires than acclaimed hits. However, risk to legacy and finance was clearly less of a concern for LucasArts then than it is for Disney now, and

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that arguably bestowed a certain vibrancy on Star Wars–branded game content. While not necessarily working toward Jenkins’s (2008a: 98) “ideal form of transmedia storytelling” with the sort of specific, anticipatory design that was the guiding light for Infinity (and which Disney now demands of all its franchises), when the old games did chance to hit upon these synergies, LucasArts produced moments that resonated in a way forbidden in the new approach. This was an inevitably messy situation, with a whole subsection of rules needing to be established in the online fan bible Wookieepedia to control the canonical and continuity implications of prebuyout video games where player choices could lead to wildly divergent characters and outcomes. The games are at their best when virtuous circles are established between theme, systems, and content, as occurs in both KOTOR and Republic Commando, each of which are given the freedom to make the most of the IP thematically rather than just showcase it mechanically. KOTOR effectively built upon the concept of the Force to segue into a nuanced morality and alignment system, wherein player choices and behavior molded both a character and an eventual antagonist. This complex game system was made accessible, as well as tolerable from the perspective of risk to the game, through the lens of the IP. Veale (2015) describes a particular playthrough of KOTOR to define how the game form can drain away affective mediation, citing an intense “dark-­side” playthrough that led to such introspective guilt and discomfort that it was almost cause to stop playing the game. This proving ground allowed for developer BioWare’s eventual Mass Effect game series, exploring similar themes of light and dark morality set against an intergalactic backdrop. In a similar vein, Republic Commando manages to make a virtue out of aspects of squad-­based, third-­person action games that can sometimes feel forced or difficult to believe: team communication and control. The fact that the characters are Clone Troopers legitimizes the kinds of behaviors that often make squad-­mates in other games appear robotic. It makes a theme out of this, allowing for this behavior to be actively explored as a narrative strand in the game, leading to memorable characterization that also reflects upon the Star Wars world from the unusual direction of the disposable grunt. These kinds of distinctive angles on the franchise were valued by fans, many of whom mourned the cancellation of 1313 primarily because it was aiming to show a grittier, darker take on Star Wars. In these examples, then, theme, gameplay, and content all work in tandem and the results galvanize franchise themes. This is how medium specificity is successfully negotiated. Within the Expanded Universe, there was even scope for transmedial connections to bear fruit, as evidenced by KOTOR’s character Bastila Shan, who bridges these games and The Old Republic MMO role-­playing game that persists today while

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also breaking out of the games and appearing in Star Wars comics and other Expanded Universe material. In The LEGO Movie (2014), the revealing twist at the end of the animated extravaganza is that there are two unnamed protagonists competing for control of a gigantic LEGO set. One, an adult (Will Ferrell), wants to preserve the toys’ value as collectables. He wants to glue all the models in place and admire the resulting diorama—one not so far from the final achievement of Battlefront, the museum centerpiece. The other character is his young son, Finn (Jadon Sand), who sees the toys as a staging ground for all kinds of tales and chaos, where characters from different contexts collide—a scenario perhaps best represented by the Infinity toy box. The film certainly seems to want viewers to empathize with the child, since Will Ferrell’s character gradually relents on his ambitions, ultimately acknowledging that there is a beauty in father and son playing together with the same toy even if the son’s creativity might break canon or drive imperfections into the painstakingly constructed backdrop. The message is clear: the timeless allure of the toy that the father values is preserved through the creativity and play his son exerts upon it—and this creativity is ultimately what the father is nostalgic for. This is the central thrust of the entire LEGO brand and the reason why its spin on toys-­to-­life will most likely prove to be the place where that kind of transmedial content now goes for the Star Wars franchise. The wider story of the buyout and the relaunching of Star Wars is related to the way in which nostalgia can be leveraged to allow both the revisiting and the enthusiastic new uptake of this source material, and presently the games represent a point where the former is being emphasized to the detriment of the latter. Disney could learn a lesson from LEGO, and it will hopefully loosen its risk-­averse grip on the franchise’s game aspects. This is necessary to prevent the nostalgia and brand enhancement evident in the Star Wars video games since the buyout from transitioning into brand fatigue. Perhaps by asserting this I am myself guilty of the same stifling nostalgia, but I believe that new Star Wars fans, raised on the infinitely configurable sandbox worlds of Minecraft (2011, Mojang) and similar games, are not always going to be content to play around in the world or in a pastiche of it—they will want to play with it as well and to explore its themes themselves to realize why they deserve such preservation.

9 Rebecca Williams

From Star Tours to Galaxy’s Edge Immersion, Transmediality, and “Haptic Fandom” in Disney’s Theme Parks

M

uch of the discussion around what has become known as Disney’s Star Wars operates from an assumption that the relationship between the two began with Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012. However, as this chapter demonstrates, the two companies have a much longer history in terms of the use of Star Wars intellectual property within the various theme parks that Disney operates (see also Proctor and McCulloch’s introduction in this volume). This chapter outlines how the connection between Disney and Star Wars actually originated in the mid-­1980s with The Walt Disney Company’s relationship with George Lucas, detailing the trajectory of the franchise’s presence from a single ride—the original Star Tours (1987–2010)—through to its more immersive replacement, Star Tours: The Adventures Continue (2011–present). Exploring the opportunities for fannish engagement that these single rides offer, this chapter also considers the strengthened presence of Star Wars in Disney parks since their acquisition of Lucasfilm. This chapter proposes that we must continue to critically consider the relationship between theme parks and transmedia franchises and pay attention to the way in which fans react to the immersion, pleasure, and play that these can offer. Since “fan-­text affective relationships cannot be separated from spatial concerns and categories” (Hills 2002: 145), the chapter argues that the presence of Star Wars in the Disney parks offers unique opportunities for fans to become immersed in its transmedia world and to move their fandom from the textual into the bodily and the spatial, engaging in forms of what I term “haptic fandom.” It considers the three iterations of Star Wars that have been present in Disney’s parks (and the other events and experiences that have operated around them). This chapter thus argues that the presence of Star Wars in Disney parks

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works to partially contradict accounts that focus on the recent merger, since Disney’s Star Wars has a longer history than we may suppose. Secondly, it proposes that in order to fully understand the forces of participation and reception at work around the franchise, we need to consider not just Star Wars fans, but also the fans of the places that the property spatially operates within.

Colliding Universes: Star Wars Fandom Meets Disney Parks Fandom Star Wars fandom has been studied from a range of perspectives (see Brooker 2002; Shefrin 2004; Hills 2003a, 2003b; Proctor 2013; S. Scott 2017), with much of this exploring how fans operate their own distinctions regarding which versions of the franchise are valued over others. For instance, Brooker (2002: 221) discusses how fans of the original movies “tend . . . to treasure the original trilogy as a nostalgic relic of childhood and to view the prequels with wariness or disappointment,” while Matt Hills (2003a) discusses how antifans of the prequels often project their frustration and disappointment onto the character of Jar Jar Binks. It is thus unsurprising that some fans were vocal when the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney was announced. Their fear of a “ ‘Disney-­fication’ of the fan object” (Proctor 2013: 213) makes sense given the broader cultural derision toward Disney as a company. It has been accused of a list of cultural crimes including indoctrinating children into capitalist systems of consumption (see Hiaasen 1998; Giroux 2010; Jackson 2011) and problematic representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity (see Bell, Haas, and Sells 1996; S. Griffin 2000; Cheu 2013). However, perhaps even more derided are Disney’s theme parks, currently located in California, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Florida, the last of which houses its largest complex, Walt Disney World (WDW), which includes four theme parks, two waterparks, two night-­time entertainment districts, and sports facilities. Disney has been accused of imposing American values onto the Parks it has opened outside the United States (Raz 1999; Renaut 2011; Yoshi­ moto 1994), and commonly held negative views perceive theme parks as “generic, lowest-­common-­denominator entertainments that fail to fully represent what they are re-­creating in order to have mass appeal. Their success points to a postmodern preference for simulation, safety and entertainment over the ‘real’ experience of landscapes and environments, and the flattening of everything in postmodern life to mass-­produced images” (Waysdorf and Reijnders 2016: 3). The parks are also perceived to encourage acts of mindless consumption since the “ultimate purpose of [their] narrativizing experience is to naturalize

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consumption activities, so that visitors consume without being aware of it” (Yoshi­moto 1994: 187). Furthermore, the Parks are often viewed as targeting children, while the adult visitor is frequently infantilized and pathologized. Given these dominant, often negative, views of both Disney as a company and their theme parks, the antipathy of some Star Wars fans toward the Disney-­ Lucasfilm commercial marriage can be understood. However, “describing the average Disney fan is impossible, as the body of Disney fandom does not consist of a specific demographic but encompasses a multi-­generational global community” (Koren-­Kuik 2013: 147). Those who visit the Disney parks are often adults who display remarkable reflexivity about their fandom of a space that is riven with contradictions regarding authenticity, reality, and consumption (see R. Williams 2015). The opportunities for the spatial expansion of the Star Wars universe within the Disney theme parks were an integral part of the company’s strategy when purchasing Lucasfilm. Disney CEO Bob Iger commented that “there will be more feature films, as well as consumer products, television projects, games, and theme park attractions” (Iger quoted in Proctor 2013). There is a tendency for theme parks owned by large corporations to draw on intellectual property that they already possess, saving them money on licensing content from other companies: “In large corporations, divisions may actually have a directive to include In-­House IP to synergistically advertise the company’s other brands. Having just bought Star Wars, for example, The Walt Disney Company needs to be seen to be exploiting it, including a presence within its theme parks” (Younger 2016: 59–60). Disney’s spatial deployment of Star Wars is even more crucial since the company cannot make full use of its other recent acquisition, Marvel Studios, in its theme parks due to Marvel’s complex licensing contract with theme park rival Universal Studios. The contract that Universal Studios negotiated with Marvel Entertainment for the construction of Marvel Super Hero Island (Universal’s Islands of Adventure, 1999) contains a range of clauses, most notably the agreement that it granted Universal “after two years [of the land’s opening], exclusive use of any Marvel character used in the land (if that character, or another character within its family (defined as a group of superheroes, such as the Fantastic Four, their allies or villains) is used in more than an incidental manner) within the United States east of the Mississippi” (cited in Younger 2016: 61). Thus, while Disney can open an Iron Man (2008) attraction in Tokyo and a Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) ride in California, the United States clause of Universal’s agreement with Marvel severely limits what Disney can do in its biggest parks in Orlando. Despite its ownership and production of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is a deal that makes it virtually impossible for Disney

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to create any Marvel attractions in Walt Disney World, while also constraining its use of Marvel properties outside of  Florida. There is therefore an even greater imperative for a return on Disney’s Lucasfilm investment across all of its divisions. However, many theme park fans are resistant to change within the spaces that they love and do not always respond to new attractions and rides positively (R. Williams 2015). Space and immersion are constructed and contested by fans with competing dominant interests—those whose primary focus is the Star Wars universe and those who prioritize their love of the Disney theme parks, suggesting that both groups must negotiate the opportunities and threats that the purchase of Lucasfilm presents.

Cinema-­Based Attractions: Launching Star Tours The relationship between Disney Parks and Lucasfilm began in 1986 when George Lucas worked as executive producer on the attraction Captain EO, a live-­action 3-­D film starring Michael Jackson, which debuted at California’s Disneyland. Eager to create an interactive ride simulator, Disney approached Lucas to develop a ride based on his Star Wars franchise. The ride opened first in California’s Disneyland in 1987, and versions were subsequently opened in Tokyo Disneyland and Disney-­MGM Studios (the former name of Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida) in 1989, with Disneyland Paris following suit in 1992. The ride was located in the Tomorrowland sections of the Disneyland parks in California and Tokyo and in Paris’s version of that land, Discoveryland. In contrast, the Walt Disney World version moved the attraction from its Disneyland-­style park, the Magic Kingdom, and instead located it in its Disney Hollywood Studios Park. This move makes sense considering the Studios’ focus on immersing guests inside movie worlds; the park has also featured attractions based on Indiana Jones, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and Toy Story. It also offered the park a big attraction to appeal to guests within the first six to twelve months of its opening in 1989. The original Star Tours, a “movie-­based motion simulator ride” (King 2000: 178), positioned the rider as a tourist traveling to the forest moon of Endor, as seen in Return of the Jedi (1983). It was “based on technologies developed by the U.S. military for pilot training simulation” and enabled “viewers/experiencers [to] sit on a motion platform that bucks and yaws to synchronise with the apparent movements suggested on screen” (King 2000: 178). In the WDW version, guests approached the exterior of the ride via trees based on the Ewok’s village, then queued through a range of scenes depicting spacecraft, props, and droids that talk to the waiting guests via audio-­animatronics. The conceit of

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touristic travel to Endor was maintained by screens advertising departure times of shuttles to various planets from the Star Wars universe, as well as aspects of the safety video that guests watched before boarding their flight, which echoes flight safety films screened on airplanes. Once entering the Starspeeder ride vehicle, guests were introduced to their pilot droid Rex who, once the ride was underway, caused the shuttle to career off course and encounter iconic images from the Star Wars films, including an imperial Star Destroyer and X-­Wing and TIE fighters. The ride concluded with a chase through the trenches of the Death Star, which was destroyed in the same way as in the film. The ride ended, and guests exited past posters advertising other planets that Star Tours visits. The original Star Tours was a classic example of the movie-­based rides that were popular in the early days of film and theme park synergy (Balides 2003). Such “film-­based rides and attractions” mean that “as participants, we are directly addressed and interpellated” (King 2000: 178). Although such attractions were accused, like the blockbuster movies they were often based on, of prioritizing spectacle over narrative, Star Tours actually offered a coherent story experience for the rider. The “something goes wrong” (Younger 2016: 108) plotline worked to place the guest in the middle of the experience, offering the opportunity to visit locations seen in the original Star Wars trilogy and inserting them into the final climactic mission to destroy the Death Star.

Greatest Hits and Repeatability: Incorporating the Prequels and Sequels In 2005, George Lucas confirmed that an updated version of Star Tours was being developed to incorporate locations and characters from the prequel trilogy. This new version—Star Tours: The Adventures Continue—has now replaced the original ride at all four locations, opening in May 2011 in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, June 2011 in California, May 2013 in Tokyo, and March 2017 in Paris. The mechanics of the ride were updated to include high-­definition film and a 3-­D screen. Storywise, it retains the conceit of space tourism but offers a detailed backstory concerning the Empire’s suspicions of links between the Rebel Alliance and the agency that runs Star Tours. The Starspeeder is thus tasked with delivering a Rebel spy to safety. The spy is selected randomly by the cast member operating the ride, and their image is shown on screen during the experience; it is more common to see a child or an older grandparent chosen for this than someone who is clearly demarcated as a Star Wars fan, highlighting that this remains resolutely a Disney attraction despite its theming. The ride also replaces the pilot droid Rex with the film’s recognizable C-­3PO, who is

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undertaking maintenance on the Starspeeder but, due to a mix-­up, ends up having to pilot the ship. The new version initially incorporated iconography from the prequel trilogy including Jar Jar Binks, Naboo, and a pod-­racing sequence alongside moments from the original three films. Following the release of The Force Awakens in 2015, the ride was modified slightly again to include possible encounters with Finn and BB-­8 or visits to Rey’s home planet of Jakku and the planet Crait from The Last Jedi, added in 2017–2018 (Lussier 2017). Unlike the original Star Tours, the new version offers a range of different moments that can be encountered. Riders experience four out of a possible thirteen moments, or segments of story, and the sequence is randomized, meaning that the ride can be different each time. There are ninety-­six possible variations, including encounters with characters such as Darth Vader, Yoda, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Jar Jar Binks, and segments on iconic planets such as Hoth, Tatooine, Naboo, and Jakku. Although the end of the ride is always the same—the Rebel spy on board the ship is delivered to safety—it encourages repeat visits for the Star Wars fan who may seek to experience as many combinations as possible. This randomization also offers the pleasures of repeatability for the more casual theme park fan or visitor. Such inbuilt “re-­rideability” is essential since Disney’s theme parks must appeal to families, couples, and the more general tourist who must be encouraged to “repeat-­ride” an attraction in order to ensure their return. The “interchangeability” of the ride, where “elements of the attraction swap out on various rides through” (Younger 2016: 395) is randomized to avoid riders being able to deliberately choose their preferred versions, instead leaving the sequence of events to the computerized ride system. Despite this, there remains the prospect of hierarchizing the experiences one may have. For example, a version that includes certain popular characters or key locations may be favored over others. The updated ride thus offers the possibility of a “greatest hits” of different moments where the dedicated Star Wars fan may get to experience encountering the “best” characters or visiting the most popular locations (e.g., the sequence on Hoth featuring iconic AT-­AT vehicles might be preferred over the one involving Jar Jar Binks’s underwater Gungan habitat due to fan antipathy toward Binks). Experiencing the preferred sequence of events allows fans to display forms of “subcultural capital” (Thornton 1995), comparable to the capital accrued from attending other live events such as gigs, the capital of “being there” (Auslander 1999). Equally, selection as the ride’s Rebel spy offers a form of privilege for those with a stronger fannish connection to the attraction, partially because this results in a greater form of personalized immersion in the ride (you become the person that the rest of the riders must protect and get to safety). However, being chosen as the Rebel spy also opens

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up the opportunity for acquiring a coveted piece of merchandise, for only those who have been chosen can purchase a Disney Parks exclusive “I am the Rebel Spy” pin badge once the ride is over and they leave the Starspeeder. As with the original version of Star Tours, all guests must exit through the gift shop.

Immersion, Transmedia, and a Sense of Place: Building Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge The increased presence of Star Wars in Disney’s parks was confirmed at the Disney Expo D23 in 2015 when the creation of a themed land at both California’s Disneyland and WDW’s Hollywood Studios was announced. The project was unofficially referred to as Star Wars Land until the announcement in 2017 of its official title of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge (Fickley-­Baker 2017). Promising a completely immersive experience, the land will “introduce you to a Star Wars planet you’ve never seen before—a gateway planet located on the outer rim, full of places and characters familiar and not so familiar” (Pedicini 2015). Disney’s own blog describes how “guests will be transported to a never-­before-­seen planet— a remote trading port and one of the last stops before wild space—where Star Wars characters and their stories come to life” (Savvas 2017a). Theme park attractions operate as one element of transmediality—“the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms” (E. Evans 2011: 1). Thus, much as the novels and comics create an ever-­expanding hyper­ diegetic universe, so too does Galaxy’s Edge. Set not in a familiar location but on an unseen and unknown planet, the experience allows the transmediality of the franchise universe to develop further through the creation of new characters, places, and spaces that have not been seen in the existing official canon of the storyworld. While much of the detail has been kept under wraps (potentially to avoid spoilers for the remaining films of the series), the land will include unique dining opportunities, new rides, and iconic imagery from the movies; for example, concept art depicts a Millennium Falcon ship and released footage of construction from Disney showed two life-­sized AT-­AT vehicles at the California park (Savvas 2017b). The construction of Galaxy’s Edge thus signals a further shift toward the desire for a completely immersive theme park experience, one that is designed to appeal both to fans of the franchise and also the Parks themselves. Alongside immersion, however, individuality of experience is also a key characteristic. At the 2017 Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, imagineers discussed further how this personalization would work:

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When guests step foot inside, they will be surrounded by a new Star Wars story—their story. And each move they make will make an impact on how the experience plays out. . . . Guests boarding the Millennium Falcon ride will have the opportunity to work together to command the space vessel—for better or for worse. Choices made on the ride, whether they end in a successful lightspeed trip or a crash landing, will impact guests when they step off the ride. . . . A reputation will follow guests, potentially tracked and catalogued by Disney’s ever-­growing MagicBand technology. And that reputation will impact how the entire story shapes around them. (Brigante 2017) This emphasis upon a more personalized version of a Star Wars experience had previously been evident at the Star Wars Identities exhibitions, which saw guests wear special wristbands to log decisions made across the exhibit. At the end, each guest was introduced to her or his own unique Star Wars character (Peters 2015). Indeed, the theme parks are not the only places where the films have had a designated place devoted to them. Secret Cinema’s screenings of The Empire Strikes Back in London in 2015 offered an immersive opportunity on Tatooine via the elaborate sets and restaging of key scenes (Pett 2016; see also Pett in this volume). Star Wars has also been the subject of various museum exhibitions and experiences (Hills 2003b; Peters 2015), and official events, such as 2016’s Star Wars Celebration (Hills 2017a) and the Star Wars exhibition in 2015 at Madame Tussauds, both of which took place in London. However, while the “ ‘rented’ and transient space of a hotel conference suite can spatialize a precise temporality” (Hills 2002: 120), these spaces are fundamentally temporary and cannot offer the consistent availability of immersion that dedicated theme park spaces can. The presumed constancy of Galaxy’s Edge at the Parks offers the opportunity for return visits and offers the security and reassurance of the knowledge that the land continues to “be there” in a way that conventions, celebrations, or immersive cinema events cannot. Galaxy’s Edge’s appeal to fans of the transmedia universe and to Disney or theme park fans is thus predicated on the desire of  both to experience ever-­greater modes of absorption within themed environments. Such theme park spaces allow visitors to more fully inhabit the fictional worlds via forms of what I would term “haptic fandom,” since “tastes, smells, sounds and physical movements that are part of the narrative world are experienced through the park. This gives them an embodied sense of a storyworld that, while familiar, was previously only cerebral or audiovisual” (Waysdorf and Reijnders 2016: 8). Indeed, while fan studies have begun to focus more clearly on the materiality of fandom (see Rehak

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2014), close attention to such haptic elements remains rare. Theme park fandom, and fan engagement with spaces more broadly, would seem, however, to allow us to consider forms of haptic experience. As Paterson (2007: 4) summarizes, “haptic, from the Greek word haptesthai, means ‘of, pertaining to, or relating to the sense of touch or tactile sensations.’ ” As we consider developments such as Galaxy’s Edge, it may prove useful to consider how the sensory sensations that they provide (including touch, smell, taste, and sound) can be understood via the concept of forms of “haptic fandom,” alongside existing understandings of immersive spaces.

Events, Merchandise, and Overlays: Coopting Fandom, Fannish Discontent While the evolution of the Star Tours ride and the development of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge are the lynchpin of the theme parks’ attractions, other experiences at the theme parks antedate Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm. For example, the Jedi Training Academy, which opened at Disneyland California in 2006 and Hollywood Studios Park in 2007, allows groups of children to be “trained” in combat and equipped with lightsabers and Jedi robes. They encounter Darth Vader, Darth Maul, and Stormtroopers, eventually vanquishing them to qualify as trained Jedi. Since the Disney-­Lucasfilm deal, this attraction has opened in Disneyland Paris (in 2015) and Hong Kong Disneyland (in 2016), while a new version incorporating characters from Disney-­specific Star Wars properties has replaced the original show in the two American parks (Andersson 2015a) and was also staged at the D23 Disney Expo in 2015. Thus, Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple in Orlando and California now includes Kylo Ren from Episode VII: The Force Awakens and characters from Star Wars Rebels (McCabe 2016b). While the Jedi Academy has adapted to foreground newer characters from Disney’s Star Wars, not all of the Parks’ attractions have survived the corporate merger. Disney’s Hollywood Studios began running the popular Star Wars Weekends events in 1997, holding these in 2000, 2001, and then annually between 2003 and 2015. These events included the Training Academy alongside parades, shows, and talks from cast and crew, as well as the opportunity to meet a range of characters including Boba Fett, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, and the Ewoks. However, given the expansion of the franchise’s presence at the Parks via the creation of Galaxy’s Edge, Disney confirmed the end of the Weekends celebrations in 2015. Announcing the opening of the Star Wars Launch Bay—an interactive walkthrough attraction dedicated to movie props from the most recent films, The Force Awakens and Rogue One, as well

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as meet-­and-­greets with characters including Kylo Ren and Chewbacca—the official Disney Parks Blog played down the ending of the Weekends events, noting that “While Star Wars Weekends has been a great way to enjoy the saga for a few days every year, now the Force will be with Disney’s Hollywood Studios every day” (T. Smith 2015). The loss of the specific events, which were hugely popular with fans, signals a clear shift from a model of engagement more akin to traditional fan conventions (held only for a finite time over certain dates) to the diffusion of Star Wars’s presence at the Parks across the whole year. This seems to indicate a move toward a mainstreaming of Star Wars fans’ activities across the Parks as a whole rather than containing them within the more fannish concept of the “weekend-­only world” (Jenkins 1992: 283) of the convention model. However, Disney appeared to backtrack slightly with their introduction of Star Wars Galactic Nights events at Hollywood Studios in Spring 2017. Unlike Star Wars Weekends, where guests were able to access all the events with a regular day-­entry ticket to the park, Galactic Nights are a so-­called “hard ticket” event where attendees must buy a specific separate ticket for that celebration (Banks Lee 2017). Running from seven o’clock in the evening until midnight, the first event was scheduled to coincide with Orlando’s hosting of  Disney’s official Star Wars Celebration event, allowing stars and production personnel attending that to also appear at the Studios. Of course, there are clear economic imperatives for Disney’s decision to offer Star Wars experiences more broadly since “Disney parks can be described as a careful integration of entertainment and fun with commodification and consumption” (Wasko 2001: 158). However, Disney appears to not yet want to completely abandon the additional benefits that hard ticket events can also offer. The cancellation of Star Wars Weekends and the creation of Galactic Nights thus speaks to both an apparent mainstreaming of the fannish experience at the Parks, as well as an awareness of the commercial value that both general theme park guests and more dedicated fans can offer. The era of Disney’s Star Wars has also led to other changes within the theme parks. Some of the Park’s longest-­standing events are marathons and races, which are organized under the brand runDisney. Although certain races have been running since 1994, the years since 2015 have seen the introduction of Star Wars–themed marathons and races. These take place in California’s Disneyland, where the Star Wars Light Side Half-­Marathon, 10k, 5k and Kids Races are staged, and Florida’s WDW where the Star Wars Dark Side Races take place (“Star Wars Rival Run Weekend” n.d.). These races offer opportunities to take part in the themed races, to meet characters such as Darth Vader and the Storm­ troopers, and to receive a limited-­edition medal. The Space Mountain rides in

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Disneyland California and Paris have also seen “overlays” to turn the attraction into Hyperspace Mountain. Overlays are “temporary changes made to an attraction, allowing it to be marketed as a unique variation for a specified period of time” (Younger 2016: 396). In California, the Hyperspace Mountain overlay exists temporarily and sporadically but was initially established for the Season of the Force event in 2015, which promoted the release of The Force Awakens (Martens 2015). The event returned to California in 2016–2017 and launched in Paris as part of the resort’s twenty-­fi fth anniversary celebrations. However, in the latter park this replacement of the original Space Mountain—in Paris uniquely themed around the work of Jules Verne—has not met with approval from all visitors and fans. As one blog noted, Why wait for the real Star Wars Land when you can create your own from the barely appropriate bones of a once-­great icon? . . . Many more casual visitors were already sharing the news of “two new Star Wars rides.” How will they feel when they realise this one’s just an ill-­fitting overlay? Will they even care? That’s a troubling point: a remarkable number of people seem to genuinely not care that we’ll be being fired out of a cannon inspired by Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into a Star Wars interior show. They don’t care about this storytelling faux-­pas, they don’t care how inspiring the attraction used to be. They just want something Star Wars, and now. (“Disneyland Paris” 2016) Such fan complaints about the replacement of rides are not limited to grumbles about the apparent dominance of Star Wars, however. For theme park fans, “the removal of certain rides or places poses a threat to their sense of fan identity or their ongoing relationship with the parks. The importance of place and the experiential and affective dimensions to this mean that fans often respond angrily or emotionally when these key places are changed or replaced” (R. Williams 2015). For example, fans of Walt Disney World’s Epcot Park objected to the replacement of a classic attraction with a ride based on the film Frozen (R. Williams 2015), and many fans are equally outraged over the decision to turn Disney’s California Adventure Park’s Tower of Terror drop ride into one based on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. In moments when theme park fans object to apparent intrusions into the Parks by existing properties such as Marvel or Star Wars that Disney has acquired, we thus see the potential for “fan-­tagonism” (D. Johnson 2007a) between fans of the franchises and the Parks themselves. Equally, we can see distinctions emerge regarding what level of presence is accepted and what is seen as encroaching: in the Disneyland Paris Today blog, the

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“actual” Star Wars Land is seen as appropriate, whereas an overlay that threatens an iconic attraction, or the “feel” of a land, is not. While theme park fans cannot fail to be aware of the links between these places and discourses of consumerism and consumption, they do also operate their own distinctions regarding what they consider to be appropriate. In the case of Frozen, for example, fans argued that the movie was a fad that was being introduced to WDW simply to sell more merchandise (R. Williams 2015). Similarly, Disney’s desire to incorporate a Star Wars ride into their parks, even in the decades before their purchase of Lucasfilm, speaks to the linkage between cinema and theme park rides (King 2000; Schatz 2015) and the synergistic opportunities for merchandise sales that this presents. This allows for “further branding of a branded commodity and creating even greater intertextuality between theme parks and the cinema” (Lukas 2008: 184). However, the first few months after Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm led to some merchandising missteps that initially seemed to reflect some of the fan fears about Disneyfication discussed by Proctor (2013). As he points out in his analysis of the Star Wars fan site TheForce.net: “Many posts, as well as many memes and posters, display an ironic juxtaposition of Disney properties with Star Wars iconography . . . [such as] Beauty and the Wookiee, The Ewok King, The Hunchback of the Jedi Temple, and The Emperor’s New Groove—which is actually a ‘real’ Disney film but works well as an in-­joke and can be interpreted as an ironic fear of a ‘Disneyfication’ of the Star Wars myth” (2013: 203–4). The first wave of merchandise available in shops within the theme parks largely consisted of T-­shirts depicting mash-­up images combining iconic Star Wars characters and theme park imagery. For example, one image featured Darth Vader and Stormtroopers riding the famous Disney carousel with the caption, “This will be a day long remembered. —Darth Vader” (which is a quote from Star Wars), while others depicted Stormtroopers wearing Mickey Mouse–ear hats (Andersson 2015b). As the relationship has continued, however, merchandise bringing together the worlds of Disney and Star Wars has become more nuanced. More recent T-­shirts, mugs, and other items have been produced that place characters from the franchise into the iconography of posters from classic Disney rides. For example, one places the ghostly figures of Yoda, Obi-­Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader from the end of Return of the Jedi in an image that replicates the classic Haunted Mansion attraction, with the ghosts replacing Disney’s famous hitchhiking ghosts, the Mansion depicted as a building from the Ewok village, and the title of the Haunted Mansion replaced with “Forest Moon of  Endor.” These attraction posters and mash-­up T-­shirts reflect a more creative merging of the iconography of the Disney Parks and the Star

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Wars universe and were received more positively than the earlier wave of merchandise (Frost 2016). As the Star Wars universe and the worlds of the Disney theme parks continue to move in the same orbits, tensions over how Disney will impact Star Wars and, equally, how Star Wars will come to inhabit the spaces of Disney, remain subject to negotiation.

Conclusion This chapter has reconsidered the concept of Disney’s Star Wars through the franchise’s place within Disney’s theme parks. This is a relationship that predates Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm by almost thirty years, yet the expanding presence of Star Wars in Disney’s branded spaces demonstrates the synergistic use of existing intellectual property in its theme parks. Moreover, considering the reception from Star Wars fans and fans of the Parks highlights how cultural hierarchies and modes of distinction operate among both. For every Star Wars fan who fears the “Disneyfication” of the series or the repurposing of Princess Leia as an official Disney Princess (Proctor 2013: 216; see also Booth’s and Jones’s respective chapters in this volume), there is a theme park fan who is concerned about the potential dominance of the franchise in the Disney Parks or the threat to existing attractions (such as that posed by the Paris Hyperspace Mountain). Despite some reservations, however, the increasing number of Star Wars attractions and the ever-­stronger depiction of its world and hyperdiegesis indicate how “fans and theme parks are tied into a reciprocal relationship marked by immersion” (Koren-­Kuik 2013: 146). However, the dual focus on immersion and personalization indicates an increased onus on the experience of the individual and their own story as they traverse Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. As we consider this emphasis on the self and the shift toward distinctive personal experiences, the concept of haptic fandom may help us better understand how forms of immersion are created via “somatic sensations and tactile experiences” (Paterson 2007: 14) and how fans—both of theme park spaces and the different franchises that occupy them—respond to this. Tracing the history from the original Star Tours through its prequel-­oriented upgrade, The Adventures Continue, to the creation of an entirely new land with Galaxy’s Edge, this chapter has demonstrated the tensions inherent in theme park attractions that must appeal to general guests while also understanding the opportunities that properties with ready-­made loyal fanbases can present. Indeed, other events such as the now-­defunct Star Wars Weekends, the occasional Galactic Nights celebrations, themed races, and temporary seasonal overlays speak to the importance of a continued presence of the brand in the Parks that has certainly

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increased since the Disney-­Lucasfilm deal in 2012. The shift from the original, more fannish mode of some of these events (like the Weekends, with their convention-­like approach) toward the wider proliferation of activities (such as the meet-­and-­greets and exhibits spanning the year) can be read as a form of mainstreaming fan practices to the wider theme park visitor. However, we must sound a note of caution here. While many theme park fans are acutely aware of the consumerist nature of their fandom (Waysdorf and Reijnders 2016: 14), there are potential issues around corporations such as Disney repackaging and selling existing fan practices back to them. As concepts such as cosplay and conventions are increasingly coopted into the official “Disney Star Wars theme park experience,” we must remain conscious of the tension between fans’ appreciation of this apparent valorization of their fandom (and their desire to attend) and the power differential inherent in all fan-­producer relationships.

Part II

10 Jonathan Gray

“Always Two There Are” Repetition, Originality, and The Force Awakens

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hortly following, and in some cases preceding, the release of The Force Awakens, the internet came alive with complaints about the film being an exercise in nostalgia that reveled in mere repetition, pastiche, and photocopying. While many such complaints hold dubious status as legitimate criticism, offered instead as “clickbait” dangled in front of fans of an otherwise critically acclaimed film, the ubiquity of the critique rendered it part of the cultural moment. The critique took on several forms, sometimes oozing contempt for fandom, writing the movie off as “fan service” or “fan fiction,” as if anything for fans could only be bad. Some such posts and reviews recycled the tired and insipid suggestion that anyone who enjoys a blockbuster Hollywood franchise film is a brainless sheep, grazing here in the pasture of Farmer Walt. Others were less unkind to audiences but instead framed themselves as aesthetic critiques, arguing that the film offered “nothing new” while wringing their hands about a culture of repetition. To Looper, “rather than coming up with a brand new story for his take on Star Wars, [ J. J. Abrams] decided to remake the original Star Wars film” (“How The Force Awakens Is a Remake of A New Hope” 2015); Slant’s Michael Perrone (2015) labeled it a “rehash” and a “carbon copy” (2015); and Variety’s Justin Chang (2015) complained that “fan service takes priority here over a somewhat thin, derivative story.” Writing for RogerEbert.com, Geraldo Valero (2016) charged it with “plagiarism,” opining that “it feels we are basically watching the same movie.” Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir (2015) scorned it as “obsessive,” “the ultimate retreat into formula,” and complained that writers Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt “barely even pretend to advance the story of the initial trilogy; they rewind it and repeat it, with new characters substituting for old ones but many of the same action set-­pieces, narrative

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dilemmas and hidden connections.” At Movie Nation, Roger Moore (2015) saw it as “achingly unoriginal,” and concluded, “Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it.” This chapter responds to and engages with this line of attack. I don’t intend this as a defense per se—gushing praise of The Force Awakens is as prevalent as the attack, and at a global box office haul of over $2 billion, it hardly needs protecting.1 But the criticism offers a handy opportunity to address prevalent discourses about Hollywood franchises’ relationship to originality, nostalgia, franchising, and repetition. The least original observation that a critic can offer about Hollywood franchising in the early twentieth-­fi rst century is, ironically, that it lacks originality or new ideas, as The Force Awakens is just one of many franchise films castigated on the grounds that they are “mere” repetition (see, e.g., the reception of Jurassic World, the Avengers films, Furious 7, etc.). And thus, since the grounds on which The Force Awakens was criticized will undoubtedly give life to many such critiques in the future, an analysis of those grounds holds relevance beyond just the case at hand. While I do not mean wholly to redeem repetition, or to offer a declaration of love for the carbon copy, I find these criticisms clumsy in their assertion of outright copying and weak in their understanding of what repetition and originality are. This chapter therefore first admits the presence of repetition—but asks why that should matter—before then discussing what is in fact new and different about The Force Awakens.

Is Chewie Home? Myths of Originality To begin, let’s catalogue how The Force Awakens might be regarded as a copy of A New Hope. In the new movie, the (1) First Order is catching up with (2) Poe, who is believed to have important information regarding the whereabouts of a lynchpin of the (3) Resistance efforts against it, when the charmingly childlike droid, (4) BB-­8, is set loose on the desert planet of (5) Jakku with said information. Our young desert-­dwelling hero with a mysterious past, (6) Rey, finds the droid and stumbles into an alliance with (7) Finn and the old warrior (8) Han Solo, while the evil organization engages its mega-­weapon, (9) the Starkiller Base, to destroy (10) many planets as a show of its supreme fascist power. Positioned within the evil organization, following the leadership of (11) Snoke and alongside numerous British actors in gray uniforms, is a figure of power and malevolence, (12) Kylo Ren, who has a fondness for helmets and dark clothing. After encountering numerous interesting species, in particular at (13) Maz’s place, some friendly and some dangerous, our heroes find plans to destroy the base, team up with some X-­Wing pilots to do so, and in a race against time to

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see who will strike first, the good guys win and destroy the base, though not before the powerful dark figure faces off with an old frenemy and kills him, much to the horror of our onlooking heroes. Replace the numbered elements above with, respectively, the Empire, Leia, the Rebellion, R2-­D2, Tatooine, Luke, Han, Obi-­Wan, the Death Star, Alderaan, Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and the Mos Eisley Cantina, and you have the plot of A New Hope. And yet, in spite of all this repetition, The Force Awakens is guilty of unoriginality only if we work with wholly uncritical, clumsy notions of originality, pastiche, repetition, and nostalgia. First, it might be worth noting the significant irony that critics who loved and admired A New Hope are only now concerned about a film being laden with pastiche. A princess must return to her people who are staging a rebellion against an imperial force; she is helped by an odd duo who seem there mostly for comic effect and by a venerable old knight who must face off against his former second-­ in-­command who went bad and now leads the imperial forces. That was the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress before it was the plot of A New Hope. Kurosawa influences abound in A New Hope and its progeny, starting with the Jedi (and Vader’s helmet) seeming remarkably samurai-­like, and extending to thematic fascinations with fealty, male friendship, and the individual’s (or individual hero’s) place in the group. Yet of course Kurosawa was himself deeply beholden to John Ford and other westerns—another genre that is plastered all over A New Hope, along with some Flash Gordon, and with numerous other popular texts and genres. A New Hope was always a poster child for postmodern pastiche of pastiche of pastiche—and proof that movies could still be enjoyable and refreshingly original while looking deep into a hall of mirrors. From the outset, then, A New Hope should challenge us to stretch beyond the widespread, uncritical notions of originality, repetition, and pastiche that have been mobilized to dismiss The Force Awakens. Indeed, we would profit from unpacking the ludicrous notion that any work of art must be “original” to be good, if originality requires stark difference, since by that definition very little art is original. Every text builds upon, and comes in the wake of, other texts. Sometimes this is direct, sometimes it’s “just” scenes or characters or character types. But nothing is original. As T. S. Eliot famously argued of the artist, “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” ([1920] 1991: 431), since art is nearly always created within and draws deeply from a tradition. The value in anything, then, comes from how it repeats and reworks, and from the often small, subtle differences. If we momentarily set aside the world of contemporary franchise films and sequels and

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instead consider lauded works of art across various other media, we see endless repetition. In theater, the trio of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides launched Western traditions of tragic drama, yet most of their plays retell commonly known myths. Centuries later, Shakespeare would vault to the top of cultural hierarchies by writing plays with plots borrowed from various sources, making him nothing if not “a master remixer” (Jenkins 2010: 108). Theater is replete with repetition, as aficionados may travel across the globe at great expense to see new productions of plays that they have seen many times before (spoiler alert: Hamlet dies). In painting, meanwhile, the great galleries of  Europe are full of globally praised paintings that conform to a rather limited set of  frames— St. Sebastian slain by arrows, again; another scene of boats going out to sea; more nude women eating grapes. For insurance purposes, in 1962, the Louvre valued at $100 million ($800 million in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation) Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, a painting that, as a bust of a woman, conforms to perhaps the most “rehashed” genre in the history of paint. One could—and to a degree perhaps should—conclude from the examples that many of our “great” artists are overvalued and fetishized. But I do not mean to question the artistry in each case. Rather, I offer them as examples of how artistry exists in execution, and in subtle, small changes. Sophocles and William Shakespeare may have rehashed their basic plots from others, but it is their small subtleties and additions that impress their audiences. A contemporary theatergoer may be delighted and in awe of the thirty-­fourth production of Hamlet that she’s seen because the nuances of acting, dialogue, staging, and pacing allow her to appreciate whole new parts of the play or valences of the characters. A museum patron standing in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may see tiny yet magical, beautiful differences from the many other female busts in adjoining rooms at the Louvre Museum. Even though these works of art are remarkably derivative, repetitious, and beholden to countless texts that came before them, they register to many as original, beautiful, inspiring, new, and fresh because of the nuances, in a way that should announce to us that much artistry and talent lies in saying something slightly new about something other­ wise wholly familiar. Certainly, Viktor Shklovsky (1965) noted that poetic or artistic language is that which defamiliarizes, a postulation that presumes and requires the presence of the familiar, whether that is a bust of a woman, a tale of a wronged son, or the tale of a rebel alliance that must vanquish an imperial power. Vladimir Propp (1990) tells us, in fact, that all stories can be subjected to the kind of exercise I have so far conducted here—of walking through the ways in which one plot repeats another. At a certain level of abstraction, a limited

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number of tales exist. George Lucas’s fascination with Joseph Campbells’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is well known, and central to Campbell’s thesis is the notion that stories, characters, and themes keep coming back over and across time. Repetition is key to myth, and thus when A New Hope situates us in a world of moral binaries and Manichean forces in which good guys wear white and bad guys wear black, its claim and desire to operate at a mythic level is in no way subtle. Within that mythic frame, we should expect to see heroes needing to storm the castle again. Or to see the young upstart experience a moment of becoming on the battlefield again. Or to see a great hero struck down publicly again. When Rey and Finn look on powerless as Kylo Ren kills Han Solo, we can see parallels with Luke Skywalker standing witness to Darth Vader killing Obi-­ Wan Kenobi, but we might also see parallels with Frodo seeing Gandalf die, with young Bruce Wayne seeing his parents killed, or with similar events from stories told through multiple generations before film or franchising existed. To say something is original is to say it is different, yet difference itself is structured upon familiarity. To observe difference in two things so radically unlike each other is banal, after all—a pen is not a marsupial. The difference that demands attention and that is more regularly remarked upon, therefore— or, to reword this, the difference that matters and that is discursively registered as difference—is difference that is structured upon and within fundamental similarity. What, for instance, makes this pen different from that one, or that marsupial different from others? The search for difference, and the sociocultural or aesthetic interest in it often presumes remarkable similarity. In storytelling terms, therefore, that which is most amazingly “different” or “original” may be only a slight reworking of something else rather than a radical alternative. In the case at hand, Obi-­Wan and Han both get struck down . . . but how are the particulars of those two scenes different in ways that evoke different reactions, from us, from the characters, by the story itself? Shortly, I will answer this question, but for now, let it be said that though originality comes when an expectation is violated, expectations are set through similarity. Sequels are regularly derided as lazy, corporate storytelling produced via a paint-­by-­numbers approach that confirms Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (1972) fear that, as a culture industry, Hollywood would simply repackage anything that had already sold and worked and would eschew anything truly, radically new. But perhaps we might allow ourselves as a culture more credit than to shake our collective head at how easily we fall for such factory-­made plotting. Instead, and building on the notion that originality requires similarity, perhaps the presence of “an original” or of a previous tale upon which a new one is in some way based, or to which it responds, sets a frame within which we can

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better appreciate originality. As Mikhail Bakhtin (1986: 69) noted, no speaker “is the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe.” Put differently, we all contribute to a dialogue. Meaning—whether of a word, image, utterance, or text—is constructed within the context of its place in a dialogue with other words, images, utterances, and texts. Of course, we need not disparage the “mere” act of repeating something that works. It’s somewhat perplexing to hear people disappointed by a sequel doing things that the original did, since surely this is par for the course. When James Bond orders a vodka martini, or gets a fast car with button-­activated weapons on it, should we roll our eyes at how the film is just “fan service”? When we return to Godfather II and find out that it’s still a gangster film obsessed with family members who sometimes operate behind each other’s backs while jockeying for power, is this lazy filmmaking? When Harry Potter has another Quidditch game that involves an amazing come-­from-­behind victory, or when Katniss must work her way through another set of competitors, is this all just pathetic repetition? Sequels repeat. That is what they promise to do. But this is not slavish remaking. The Force Awakens’s promotions and trailers in particular were clear about their intentions. The prominent use of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in promotional materials made it clear that the gang was getting back together. One of the most repeated lines across its many trailers was Kylo Ren’s “I will finish what you started,” and one trailer ended with Han pronouncing, “Chewie, we’re home.” All sequels are “fan fiction,” if fan fiction is the act of taking many of  the same characters or elements and reworking them with some new elements added. And unless a sequel radically violates the terms of the original world, it’s also always “fan service.” Using those terms to criticize a sequel, therefore, is not only indicative of the speaker’s derogatory, elitist ignorance about fandom (and about audiences more generally), it also betrays a lack of awareness of the very point of sequels, as if one complained that a eulogy wouldn’t shut up about the dead person and how good they were.

Always in Motion Is the Past: Repetition with Difference But, as I have been arguing, the test of The Force Awakens should come from how its repetition sets up the capacity for difference, for new valances and meanings. I will therefore now shift from offering general observations on the nature of originality to ask specific questions of The Force Awakens and of elements judged to be especially repetitious. Starting with our central characters, Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren offer obvious echoes of Luke, Han, and Darth Vader, respectively. As Luke was for A New

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Hope, Rey is the centerpiece of The Force Awakens. In Luke fashion, moreover, her family and background are enshrouded in mystery, as she has been either abandoned or hidden on a desert planet that looks a lot like Tatooine. O’Hehir (2015) dismissively introduces her in his review as “an orphan who doesn’t understand his or her true powers.” Compared to Luke, however, she’s so much more capable, less whiny. We meet her living alone, with no indication that she has had company for a long while. She lives not on the family farm, but in an old AT-­AT, ransacking downed Imperial ships for scrap parts. The schtick surrounding her annoyance at Finn taking her hand tells us a lot about her independence (“I know how to run without you holding my hand!”), as does her unflinching willingness to chase down Finn in the first place and to stand up for herself. Luke needs to ask for permission to do pretty much anything and is fearful of the Tuscan Raiders who surround his farm, and with reason, since they easily overcome him when he ventures out—whereas Rey is fearless and unflappable. We soon see, too, that the Force is stronger in her, as is her self-­confidence. Thus, where Luke needed two films to settle into the role of hero, Rey is a hero from the outset (saving a droid in distress is, indeed, one of  her first acts of  business). Despite being the film’s clear hero, she doesn’t destroy the Starkiller Base, nor does she defeat the bad guy, and yet she offers a stronger spine for the next two films than Luke ever did in A New Hope. Luke’s boyish naïveté was often open to ridicule from Han (and from fans), whereas Rey is nobody’s fool. Finn appears in my plot-­parallels exercise as a counterpart to Han, but he is not at all Han. He’s a defector, not just a rogue. Being a defector invites us to think about the ethical positioning of being part of the First Order in a way that none of the original movies ever cared about and in a way that immediately suggests deeper principles, whereas Han’s principles are notoriously questioned throughout A New Hope. Finn is not as sure of himself as Han is, and he is arguably allowed a wider range: brave, crack shot, scared, tentative, funny, impulsive, controlled, along for the ride, ready to act. Where Han was placed, alongside Obi-­Wan, in the role of mentor and guide for Luke, Finn and Rey are learning together, and if anything, Finn is slower on the uptake. Quite simply, too, Rey is a woman and Finn is black. An overwhelming amount of the attacks on The Force Awakens offering “nothing new” have been from white men who don’t seem to appreciate why it matters that the most successful franchise in media and merchandising history has just been entrusted to a white English woman, a black English man, and (with Poe) a Guatemalan-­ American man. To see Rey as parallel to Luke, Finn to Han, is thus as misguided as it would be to see Thelma and Louise as “just another buddy film,” or The Jeffersons, The Cosby Show, or black-­ish as yet more American family sitcoms.

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As a franchise, Star Wars has regularly relegated racial and ethnic minorities to being comic fodder or the basis for stereotyped alien races, as evident in The Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar and the Gungans’ minstrelsy, as well as in its use of Asian accents for the Trade Federation (see Brooker 2001). Leia, meanwhile, was introduced to us as a princess, decked in pure white, a starkly different image from that of Rey abseiling alone down the abyss of a star destroyer in ruins. Our bad guy is different too. At a shallow surface level, Kylo Ren is Vader-­ like. Looper’s review notes, “We’re stating the obvious here. Kylo Ren is clearly a reincarnated Darth Vader, right? An evil, looming, masked black figure who reports to a gigantic, withered monstrosity of evil?” (“How The Force Awakens” 2015). When we encountered Vader, though, he was derided for practicing an obscure religion and was simply “A Bad Guy”; by contrast, Kylo Ren not only follows Snoke in a way that automatically privileges him over his counterpart General Hux, and that puts him in a long line of Sith, but we know at this point in the franchise to assume that bad guys have good struggling within them and so we’re asked to relate to him differently. Vader, moreover, is confident and assured: he doesn’t run anywhere, he just strides; he never questions himself (till the end of Return of the Jedi); he seems certain of victory. Kylo Ren is replete with weakness, which is sensed by Rey when she reverses his mind-­reading trick; he rages like an angry toddler in ways that are both pathetic and played for humor; he shows off; and for half the film he has his mask off, thereby allowing us greater access to his humanity and his emotions than we ever had with Vader. Before we even knew of Vader’s past, he had been established as the über–bad guy, dressed in black, with a Germanic name and Japanese-­style helmet in an American film released just three decades after World War II, and questionably human. His presence, therefore, was established clearly before he was humanized, whereas Kylo Ren is humanized almost immediately by Lor San Tekka, who says, “I know where you come from, before you called yourself Kylo Ren.” And if Ren is a different type of villain, so too, then, will defeating him require a wholly different bag of tricks than defeating A New Hope’s Vader. Criticisms of The Force Awakens’s originality also focus on particular set pieces and events. Starkiller Base, for instance, struck many critics as Death Star 3.0—to Looper, “just a complete rip off” (“How The Force Awakens” 2015). However, we should hardly expect our bad guys to retreat from building death stars when their destructive potential is so clear. The mere presence of  “another Death Star” should offend us no more than the presence of another six-­shooter in a Western. If Starkiller Base is worthy of scorn—and I believe it is, to be clear—this is not because it’s the third such base in the series but because it is

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so easy to destroy that a lone janitorial Stormtrooper knows what, years before, it took “many Bothan spies” dying to find out about Death Star 2.0. Or take the much-­discussed killing of Han, somewhat reminiscent of the killing of Obi-­Wan. And yet, Obi-­Wan wants to be struck down: Vader taunts him with the idea that when last they met Obi-­Wan had been the master and suggests that he now has control, and yet the taunt is met with no validation by Obi-­Wan, who instead smirks whimsically, stops fighting, and closes his eyes with calm acceptance. One might easily conclude that Obi-­Wan could defeat Vader if he tried but that, somehow, he believes in a higher purpose—for Luke, at whom he glances before sacrificing himself—that will be served by his dying. He matches Vader’s taunt by promising that his being struck down will only make him more powerful, thereby never relinquishing control of the encounter to Vader. More immediately, too, Obi-­Wan takes on Vader to provide a distraction and to allow Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, and the droids to escape the Death Star. By contrast, when Han steps out onto the bridge to meet Ren, he is no decoy, and he does so not to fight his son but to reason with him, to try to win him back. Obi-­Wan never tries to win Vader back to the light side of the Force on the Death Star, whereas Han only wants his son to shirk off the dark side. There is little suggestion that he does so to help Rey along a path, nor does he seem at all sure of himself. Obi-­Wan’s quiet resolve is absent, as Han approaches Ren clearly aware of the danger and of his own mortality. And, of course, he is not approaching an old friend and Padawan: he is approaching his son. Yet, where Obi-­Wan seemed sure of his control of the situation on the Death Star, Kylo Ren has all the power and control on the bridge. Moreover, when Ren finally slays his father, Han’s body remains—unlike Obi-­Wan’s, which completely disappears when struck by Vader’s lightsaber—falling down the air shaft in a scene more reminiscent of Luke’s defeat at the hands of Vader in Empire Strikes Back. To compare Han’s death to Obi-­Wan’s, therefore, requires a myopic inattention to detail, as almost every element of the scene, from the intent of each party to the likely emotional impact on the viewing audience, is markedly different (see Kies in this volume). In analyzing scenes such as this one, we must also consider character history and the relationships that audiences have had the chance to establish with each character. When Vader kills Obi-­Wan, Obi-­Wan has had fairly little screen-­time; by contrast, when Ren kills Han, Han is arguably the most beloved character in a forty-­year-­old franchise (though admittedly not all viewers will have seen the films in the original order). The emotional weight of that scene is considerable, especially for a franchise that has killed remarkably few heroes: compared to the deaths of, say, Porkins, Han’s tauntaun, or Random Ewok #84, Han’s death

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packs a rare punch for Star Wars. Certainly, we must take the thirty-­eight years that separate A New Hope and The Force Awakens into any account regarding how scenes, characters, or themes reminiscent of the former play for “first generation” audiences in the latter. Just as we should expect the experience of attending a ’70s disco night at a night club in 2016 would be markedly different from attending a disco night in the ’70s, so too must we be sensitive to how every scene, character, and event has likely accrued (or in some cases lost) meaning over time. When we know what happened to Luke, Anakin, Han, and friends in their earlier versions, any shadows that we see of them upon contemporary iterations will be read differently precisely because of our awareness of what has happened. And although here I privilege the “original” audience member who has seen them in release order, and not the chronology set up by the prequels, the experiences of any audiences watching in another order will divergently add or subtract differential weight to the scenes, too.

“Only Pain Will You Find”: Nostalgia and Remembrance Indeed, though I reject the suggestion that The Force Awakens is encumbered by its past, its characters and its world are very much aware of, wrestling with, and tortured by their pasts in a way that is quite unique for Star Wars. The Force Awakens situates us in a galaxy where fascism and evil seem doomed to return, as a constant threat, even when we thought they were vanquished. When in 1977 we met Leia’s Rebellion, they seemed to have been fighting the Empire for only a limited time (as suggested, for instance, by the announcement in the middle of the film that the Emperor has only just then dissolved the Senate). The Force Awakens is located from the outset in a bleaker, darker world, as we know this “new” dark force to be yet another iteration of a darkness that clearly cannot be shaken. This darkness is further signaled by a constant awareness of loss: Rey is waiting for her family (who Maz later tells her will never come), and Han and Leia didn’t live happily ever after—they lost their son, Leia lost her brother, C-­3PO seems to have lost R2-­D2, and eventually we all lose Han. As with the death of Han, each of these losses is felt more deeply, too: Han and Leia are shown to have been unable to recover (at least as a couple) from the loss of their son, and Rey feels the absence of her parents as Luke never did. Tears are shed, and even Kylo Ren is tortured by who he was in a way that we can only imagine for Vader in Return of the Jedi. Thus, The Force Awakens regularly strikes a somber, elegiac tone that stands in stark contrast to the regularly effervescent, future-­centered, and upbeat tone of the original trilogy (including even the notably darker Empire Strikes Back).

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Importantly, too, where A New Hope is governed by young people and brims with youthful desires to become someone, to grow up, to create something new, and to throw off the shackles of old guardians, The Force Awakens respects and reveres its elders. Uncle Owen is unlikable for holding Luke back, Grand Moff Tarkin and other old Imperial officers seem similarly to hold Vader in check, and Obi-­Wan is exceptional precisely because he plays the role of cool uncle saying that Luke should go ahead and train as a Jedi, leave home, tag along to a bar filled with scum and villainy. There’s more than a touch of the sixties in our heroes. In The Force Awakens, only Kylo Ren rages against his parents, and not only are we as an audience presumed to side with those parents, but his reverence simply skips a generation and is directed instead toward his grandfather. Meanwhile, the film is quite tender in its brief treatment of Leia and Han as an old couple, Mark Hamill’s face in the closing scene is worn down by time, and even new character Maz has wisdom to be heard. While both The Empire Strikes Back and The Force Awakens have mythic set pieces in which our heroes descend into a dark passage to confront their demons, Luke’s journey on Dagoba is framed as a coming to terms with the path ahead, while Rey is drawn to Maz’s basement by the sounds of herself crying as an infant, and the visions that strike her when she touches the lightsaber are of the past. A whole new set of thematic valences is on offer in The Force Awakens, therefore, and though these may well have been designed with the (middle-­)aged fan in mind, they nevertheless renovate the galaxy for new inhabitants. Ironically, then, when critics say The Force Awakens is drenched in nostalgia, they’re noting that it operates in a different mode from A New Hope, which while stylistically nostalgic is resolutely future-­centered. Certainly, nostalgia is as misunderstood as is originality, and so in these final paragraphs, I want to consider The Force Awakens and nostalgia. Nostalgia is often used clumsily to mean “a desire for repetition,” but its temporality is more complex. Nostalgia creates an alternate version of the past that is, as Paul Monaco (1987: 100) notes, “recollection sweetened, mystified, or mythified” (see also Proctor 2017). It is thus always “a manipulation of historical consciousness” in which “tracings of the past have been taken and molded into intellectual constructs” and is never mere repetition. Monaco somewhat confusingly calls nostalgia “memory without pain,” referring to its historically revisionist creation of a preferred improvement upon the actual past, but he acknowledges that there is always considerable pain inasmuch as nostalgia “is not euphoric, and is often tinged with sadness and penetrated by a sense of loss. Indeed, this is perhaps its most salient and commonly felt association” (1987: 100). Michael D. Dwyer (2015: 10) concurs, writing of nostalgia as “a kind of affective

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critique” that “arises when the desire for homecoming is simultaneously coupled with a recognition of its impossibility.” Nostalgia as feeling revises the past in ways that may make us feel trapped in the present. As genre or mode, nostalgia can simply revel uncritically in that feeling (cf. Happy Days), but more sophisticated uses can interrogate the feeling and encourage reflection: not only that we can’t go backward because of time’s onward march, but that the time, place, or feeling that we want to go back to was never really there. I contend that The Force Awakens plays with this form of nostalgia, thereby directly challenging even the possibility of repetition or of being able to go back and do it all again. Consider Kylo Ren, who holds onto the melted mask of his grandfather and who looks to it for guidance and support. We know this to be a pathetic act, partly because speaking to a melted mask isn’t entirely healthy but mostly because we know his grandfather well. Anakin went to the dark side, destroying many good people in the process—even killing children in the process—and allowing the rise of fascism. He lives up to his destiny to “bring balance to the Force” in his last moments, but overall his life was unequivocally tragic. He wore his mask, what’s more, not as a fashion choice but to hide a scarred face, to hide his last vestiges of humanity, and to be able to breathe. Ren may seem Vader-­like since he is actively trying to emulate him, but to want to walk in Vader’s footsteps, to “finish what he started,” shows a deeply misguided misunderstanding of history. Ren is a figure suffering from nostalgia, mired and trapped in the past that he has created, not a real past. And yet when his father Han tries to rescue him from it, Ren acknowledges that moving back in time isn’t possible. Han’s final words with Ren are marked by futility—precisely because we’ve seen the original trilogy, we know when Han steps out onto that bridge that he’s dead, and as he appeals to Ren we know the appeal will fail. There is no going back. To be fair to The Force Awakens’s critics who allege woeful nostalgia, they’re not talking about nostalgia within the diegesis; they’re talking about nostalgia for the original films. Abrams certainly gives us Han and Chewie in the Falcon again, X-­Wings destroying enemy bases, lightsaber battles in the dark, and even iris and wipe edits. But he also denies us some pleasures in thoughtful ways that conform to this interesting, reflective type of nostalgia. Take Han and Leia. We don’t get much of them bickering in a playful, sexually charged way in The Force Awakens, and we don’t see them living happily ever after. We see them hug, but with Leia’s eyes full of loss and sadness. They reflect upon the fact that their relationship wasn’t strong enough to survive the loss of their son, and in their reflections that they each responded by “going back to the only thing I was ever any good at,” there’s an admission that they weren’t all that good at being with each other. There’s an acceptance of this, moreover, and Abrams never poses

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the state of their relationship as something to be resolved or overcome. I find a painful beauty in that. Nostalgic? Yes. But not at all repetitious, nor a return to the way things were; instead, a message that the only (open, obvious) couple that the original trilogy gave us wasn’t a princess and her knight destined to live happily ever after, and that maybe we don’t need the princess and the knight to live happily ever after. In short, The Force Awakens isn’t just an exercise in the gleeful nostalgia of going back to where we were, and it has a more complex relationship to time and to the pasts in and of the film. The Force Awakens engages with nostalgia, but it is a thoughtful engagement. In The Phantom Menace, Master Yoda explains the Sith’s Rule of  Two: “Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.” Yet throughout the Star Wars films, we see not simply masters schooling their apprentices but also apprentices bettering their masters, whether through being more powerful or more interesting. In this chapter, I have argued that all texts, especially within a world of franchising, are apprentice to one or more other masters (since, contra Master Yoda, regularly there are more than two). Yet this alone does not foreclose their capacity to be as powerful, interesting, or original as their masters. The Force Awakens is indeed A New Hope’s apprentice in many ways, but in and of itself this tells us nothing of its originality. Criticisms of franchise “unoriginality” such as have been detailed here too regularly rest upon weak and ultimately unfeasible notions of originality that merely stand in the way of a more powerful, more interesting critical approach.

11 Emma Pett

“Real Life Is Rubbish” The Subcultural Branding and Inhabitable Appeal of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back

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his chapter explores the promotion and reception of Secret Cinema’s immersive production of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), which ran from May to September 2015 in Canary Wharf, London. Secret Cinema is a United Kingdom–based events company specializing in the production of immersive or participatory film screenings.1 Its four-­month production of The Empire Strikes Back sold 100,000 tickets and was the forty-­eighth-­ highest grossing film of 2015 in the United Kingdom, taking more at the box office than many well-­publicized and award-­nominated new releases such as Birdman (2015) and Carol (2015).2 While this can partly be accounted for by the enduring appeal of the film with fans of the franchise (Proctor 2013), the marked success of this immersive production also raises questions around changing patterns of cinema exhibition. This analysis of the promotion and reception of Secret Cinema’s Star Wars event therefore explores the intersecting factors involved in what has been theorized as part of a turn toward demand-­led, bespoke film distribution strategies (Kehoe and Mateer 2015). Although this immersive production of The Empire Strikes Back was fully endorsed by Lucasfilm (Rosser 2015), its promotional strategies did not incorporate the ubiquitous franchise branding adopted by other transmedia tourist attractions operating at the same time, such as LEGO Star Wars Days and Star Wars at Madame Tussauds. While these attractions traded on the official Star Wars brand to attract customers, Secret Cinema developed an alternative marketing strategy, framing its “Stay Disconnected” campaign to promote The Empire Strikes Back in terms of its exclusivity, community, and “liveness” (Auslander

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1999). Indeed, interviews conducted with event participants across the summer of 2015 suggest that an aversion to the “Disneyfication” of the Star Wars franchise might have contributed to the success of Secret Cinema’s subcultural branding of The Empire Strikes Back event, in that it appealed to fans of the original trilogy who complained it had been “spoilt” since Disney’s acquisition (Pett 2016: 165). In this chapter, I first argue that through both marketing strategies and merchandise designs, Secret Cinema employed a commercial reworking of subcultural capital and of being “in the know” (Thornton 1995) in an attempt to attract both an “early adopter hipster-­elite” (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015) as well as fans of the original Star Wars trilogy. This was achieved through the modus operandi of Secret Cinema’s marketing campaign and the aesthetics of its promotional materials, which I suggest resemble “transformational” fan artworks in their reworking of iconic images and the familiar logo (obsession_inc 2009). The following study of the critical and popular reception of Secret Cinema’s production of The Empire Strikes Back reveals that it was broadly positive. While partly capitalizing on the long-­standing popularity of the film with fans of the franchise, this success might also imply an effective repositioning of its brand identity to appeal to both loyal Secret Cinema devotees and to a new generation of Star Wars fans. Many of the reviews of the event remarked on this, thus offering a striking contrast to the reception of Secret Cinema’s 2014 blockbuster production of Back to the Future. In this reception study of seventy-­one reviews of The Empire Strikes Back published in the mainstream media and on popular websites and blogs, I identify some of the critical discourses framing Secret Cinema’s second blockbuster production and the way in which it circumvented critiques leveled at Back to the Future. These discursive frameworks focus predominantly on conceptions of fandom and what has been described as the “inhabitable” appeal of the Star Wars universe (J. Gray 2010: 187). This analysis is preceded by a brief discussion of the very few negative reviews of the production that focused on issues of scale and monetization; tellingly, it is only within this context that detractors of the Secret Cinema brand reference the Disney brand. I argue that the marginal status of this antipopulist Disney discourse within the broader context of reviews for the production indicates the successful way in which the subcultural branding of The Empire Strikes Back evaded association with The Walt Disney Company and engaged with the full spectrum of Star Wars fans. Founded in 2007, Secret Cinema has built its brand identity around a clandestine and bespoke repackaging of classic, cult, and popular films as interactive audience experiences. The initial concept and “Tell No One” brand required

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keeping the title of the film secret from participants until they arrived at the event they had purchased a ticket for. However, in 2014 the company launched its Secret Cinema Presents program of immersive events, which focused on the production of large-­scale immersive reworkings of blockbuster films. This arguably created a conceptual tension. On one hand, participants were instructed to “tell no one” about their experiences and to follow the secretive instructions leading up to the event; on the other hand, they were also fully aware of the film they were choosing to buy a ticket for. Furthermore, the scale of the production and number of people attending meant that maintaining secrecy shrouding the event was much more difficult. The production of the first Secret Cinema Presents event, Back to the Future, was mired in technical issues, resulting in ticket cancellations and a negative backlash on social media. Furthermore, fans of Back to the Future, with no prior experience of the Secret Cinema brand, were perplexed and frustrated by the secrecy surrounding the location, the requirement to surrender mobile phones upon arrival at the venue, and the instruction to “Tell No One” about their experiences (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016). Although financially successful, Secret Cinema Presents’s production of Back to the Future led to media speculation that the events company had lost its way and alienated its core audience, who were attracted to the bespoke, hipster aesthetic of its earlier productions (Greenwood and Barnes 2014). It was within this discursive context that Secret Cinema began marketing its production of The Empire Strikes Back.

#WithYou: Subcultural Branding and the Rebel Aesthetic Secret Cinema’s four-­month run of its immersive production of The Empire Strikes Back was promoted via a series of covert emails, which invited participants to join “Rebel X” and gather at secret locations across London. These included a launch event at Alexandra Palace, a pop-­up store in Shoreditch, and a Secret Cantina nightclub located at Hoxton Town Hall. This covert marketing strategy was also extended across social media spaces, particularly Twitter and Facebook, where participants were encouraged to share their experiences of preliminary events using the hashtags #RebelX and #WithYou. Sarah Atkinson and Helen Kennedy have argued that the themes of rebellion and secrecy central to the narrative of the Star Wars franchise perfectly complemented Secret Cinema’s “Tell No One” brand. This brand synergy facilitated what Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) have dubbed a “secret aesthetic,” which played out across online and offline spaces in the run-­up to the production, allowing participants

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to perform in character on social media as well as at the actual events. This, they argue, meant that Secret Cinema’s production of The Empire Strikes Back sidestepped some of the issues that had arisen with its previous production of Back to the Future in 2014, at which fans of the film had objected to the secretive tactics employed by Secret Cinema (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015). However, in this chapter I contend that not only did the covert character of Secret Cinema’s marketing strategy mirror the secretive ethos of Star Wars’s Rebel alliance, but similarly that the design of the posters, costumes, and merchandise created for the production were likewise inflected with a subversive, cult aesthetic. The range of paratextual materials surrounding this immersive production is, I argue, central to understanding how the events company repackaged The Empire Strikes Back as a means to restore the brand credibility of its blockbuster Secret Cinema Presents brand of immersive entertainment. Largely eschewing Lucasfilm-­Disney’s pervasive Star Wars logo, both the branding developed to market the launch event at Alexandra Place and the subsequent elements of the immersive production offered little information about the events to follow and traded on an enigmatic appeal.3 The grainy, black-­and-­ white aesthetics of the posters offered an alternative imagining of the Star Wars universe far removed from the familiar logo and glossy Disney designs created to promote the official cinematic release of The Force Awakens (2015) later that year. Similarly, the costumes and badges available to buy at the pop-­up shop did not directly reference the official merchandise of the Star Wars trilogy but were instead informed by a countercultural, DIY aesthetic. Posters and other items of merchandise available to buy at the preliminary and main events were also designed to extend Secret Cinema’s subcultural branding of the event across several spaces. The DIY “Rebel aesthetic” of the merchandise and other paratextual materials produced by Secret Cinema are, I argue, suggestive of what has been termed “transformational fannish activities” (obsession_inc 2009) in the way it reworks or “twists” the source materials for its own purposes. Subcultural branding has previously been considered in relation to fashion and clothing cultures. Cath Davies’s (2014: 3) study of the aesthetic appeal of the Dr. Martens brand considers how subcultural discourses of the past have been appropriated and repackaged to generate contemporary consumer demand “by foregrounding the ideology of individual expression and non-­conformity.” Drawing on the “cultural biography” of the brand, Davies offers a textual analysis of contemporary Dr. Martens branding to illustrate how the heritage of subcultural ideology is channeled and employed to encourage “contemporary consumers to view their brand as a platform on which identity is inscribed,

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reinvented and reconfigured” (15). However, Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back merchandise did not draw directly on the official franchise branding in its design and aesthetic appeal. Rather than transfer brand loyalty onto the merchandise produced by Disney’s Star Wars, Secret Cinema instead focused on subcultural appropriation of the Star Wars brand that, as I outline, drew on a transformational “Rebel aesthetic.” Whereas affirmational fan practices seek to replicate official creative sources faithfully, transformational fan practices set out to reshape and transform elements of the fan object or universe for their own purposes (obsession_inc 2009). In a similar way, Secret Cinema’s merchandise and branding surrounding its production of The Empire Strikes Back was imitative of fan artwork and thus potentially appealed to fans of the original trilogy. The resemblance of the paratextual promotional materials for Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back to transformational fan art is significant in the historical context of the relationship between Star Wars fans and Lucasfilm. Wrangling and conflict between the fan community and Lucasfilm has long characterized this relationship, which perhaps reached its most antagonistic point during the release of the prequel trilogy. As Will Brooker (2002: 8) notes, “Lucas’s return as omnipotent author therefore puts him in the ironic position of reclaiming control over an Empire, stamping his own vision on the Star Wars universe and stamping out ‘rebel’ interpretations such as slash fiction or films that infringe copyright.” The appeal of Secret Cinema’s fan art–inspired transformational merchandise to the generation who grew up with the first trilogy is perhaps not surprising. It also facilitates the creation of an inhabitable, nostalgic world in which fans can re-­create the Star Wars role-­play of their childhoods. However, it has been suggested that this might create an inherent tension in Secret Cinema’s marketing strategy. Atkinson and Kennedy (2016: 264) argue that “this ethos of rebellion and the countercultural call for participation is in contradistinction to the cultural dynamics and consumption at work here— where participants pay theme park prices for ‘Spice Smuggler’ and ‘Bounty Hunter’ cocktails and get drawn into merchandising opportunities which are at odds with the anti-­establishment discourse which they exploit.” Atkinson and Kennedy identify a contradiction between the subcultural, anti-­establishment appeal of the event and the inescapable monetization of the production. While this is astutely observed, I argue that the subcultural capital of  Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back plays alongside, and in tandem with, the unique inhabitable appeal of the Star Wars universe for both fans and converts alike. This becomes evident through an analysis of the critical and popular reception of the four-­ month event.

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Tell Everyone: An Overview of Critical and Popular Responses This overview of the critical and popular reception of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back examines twenty-­seven newspaper articles and forty-­six online reviews, all of which were published between March 2015 and April 2016.4 The range of online reviews includes articles from mainstream sources, some of which were also published in print format (such as the Radio Times and Metro reviews), as well as blog posts from fans and other online reviewers. In this respect, the selection of materials considered does not set out to privilege “professional” over “amateur” reviews, a distinction which is increasingly difficult to maintain, but instead offers a comprehensive cross-­section of reviews of the event published both online and in print. These seventy-­one reviews are then analyzed to identify recurring discourses and points of reference, as well as to establish the extent to which the event was received positively by critics and fans. In the mainstream media, twenty-­one of the articles referencing Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back were largely neutral or ambivalent in that they discussed box office takings or other factual information. Just one article, published in the Guardian, was a wholly critical review, positioning the production as part of the ongoing trajectory of Secret Cinema’s “fall from grace” (Benjamin Lee 2015). The remaining five reviews in the mainstream press were broadly favorable and positive in their evaluation of the event. Online reviews were more varied and complex in their tone and content, suggesting that beyond the parameters of the mainstream media there was less pressure to adopt a strong position or opinion in relation to coverage of the production. Of these reviews, five were neutral and mainly factual in content; thirteen offered a balanced appraisal, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the production; twenty-­six were overwhelmingly positive and celebratory in tone; and two were critical. The prominent discursive frameworks identified across these articles focused on (1) comparisons with previous Secret Cinema events; (2) the importance of being (or not being) a Star Wars fan in relation to appreciating the event; (3) ticket and refreshment prices; (4) having fun and being “immersed”; and (5) box office takings. While the majority of the reviews were positive, the small minority offering an overtly critical response tended to contextualize The Empire Strikes Back unfavorably alongside previous Secret Cinema productions. Benjamin Lee (2015) in the Guardian concluded that “Secret Cinema’s gradual fall from grace continues with a flawed production,” while Wired’s James Temperton (2015) mourned, “the once wonderful format has lost its way.” Central to these critical responses

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were issues of monetization and scale. Temperton’s description of the event as a “rip-­off pantomime” focused on the ticket price (seventy-­eight pounds) and his accusation that “the money-­grabbing nature is what grates most. The seemingly constant presence of roaming food and drink sellers makes it feel like you’re being ‘monetised’ from start to finish” (Temperton 2015). This complaint was echoed within a number of other reviews. One reviewer observed that “with the cost of outfits, travel, food and drink, this Secret Cinema show isn’t kind to your wallet” (Eames 2016); and another noted “one Star Wars fan taking to Twitter called the price hike daylight robbery” (Parton 2015), highlighting the fact that tickets were significantly more expensive than they had been for Back to the Future in 2014. The scale of the production was also central to the critical discourse of monetization. In the Guardian, this manifested as a complaint that “the scale of it all makes it difficult to understand what on earth is happening. . . . The re-­enactments of iconic scenes are made difficult to see thanks to the crowds of people” (Benjamin Lee 2015). Tellingly, the only reviewer to reference Disney was also negative in his assessments, arguing that “when it started Secret Cinema felt like a small club at which people could enjoy films in a new way. It was clever, fun and intimate. It is now like a trip to Disneyland but with subpar special effects” (Temperton 2015). Both Lee and Temperton thus frame their critique of The Empire Strikes Back within a discourse that devalues popular, big-­budget immersive productions, and valorizes the bespoke, exclusive nature of earlier Secret Cinema events. However, beyond this discursive framework there was notably little criticism of the production itself, with Lee conceding that there were “a couple of nice touches which it would be unfair to reveal” and that “the sets are undeniably impressive” (Benjamin Lee 2015). These critical reviews suggest, then, that even detractors of the Secret Cinema brand found it difficult to fault its production of The Empire Strikes Back and were forced to retreat to an antipopulist discourse in order to validate their position. The vast majority of reviews, however, agreed that this immersive production of The Empire Strikes Back was a triumph, particularly following the technical problems and cancellations that had been associated with Back to the Future. The Independent’s reviewer felt that “Secret Cinema has proved that it is on form with this new show” (Eleftheriou-­Smith 2015), and others were far less reticent, stating the event was “a punch-­the-­air thrill ride that doesn’t fail to delight” (Eames 2016), “unexpectedly moving” (Marcus and Ralf 2015), “a once in a lifetime immersive encounter” (Gillam 2015) that “feels like the best cosplay convention you’ve ever been to” (“Secret Cinema” 2015) and that participants should “prepare to fall in love with Star Wars all over again” (Deen 2015).

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These celebratory responses also countered criticisms regarding monetization, as some reviewers actively addressed complaints made about ticket prices. A reviewer for LondonTheatre.co.uk suggested that such criticisms were unjust and argued that “fans fork out their money for special occasions, and judging from the audience’s response last night, it’s an expenditure that they certainly aren’t regretting” (Millward 2015). Perhaps tellingly, this reviewer was writing for an audience interested in shows that generally carried a higher price tag for an evening’s entertainment. Financial considerations aside, the discussion of fans raised by this reviewer touch on another significant framework characterizing the reception of The Empire Strikes Back, that of Star Wars fandom.

“Secret Star Trek”: Super-­Fans, Nonfans, and Converts A key discursive framework evident in fifty-­three of the seventy-­one articles surveyed was the extent to which those attending the event needed to be a Star Wars fan in order to appreciate it. A small number of reviewers concluded that this was for die-­hard fans only, and that “the more devoted the fan boy or girl you are, the more likely you are to appreciate the hundreds of little winks and nods to the wider universe” (Wright 2015). The more mixed reviews were most likely to be aligned with this position, and a few made the argument that “the extortionate price tag does make it for super-­fans only” (Howes 2015). Unsurprisingly, the Guardian’s reviewer contended, “The decision to indulge in a ticket is . . . dependent on just how much of a Star Wars fanatic you are. There is no space for apathy here” (Benjamin Lee 2015). However, the majority of reviewers concluded that this was an experience “for fans and non-­fans alike” (Holmes 2015). A number of reviews argued that the event was hugely enjoyable “even if you only like Star Wars a tiny bit” (Ratcliff 2015), with some stating that “I’m not even a huge fan of Star Wars and yet I was incredibly entertained’ (Millward 2015). The way in which individual reviewers evaluated the extent of their fandom in relation to their enjoyment is indicative not only of the sheer diversity and scale of Star Wars fandom, but also of the way in which the production successfully created a generalized appeal. As one review observes: “For the new generation of Star Wars fans, the experience is fantastic” (Badat 2015). Other reports note that “we saw seven-­year-­old kids and a couple in their seventies having a great evening” (Marcus and Ralf 2015). The cross-­generational appeal of the Star Wars franchise was thus successfully translated into the cross-­generational appeal of this Secret Cinema production. Several reviewers also discussed becoming Star Wars fans as a result of the Secret Cinema experience. One reviewer began by establishing that, “I really

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didn’t like Star Wars. I might even have classed myself as a dis-­fan. An un-­fan. A decided non-­fan of Star Wars,” before concluding with the statement: “If you can go—do. It’s a great night and you will enjoy yourself; from an ex-­non-­fan, I guarantee it” (Wolfe 2015). Another reviewer recounted the way his companion at the event became converted to the Star Wars franchise, noting how “even my companion, who kept calling it ‘Secret Star Trek,’ and asking after ‘Princess Layla,’ wanted to stay to the end. Incredibly, she wanted to know how the story ended” (Holmes 2015). In addition to those reviewers who positioned themselves or their companions as Star Wars converts, others recommended it as “a brilliant way to introduce your family to a series of films you may have watched growing up. . . . Personally, I hadn’t seen a Star Wars film until the day before (*squeal*), but with hindsight, I am glad I did. The sets are seriously jaw-­dropping, and it was great to recognise things, places and characters I had seen” (Hudson 2015). The diversity of fan identities among those who attended and reviewed the event underlines the enduring and evolving popularity of the Star Wars franchise. This suggests that the subcultural appeal of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back, discernible in the marketing campaign and merchandise created for the event, was accompanied and, to a certain extent, subsumed by the overwhelming popularity of the Star Wars franchise. Finally, this chapter now turns to consider the pivotal role of cosplay, once considered a niche or fannish activity, in facilitating the immersive production’s success.

“I’m Such a Happy Chewbacca”: The Inhabitable Appeal of Star Wars Characters The Star Wars franchise has a significant history in relation to merchandise that has been documented elsewhere (Fleming 1996; Brooker 2002; Hills 2003b; Kapell and Lawrence 2006; J. Gray 2010; Geraghty 2014). Of particular relevance to Secret Cinema’s immersive reconstruction of the Star Wars universe is what Jonathan Gray has described as the inhabitability of the media worlds it invokes. Recalling an interview with Damon Lindelof, Gray (2010: 187) notes: “When I asked Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof about transmedia’s potential at the IRTS [International Radio and Television Society] and Disney Digital Media Summit in 2008, he began his answer by giving a long history of the Boba Fett toy and of Star Wars’s mastery of transmedia storytelling, ‘What Star Wars represented to many . . . was a belief that media worlds could and should be somewhat inhabitable’ ” (emphasis in original). The ability of Star Wars merchandise to invoke these media worlds and make them accessible and inhabitable to fans

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offers a second way of understanding the significance of paratextual encounters in facilitating Secret Cinema’s success. Perhaps the most notable recent entry into the history of Star Wars merchandise is the phenomenal popularity of Chewbacca Mom, whose Facebook Live video of herself trying on a Chewbacca mask went viral and was viewed 141 million times within twenty-­four hours.5 While Chewbacca Mom’s infectious enjoyment of the mask was clearly part of the video’s popularity, it also illustrates the extent to which people enjoy dressing up as Star Wars characters.6 One reviewer of Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back described the event as “the best cosplay convention you’ve ever been to, mixing interactive theatre with a club night, merchandise stalls and a terrific food market” (“Secret Cinema” 2015). Another confessed: “I’m not particularly good at cosplay but I had always wanted to dress as Mara Jade from the extended world of the Star Wars novels and couldn’t resist finally doing it” (Power 2015). Even mildly critical reviews of the event, such as Nick de Semlyen’s review in Empire, suggest a self-­parodic delight taken in the cosplay element of the evening: “Empire—who dressed ‘up’ for the occasion as a Dark Helmet–esque Darth Vader, a gaffer-­taped-­trousers-­wearing Han Solo, a crap Porkins and a Poundshop Obi-­Wan—got pestered by Jawas, enjoyed some Lando’s Chicken (pun of the night) and accidentally wandered into an expansive outdoors smoking area, proving that deathsticks are still in vogue” (de Semlyen 2015). De Semlyen’s review suggests the broad appeal of dressing up (badly) as characters from the Star Wars universe. The same enjoyment is articulated by a number of other reviewers, as evidenced in comments such as “life’s hard when you’re a Jedi kitted out in eBay’s finest robes, especially after a night drinking Spice Smugglers at the Mos Eisley Cantina” (Orr 2015), and “I even had a brief chat with C-­3PO at one point . . . . Well, you don’t get to do that every Thursday evening!” (Millward 2015). There is a sense in many of these reviews that even those who did not position themselves as Star Wars fans found the cosplay element of the production to be one of the most enjoyable parts: “Cinema-­goers without an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Dagobah system can still throw themselves into the extra-­ terrestrial role play, exploring the hand built alien landscapes and enjoying the music in the cantina without being able to hum along to Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes” (Tracy Brown 2015). As de Semlyen and Brown infer, there is an iconic familiarity of characters from the Star Wars universe. This makes them instantly recognizable even to those with little fan knowledge and thus facilitates a cosplay-­for-­all scenario. The repeated discussion of cosplay in the reviews of Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back suggests that the experience of inhabiting or encountering these familiar characters at close quarters offers

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a significant pleasure to those attending the event. Part of this enjoyment is a collision of iconic cosplay with mundane “real world” experiences, as was also discussed by participants in a small audience study of the event (Pett 2016). One interviewee, Simon, remarked: “There’s this funny jarring thing when you see a Jedi Knight having a cigarette outside, and I kind of really like that too” (quoted in Pett 2016: 163). This participant’s enjoyment in being a part of an ensemble performance of The Empire Strikes Back rested, partly, in the combination of cosplay with nonperformative, mundane moments, when the role-­play was temporarily suspended during a cigarette break. A final dimension of the discourse surrounding the cosplay element of the event centered on the tension between “fun” and commercial exploitation, or, as a reviewer in the Radio Times (Holmes 2015) called it, the “fun/money ratio.” This review frames its evaluation of the role-­play aspect of the event within a discourse of monetization, a discourse also observed in a study of audience evaluations of immersive cinema conducted at the Prince Charles Cinema in London (McCulloch and Crisp 2016). There is an implication, then, that the inability of participants to engage in the “make believe” element of Secret Cinema stemmed from their issues with pricing: The Sith-­on-­tour are missing the point and so, frankly, are people grousing about the price. You could see them, as they ate their falafel while standing next to Boba Fett, taking their own temperature. “Am I having fun? Am I having enough fun? What is my fun/money ratio?” Look. This isn’t an “immersive experience.” It’s play. Make believe. It simply has a bigger budget because, for whatever reason, adults aren’t allowed to pick up sticks in a park and have a lightsaber fight. (Holmes 2015) The “make believe” element identified by Holmes is similarly described by another reviewer, who recounts his experience of leaving the event at the end of the night: “The movie eventually concludes to the sound of mighty cheers, the actors assume their final positions . . . while most of us head back down to Earth, glowing like newly activated lightsabers. ‘Real life is rubbish,’ sighs one costumed chap as he re-­enters the station, to widespread agreement. We’d all trade infinite seeds and jewels to go back up there one more time” (Hawkins 2015). In this final respect, then, the most successful aspect of Secret Cinema’s presentation of The Empire Strikes Back is the way in which it offers an opportunity, as one reviewer (Holmes 2015) suggests, to go “straight back to childhood.” As the reviewer in the Daily Telegraph argues, it’s “ridiculously good fun. . . . There was clapping, booing, cheering and a definite party atmosphere throughout” (Hawkes 2015). The appeal of “make believe” and of returning to

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childhood looms large in the critical reception of the event, suggesting that it is this dimension of Secret Cinema’s marketing of The Empire Strikes Back that is most effective. As founder Fabien Riggall expounds: “For me what Secret Cinema represents is that feeling of going to the cinema as a child. . . . It’s where the relationship you have between your seat and the screen is very different to you than the one you have when you’re an adult, and the experience of going to the movies as a child is a much larger than life experience” (quoted in Galusha 2015). The Star Wars franchise therefore offers an unusually effective brand match for Secret Cinema. As a part of one of the most inhabitable and popular fictional worlds in the transmedia marketplace, The Empire Strikes Back offers a text that perfectly complements Secret Cinema’s re-­creation of a “larger than life” experience of childhood media engagement.

Conclusion This study of the promotion and reception of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back contributes to a growing field of academic work analyzing “the most voluminous paratextual entourage in entertainment history” (J. Gray 2010: 177). That an immersive production drawing on the Star Wars universe was a success is not surprising. However, this study suggests that Secret Cinema was successful in marketing its production to a broad and diverse audience: an early adopter hipster elite, devoted Star Wars fans, casual audiences, and newcomers to the franchise. This was achieved through a combination of subcultural marketing and effective production values that were aligned with the already existing inhabitable appeal of the franchise and that facilitated a cosplay-­for-­all culture. This chapter also extends existing analyses of the synergy between Secret Cinema’s brand and the Star Wars franchise. Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) have previously argued that this resulted in a “secret aesthetic” derived from the franchise narrative. I have developed this to consider the subcultural branding of Secret Cinema’s merchandise, suggesting that its resemblance to transformational fan art extends subcultural branding across a wider range of paratextual spaces. However, I also suggest that the inhabitable appeal of the Star Wars universe was a more powerful and significant factor in determining the success of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back. The marginal role played by discourses surrounding Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars franchise is significant here in one respect. Critics of Secret Cinema’s Empire Strikes Back employed references to Disneyland as a means of be­ littling the value of the event as excessively populist, especially via a discourse of monetization. Interestingly, this also reflected a fan discourse identified among

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the generation who grew up with the original trilogy (Pett 2016: 165). However, such critiques overlook how effective subcultural branding was for this segment of the audience in that it circumvented associations between the Star Wars franchise and Disney. Thus, a combined study of the marketing and reception materials surrounding Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back reveals the complexity of its paratextual positionings in order to achieve popular, critical, and commercial success.

12 Paul Booth

Disney’s Princess Leia

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ne of the most telling moments from Star Wars: The Force Awakens occurs in what appears to be a throwaway moment, a laugh for longtime fans. Upon seeing Han Solo emerge from his Millennium Falcon with Chewie by his side at the resistance camp, a visibly flustered C-­3PO turns to General Leia Organa and exclaims: “Princess! Er . . . General!” For the audience in the theater when I was seeing the film, the bit of dialogue prompted laughter, “squees” of glee, and smiles of recognition. Indeed, in the film Leia is more often referred to as “General” than as “Princess,” and this deliberately sets up a clear divide between these two aspects of the character. The line is more appropriate than Threepio might first imagine, as it places a cultural debate squarely in the middle of one of the largest films of all time—how, exactly, does Leia fit into the Star Wars franchise, given that Disney owns Lucasfilm? What does it mean that Leia transistions from a princess when her text becomes a Disney film? Is Leia, as fans have questioned since the merger in 2012, a Disney Princess? Or is she something else? In this chapter, I will analyze the Disney-­Lucasfilm merger with a specific focus on the fan reaction to Disney Princess Leia. I will focus specifically on a comparison between the Disney Princess Leia controversy and a textual analysis of Disney-­Marvel’s five-­issue comic release of Princess Leia as a paratextual and transmediated way of exploring the shift from princess to general. Using Lincoln Geraghty’s (2014) conception of collecting and nostalgia, and Jonathan Gray’s (2010) discussion of paratextuality within media franchises, I will discuss the ranges of ways that merchandising played a role in the fan interpretation of the merger and its representation through authorized ancillary works. Ultimately, I argue that fan depictions of “Disney Princess Leia” become more than just silly memes; they reflect a growing bifurcation of media products in gendered lines and have influenced the direction of the series.

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“Finally! A Disney Princess Who Doesn’t Suck!” A Huffington Post headline on Halloween day 2012 seems to represent both the best and the worst of the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney. “Leia Is the Newest Disney Princess,” the headline reads, but the article doesn’t go into too much more detail: “But there might just be a silver lining in all of this. Finally! A Disney princess who doesn’t suck!” (“Leia Is the Newest Disney Princess” 2012). The equivocation in this article is relevant. Not only does the author indicate a negative reading of the Star Wars acquisition, but she or he also highlights an assumed positive effect this might have: the addition of a badass fighter to the more passive Disney Princess Line, an extremely popular and valuable franchise that focuses on eleven fictional female heroines who have appeared in various Disney franchises. The gendered reading of this is clear: girls’ media (and, by extension, girls’ toys) are less valuable and less interesting than so-­called boys’ media and boys’ toys. Such an assumption is not only sexist, but it also rests on some incorrect information: Disney’s Princess Line is incredibly valuable, as Claire Suddath (2015) writes: “Mattel put the size of its Disney Princess doll business at $300 million, though analysts at Needham say it’s closer to $500 million.” And that’s just the dolls: Suddath values the entire franchise (which includes films, books, and clothes, among other things) at $5.5 billion. The Huffington Post article was referencing not just the $4.05 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, but also a specific image—Princess Leia, blaster in her hand, determined look on her face, with the label “Disney Princess” emblazoned on the bottom of the photo—found within the online fandom (“Obligatory of the Day” 2012). As with any fan discussions about Leia, there is a certain amount of ambiguity in this image: Is the creator of the meme arguing that Leia will be a badass Disney Princess (“Finally! A Disney princess who doesn’t suck!”)? Or are they condemning the acquisition, linking Leia with the perceived antifeminist portrayals of other popular Disney Princesses like Snow White, Aurora, Ariel, or Belle (a hint at what is to come, if Leia is treated the same way as the other Princesses, demure and meek)? The image itself seems a good metaphor for the reaction to the merger from fans of both Disney and Star Wars—a certain amount of confusion, some hopeful glances at what is to come, and some trepidation at the perceived “Disney-­fication” of the beloved Lucasfilm franchise (for analysis of reactions to the acquisition, see Proctor 2013). And franchise is the operative word. The purchase of Lucasfilm firmly cemented Disney as a leader in twenty-­fi rst-­century media conglomeration, for in the space of only six years between 2006 and 2012 Disney purchased not just Lucasfilm (which includes Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the special effects house

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Industrial Light and Magic), but also the Marvel universe, Pixar Animation Studios, The Muppets franchise and, more recently, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox holdings (see Lee and Kang 2018). Combined with Marvel Comics and the rapidly expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Disney’s Star Wars expanded not only the cult universes Disney owned, but also the fans that Disney sought to reach. Thus, the tensions within the figure of Disney Princess Leia seemed to lie not just in the political economy of corporate mergers, but also in how these mergers might affect the common perceptions of the characters by the fan audiences of these franchises. Whether accurate or not, there are gendered assumptions about the audiences of Star Wars, Marvel, and the Disney Princess Line. Indeed, according to Monika Bartyzel (2015), writing in Forbes: What was once implicit is now explicit. . . . Fans are greeted with flagrant disinterest in the diversity these franchises already have and the money they could make from them. According to a former Marvel employee quoting her supervisor, the company’s desired demographic has no girls because “that’s not why Disney bought us. They already have the girls’ market on lockdown.” . . . Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm because they wanted to access the male market. To achieve this goal, they allocate less to Marvel’s female demo, and even less to a unisex one. This artificial binary can also be read in Disney’s shift in Princess toy manufacturer—from Mattel to Hasbro—on January 1, 2016. As discussed by Suddath (2015), Hasbro “has traditionally kept to the boys’ side of the toy aisle, with brands such as Nerf and Transformers” (although recently they also launched the My Little Pony line). In contrast, Mattel has Barbie, the biggest doll brand in the world, and a number of other girl-­centric toy lines. Although such a clear gendered split may be a bit too pat in specifics, Disney’s move, as Suddath argues, reveals a corporate bifurcation of audience. Hasbro already makes products for some of their other franchises (Star Wars and Marvel) and thus, for Suddath, Disney’s purchase of Marvel and of Lucasfilm may appear to be an attempt to diversify audiences, but it also codifies specific gendered stereotypes into specific franchises. Hasbro, the “boys toys” manufacturer, seems a more “natural” fit as “Disney decided to try to portray the princesses more as heroines than damsels” (Suddath 2015). In other words, Disney seemed to attempt to use the shift to highlight the masculinized enculturation of its new franchise. Here, the Disney purchase of Lucasfilm illustrates a clear, gendered hierarchy of fandom and character (Bethan Jones 2015), as the (perceived) feminine toys and interests of Disney are devalued and reworked into the more (perceived) masculine toys and interests of Star Wars.

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This corporate gendering trickles down into fan work as well. As Condis (2015: 199) discusses, in terms of gender and gaming, gendered assumptions over popular culture affect “the contours of the participation gap more fully and questions who is able to lay claim to titles like ‘fan’ . . . how those titles are being contested along gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed lines, what happens when new users lay claim to those titles, and how some fans are reacting to the loss of their privileged relationships with content producers.” Whatever the impetus behind the meme, the Disney Princess Leia controversy became a fan focus. Fans created art, comics, videos, fiction, GIFs, and a multitude of other online works to highlight the interaction between Disney Princesses and Lucasfilm. In one particular image, Han and Luke discuss Leia’s “arrival” as a Disney Princess. Besides being an illustration of the critical production knowledge that fans bring to the online discussion (i.e., fans are very much aware of the political economy of the franchises of which they are fans), these images also demonstrate the cultural hierarchies that permeate massively popular cult franchises. At the same time, fan discussion can reflexively permeate professional products (Shefrin 2004), and in the case of Disney Princess Leia, arguably facilitated Disney’s greater engagement with the topic.

Disney Princess Leia Princess Leia was royalty before the Disney Princess line was even a glimmer of thought in the Mouse’s imagination. The (adoptive) daughter of  Bail Organa and Queen Breha of Alderaan, Leia became the Princess of Alderaan during the period between the three Star Wars prequel movies and the original trilogy. Of course, two things happened to change that: first, Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star during Star Wars: A New Hope (1977); and second, Leia learned that her real parents were Anakin Skywalker and Senator Padmé Amidala (who, of course, was also Queen of Naboo—which means that Leia is a princess regardless of her parentage). Her transition from princess to general thus is one of both circumstance and semantics. Given that George Lucas relied heavily upon Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) to structure the original Star Wars trilogy, it shouldn’t be a surprise that his storyline generally followed a patriarchal view of adventure narratives (Seastrom 2015). As a princess, Leia was positioned in many ways as a quintessential object (especially in the first movie, before the revelation about the existence of her sibling and rather dour father), but as a politician and military leader she also differed from the demure, damsel-­in-­distress

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stereotype when playing up that more political or militaristic background. She did sometimes need rescuing but also sometimes did some rescuing herself. As a princess, Leia has always tended to differentiate herself from the stereotype (due largely to Carrie Fisher’s performance), but in doing so often had to disavow that title. For Parramore (2015), “Fisher brought an edginess to the character that is something more than just toughness or, some might say, bitchiness.” Yet, as Han Solo’s flirty delivery of the title “Princess” illustrates, the term can seem more insulting than regal. Her princess nature is paradoxical. The perception of Leia by fans didn’t seem to hinge on her royalty but on her bravery; she was rather a “cunning diplomat, fearless warrior and undercover agent. . . . Leia is so badass that she . . . can wield it with a glance, whether withering or empathetic or commanding” (Parramore 2015). The fannish perception of Disney Princesses lies counter to this badass version of Leia: for some fans, the Disney Princess franchise focused more on passivity and consumerism than on feistiness (Orenstein 2012). Media critic Henry Giroux (2010) argues that Disney’s commercialization, in fact, “commodifies cultures, sanitizes historical memory, and constructs children’s identities exclusively within the ideology of consumerism” (156). As I will demonstrate in the latter part of this chapter, academic literature on participatory culture (e.g., Jenkins 2006a) argues that fans and consumers have more agency to resist these ideologies (and there are many fans who do). However, pop culture perceptions, emerging from critics like Giroux and Peggy Orenstein, note that the Princess Line is “all about clothes, jewelry, makeup, and snaring a handsome husband,” which, Orenstein argues, demonstrates to young girls the “importance [of] . . . being pretty and sexy” (Orenstein 2012: 16). The Disney Princess Line has only been an official paratextual product from Disney since the early 2000s, when the then-­chairman Andy Mooney noticed that many of the young girls attending a Disney on Ice show were dressed like princesses but did not have authentic Disney products to wear (see Orenstein 2006). Mooney set about rectifying this corporate oversight and, in January 2000, started a new line of merchandise that featured many of the most popular Princesses as one franchise. The original nine Princesses were Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Tinker Bell (Tinker Bell was removed shortly after the franchise debuted). As of this writing, the Line has been augmented with Tiana, Rapunzel, and Merida. As of 2013, before The Force Awakens, the Disney Princess Line was the most valuable popular culture franchise in the world, while Star Wars was number two (Graser 2013); as of 2016, it had been overtaken by Star Wars. There are more than 25,000 Disney Princess items in an over $3 billion franchise (Orenstein

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2006). Disney Princesses are merchandised with all sorts of objects: according to the Disney Princess wiki page (“List of Disney Princesses” n.d.), they are featured in products ranging from sing-­along movies, dolls, and other toys to bed linens, clothing, and toiletries (such as hairbrushes and toothpaste), and are also prominently featured at the Disney theme parks. The wiki page goes on to describe the requirements for being a Disney Princess, which focus on their romance and beauty: “They are also known for their inner and outer beauty, as well as having beautiful singing voices (the exception to this is Merida, who only sings a song with her mother when she is little). Each Princess (excluding Merida and Elsa) also has a romance that is resolved by the end of the film; the male counterparts are known as Disney Princes” (“List” 2014). Do Rozario (2004: 38) reads the Disney Princesses as metonyms for the culture of their time: for example, Snow White “matures in the Depression and is happy to pitch in with the working class dwarves in times of high unemployment and poverty until she is found once again by her prince.” Princess Aurora, who appeared in 1959, “is a prototype Baby Boomer . . . [who] wanders barefoot in the woods and is uninterested in the affairs of kings, [and is] devastated when she learns she is a princess and will not be able to make her date with the boy she met in the forest” (38). In this, Aurora is a contemporary of another one of the gendered innovations of mid-­century Americana: the Barbie Doll, itself a site of cultural struggle (M. Rogers 1999). The Disney Princess franchise has been very firmly (and successfully) marketed to girls: while it has played up the more heroic aspects of the characters, it remains tethered to the more traditionally feminine aspects of the characters (frilly dresses, tiaras, etc.). For instance, Disney Princess Merida became a locus of debate when Disney changed her character design to look more stereotypically feminine (Child 2013), and fans successfully petitioned the company to maintain her less glamorous appearance. Star Wars, with its veneer of science fiction and space battles, has been largely (and, to many, unfairly) marketed to boys. As The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams told Good Morning America in 2015: “Star Wars was always a boys’ thing, and a movie that dads could take their sons to.”1 The release of The Force Awakens merchandise with little presence of the major female character Rey is evidence of a gendered emphasis as well, as Kain (2016) argues that “toymakers were specifically directed to exclude Rey from their products because Star Wars toys are geared at boys and boys allegedly don’t like playing with female action-­figures. . . . All this came to light when consumers noticed a distinct lack of Rey options, which toymaker Hasbro claimed had to do with preserving plot secrets rather than anything nefarious.” Thus, the merger with Lucasfilm and the presence of Leia as a princess troubled the easy

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dichotomy many fans had made between the two franchises. Leia—a cool and powerful figure (who was also a princess)—seemed not to fit within the line of princesses who were royalty first and heroes (perhaps) second. This gendered dichotomy, as discussed by Bethan Jones (2015: 121) in reference to My Little Pony fandom, asserts itself through fan discussion of “what constitutes literature and what is simply nothing more than a ‘popular’ text, unworthy of critical analysis or engagement.”2 Just as Jones draws a parallel between the (devalued) text of Twilight and My Little Pony, so too does the interaction between Disney Princess and Star Wars reveal a disruption in “traditional notions of gender” (123) as interpreted by fans. From before the release of The Force Awakens, reviewers and critics were speculating as to the role of “Princess” Leia in the film. For instance, as Peter Sciretta (2015), writing for Slash Film, argues, “the latest details [from the film] include the reveal that Leia Organa is no longer called a Princess. Is this just an excuse to not include Leia in the Disney Princess line­up? . . . General is a lot more fitting for her role as a military leader anyway.” After the film premiered, Parramore (2015) argued that Leia’s role had shifted. In the original trilogy, she was a “force to be reckoned with.” In The Force Awakens, though, Parramore argues the opposite: [In A New Hope] the princess, though taken captive by Darth Vader, quickly establishes her redoubtable presence. Fixing the leader of the Dark Side with an imperious stare, she talks down to the galaxy’s most heinous villain with how-­dare-­you indignation even as he towers gigantically above her. . . . A welcome departure from space bimbos shaking their assets through the cosmos, she was both dignified and noble, while exuding a sensuality that went far beyond her physical form. . . . But the Leia of Star Wars: The Force Awakens spends most of her time standing around and looking pained and concerned. De­sexed and de­energized, especially in comparison to Solo, she comes off as a sort of celestial Mother Superior. She gets off a few snappy exchanges with Solo, her sparring partner of yore, but what had once been screwball comedy, heavenly romance and pin­me­to­the­wall lust all rolled into one has sputtered mostly into shared parental concern. Leia’s role in The Force Awakens took on more significance as Fisher also began to respond to sexist and body-­shaming comments from the media and fans about the aging of Leia. Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly noted that, while Harrison Ford has aged and Han Solo perishes in the film, it “comes out worse for our friend Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia, because she doesn’t look like Princess Leia” (Media Matters Staff 2016). Numerous fans and critics echoed O’Reilly’s

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comments, and Fisher—as reported by Guardian reporter Ben Child (2015)— tweeted in response that “social media trolls should focus on more meaningful aspects of her return to the role of Leia Organa—now a general—for the first time since Return of the Jedi in 1983.” Despite her rightful condemnation of the sexism of the trolls, Fisher’s point here also reaffirms the cultural value of the general over the princess. Indeed, even in the films, Leia’s work as a princess was often overshadowed by her work as a military leader, and to try to establish this, fans have created art that demonstrated both sides of her personality. For instance, artist beware­ itbites (2012) created an image that is a combination of Leia’s blaster and hair buns with the frilly, feminized dress of the Princess Line. Conversely, some fan work attempted to make the Princesses fit into the Star Wars universe rather than adapting Leia to the Princess universe. In one example of fan art, artist Isaiah Stephens has rendered Disney princesses Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, and Aurora as Stormtroopers, as if illustrating how beneath the lace and frills lies a badass warrior (see Duncan 2015). Although space prevents me from including the multitude of other fan images of Disney Princess Leia—many of which build on and augment these different values of the tension between feminine princesses and masculine military leaders—I think it is relevant to note how fan audiences can use a critical stance to raise awareness of both social and cultural issues (Brough and Shresthova 2012; Jenkins and Shresthova 2012). On the one hand, images of Leia that are critical of the Princess label may reflect a type of masculinized protective boundary around the beloved Star Wars franchise; on the other hand, however, they may open up discussion and dialogue about what cultural perceptions of gender can illustrate. Fans work in an unauthorized, unsanctioned environment for their interpretation, but Disney has the corporate authority to delineate the role of Leia, as I describe of their official Marvel graphic novel Princess Leia in the next section.

Marvel Comics’s Princess Leia If, as Do Rozario (2004: 34) notes of Disney Princesses, that “the princess is a fairytale staple and even in the world’s republics, she continues to be re-­drawn,” then it is perhaps punningly perfect to argue that Disney’s takeover of Marvel and Star Wars has demonstrated that Princess Leia is a staple of the Republic, and she has most recently been redrawn in the pages of Marvel’s 2015 comic series, Princess Leia. The tension between Princess Leia and General Leia came to a head in Mark Waid and Terry Dodson’s (2015) five-­issue series, an exploration

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of the events between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Disney has deemed the comic to be canon, and it became the top selling comic in March 2015 and one of the top ten of 2015 (Cox 2015). The comic is notable for focusing not just on the princess elements of Leia’s background but also for charting her development into a general—it bridges the character gap, if you will, between A New Hope and The Force Awakens. The comic functions as both a paratextual entity and as a transmedial extension to the Star Wars universe. As a paratext, the comic both explores and deepens the story within the franchise while also existing somewhat outside that story. For Jonathan Gray (2010: 23), paratexts “surround texts, audiences, and industry” as products both ancillary and contextual. Paratexts are both part of a text and also inform our understanding of that text (a book’s cover, e.g., is a paratext). As a transmedial extension, the comic fits within the larger universe of Star Wars. Transmedia storytelling, a phrase now associated with the work of Henry Jenkins (2006a; 2007; 2011), can be defined as one story told over different mediated extensions; that is, parts of a larger narrative can unfold in film, television, video games, or (in this case) comics. That Princess Leia can be seen as both paratextual (about Star Wars) and transmedial (of Star Wars) is crucial. It means that it can serve a dual purpose of both reflecting on aspects of Star Wars and augmenting the Star Wars universe. For characterizations of Leia herself, it means that the authors can use the comic both to comment on and to justify the positioning of Leia as princess and as general. The story of the comic follows Princess Leia as she travels the galaxy attempting to find the Alderaanian people who survived the destruction of their homeworld. She is accompanied on this trip by Evaan Verlaine, an Alderaanian royalist, who at first resents Leia for what she perceives to be her abandonment of her people but who later comes to recognize Leia’s authority. The five-­issue series seemingly revolves around the notion of Leia’s perceived royalty. Early in the first issue, while Leia is giving a speech commemorating Luke, Han, and the other Rebel pilots, she memorializes her family: “Let us take a moment to honor the lost souls of Alderaan. To honor Viceroy Bail Organa and Queen Breha Organa.” Her less-­than-­emotional speech prompts two members of the rebellion to snidely chitter-­chatter: “That’s all she has to say? Man, what’s with the ice princess?” “You know royals,” the other responds. “They don’t show emotion to the plebes” (Waid and Dodson 2015: 1:5–6, emphasis in original). Throughout the first issue, Leia’s role as a princess is a perceived weakness. She approaches a general to ask if she can help the rebellion; he first addresses her as “Princess” and then patronizingly responds, “The best thing you can do for yourself and for the alliance right now is simply to grieve” (1:11). Leia is

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berated by her subjects, including Evaan, for not being royal enough—she is too progressive, too far from the austere and conservative version of royalty displayed by her father. Yet it is her royal pedigree that eventually convinces Evaan to fly with her and that grants her the authority throughout the series to explore new worlds to find her subjects. Throughout the comic series, Evaan—a female military pilot and devoted Alderaanian—is placed in stark contrast with Leia, a progressive royal who is transitioning away from her royal duties. As a rare female duo in comic books, the two of them form a partnership founded not in arguing over superpowers or vying for male attention but rather in the value of understanding through communication and duty. In issue 1, Leia explains to Evaan that she must have “the truth . . . at all times. And if I fail to ask, I’ll expect you to volunteer it. Right now, we are Alderaan’s children, Evaan. You and I. Let’s not dishonor that by speaking falsely—or by not communicating at all” (1:21, emphases in original). Each time Leia’s royal demeanor shifts to a more political one, Evaan’s military façade breaks and she becomes more feminine and communicative. The transition that Disney-­Marvel is defining here is clear: the “Princess” elements of Leia can be dissolved even while her more feminine traits—her emphasis on communication and negotiation, compassion and friendship—can be valuable as well. This transition becomes codified at the end of the series. Upon saving the remaining survivors of Alderaan, Leia, and Evaan head back to the Rebel base. Leia knows she must move on to help the Rebellion against the Empire. Evaan, now close with Leia, cries and exclaims, “And who’s supposed to lead us?” Leia hugs her tightly and says, “You’d be good.” A moment of confusion, then Evaan—“They need their princess”; and Leia’s response—“So elect one. I endorse you” (5:25, emphases in original). The tables have turned. Leia is now the military leader and Evaan the princess. Disney’s version of Princess Leia has transitioned away from her role in A New Hope and the stage is set for General Leia in The Force Awakens.

Conclusion: General Leia and Star Wars Merch According to Jonathan Gray (2010: 177), “Despite its iconic status in licensing and merchandising history, Star Wars’s merchandising has attracted remarkably little attention within media and cultural studies.” Yet, merchandising is crucial for Star Wars fans, as “through play, the Star Wars toys allowed audiences past the barrier of spectatorship into the Star Wars universe” (176). Toys and other aspects of merchandising have become big business (thanks, in part, to A New Hope), and it is now a “near-­universal requirement that toys come with a movie or TV show. Today, the $23 billion U.S. toy industry fluctuates a few percentage

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points every year, but sales of toys that don’t have their own movies or shows are flat or declining” (Suddath 2015).3 For Geraghty (2014: 180), collecting merchandise can be a fan endeavor all to itself, separate from the viewing of the film; collecting is a way for “the fan to reconnect with their own past through the interaction with memories and nostalgia embodied in the very objects they collect.” Merchandise helps us connect with the media texts we love. Of course, just as Disney’s gendered readings of Leia and the Disney Princesses affected fan responses, so too did the gendering of the merchandise. When The Force Awakens merchandise was released ahead of the film—and then especially after the film came out—fans noticed a major absence: Rey (see Jowett in this volume). As Boboltz (2016) describes, this was “a conspicuous absence considering her large role. Soon, [fans] started using the hashtag #WheresRey on Twitter and Facebook to voice their concern over that lack of representation.” Rey, arguably the main character of the film, was not present in the official Monopoly game (even though Darth Vader was—a character not even present in The Force Awakens), a model of the Millennium Falcon (which Rey flies in the film), or a six-­pack of major figures from the film. Boboltz found that Rey was in only 27 of 146 toy items in Disney’s online store; Target only had her in 17 out of 267; and Toys “R” Us featured Rey in just 10 out of 254 items. By contrast, the Kylo Ren figure appeared in 42 items in the Disney store; 54 in Target; and 46 in Toys “R” Us. As Boboltz (2016) notes, “Kylo Ren also appears more prominently on packaging than Rey, and is more likely to be grouped with other male characters, presumably to make the product more appealing to young boys.” (Disney claims that Rey was left out of packaging to avoid “spoilers.”) Disney reacted to this news by releasing additional Rey toys, indicating the powerful flow of information from fan to producer—and, naturally, vice versa. And, as Lorna Jowett (2015) describes, “pre-­release products featuring Rey have apparently sold out . . . and several news reports have drawn attention to continuing complaints about the lack of toys aimed at girls, or perhaps more accurately, the way such toys are persistently aimed at boys.” Jowett ties this to another, similar gender disparity displayed by Disney’s other major franchise, the MCU, or Marvel Cinematic Universe. When Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) was released, much of the merchandise featured depictions of the male heroes— Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and Hawkeye—but few of them featured the sole major female on the team, Black Widow. In fact, even in sets that depicted scenes that included Black Widow in the film, Black Widow was absent (e.g., in the film Black Widow drove a motorcycle into a truck, but the action playset had Captain America in this role instead). As Jowett (2015) notes, “Audiences are demanding more and better female characters (and characters of colour, and

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non-­heteronormative characters). But even when steps are taken towards this, these characters are omitted from product ranges,” and this can have major consequences for the fan bases, especially when those fans are young and the lack of female role models or role models of color can reaffirm traditional stereotypes. Merchandising for Disney Princesses, however, is the name of the game: the Princess Line exists almost entirely as paratexts. That the Princess Line is aimed primarily at a young, female audience is obvious, and yet the Disney Princess franchise has since its inception been alternately criticized and lauded for its portrayal of femininity and female empowerment. Peggy Orenstein’s (2006) New York Times article highlights this tension: “As a feminist mother . . . I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-­girl culture that has risen around it. . . . I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble ‘So This Is Love’ or insist on being called Snow White.” At the same time, “it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female.” In some ways, the Disney Princess Line embodies a number of tensions faced by women in a feminist or postfeminist world, and the princesses themselves may help girls deal with these tensions early in life. If anything, the fan reaction to Disney Princess Leia helps us reexamine the role of princess itself. In Disney films, the princess is often at the mercy of a more aggressive female character. Do Rozario (2004: 42) notes that this antagonistic relationship tends to come from a femme fatale character: While there is a general tendency to read the princess’s passivity in patriarchal terms, it is apparent that her passivity has more to do with the ambitions of the femme fatale. The passage of power through the princess is ostensibly patriarchal: she ensures the kingdom’s continuity as first, daughter and later, wife and thus validates majesty. However, it is in that function of validation that real female power lies. Thus the femme fatale attempts to keep the princess under her power, and failing that, to render her unconscious, thereby unable to validate the majesty of king or prince. This relationship—often between stepmother (Evil Queen) and princess (Snow White), or between female monster (Ursula) and heroine (Ariel)—in fact grants the princess power even as it denies her power. In defeating the female insurgent, the princess “has effected the resolution and her choice is always honored: there is no return to the former patriarchal structures. . . . The Disney kingdom may

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still seem a man’s world, but it is a man’s world dependent on a princess” (Do Rozario 2004: 57). While the original trilogy made Leia a valuable model of female empowerment by denying her princess-­like characteristics, the comic series of 2015 turned those more feminine attributes into positive ones. Key to this realization for Disney was the foil of Evaan. In the original Star Wars trilogy, there is no other female character against whom Princess Leia can be contrasted; she had to represent too many things to too many people. Later, Leia is a general, not a princess. In The Force Awakens, Rey can be both feminine and an impetus of major action. Perhaps Star Wars has finally moved away from the gender politics of a long, long time ago and is embracing more progressive, feminist values. Despite a preponderance of the stereotypical angry, white, male fan, there does seem to be a shift toward more empowered women and young female fans as well. When I viewed the new Hasbro line of Disney Princess dolls on Amazon.com, I was met with some new-­but-­familiar-­looking dolls. But most tellingly, I found out that customers who viewed Merida also viewed a “Star Wars Slave 1 with Boba Fett” action figure set, based on the original trilogy character. The algorithms of Amazon have obviously picked up on the fact that not all toys need be gendered— it remains to be seen whether Disney has done the same.

13 Lorna Jowett

Rey, Mary Sue, and Phasma Too Feminism and Fan Reponses to The Force Awakens Merchandise

D

isney has often been criticized for gendering its products, and recent animated Disney movies, such as Brave (2010) and Frozen (2013), appear to be making changes to their female protagonists, with varying degrees of success.1 Fans, parents, and consumers of all ages have become increasingly vocal about the way representation operates in popular culture: this public debate encompasses diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and gender, and can be seen in phenomena like the #Wheres Widow–explained by Twitter user @WhereIsNatasha (n.d.) as “Dedicated to finding Black Widow in Marvel Merchandise. It’s like Where’s Waldo, but with more misogyny”—or #OscarsSoWhite controversies. The Force Awakens’s prerelease promotional images and materials assured audiences that the film would feature old favorites alongside new characters and were seemingly designed to preempt criticisms about lack of diversity. Princess Leia is now General Leia; the main hero of the film is a young woman, Rey; the other major new lead, disaffected Stormtrooper Finn, is played by an actor of color; and the villainous Captain Phasma is female. While some criticized Rey’s character as a wish-­f ulfilment fantasy—in fan terms, a “Mary Sue”2—the film’s massive success seems to speak for itself: audiences are clearly willing to embrace female and minority protagonists in major movies. As William Proctor (2016b) notes, “The fact that Rey is this trilogy’s Luke represents a major shift in both the Star Wars mythos and the entertainment industry at large. [Daisy] Ridley is playing a female protagonist in what has historically been viewed as a ‘boy’s club’ (and remains so, in many ways).” Yet while the film itself met with general enthusiasm from Star Wars fans, the related products and merchandise had a rather

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different reception. Rey’s absence from many Force Awakens product lines provoked angry responses, especially—but not exclusively—from female fans who already felt let down by the invisibility of female characters in Marvel universe merchandise for the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) or, even more recently, the female-­led Ghostbusters remake.3 In Cult Collectors, Lincoln Geraghty (2014) observes that “fan culture is not commodified but personalised,” with fans making meaning around objects they collect even as they consume “official” merchandise. “However,” he adds, “if fandom and collecting are about formations of the self then they are also products of the cultural environment—how we are influenced by culture and what parts of culture we take into our own” (4). Both “formations of the self” and “products of the cultural environment” are arguably even more significant to female fans of major media franchises who have often felt ignored or sidelined, given that many of these major action-­adventure franchises seem to be aimed at, made by, and primarily featuring men. “The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning,” Kristina Busse (2009: 105) points out, “when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn’t offer—dominated as it is by male producers.” Fan fiction as a type of fan creation or participation has even been gendered as female by fandom scholars. Geraghty summarizes how “recent fan scholarship has focused on the differences between gendered conceptions of the fanboy and fangirl, with the former perceived as being more affirmational and celebratory of media texts while the latter is more likely to transform them and reconstitute them for the needs of the wider fan community” (2014: 54). Working as a companion piece to Paul Booth’s analysis of “Disney’s Princess Leia” in this volume, this chapter examines the #WheresRey controversy as a discourse, the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in promotion for the film and related merchandise, and responses from fans. One of the reasons fan production, and fan fiction in particular, is often characterized as female is the sense, alluded to by both Busse and Geraghty, that female fans can feel the need to transform texts that rarely feature female characters or concerns. Of course, female audiences and female fans may respond to stories with male protagonists, and yet such identification does nothing to challenge the notion that male experience is “universal” and therefore that male-­centered stories need not change to accommodate female consumers. Robin Wood’s (1985) argument that patriarchal stories in Hollywood may result in the alienation of women has been critiqued by Peter Krämer (1998), yet Krämer’s argument is not entirely convincing in its appreciation of the lived experience of gender and audience identification.4

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Moreover, Krämer’s work was published in 1998, almost two decades prior to the contemporary “callout culture,” which is identified by some as characteristic of a fourth wave of feminism (see, e.g., Munro 2013) and is highly visible in the analysis of The Force Awakens that follows. Fandom studies has developed several alternative ways of thinking about fans and consumption, with the term “prosumers” describing fans who can positively influence taste formation and buying choices. If fans are now being seen as influencers, then as Henry Jenkins (2008b) notes, “Consumption in a networked culture is a social rather than individualized practice.” An article for Forbes (Gunelius 2010) magazine describes prosumers in industry terms as “the members of the social web—bloggers, microbloggers, forum posters, social networking participants, and so on, who spread messages, influence people around the world, and drive demand.” Just as virtual social media spaces have become gathering places for feminists in the twenty-­fi rst century, who use them to publicly call out misogyny, sexism, or double standards, so too have fans—as prosumers—acted as “online influencers”; and therefore “business leaders and marketers must not just identify but also acknowledge, respect and develop relationships with [them] in order for their products and brands to thrive” (Gunelius 2010). Naturally, fan critiques of material objects aimed at fans may differ from feminist critiques of these things, yet at times, as the following analysis outlines, the two converge. For some fans, selective spending is a way to pressure business and commercial interests into paying attention. If the merchandise and material objects do not align with the tastes of some consumers, not buying them is a viable means of protest. For others, traditional consumption or spending is not the motivation: for these people, the argument is about equality in terms of choice, addressing a principle rather than necessarily advocating consumption itself. In this sense, the notion of transforming and reconstituting media products can be aligned with the second-­wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political.” Some fans personalize their consumption of texts and of objects through their lived experience as female or through their political conviction as feminists. In the age of social media and trending topics, Disney’s Star Wars and other media franchises are not just being consumed critically and selectively: feminist critiques (or celebrations) of them also reconstitute the object of fandom as rallying points for fans who feel similarly, serving the needs of a particular demographic within the fan community. Simply exchanging views and debating aspects of fan-­related feminism or feminism-­related fandom helps serve the need of all fans (irrespective of gender) that desire more equal representation in the media and more equal treatment from the companies who market

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media tie-­ins. This chapter examines the complexities of merchandising and consumption, highlighting how commercial productions and fan responses to them might appear to challenge conventional gender binaries while at times maintaining heteronormative structures.

Fourth-­Wave Feminism and Callout Culture The desire for more inclusive representation is fast becoming a demand, despite the industry’s resistance to change. Film series like The Hunger Games have proven that female protagonists can be popular with mixed-­gender audiences— Hunger Games: Catching Fire was one of the most popular films with U.S. cinemagoers in 2013 (the audience split 46 percent male to 54 percent female, according to the Motion Picture Association of America’s [MPAA] report for that year [Motion Picture Association of America 2014]). Women in the industry, though, note that it is still extremely difficult to fund female-­centered projects (see Van Syckle 2016). Moreover, the success of female protagonists has not yet permeated promotion and merchandise. The wide circulation of stories such as the Tesco “Fun Gifts for Boys” faux pas in the United Kingdom (“Tesco ‘Gifts for Boys’ Sign Removed after Girl’s Complaint” 2014) and the eight-­year-­old girl who wrote to Hasbro about the lack of Rey merchandise (see Cox 2016 for one account of this) means that these “trending” issues attract greater attention, and this in turn requires the companies involved to respond (see also Proctor’s chapter in this volume). Debates about inclusivity (or its lack) in media products range across audiences, with some comments and analyses focused on children, some on adults. What constitutes fan consumption and response is consequently rather blurred. Audiences may be hailed as fans regardless of whether they display fan characteristics or whether they see themselves as consumers or viewers of a cult or niche franchise or property. The mainstreaming of the fantasy genre and the success of comic book movies and TV series also blur boundaries between cult and mainstream. Parents might protest, or at least comment on, the media and merchandise available to their children, though parents are often consumers by proxy. Online and social media communities such as Legion of Leia describe their mission as “[raising] awareness of the fact that women love sci-­fi . . . and our contributions to it are out of this world” (Legion of Leia 2015); while The Mary Sue website’s “About Us” section explains: “We promote, watchdog, extoll, and celebrate diversity and women’s representation. . . . We pride ourselves on being an inclusive, feminist community of people who not only love what they love but

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care about others who love it and have an intense passion for those who create it” (“About Us” n.d.). Both of these descriptions demonstrate awareness of the complexities of media production and consumption as well as of how audiences are positioned and segmented even as they challenge the potential for exclusion in assumptions about genre, gender, and fandom. Navigating these complexities is not always easy. Debates about “blue” and “pink” aisles in toy retail outlets rumble on, with parents and children taking issue with the categorization of toys by gender. A picture of seven-­year-­old Maggie Cole—standing in a branch of the supermarket Tesco and pointing to a sign that read “Fun Gifts for Boys” next to a display of Marvel Avengers products—was posted on Twitter by her mother, Karen, widely shared, and eventually prompted a change of Tesco store policy (“Tesco” 2014). Alternatively, the award-­w inning short film Barbie Boy (2014) examines the pressure on boys who prefer to play with dolls. An article by Derek Johnson (2014: 896) examines the controversy surrounding young Star Wars fan Katie Goldman, who felt bullied for liking Star Wars and owning related products (in this case a water bottle) and whose mother’s campaign in response led to a response by Lucasfilm proclaiming, “Star Wars is for everyone—including little girls!” Here, Johnson examines “how entities like Lucasfilm—and its licensed partners in franchising media properties like Star Wars—continue to position Star Wars and its consumers in relation to normative ideologies of gender and sexuality, even while claiming to empower the lifestyle choices of marginalized consumers like Katie” (896). Now that Disney owns the Star Wars intellectual property (IP) and features female heroes who are not just princesses, this analysis offers interesting points of similarity and contrast. As Johnson argues, “The spaces and practices of girls’ participation” in franchises such as Star Wars are regulated and constrained by their “design, marketing and presentation” (2014: 897). Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach’s (2012: 384) survey of Disney’s online toy store found that factors like color and type of toy continue to impact their gendering in major ways: “nearly all of the action toys, small vehicles, weapons, and building toys were for ‘boys only,’ while nearly all of the toys that were dolls or related to beauty, cosmetics, jewelry, and domestic work were for ‘girls only.’ The Disney marketing of toys . . . reflected a traditional view of masculinity associated with physicality and a traditional view of femininity associated with nurturing and domestic qualities as well as concern with physical attractiveness.” This logic limits thinking about toys and other products in relation to media franchises and extends to assumptions about genre and audiences. “Disney already sees the world in a gendered binary,”

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observes Paul Booth. “Disney’s purchase of Marvel and of Lucasfilm may appear to be an attempt to diversify audiences but it also codifies specific gendered stereotypes into specific franchises.” The sheer economic success of the Disney Princess Line (as Booth details) means that Disney does not need girls to be interested in Star Wars or the Marvel universe—these are properties expected to capture the boys’ market. Thus, Star Wars fans both young and old may find themselves ignored by product lines, despite the film’s apparent commitment to inclusivity. This stands somewhat in contrast to the earlier #WheresWidow campaign and to complaints about Marvel products that erased both Black Widow and Scarlet Witch, even from products depicting scenes in which they feature prominently. I by no means condone their erasure, and yet these characters did not feature in Avengers: Age of Ultron to the extent that Rey does in The Force Awakens, despite the fact that both films field an ensemble cast— and this made it all the more insulting and nonsensical that Rey was excluded from many items of merchandise. She did feature in single-­character toys and lines but was absent not only from the special edition Monopoly game but also from the Millennium Falcon and other sets, a fact that prompted people to post images of the products and comment on her absence: “#WheresRey my daughter noticed in 2 seconds and actually asked, where’s Rey mom?” tweeted one frustrated parent (Gilson 2015), while another commented, “My daughter likes #StarWars but @toysruscanada says nope! #WheresRey cc@HeroicGirls” (Jason L. 2015) and linked to an article about the problem. Several others forcefully tweeted their incredulity: “Are you INSANE @Target @Hasbro? The main characters of the film are girls! You give us random pilots?? #WheresRey” (Stahlberg 2015).

Shopping in the Pink Aisle In January 2016, Sara Boboltz reported how an admittedly “cursory look at online retailers” found 27 Rey toys out of 146 Star Wars items in Disney’s online store, while Toys “R” Us featured 10 Rey products out of 254 Star Wars items (Boboltz 2016). My own search in April 2016 found that the U.S. Disney online store carried a total of 516 Star Wars items, only 35 of which were tagged as related to Rey (and some of which do not actually feature her). Faced with hundreds of Force Awakens products, with only a small proportion featuring Rey, shoppers might well reject the justification offered in statements from manufacturers—that Rey did not feature in prerelease products, including Monopoly, because of possible spoilers—as simply an excuse. (The response was

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robustly rejected by many; see, e.g., Perez Hilton [“Star Wars Monopoly Finally Adding Rey after Major Backlash!” 2016], who tweeted images of the offending products with commentary added by “Rey.”) Yet the number of Rey products, as reported by Boboltz (2016), needs context in terms of the proportion of products featuring other characters, especially those new to the Star Wars brand. My own cursory look at Disney’s online U.K. store in March 2017 found 223 Star Wars products and 105 The Force Awakens products, with 21 categorized as “Rey.” However, searching for “Finn” turns up 19 items, only a few less than searching for “Rey”; while searching for “Poe” returns 10 results. The conclusion that the two most prominent new characters in The Force Awakens are being treated equally could be justified, given that there are twice as many products featuring them than other new characters. (Notably, a search for “Kylo Ren” brings up 41 results, suggesting that villains are more marketable than heroes.) Without a more rigorous study, the number of products related to various characters, male or female, cannot be fully analyzed. It is understandable that consumers, expecting to buy toys or products featuring the character most viewers took to be the hero of the film, might be disappointed by the small proportion dedicated to Rey. Parents objected to both the narrative illogic and the apparent economic illogic of such an approach, as in one YouTube video asking “Where’s Rey?!”: “Kim from Made By Mommy just got back from seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakes [sic] and she just realized exactly how big of a mistake toy companies have made by leaving out Rey from various sets” (MBM Crafts 2015).5 Thus, while Auster and Mansbach (2012: 385) discovered that “Disney markets toys in a way that seems to rely on girls’ willingness to cross gender lines with regard to toys,” this is not seen to work in reverse. Several articles on #WheresRey report what an employee at some of the product meetings was told: “We know what sells. . . . No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it” (quoted in Boehm 2016).6 This dated logic may have worked for previous female Star Wars characters like Leia and Amidala who, however the film depicted their behavior, were still “princesses.” It does not seem to apply to a character like Rey. The MPAA report for 2015 notes: “Among the top five grossing films in 2015, Jurassic World, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Furious 7 all attracted majority male audiences” (Motion Picture Association of America 2016). With a viewership split 58 percent male to 42 percent female (as reported in Motion Picture Association of America 2016), The Force Awakens clearly attracted as many male viewers as other action movies with more conventional male-­centered stories and male protagonists. In the case of The Force Awakens, however, buying a T-­shirt with the “hero” of the film

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might necessitate buying a product “with a female character on it”—were it not, that is, for the decisions of those in charge of managing the Star Wars product lines for the film. Tariq Kyle (2015) introduces a list of “ten Rey Star Wars toys and shirts you need in your life” for Hypable, with the comment, “We put together this list—so you can return all that Kylo Ren crap you got for Christmas and bring home more items featuring the real star of The Force Awakens, Rey.” He goes on to observe: “There are too many shirts with the entire cast or just Kylo Ren or just Han and Chewwie [sic], and not enough of Rey. So get this shirt while you can and represent your love for Rey—no matter what gender you are!” This article (Kyle 2015) encourages male gender-­crossing in terms of consumption: “Don’t let the fact that this is a girl’s shirt deter you, gentlemen. You best bet I’ve already purchased mine, and I’m a 25-­year-­old man!” However, the active encouragement (i.e., “Don’t let this deter you, gentlemen”) suggests that resistance may well be an obstacle. The many female fans that have been buying men’s T-­shirts for years—because companies do not make “girl’s” versions, as is still the case with much of the new Star Wars merchandise (see Jowett 2015)—can relate to this. Kyle’s admonition to “represent your love for Rey” by buying a T-­shirt featuring The Force Awakens’s female hero also indicates another possibility: that of politicized fan consumption and economic power (though, admittedly, this too is problematic). Female fans might also find that some items and product lines specifically aimed at girls commodify a different fan identity, more conventionally feminine and heteronormative. The pink-­themed “I only date Rebels” line of women’s nightwear by Primark (Jowett 2015) seems to officially enact Derek Johnson’s (2014: 906–7) description of amateur images that reconstitute Darth Vader as “more appropriate for feminine identification, his black costume remade in pastels and presented ‘for Katie.’ ” Shoe brand Irregular Choice’s Star Wars line (first-­wave prerelease 2015, second wave 2016) fits into Auster and Mansbach’s (2012: 384) delineation of “a traditional view of femininity associated with . . . physical attractiveness.” The description of the “I Know” shoes on the Irregular Choice blog hails readers at once as Irregular Choice fans and collectors and as Star Wars fans: “These stunning flats feature vintage style faded floral print with Han Solo and Princess Leia digital prints and intricate floral embroidery to finish. You love them? We know!” (Irregular Choice 2015). Derek Johnson’s analysis of the #MayTheForceBeWithKatie controversy of 2010 concludes that “while the logics of ‘pink’ media franchising have increasingly affirmed the participation of girls and women in cultural arenas that more generally privilege men and boys, that participation has been regulated, remade, and reshaped to fit within, more so than trouble, traditional norms of gender, sexuality, age, and

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race” (2014: 907). In this way, he writes, it seems that a given property “endorses the consumer and lifestyle choices of female science fiction fans, but does so in a way that reassures their femininity and heteronormativity” (2014: 907). This observation potentially mirrors how fan scholarship has characterized female fan activity as transformative. Geraghty notes that the only difference in fan-­directed online store ThinkGeek’s Doctor Who gift packs for men and women was the replacement of a sonic screwdriver in the former with River Song’s journal in the latter (2014: 66). The journal (which in the television series details River’s meetings with the Doctor) seems to be a concretization of the alignment of female consumers with writing (or rewriting and transforming), as well as with female characters. Similarly, Auster and Mansbach’s (2012: 387) appendix of Disney toys lists a Toy Story Etch-­A-­Sketch as an example of “creative” toys for “boys only” but a Disney Fairies Make Your Own Keepsake Memory Book as the parallel “girls only” example. It is notable that one of the items available in the U.K. Disney store is listed as a “Star Wars Journal”; the description reads, “Any fan of Star Wars will love this exciting journal”—but it features an image of Rey on its cover and the sole review mentions it having been bought for the purchaser’s granddaughter (“Star Wars Journal” n.d.). Alongside the assumption that keeping a journal or diary is an activity for girls, apparently, lies the assumption that girls only identify with female characters.

Gender-­Neutral Characters? Even when it comes to products featuring female characters from the film, there are inequalities: feeding the #WheresRey protest was the relative visibility of Rey and Phasma in merchandise. While Rey was minimally featured in prerelease merchandise, despite being clearly signaled as a key character, Phasma, along with Kylo Ren, was presented as a significant villain and was popular in prerelease sales. Bill Sencio (2016) opined, “There’s a lot of intriguing new characters making their debut in The Force Awakens, but the most talked about is Captain Phasma, Gwendolyn Christie’s First Order Commander. The internet established her as a name to remember months ago, but as of #ForceFriday, with Phasma being the first action figure to sell out at stores everywhere, she has effectively become the most popular character from The Force Awakens.” Sencio goes on to argue that “this not only adds another nail in the coffin of the myth that ‘girl figures don’t sell,’ but also means there are quite a few Captain Phasma toys to choose from (or will be when stores start to restock their empty shelves).” While is it never quite articulated in such bald terms, the feeling in some quarters seemed to be that, because Phasma appeared in full Stormtrooper

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armor, she was a more androgynous or ungendered figure and could therefore be popular with boys as well as girls.7 Unless you knew Gwendoline Christie played the character, nothing in prerelease material identified her as female, nor were Phasma action figures labeled as girls’ figures. After the film was released there was debate about why Phasma never took her helmet off, with some arguing that the casting was thrown away and Christie’s performance limited because her face was never seen. Christie herself explained that “as an actor I’m interested in transformation and different kinds of roles. . . . I thought it was a really interesting opportunity to play a female character where we formed an opinion of her based on her actions rather than the way she has been made flesh” (quoted in Hibberd 2016). Other articles and interviews suggested (though it was never confirmed) that the character had originally been planned as male, and the whole issue of visible gender identity became somewhat confusing. Social media and the internet widely reported an exchange on the Star Wars Facebook page provoked by a follower’s comment about Phasma’s armor: “ ‘Not to be sexist, but’s really hard to tell that’s female armor for me,’ the follower wrote. [The Facebook page then responded,] ‘It’s armor. On a woman. It doesn’t have to look feminine.’ . . . Even though the comment has now been deleted, the Internet managed to get screenshots and it has become a hot topic of discussion” (Didelot 2016). The deletion of the comment only fuels the way this exchange is becoming a kind of apocryphal story, with certain forces apparently attempting to manage the debates while others eagerly take them as yet more evidence that this is a topic that deserves discussion. Phasma is displayed across a range of products as active, menacing, and powerful—as is Kylo Ren (though both characters are undermined in the film). Phasma’s poses are comparable with other Stormtroopers, though her centrality, the distinctive color and decoration of her armor (especially the Roman-­style cloak), and a large blaster emphasize her commanding role. Products present her clearly as a figure of authority, with agency and a degree of autonomy. In the film, however, her role seemed minimal, causing some dissatisfaction: “My biggest complaint with the film is that it had far too little Captain Phasma. Phasma, the badass Stormtrooper captain played by the equally badass Gwendoline Christie, was only in a few brief scenes, despite being hyped up as a groundbreaking baddie” (Truffaut-­Wong 2015; see also Guerassio 2015). The same opportunity that Christie identifies for Phasma could be applied equally to Rey, were she judged on her competence and fighting ability. (The argument for considering Rey a Mary Sue hinges on the perception that she is too powerful and competent to be anything but a wish-­f ulfilment figure.) The way the character “has been made flesh,” as Christie put it, is more immediately

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apparent with Rey—yet even so, Rey is female without necessarily being feminized. Previous female characters in Star Wars are visually fixed in certain ways: iconic images of Leia include her kneeling in front of R2-­D2 recording the message for Obi-­Wan (A New Hope) or wearing the infamous gold bikini (Return of the Jedi). Although the films’ narrative inflects and subverts these moments with Leia’s gun-­toting behavior and pointed comments about not needing rescuing, the poses themselves—potentially, at least—reinforce the notion of her as a sexualized or diminutive female, defined by her hairstyle and clothing as much as by her actions. Amidala from the prequel trilogy is even more limited, not simply by the decorative adornments of femininity that define her visually, but also by imposed narratives of appropriate heteronormative femininity (Woerner 2015b). By contrast, Rey never changes her unisex clothing in The Force Awakens and is presented as unambiguously heroic. In the most commonly reproduced still images, she is depicted upright and alone against the landscape of Jakku, signaling her independence. Other common depictions include the droid BB-­8 as her sidekick. The height differential alone suggests her dominance, and the fact that her companion is a droid, not another human, avoids connotations of gender or (heterosexual) romance. Fan-­created T-­shirts and products consolidate Rey’s heroic stature by repeating images of her standing tall or in what is described as “fighting stance” (FangirlFuel n.d.) and in almost all images she holds her staff, a reminder of her physical prowess and skill. While one popular image of Leia includes her blaster, Rey seems not to need a gun and can rely on her own hard-­learned fighting techniques. This visual iconography is reinforced in several items by the accompanying line “I can handle myself” in the design (FangirlFuel n.d.). Additionally, a search for “Rey Star Wars” on the Etsy online marketplace returns 2,107 items, whereas a search for Phasma returns only 362 and Finn 262. A search for Kylo Ren, by contrast, returns 2,541 items, with the front page of results likewise reiterating iconic, active, and heroic poses. (See Elana Levine’s [2015] Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Lady Porn and Brigid Cherry’s [2016] Cult Media, Fandom, and Textiles for more on female fan production and crafting.) In a nominally more supportive environment for creative production and circulation of goods, the quantity of products available is more reflective of the characters’ screen time as well as their longevity or simply their popularity in terms of the ongoing franchise: an Etsy search for Leia (5,704 items), Han (7,548 items), Luke (7,313 items), and Darth Vader (a whopping 18,545 items) bears this out. Allowing more of a range of voices within fandom, this type of craft production still does not preclude repositioning female fans in heteronormative

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structures of femininity (especially via Han and Leia’s iconic lines, “I love you.” —“I know.”). The category of feminist fans need not exclude male fans who might wish to see more inclusive representations, and yet some Etsy products follow the “female role model” logic that Derek Johnson discusses rather than encouraging gender-­crossing. Naturally, some fans and viewers feel challenged by such representations and the positive responses they might receive. Examining the gender-­swapping of characters in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series (2004–2009), Derek Johnson (2011: 1089) notes how Starbuck was transformed from “the tough-­talking, cigar-­chomping, male action hero played by Dirk Benedict in the original series into the tough-­talking, cigar-­chomping, female action heroine played by Katee Sackhoff in the remake. The gender flexibility made possible through the successive reproduction of the character, however, presented a threat to many potential audience members and industrial agents alike invested in the masculinized bravado of the original.” The responses of Benedict and other Starbuck “haters” has since been repeated in responses to the debut of Michelle Gomez as Missy in Doctor Who (from 2014),8 the replacement of Peter Capaldi with Jodie Whittaker as the Time Lord, Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015),9 and the Force Awakens and Rogue One trailers. The last of these (released in April 2016) set off social media debates again by clearly showing the film’s protagonist to be another capable woman, Jyn Erso. “Is literally every new Star Wars going to be some feminist propaganda? Jesus, this looks terrible,” writes one commenter on the trailer, while another complains, “Again with the girl main character! I may be done with the Star Wars movies from here on” (quoted in Cassano 2016). It is heartening, however, to see many fans dismissing such carping. Take the Rey-­as-­Mary-­Sue argument, which could equally have been applied to Luke in A New Hope. Star Wars tends to offer action, thrills, and fantasy wish fulfilment—like many adventure tales of heroism and villainy. As Lane (2016) puts it, Rey was accused of being too capable because she actually knew how to fly a ship and could hold her own in a lightsaber battle by finally embracing the power of the Force within. Never mind the fact that in previous films, Luke Skywalker took down the Death Star with little more than the Force at his aid, and his dad, little Anakin Skywalker, was able to blow up the Trade Federation even though he’d never flown anything outside of Tatooine before. It’s amazing how many dudes stayed silent when those

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events took place, but as soon as Star Wars put a lightsaber in a girl’s hand, a hopefully small, but still incredibly loud, section of the manosphere cried Mary Sue. “I want to turn these comments into a liquid and drink them,” says Jimmy Donnellan (2016), “although I have to be careful with how much. My doctor told me to watch my sodium intake.” (Redbubble even features a T-­shirt showing Furiosa holding a foaming glass—with the caption “Male Tears” in case we missed the point [SlideRulesYou n.d.].) While the categorizing of certain responses as “man tears” or as coming from the “manosphere” might seem problematic, potentially reinstating essentialist gender binaries, the relish with which such terms are used suggests both vindication and emotional catharsis for feminist fans—and possibly a touch of self-­conscious reappropriation of gender binaries. Notably, it is no longer considered necessary to contain such emotions: online communities such as Legion of Leia, The Mary Sue, and Heroic Girls provide spaces for these voices to present their points of view as passionately and with as many geek credentials as those from the manosphere. Jenna Busch (2015) openly shouts about #WheresRey: WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO TO MAKE YOU LISTEN? Do we need to boycott your stores? Stage national protests? Laugh in your face? You have a non-­descript fighter pilot and not the main character. Hell, you included Ultron in the Avengers set instead of Black Widow, but I thought you may have learned. Clearly you didn’t. I’ll remember that when I decide to furnish my desk with toys. They’ll no longer be from you. As already indicated, some bloggers and sites published their own lists of what Rey merchandise was available or tips on buying the best Phasma figure, accompanying these with statements about purchasing power, selective spending, and critiques of inequality. Thus Matthew Rozsa (2016), in the title of his Salon article, exhorts, “Star Wars Fans, Unite: The Only Way to Fight #WheresRey Trends Is to Stop Buying the Toys,” and in the article continues, “Don’t buy it if Disney’s merchandising teams can’t pledge to stop the Star Wars and Marvel gendered-­toy insanity.”

Conclusion Fan responses to The Force Awakens develop ongoing discussions about “strong women” in contemporary media and popular culture: what this means, who it matters to, and whether it has just become a form of tokenism designed to lure

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female or feminist viewers. Discussion about and around the area of inclusivity ranges across costume, action, sexuality, as well as issues of race, ethnicity, and dis/ability (none of which I have space to address here). Various articles also celebrate Kathleen Kennedy’s achievements as Lucasfilm executive during the Disney acquisition, noting her vow to champion inclusivity behind as well as in front of the cameras. Whether more fans exercise selective spending to apply pressure where it really counts remains to be seen, and if Star Wars products are aimed only at the boys’ market then this may not make a substantial difference in any case. The #WheresRey phenomenon demonstrates that all is not equal in pop culture franchises, but the support for the hashtag and the responses from companies involved suggest that progress, however slow, is being made. As Kennedy herself describes the process of having more women involved in creating the story of the new Star Wars, “It just changed certain things by small increments. But cumulatively it makes a difference.” Likewise, several of the articles quoted here imply that small changes are being made, even if this is only in terms of raised awareness. It would be interesting to see more empirical and qualitative research in this area in order to tease out the contradictions and complexities that are apparent even in self-­confessed feminist fans’ discourse and commentary. Heteronormative gender roles still have a firm grasp on the cultural imagination of producers and consumers, as is evident in the analysis. Moreover, privilege makes it more likely that certain voices will be heard than others: many of those critiquing commercialized representations are—like myself—educated, privileged, white women. Given that The Force Awakens and Rogue One feature protagonists of color and (subtextually, at least) nonheterosexual characters, further evaluation of such intersectionality would also make a valuable contribution to fandom studies and Star Wars scholarship. As a feminist scholar and a female Star Wars fan, I find it difficult to disentangle my emotional responses from my academic analysis, and as my career progresses I am less inclined to compromise and pretend academic “objectivity.” Reading and citing feminist responses in this chapter, I am not distantly evaluating them—rather, I am feeling them. Traditional views about objective enquiry might require dismissing this emotion, but in my view this feeling, that the personal is political, is what drives callout culture, in social media and in academia.

14 Bethan Jones

Jafar Wars Fan-­Created Paratexts in Alderaan Places

A

t the time of this writing, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has been in cinemas for just over a month and Carrie Fisher has recently passed away. These events are not linked, of course, but their proximity—Rogue One was released on December 16, 2016, while Fisher passed away eleven days later on December 27—has almost inevitably led to the perception that they are connected, particularly given the CGI cameo in the film by a young Princess Leia (played by Ingvild Deila). Initial responses to Rogue One’s use of CGI in this way—to feature Guy Henry in Peter Cushing’s former role as Grand Moff Tarkin and Deila as a young Leia—were criticized by many, including Forbes, USA Today, and Vulture (Kenreck 2016; Lawler 2016; Lincoln 2016). Since Fisher’s death, however, John Knoll, the chief creative officer of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), has revealed that Fisher was involved in the process and was happy with the cameo after watching a finished cut of the scene (Rothman and Sandell 2017). While Fisher’s response to the use of CGI may not be enough to convince fans adamant that the effects failed (falling into “the uncanny valley,” as it were), Knoll’s statement—and Fisher’s death— nonetheless act as paratexts to Rogue One. Jonathan Gray, in his extensive work on paratexts, draws on the ideas of literary theorist Gérard Genette, who argued that a literary text is “rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by . . . productions such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations” that surround it and extend it (Genette 1997: 1) . Genette defined these productions as paratexts and described the paratext as a form of  “airlock” between the reader and the textual world, an influence that “is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it” (1997: 2). Gray (2006: 36), however, believes that the paratext “does not stand between reader

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and text as much as it infringes upon the text, and invades its meaning-­making process.” He argues that industry-­created paratexts—such as episode guides, cast and crew interviews, games, trailers, and DVD commentaries—inform viewers’ knowledge of the text and frame modes of understanding and engagement (J. Gray 2010). The knowledge that Fisher approved of the CGI, coupled with her death and the impact that had on Star Wars fans, certainly provides fans with a new frame for engaging with the text. Gray also, however, refers to viewer-­created paratexts: citing fan fiction, fan film and video, fan art, and so on, he argues that these also play a role in “challenging or supplementing those created by the industry . . . in carving out alternative pathways through texts” (2010: 143). Drawing on Gray’s notion of the viewer-­created paratext, this chapter seeks to examine the role that fan productions—including fan fiction, art, and videos—play in framing and anticipating the narrative surrounding Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise. I analyze fan art, fan vids, and fan fiction that feature crossovers between Disney texts and Star Wars and responses to these works by fellow fans. I searched Archive of Our Own (AO3), Tumblr, and YouTube—as three of the most popular platforms for fic, artwork, and vids, respectively—for content containing the keywords “Disney” and “Star Wars.” I also limited the search to content published after Disney’s takeover of Lucasfilm. While there is much fan-­created Star Wars work, including works with Disney crossovers created before the buyout, I focus exclusively on those created after Lucasfilm was sold in order to analyze how fans were talking about and understanding Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars (see also Proctor 2013). By including fan comments, I have depicted them as they appear online and have not revised or edited text. I argue that by creating crossover works showing Disney characters in a range of scenarios and locations within the Star Wars universe, these viewer-­created paratexts demonstrate the way in which fans engage with, understand, and recode (Bethan Jones 2016) the text. In analyzing other fan responses to the crossover works, I suggest that these paratexts can play a role in fan reception of the original texts, providing fans with new ways of engaging with and understanding them. Furthermore, I suggest that these paratexts, created before the official release of The Force Awakens, demonstrate that fans’ engagement with, interest in, and concerns about a text are not limited to one text alone but can also be developed through fans’ intertextual knowledge—in this case, of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and Disney. Although fan-­ created content has been examined in multiple academic accounts, little scholarly attention has been paid to crossover works (for notable exceptions see Perez 2013; Samutina 2016; Booth 2016; and Bethan Jones 2017) and even less

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to crossovers created due to the amalgamation of two (well-­k nown) parent corporations. This chapter thus serves as an intervention into an area of growing interest and facilitates a better grasp of fan understandings of texts and their commentaries on industrial practices.

Come to the Dark Side—We Have Disney: Fascination and Frustration in Crossover Texts As the name suggests, the crossover—in this context also known as a “mash­up”—is a work combining two or more texts and featuring characters from those texts in a coherent story. Henry Jenkins (2006a: 258) suggests that fandom is born from a combination of both fascination and frustration: “If media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.” Jenkins considers fan works to exist in a specific canonical universe, but I suggest that these frustrations and fascinations with a text are not limited to a single text alone. Rather, they can also be developed by and expressed through fans’ intertextual knowledge of multiple texts. Gray explains that one of the ways that intertextuality works is by texts including references to other texts, and so joining a network, becoming only a part of a broader meaning. The X-­Files, for example, is a highly intertextual show. References are often made to other texts: for example, I Dream of Jeannie (in the seventh season episode, “Je Souhaite”), Frankenstein (in the fifth season episode “The Post-­Modern Prometheus”), and Star Wars (in the third season episode “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ ”), among others. While The X Files can certainly be understood without prior knowledge of these other texts, the intertextuality of the show has a potential impact on how it is decoded by its audience. Gray (2006: 33) notes, “If we view decoding as a process of ‘reading through,’ we realise that we read through . . . in the sense of reading via other texts. As we try to make sense of a text, we activate our (inter­ textual) genre literacies. . . . Other texts are always there with us as we work our way through a text.” When Disney announced their takeover of  Lucasfilm, Star Wars fans’ knowledge of Disney texts became important to their understanding of how Star Wars might be developed under its new management. One query concerned Princess Leia and her status as a (potential) Disney princess (see also Booth in this volume). Leia is a princess in the Star Wars universe, at least until in The Force Awakens she is referred to as “General,” and this raises questions over whether she automatically “becomes” a Disney Princess after the acquisition. The answer from Disney, initially, was negative. In order to become a

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Disney Princess, the proposed heroine must be inducted at a special ceremony at one of the Disney Parks. Disney also tweeted in May 2014 that there were no plans for Leia products to be sold in stores (shopDisney 2014). Despite this, however, fans began creating crossover art featuring Leia as a Disney Princess. Some of these were depictions of Leia in classic Disney Princess poses, such as “Now That Disney Bought Lucasfilm” (Captain RibMan 2012), which features Leia in the archetypal “Snow White” pose, surrounded by mynocks instead of birds and R2-­D2 peeking from behind her skirt instead of a forest animal. The image and title are, however, ambiguous and able to be read differently depending on the viewer’s opinion of the Disney takeover, as comments on Captain RibMan’s original Facebook post demonstrate. On the one hand, “Now That Disney Bought Lucasfilm” enacts an implantation of Leia for a Disney Princess and depicts Leia as part of the classical Disney universe, cementing Star Wars as an iconic Disney product and providing fans with, as one commenter puts it, a “princess who kicks ass.” On the other hand, however, Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm suggests that the corporation will “Disney-­f y” Star Wars, making it overly cute and thus, for some fans at least, ruining the franchise. Also interesting to note, however, is that this design, retitled “Princess,” was made available on Captain RibMan’s ShirtPunch shop following fans’ requests for it to be sold as a T-­shirt, also subverting Disney’s statement that official Leia products would not be sold. Other artwork, however, functions to introduce Leia as she exists in the Star Wars universe into the Disney universe and thus acts as a form of world-­ building. Writing about fan fiction, Natalia Samutina (2016: 4) notes that the crossover genre “is not only unmistakably multifandom, but also more demanding in terms of world-­building. In a sense, the crossover genre epitomizes the transformative nature of fandom reception and provides a perfect example of fans’ imaginary world-­building.” In “Pocket Princesses #36” Amy Mebberson (2012) draws on her knowledge of other Disney princesses to depict their reactions to Leia joining their ranks. Mulan and Merida, both of whom are warriors in the Disney universe, are intrigued by Leia’s weapon, Rapunzel is fascinated by Leia’s hair, and Tiana’s mother creates a Disney Princess–style dress for Leia (albeit one that is modeled on the infamous metal bikini), symbolically inducting her into the realm of the Disney Princess. Mebberson thus envisages a new world in which Leia joins the other Disney princesses and interacts with them while retaining her canonical personality. Mebberson’s image suggests a more positive interpretation of Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars; featuring Merida and Mulan suggests that Leia joins the ranks of existing warrior princesses and thus that fears about her character being Disneyfied are unfounded (see Proctor

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2013 for a breakdown on fan reactions to the acquisition). Warrior princesses are a part of Disney canon, too, and particularly in recent years. Indeed, Leia’s interaction with Merida and Mulan in Mebberson’s image suggests that fans are aware of the possibilities that Disney’s Star Wars may hold for future female characters. Commenting on the artwork on Facebook on December 1, 2012, Michael Shigetani writes: “So I now have this image: Merida and Mulan are bored, and Leia says, ‘come on, I know just the place.’ Next scene: the three of them getting into a bar fight at Mos Eisley” (Pocket Princesses n.d.). Although a canonical crossover featuring Leia, Mulan, and Merida is unlikely, Leia’s induction by Disney may lead to stronger female characters being included throughout the Disney franchise. Not all fans were pleased with the idea of Leia becoming a Disney Princess, however. In a Tumblr post, intellichick (2012) writes that, while Leia did some fairy-­tale things, she is valuable because her narrative forms part of the (predominantly male) Star Wars universe yet isn’t buried by the other male narratives. In other words, while Disney Princesses often exist in relation to male characters (Snow White is woken from a coma by Prince Charming; Cinderella is saved from a life of servitude by Prince Charming), Leia is a powerful character in her own right. Christian Knight (2015) also contrasts Leia with the existing Disney Princesses, writing: But Leia is a bona-­fide princess. In fact, she’s on a whole ’nother level from the Disney Princesses. She’s the adopted daughter of Bail Organa of the Royal House of Alderaan. That’s a much bigger deal than Aurora’s kingdom or Ariel’s realm under the sea. Snow White had the witch trying to destroy her . . . but Leia had the forces of Emperor Palpatine hunting her down, led by no less a dark knight than Darth Vader himself. Tiana is a product of the French Quarter of New Orleans. Well, Leia comes from an even sleazier background: senate politics! And don’t even get me started on how Leia does things with her hair that Rapunzel can only dream about. These particular groups of Star Wars fans thus draw on their intertextual knowledge of Disney to argue for Leia as the ultimate princess—and often contrast her to their perceptions of what constitutes a typical Disney Princess. Casey Frennier (2012) illustrates this with a piece of art on her website in which a photographic image of Carrie Fisher as Leia is included in a tableau with the other, animated, Disney princesses. Drawing the distinction between Leia as a live-­action, rather than an animated, character highlights her differences from the other Disney princesses, as does the fact that Leia stands apart from—and in front of—the others. Leia also

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wears the slave costume from Return of the Jedi, which Disney has pulled from all merchandise (Sampson 2015). Beneath the artwork, Frennier wrote: I realized tonight (since Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas) that Princess Leia is now a Disney princess. Disney now has a monopoly on all the good princesses. The only princess hold-­out now that Disney doesn’t own is Princess Peach from Super Mario Brothers. There has been a backlash from loyal fans refusing to acknowledge that she has joined their ranks who now refer to her only as Senator Leia Organa of Alderaan. The response hasn’t been all negative, though. The Ewoks, Wookiees, fans who want to see more Star Wars movies, and Whatever-­ The-­Fuck-­Jar-­Jar-­Binks-­is are all thrilled about the acquisition of Star Wars by Disney and Leia being added to their elite princess ranks. Star Wars Episode VII is expected to release in 2015 and is expected to suck. Frennier’s commentary further suggests her dissatisfaction at Leia joining the ranks of Disney Princesses and her frustration with fans who are happy with this development, as well as with those who approve of  Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm. Her crossover artwork here thus functions both as a criticism of  Leia becoming a Disney Princess and as a commentary on some factions within Star Wars fandom and on the Disney buyout. Indeed, Frennier’s note can be viewed through the lenses of “fantagonism,” which consists of “ongoing, competitive struggles between both internal factions and external institutions to discursively codify the fan-­text-­producer relationship according to their competitive interests” (D. Johnson 2007a: 287), and “fantipathy,” which is “a specific mode of critical fan discourse, taking place within a fan community, and characterized by professed dissonance between fan and fan object/text” (McCulloch 2018: 231). Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm has not been celebrated by all fans and there much is evidence of antifan discourse surrounding the takeover and subsequent films. Of course, this “intra-­fandom antagonism [is] grounded in debates about subcultural capital” (Bethan Jones 2016: 54)—Frennier’s comment about the fans of Ewoks, Wookiees, and Jar Jar Binks utilizes the subcultural capital of the “true” Star Wars fan who dislikes those particular species and characters, which are routinely derided by fans of the franchise.

The Best Way to Experience the Prequels: Fan Works as (Re)Orienting Paratext Frennier’s art, however, invites the viewer to engage with it on a humorous level in addition to as part of a deeper critique. The inclusion of humor is an

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important one, and humorous fan works abound, allowing fans catharsis, social inclusion, and critical commentary. Madeline Klink (2008) discusses antifans’ use of humor in her analysis of the Twilight antifan community on LiveJournal, noting that macros (i.e., captioned images) and other explicitly humorous productions form a major part of the site. Klink (2008: 24) terms those who read the books with the purpose of snarking at them “lolfans” and suggests that like fans, they “produce many transformative or derivative works” but with the marked difference that “these lolfans’ productions are all about humor—and not necessarily parodic humor.” Similarly, Harman and Jones (2013: 958) argue that those who “spork” Fifty Shades of Grey “position themselves in an elevated position within fandom and, through sporking, promote a distinction within fan culture based on cultural capital that they possess, and which the authors and fans of the fiction they spork do not.”1 Those who share the same opinion as Frennier, then, are able to laugh at ostensibly inferior fans—who like the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks and who have no issue with Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm—while maintaining their own subcultural capital among other like-­ minded fans. Jonathan Gray (2010: 146), writing about viewer-­created paratexts, writes that he is interested in those that invite increased attention to a given plot, character relationship, or mode of viewing. He notes that viewer-­created para­texts “may echo industry-­created paratexts, but they might also . . . call for subtle changes in interpretation . . . and [open] up new paths of understanding.” The kinds of paratexts that Gray refers to here are, I would suggest, similar to what Jason Mittell has theorized as “orienting paratexts.” These, Mittell (2015: 261) suggests, are “distinct from transmedia paratexts that explicitly strive to continue their storyworlds across platforms . . . [instead] providing a perspective for viewers to help make sense of a narrative world by looking at it from a distance.” Mittell argues that there are four basic facets of storytelling that might require orientation—time, events, characters, and space—and that each of these may be oriented through one of three practices—recapitulation, analysis, or expansion. He refers to video remixes created by Lost fans as a means by which fans create orientation tools that serve as “analytic forms of orientation, providing insights via rethinking the show’s narrative timeframe” (2015: 266). Mittell does note that while “many fan paratexts aim for character reinterpretation, [he] would not call most of those ‘orientation practices’ per se, as they are less focused on making sense of the existing narrative world than expanding them into other possibilities” (269). When Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm was announced, fans began making sense of Star Wars as part of the existing metanarrative of

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Disney. Fan works such as fan vids and fan mixes could thus be considered reorientation practices, as well as reorienting paratexts. Although, like Frennier, Box Step Productions’s (2012) “Star Wars Disney Musical—Part 1” utilizes humor, it also provides an alternative perspective through which viewers can understand Disney’s Star Wars. It does this first by asking: “What if Disney remakes Star Wars . . . as a Musical? We think the Lucas Films take over could look something like this . . . .” The video opens with scrolling text à la Star Wars while the opening bars of The Lion King’s “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” play in the background. The text apes that of the films, with Disney reframed as the evil Federation who, “in their bid to control all cinema, has swept in and taken Lucas Films [sic].” The text continues: “As the midi-­ chlorians join the circle of life, a small band of Disneyphiles versed in the ways of the force believe that this union does not spell certain doom for the future of Star Wars.” This highlights the second way in which the vid offers an alternative perspective: rather than prioritizing Star Wars fans, who have predominantly seen the buyout as a negative thing, the vid associates a positive response to the acquisition with Disney fans. This serves as a reminder that two fandoms are invested in the merger—Star Wars and Disney—and that far from one homogeneous response, they may each act in different ways. The vid then cuts to a young Anakin Skywalker singing a duet with Watto to the same tune. The lyrics refer to Anakin’s quest to become a Jedi and Watto’s ownership of him, while the visuals show Anakin’s training as a Jedi. The vid continues in a similar theme, rewriting iconic Disney songs to fit into the Star Wars universe and pairing each with images from the films. Luke, for example, is contrasted with The Little Mermaid’s Ariel as he sings about leaving Tatooine to the tune of “Part of Your World.” Box Step Productions produced two other Disney Star Wars musicals, each following a similar pattern to the first. In “Star Wars Disney Musical—Part 2,” Darth Sidious is compared with Scar (The Lion King) as he sings about his plans to create an Empire to the tune of “Be Prepared”—complete with backing singers taking the part of the hyenas (Box Step Productions 2013). Crossover vids, particularly when they involve two such popular franchises, become more marketable than works based on a single text and thus result in more cultural capital among fans of the original franchises. In some cases, as with Captain RibMan’s Disney-­Leia crossover image, they can even result in financial reward. What the vids also do, however, is to orientate events and characters in Star Wars in relation to the wider Disney universe through what Mittell refers to as recapitulation (2015: 266). The comments on YouTube in response to the Box Step Productions (2012) vid also

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reflect the ways in which fans have understood them in relation to the Disney takeover: Think of Disney as just another company, like Universal. Disney is just going to give the movie makers a budget and the movie people have to do the rest. So it’s JJ Abrams we actually have to worry about. I got to say, I have, mixed feelings. One the one hand, should Disney do this, they’d all die. But, it neat how you took famous songs, and made them star wars. Nice job. This is really good. I was just laughing the whole time ’cause I totally saw this happening in my head when I heard the whole Disney thing. Fans also requested Disney songs for future videos and discussed who they thought would sing them. One comment suggested “Hellfire,” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with responses suggesting Vader or Palpatine singing about Luke, or Anakin singing about Padmé and how he would do anything— including turning to the dark side—to save her. Others referred the songs back to the original films, with one poster commenting: “This makes the battle of endor so much more epic, i love it :D.” The fan vids thus act as (user-­generated) paratexts, with the producers adapting existing song lyrics to examine Star Wars in relation to the Disney buyout, affording other fans new ways of interpreting the films, considering the franchise’s future, and, as Coppa (2008: 1.1) writes, acting as “an interpretive lens to help the viewer see the source text differently.” Fans’ intertextual knowledge is drawn upon to enable them to draw links between characters spanning multiple franchises. Judge Claude Frollo thus becomes Darth Vader, and the lustful thoughts about Esmeralda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame are reinterpreted with a homoerotic subtext with Vader singing about Luke. Similar to the way in which Elizabeth Woledge (2005: 248) suggests that slash fiction “implicitly ask[s] the reader to question their response to Star Trek, to return to the text and decode it differently,” crossover works created following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm ask fans to return to Star Wars and decode it differently—through their knowledge of Disney—or return to Disney films and decode them through their knowledge of Star Wars. In addition to paratexts’ ability to offer a space for reflective analysis, Jonathan Gray (2010: 154) suggests that they can “also draw our attention to specific characters and relationships, ‘highlighting’ their path through a tale and thereby [drawing] attention to their peculiarities.” He argues that this process is rarely so obvious as in fan vidding and cites the Dexter fan vid “Blood Fugue”

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(Luminosity 2006) as one example. The video offers a three-­minute examination of Dexter’s bloodlust and of the genesis of a serial killer, and Gray argues that it offers a sustained period of introspection (2010: 157), all the while set to a frenetic string piece designed to put the viewer on edge. Fans of Disney films have created Star Wars–inspired versions of Disney trailers, such as NeonicFilm1138’s (2014) “Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer—Frozen Edition” and Bad Mosquito’s (2014b) “Star Wars: Episode VII Trailer (Disney Toy Story Version).” Both trailers overlay dialogue from The Force Awakens onto the respective Disney film, thus changing the story. Bad Mosquito’s (2014a) “Star Wars: Episode VII Trailer (Disney Frozen Version)” opens with a long shot of the hallway in Castle Arendelle and the line, “There’s been an awakening in the Force. Have you felt it?” Anna then bursts out of a room and runs down the hallway. Various scenes from the film are then featured while the audio from the Star Wars trailer plays. Elsa is depicted as Kylo Ren while Anna and Kristoff are depicted as the good guys, utilizing the light in the battle against the dark side. This affords viewers a chance to reflect on Frozen in relation to Star Wars and its story of good versus evil, but it also provides a preemptive examination of what The Force Awakens might entail. Created a year before the film’s theatrical release, the fan trailer features limited audio, runs to one minute thirty seconds—the same length as the teaser trailer for The Force Awakens— and mirrors the official trailer, with selection of scenes and cuts as similar as possible. The depiction of Elsa as Kylo Ren also suggests that a redemptive storyline is a possibility: Elsa struggles with controlling and concealing her magical abilities, harms the people she loves, but finally finds redemption through defeating her fear of her powers—in some ways undergoing an awakening of her own. Writing about fan vids, Jenkins (1992: 234) refers to “constructed reality” videos, in which “creators build original narratives, often involving multiple media universes, through their recontextualization of borrowed images.” The crossover vid thus creates an entirely new story but does so by pairing visuals from one film with dialogue from another, rather than linking together shots from each original series. It is not simply vids, however, that reconstruct a world using multiple texts. The crossover fiction (or “fic”) works in a similar way to build original narratives; but rather than relying on footage that is cut and recontextualized, writers use their—and their readers’—knowledge of both texts and genres to develop a new storyline.

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Where Is the Balance in the Force? Crossover Fan Works and Metacriticism The crossover fic can also utilize a number of fan fic tropes and conventions, from the “genderswap,” which swaps the canonical gender of the character, to “fluff,” typically a story with displays of affection instead of any angst. Crossovers exist across a variety of texts and genres, and Star Wars has already generated numerous crossovers. A search on fanfiction.net as of August 2016 returns over 1,000 results, with crossovers from Harry Potter (442), Lord of the Rings (55), and Sesame Street (2). One of the pleasures of the crossover is in developing a “What if?” line of storytelling that is often found in fan fiction but also in superhero comics. What if Darth Vader and Voldemort joined forces? Or Han Solo discovered a blue police box that could travel through time and space? Crossovers between existing universes that have nothing in common often take an element of commonality to join the narratives (such as two villains) or introduce an aspect of one universe (the tardis) into another (the Death Star). Where Star Wars and Disney crossover fics diverge, however, is in the canonical joining of the universes where previously they had been separate entities. Rather than simply imagining what would happen if Chewbacca met a beautiful girl, the crossover fic between Star Wars and Beauty and the Beast can join them in same universe and can also offer commentary on that universe. There is thus a difference between the crossover fic (Star Wars and Harry Potter) and the new “shared universe” fic (Star Wars and Beauty and the Beast). The shared universe fic is facilitated by the two studios’ new allegiance, when possibilities that may not have occurred to fans previously suddenly become apparent. Furthermore, when the crossover work is created after a merger, it is created with the intertextual knowledge of that merger and fans’ thoughts, fears, desires, and apprehensions. Thus, we can examine a Star Wars-­Disney crossover as part of a larger metatext encompassing what we know about both Star Wars and the typical Disney fairy tale through an understanding of both source texts. This understanding works not only to situate the new text but also to draw comparisons between the original source texts and to offer new ways of engaging with and critiquing them. Fan author fresne’s (2012) Star Princesses of Long Ago and Far Away is a series of drabbles (100-­word works of fiction) concerning the Disney Princesses that is set in the Star Wars universe. The fic’s summary reads, “Long, long ago, and far, far away, princesses held their own,” and each story centers on a different Disney Princess. In the first, for example, Snow White is the elected princess and representative of the Dwarven mining coalition and meets the Neimoidians’

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representatives of the Trade Federation to discuss mining rights. Snow White retains her ability to make forest animals do her bidding, and the fic alludes to her experience with the evil witch: “She was familiar with what he offered. A sweet apple of a deal to deliver their goods in exchange for exclusive rights. Snow White knew all about poisoned apples.” The fic also, however, positions Snow White as possessing more power and agency than she is afforded in the Disney fairy tale: “The leader of the delegation, Nute Gunray, seemed to be distracted by the potential for non-­resilience in her garb. That was why she had worn it.” In a later scene, fresne similarly alters the story of Cinderella from that of a girl rescued by Prince Charming to a girl rescued by the Force: She ran and she lifted and she grew strong in her hate. Her Godmother came to the kitchen door and spoke of how sleeping in the fire had made her strong. She offered to teach her to use her hate to grow stronger yet. It was not a decision that was many steps in the making. She embraced her Godmother. She embraced her teacher. She embraced the darkness, black as the cinders in which she slept. She whispered the code of her Godmother. “Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.” She grew very strong. Cinderella becomes a Sith Lord who takes revenge on her stepmother and stepsisters, thus turning the original fairy tale on its head and demonstrating how crossovers can function as a critique—in this case, of the representation of gender in the original Disney films. Deborah Kaplan (2006: 137) notes that “the environment of fandom is richly interpretive,” and the crossover fan work functions within the bounds of this interpretive community. The crossover as fan-­created paratext is shared with other fans and, as Jonathan Gray (2010: 162) notes, “will simultaneously provide evidence about how any given community or individual watches the show in question, and it will serve as a paratext that encourages others to watch in a similar manner.” This is evident in response to fresne’s work. Responding to the Cinderella story, the user runawakskellum wrote, “And Sith! Cinder’s revenge is brilliant. It makes sense that she would become a Sith but I don’t think I ever would have thought of it.” Eustacia Vye also commented: “I love the image of

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the princesses in the Star Wars universe. Sith Cinders is so stealthy, and now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it. It’s fun to turn Cinderella into a tricksy one, isn’t it? She’s a spy in Fables, and that’s what this reminded me of a little.” Her knowledge of Star Wars, Disney’s Cinderella, and the comic series Fables thus enable her to read Sith Cinders as a believable character, not out of keeping with either the Star Wars or Disney universes but still functioning as a commentary on each of them. Similarly, the user DAsObiQuiet’s response to the Snow White fic also demonstrates intertextual knowledge of Star Wars and a rereading of the Disney fairy tale through the fic’s lens: “Did you have [Snow White] there in relation to Amidala (because we all certainly saw the correlations) or was this a ‘before/after’ kind of thing, on another, similar planet maybe? I’d like a bit more explanation there, if you could.” The fan author supergreak’s (2014) Let It Go, You Must also works to rewrite aspects of a Disney story through introduction of Star Wars elements. In this story, Elsa is in possession of the Force and is sent away for training while her parents teach Anna all she needs to know to become queen of Arendelle. In a similar narrative to Frozen, Anna is seduced by a suitor—Emperor Palpatine in this case—who is using her to further his own end, but unlike in the Disney film, Anna is not gullible enough to be taken in by his attentions. Instead she runs background checks on the Emperor and has her bodyguard trailing them on their “date”: Really, you’d think he assumed that she’d been thrown on the throne unexpectedly at nineteen with no training whatsoever. As if! Ever since Elsa joined the Jedi, her parents shifted their training focus to Anna. History of the planet, the sector, the Republic. Mathematics. Physical training— mostly running and strength exercises, although she sometimes practiced archery with the equally young Queen of Naboo, who had seriously wild red hair when her handmaidens weren’t watching. . . . Diplomacy. Court manners. Fashion. Self defence, and “aggressive negotiations.” Torture resistance, how to escape from kidnappers, a year with the Palace Intelligence Agency learning disguises and weapons and how to discern lies and half-­truths. The first aid, piloting, the main industries of the planet. She knew minute details about everything from cobblery to Winter Recreational Sports to agriculture, and she once won the town strong-­being contest, 8–12s division. And Palpatine thought she’d be fooled by a sweet smile and finishing her sentences? Ha. Ha. No.

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Anna is thus afforded more agency and intelligence in the fic than she is in Frozen, although Elsa struggles to control her own powers as much as she does in the film. The fic is a multipart work, however, and so follows the characters over a longer period of time than the film. Chapter 2 sees Elsa a few decades after chapter one, tracking down an escaped Palpatine and offering advice on training a new Padawan to Obi-­Wan Kenobi. Although the fic has not been completed, it nevertheless offers an opportunity for fans to revisit Frozen with the question of what would happen if Elsa was a Jedi, utilizing their intertextual knowledge of  both franchises and recoding each based on that knowledge and on the crossover paratexts.

Conclusion In creating crossover fan works between Star Wars and other Disney properties, fans can speculate about what stories Disney may come up with for the franchise, as well as what the franchise may do for other Disney characters. Leia’s inclusion into the ranks of Disney Princesses may lead to stronger princesses who are able and willing to fight for their beliefs rather than simply to “get the prince,” and fans are able to revisit and reinterpret Disney texts through the lens afforded by Star Wars and fan-­created paratexts. In addition, user-­generated crossovers can also provide new viewpoints for fans to revisit and reinterpret both Star Wars and Disney texts. I have examined some of these paratexts in the course of this chapter, analyzing art, vids, and fic that each take aspects of Star Wars and Disney and merge, combine, and remix them to create new texts that allow new understandings of the originals. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, scholarly work on crossovers is few and far between, and work on “shared universe” fics created after the merger of two parent corporations is even more scarce. Analyzing these stories, however, affords fan studies scholars an opportunity to examine the interplay between different fandoms, how fans’ intertextual knowledge is used and shared, and how it reshapes other fans’ perceptions of the source texts. The crossover, as examined in this chapter, transcends the bounds of individual fan communities as well as those of the interpretive community suggested by Kaplan—new works are created that straddle two or more fandoms, and that also draw on the wider discourses and metatexts surrounding them. Samutina (2016: 436) writes: Fandoms and fan fiction communities are quite often studied in contemporary publications in their “purity,” as if their borders were impermeable, and a proper fan was obliged to stick only to his/her own beloved canon

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universe endlessly. On the one hand, it makes sense in general, because these cultural forms are rooted deeply in the practices of communities and the unique history of their writing and communication. . . . But on the other hand . . . contemporary online communication allows and even encourages participation in multiple fandoms simultaneously. It was possible for fans to enjoy Star Wars and Disney as “pure” franchises prior to the Disney buyout, although crossover works were certainly in existence. But the borders between Star Wars and Disney, by virtue of the latter’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, have become permeable and have allowed crossover works to function in ways new and different from previously existing crossovers. This also, however, poses questions for scholars: How do we theorize crossover paratexts? Are these part of the textuality of Star Wars, or of Disney, or both? These crossover works become, as Gray (2010: 146) suggests, “a paratext with which fans can repurpose characters,” and the fan creativity involved in producing these texts “can work as a powerful in medias res paratext, grabbing a story or text in midstream and directing its path elsewhere.” Yet the existence of such paratexts complicates Gray’s work in that they critique and celebrate the merging of the franchises, as well as offering fans new ways of understanding each text. They may work as in medias res paratexts to direct the story elsewhere, but they also work as metatextual paratexts, commenting on the overarching events that led to their creation in the first place and directing fans’ attention to these events even if they are unable to direct their paths elsewhere.

15 Michelle Kent

“You Die! You Know That, Right? You Don’t Come Back!” Fans Negotiating Disney’s (De)Stabilized Star Wars Canon

I

n the late 1990s, fans awaited George Lucas’s first installment of the new Star Wars prequel trilogy with great excitement and no small amount of trepidation. While The Phantom Menace ultimately failed to live up to the expectations of many existing fans (Brooker 2002), the prequel trilogy was undoubtedly successful in introducing a new generation of viewers to the Star Wars universe. Despite a certain lingering mistrust of Lucas’s artistic vision among fan communities, the years following the prequel trilogy saw the release of many well-­received Star Wars texts—from Emmy Award–winning animated series The Clone Wars to more than a hundred Expanded Universe (EU) novels. In 2012, The Walt Disney Company purchased Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise for over $4 billion (Proctor 2013) and announced their intention to produce new Star Wars films and other transmedia products, beginning with a sequel trilogy of films and an anthology series (comprising, at the time of this writing, Rogue One and Solo). Disney subsequently announced on StarWars .com that “[in] order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII–IX will not tell the same story told in the post–Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe” (Star Wars 2014). Here, Disney-­Lucasfilm expressly stated that they would be overwriting the narrative trajectory of their newly inherited EU content (see also Harvey’s and Freeman’s chapters in this volume). Disney’s overhaul of the Star Wars narrative universe included rebranding all previously released EU content under the new, specifically noncanonical label of Star Wars Legends, to make way for Disney’s own internally managed, official Expanded Universe products (Proctor and Freeman 2016). Perhaps it is not surprising,

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then, that a familiar pall of fannish anxiety and trepidation preceded the December 2015 release of the first installment of Disney’s new sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens. At first glance, Disney’s narrative restructuring may look like arbitrary franchise maintenance with little real-­world consequence: a straightforward, economically driven effort to manage the glut of Star Wars transmedia tie-­ins encompassing some 260 novels, 180 video games, over 1,000 comic books, and other ephemera (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 224). Or perhaps a somewhat extreme example of what Matt Hills (2012c) calls “fanagement”: that is, “the attempted management of fan readings, responses and activities [which] does not merely give fans what they want, i.e. coherence and narrative consistency [but instead] protects brand value by responding to fan criticism regarding continuity errors, and anticipating possible fan critiques.” In this chapter, I contest the notion that Disney’s changes have no impact on real-­world fan practice beyond quantifiable changes in sales figures, or that they represent a foolhardy attempt to end fan debate about what constitutes authentic Star Wars canon. Drawing on interviews conducted in early 2015 with Australian members of the Star Wars costuming fan clubs the 501st Legion (501st) and Rebel Legion (RL), I expose how their expression of anxiety about The Force Awakens may have little to do with the film’s prospective narrative mutability resulting from Disney’s canon restructure. The 501st and RL are the two largest international Star Wars costuming fan clubs, the former encompassing the villains and Imperial characters and the latter the heroes and Jedi. The clubs operate independently and in partnership on a global scale to regularly mobilize local chapters of fans (501st garrisons and RL bases) for public appearances (known as “trooping”) in exchange for charity donations, with most of the proceeds benefitting children’s charities. I contend that the anxiety these fans expressed in relation to The Force Awakens and Disney’s treatment of the franchise reflects a deeper concern about how changes to the structure of the franchise threaten their ability to participate meaningfully in their fandom as members of these global fan communities. The data in this chapter forms part of a study investigating the wider Australian audience reaction to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and the subsequent overhaul of the Star Wars canon, focusing on the production and reception of The Force Awakens. In 2015, I coordinated with a prominent Melbourne-­based member of the clubs to circulate a call for research participants via social media, through which I invited participants to register their interest by email to organize recorded interviews. The first round of semistructured individual and group interviews were conducted in person and online using video conferencing software in the first half of 2015, and each interview ran for 45 to 120 minutes.

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This chapter focuses on the responses of seven of the thirty-­one participants interviewed before December 2015 (identified hereafter as Amy, David, Emma, Eric, Logan, Phillip, and Ryan). These fans were active members of the Australian 501st or RL at the time of interview, with some holding dual club membership and sometimes also membership in other Star Wars costuming clubs such as the Mandalorian Mercs (for bounty hunter and mercenary characters). Although these fans lived in geographically disparate locations, they all shared varying degrees of contact with each other and with club members across the country and worldwide. As well as meeting at events, club members interact online through social media sites and the club forums, where they organize events at the local and national levels and engage in the tradition of lively fan discussion. Therefore, while the small scale of this study prohibits generalizations about how Disney’s franchise changes were being experienced and negotiated by club members around the globe—or even by the majority of other local members—the responses of these fans represent a networked snapshot of the Australian Star Wars costuming community’s general reaction to Disney’s changes and of their perceptions regarding how their own local fan practices might be affected in the future. In this chapter, I argue that these fans show an awareness that, on some level, their fannish identity could well be contingent on their enjoyment and acceptance of The Force Awakens as a coherent continuation of the Star Wars story. However, they are also reliant on the belief that Disney will not drastically interfere with club operations. They are critical of the economic motivation behind Disney’s canon restructuring and concerned that these changes might significantly alter their future interactions with Star Wars as a nostalgia-­laden cultural object and a changing narrative entity that they expect to continue consuming and promoting. Taking as a starting point William Proctor’s (2013) study of fans’ initial reactions to Disney’s purchase of Star Wars, I consider how Star Wars has functioned as a reliable text that has informed the life narratives and identities of my participants, and I explore the negative impact that major changes to this text could have on their sense of self and their cultural membership as fans. I draw on the concept of ontological security to unpack the complex relationships these fans have with their fan objects as consumers, active brand ambassadors, and members of a community dedicated to using their fandom for civic engagement. Ultimately, I expose how brand management strategies enacted by media production houses like Disney can markedly influence the way that fandom is incorporated into everyday life and how acts of “commodity braiding” (Freeman 2014), intended to unify (original and acquired) products, can have unexpectedly negative consequences for fan community practices.

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Ontological Security and the Transference of Cultural Property In 2013, William Proctor presented the results of his “affective mapping” of survey responses by one hundred Star Wars fans and found that, contrary to much of the media coverage of fan reactions at the time, the majority of his participants were generally “cautiously optimistic” about the news that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise and were excited at the prospect of new Star Wars transmedia products being released in the near future (Proctor 2013: 200).1 Having had two additional years to come to terms with the situation, my participants were already able to comment on their personal experiences of how Disney’s changes were reshaping the future of the franchise and their interaction with it. On balance, they echoed the primarily positive responses of Proctor’s participants, but as the conversations progressed, the idea of Disney’s unimpeded ability to rewrite Star Wars canon emerged as a potential threat to them as individual fans operating in their particular fan communities. Their investment in the franchise, particularly those who had been fans of the EU, left them feeling vulnerable to Disney’s authorial and managerial whims, although they often had difficulty articulating the source of their unease. Proctor suggests that the threat of authorized canon revision is tied to the perception that “fictional aspects of the text have consequences in ‘the real world,’ ” and so the destabilization of the previously established (though highly contested) Star Wars canon hierarchy becomes “a legitimate cause for concern and a significant peril for a fan’s ontological existence” (Proctor 2013: 220), particularly for EU fans. Identifying how these fictional elements intersect with the real worlds of these fans and their “self-­narratives” (see also Hills 2002; Proctor 2017) provides insight into the relationship between Disney’s narrative reconfiguration of Star Wars and the ontological security that Star Wars as a cultural object has offered them over time. This approach illustrates how the threat of canon instability could affect or alter their particular fan practices—specifically mimetic costume fabrication—to demonstrate why access to a clearly demarcated and authorially constituted canon is integral to their fannish identity. This then exposes how major changes overtly threaten how they perceive their roles as fans, cultural ambassadors, and ultimately as useful citizens. Fandom studies scholars have established myriad ways in which fans use the traditions and cultures that they create through their interactions with fan objects and with each other as frames of reference for understanding and interacting with the wider cultural sphere (Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005). The theoretical

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frame of ontological security, first set out by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990) and expanded by Hills (2002), provides a powerful tool for understanding how the function of a (fictional) narrative canon intersects with (physical) mimetic fandom—the practice of creating “highly screen-­accurate prop replicas” (Hills 2014a)—and how the concept of canon is consciously invoked by those fans who physically embody characters through costuming and performance at cultural events. Star Wars as a cultural object with a symbolic authorial figurehead (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 231) had been present during most or all of these fans’ lives and thus constituted a reliable, familiar, and secure ontological object. Because Star Wars has developed such ubiquity as a cultural touchstone, fans (and nonfans) can use it to frame other textual and social encounters or even deploy it as a “cultural [resource] with which to examine difficult social and political questions in a more manageable context” (Hinck 2012; see also J. Gray 2012). Popular texts like Star Wars can function ontologically as “transitional objects” (Hills 2002: 104), which are explored through affective play, not just during childhood but throughout a person’s life as part of their ongoing project of self-­continuity (Hills 2002: 106–12; see also Harrington and Bielby 2010b). Fans who repeatedly engage with these transitional objects do so because such objects allow them to maintain their sense of self-­identity over time, providing consistent access to happy memories of textual consumption and affective play. Similarly, physical artifacts like toys also act as constantly available “access points” (Giddens 1990: 83) for engaging with an object’s textual universe, accounting for what Colin B. Harvey (2015) describes as the affective nature of the “nostalgia-­play” that permeates the Star Wars collectible toy universe. This could also account for the fannish desire to produce and own screen-­accurate replica props and costumes, particularly from the texts that fans encounter in their formative years. The participants in this study perform their fan identity through their ongoing investment in Star Wars in ways that are both psychic (repeatedly engaging with the narrative content of Star Wars and discussing that content with other fans) and physical (through the process of building costumes and dedicating leisure time to participating in group events). Thus, when Disney officially redesignated the original EU as noncanonical, the fan object was in many ways destabilized, something that affected not just their fan identity but also their ability to perform that identity in their everyday lives.

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The Legend of  Lucas: Conceptualizing Authorship and Collaboration In the pre-­Disney era, the perception of the hyperdiegetic (Hills 2002) stability of the Star Wars universe was predicated on George Lucas’s public role as the creative genius or auteur, who ostensibly (and omnipotently) ensured narrative coherence across the various transmedial iterations of the text (Hills 2002: 132– 38). In the 1990s, the EU flourished as more professional creators began “playing in the Star Wars sandbox,” as Proctor and Freeman put it (2016: 231), but Lucas’s author-­f unction was maintained by the Lucas Licensing editorial team who operated under a “set of guiding principles” for managing the hyperdiegesis, while Lucas himself “remained hands off for the most part” (231). In essence, Lucas’s role as chief creative authority was cultivated by the licensing team with minimal personal effort, while his “pope-­like” authorial weight lent “authenticity to the EU as an officially sanctioned canonical extension” of the Star Wars universe (231). During my interviews, Lucas’s centrality was implied in every aspect of hyperdiegetic production, yet in the same breath this would be contradicted by emphatic acknowledgments that the sprawling universe of Star Wars could only exist through the collaborative efforts of the entire Lucasfilm staff. The participant Logan’s remark—that “[Lucas] made Star Wars, he is Star Wars. . . . He started it, but he couldn’t have finished it without everyone”—demonstrates how fans use auteur figures to define a point of reference within the context of collaborative industry creations in order to establish a sense of coherence or continuity in relation to the narrative world. In this sense, the fans see Lucas as the primary representative of the “abstract system” (Giddens 1990: 80) of Star Wars cultural production, expressly responsible for maintaining the franchise’s overall coherence, and so his (omni)presence provides fans with both ontological and emotional security. When Disney acquired Star Wars and continued production without Lucas’s direct input, his credibility as auteur was rather publicly “swept away and replaced by multiple stewards collectively known as the Lucasfilm Story Group” (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 236), which Disney established to “oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development” (Star Wars 2014). To manage potential brand instability resulting from this staffing restructure, Disney carefully controlled their news updates through a series of press releases on the official Star Wars website. Disney set about publicly installing staff who would be viewed by fans as trustworthy: Kathleen Kennedy as president of Lucasfilm (promoted from her previous role as Lucasfilm co-­chair); Leland Chee, formerly the curator of the Expanded Universe Holocron archive, as part of the Lucasfilm Story Group; or

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successful Hollywood director and self-­professed Star Wars fan J. J. Abrams as director of The Force Awakens (and now the forthcoming Episode IX). The fans knew that this carefully orchestrated prerelease marketing campaign was designed to reassure them that everyone was working diligently to keep their fan object safe, and for the most part they were satisfied. Their interviews were peppered with many displays of what Proctor (2013: 214) describes as “optimistic” and “positive ambivalence,” as the fans hedged their excitement with humorous cynicism about Disney’s “ulterior motives” and how they might try to tie Star Wars into the larger Disney brand in a kind of “Disneyfication.” Ryan jokingly declared, “There’s just gonna be songs in the middle of the movie,” while David was quick to distance his (genuine) misgivings about Disney’s involvement from “all these people who go online and rant and rave about, ‘Oh! There’s gonna be Mickey [in it,] there’s gonna be the Disney Castle at the beginning.’ It’s not gonna happen. . . . Leia’s not gonna be a Disney Princess” (see Booth’s and Jowett’s chapters in this volume). These wry jokes were perhaps a light-­hearted dig at the researcher for asking so many obvious questions that the fandom had already spent two years joking about and debating. But the humor could also have been a strategy of deflection—their way of guarding themselves against being stereotyped as overly earnest or obsessive fans, perhaps because they felt self-­conscious about giving highly engaged and critical responses about a media object with low cultural prestige (see Stanfill 2013 for an analysis of the way in which fans internalize such stereotypes). They also used humor when describing how they (and other fans) were steeling themselves for disappointment regarding The Force Awakens and Disney’s future narrative direction. Many jokes alluded to the prequel trilogy as providing a cautionary tale of fan betrayal. As Amy remarked, “With the movies I feel that people are bracing ourselves, like, I braced myself for watching it. . . . As long as you don’t have any, what’s the name of . . . the water planet that Jar Jar’s from? I don’t want no Naboo, ok!” At the other end of the scale of “fantipathy” (McCul­ loch 2018), more ambivalent comments betrayed a concern about whether the changes would prove commercially successful and sustain long-­term interest in the franchise. Given the value of the EU to existing fans, Phillip was undecided about the wisdom of whether overwriting it and “deciding not to follow anything [from the original EU] strictly, I think, is . . . I wanna say a good idea but I might totally be eating my words when I watch the film: it could be a total flop and [I’ll] think, ‘Oh my god that’s the worst thing they’ve ever made!’ ” Overall, it was often difficult to distinguish whether their anxiety about The Force Awakens stemmed from a concern about Disney becoming the cultural custodians of the narrative; from their predominantly negative opinions of the prequel trilogy;

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or from the very idea that these new Star Wars films and stories would become indisputable Star Wars “fact.” Cynicism aside, these fans seemed generally willing to trust that Disney would treat the production of The Force Awakens respectfully, rather than “cashing in” on a mediocre child-­oriented product that put technical production ahead of art and “profit ahead of aesthetics” (Proctor 2013: 212). Of course, this optimism might simply reflect Disney’s economic health, which enables the company to hire the best people in the industry, including masterful artists who could create a film that the world would instantly take to heart and that would appeal to a (global) family audience just like A New Hope did in 1977. They frequently described The Force Awakens as the flagship product for the new Disney Star Wars brand, which would need to appeal simultaneously to the established fan base and new audiences for the franchise to remain culturally relevant and economically viable. In this sense, Disney was seen as an appropriate successor to Lucas because the company has “the resources, the money [and] the family orientation” (Emma) and a reputation for producing high quality products with wide audience appeal. Phillip insisted that Disney’s creative staff were fully aware of their (culturally custodial) obligation toward their new and established audiences: “They know that there is a big fan base out there [of] people who are just getting into Star Wars, like maybe younger kids but also the older fans as well.” Although these fans were undeniably nervous about how Disney would achieve the balancing act of appealing to both the fan and nonfan audience (the memory of Jar Jar Binks certainly loomed large), they cited Disney’s Marvel films and in-­house productions like the TRON films and John Carter as evidence of the company’s ability to create quality science fiction films that were not solely child-­oriented or that exhibited overt signs of “Disneyfication.”

The Expanded Universe(s) and Narrative Instability When Disney rebranded (or debranded) the Expanded Universe as Star Wars Legends in 2014, they assured fans that demand would keep the original EU texts in print so that the stories wouldn’t immediately disappear from the wider fan community’s consciousness. Of course, the legitimacy of the EU has long been rigorously debated by individuals and groups of fans who “often invent their own rules as to what is and is not legitimate in terms of the wider transmedial world, determining for themselves whether something is or isn’t canon, regardless of the intentions of those in supposed control of the storyworld” (Harvey 2015: 183). With fans required to confront thousands of narrative years and almost four decades of accrued transmedia—as well as the long-­r unning

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and sometimes bitter debates and “canon wars” among fan communities (see Brooker 2002: 101–13)—it is hardly surprising that EU newcomers are deterred by “the commitment, devotion and economic cost of keeping up-­to-­date with one’s favourite ‘hyperdiegesis,’ ” and this can “threaten a fans’ ‘ontological security’ regarding the object of their affections” (Proctor 2013: 219). Jonathan Gray (2010: 177) describes the sprawling Star Wars franchise as having “arguably the most voluminous paratextual entourage in entertainment history,” and so determining where to even begin engaging with it can be so daunting that many fans avoid the EU altogether. This was certainly true of the fans in this group; Eric and Logan were the only fans interested in the EU, while the others had only the most cursory engagement with it and even then tended to be interested only to the extent that it was either directly related to their costumes (through character-­specific stories) or had been released around the time that they first encountered Star Wars (like film novelizations and comics). With the exception of Logan and Eric, these fans had a fairly finite ontological engagement with their fan object. They all subscribed to the Lucasfilm-­ authorized official hierarchy of canonicity: at the time of these interviews the “real” story of Star Wars comprised only the six films, while everything else was entirely supplementary and characterized by varying degrees of authenticity and relevance. However, they all stressed the enduring importance that the original EU had for other fans, and like some of Proctor’s participants they viewed the delegitimization of the original EU as disrespectful to both the content creators and the fans. Eric, who had the strongest connection with the EU among the group, thought that Disney was unfairly stifling their staff by prohibiting them from exploring complex storylines and concepts that wouldn’t fit neatly into the child-­friendly Disney brand. He cited a fairly substantial list of unreleased or canceled adult-­oriented Star Wars products (including games, comics, and books), which he believed had been canceled during the acquisition phase because the stories might have included elements that Disney simply “didn’t like, or that were too violent, or that didn’t suit what they’re looking for. They’ve basically just gone ‘clean wipe’ and just got rid of everything.” Fans like Eric were incensed that these projects, some of which had been eagerly anticipated for years, may have been canceled because they wouldn’t be appropriate for a young audience. These fans read the decision to cease production on these adult-­oriented texts as exclusionary and openly hostile, both toward the content creators who were working on these products and to their adult audience who want to use the EU to explore more complex concepts within the storyworld. Tied to the concern for other fans was the idea that the Legends label would reduce the cultural capital of fans who were knowledgeable about the original

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EU or who owned extensive collections of these now defunct stories, or that of any fans who continued to invest their time and money in these texts instead of keeping up with the new incarnation. Logan believed that the Legends content would still hold some value for new fans, because “now that it’s no longer canon, and it’s its own separate entity, it will be something more for them to explore, yet detached from Star Wars I suppose? . . . It’s more Star Wars. It’s still [there] to be read, it still exists.” However, when asked if the rebranding would shape his own consumption patterns, he clearly articulated this shift in cultural capital acquisition: “Here’s the real-­world effect: I think I find myself wanting to buy the canon books, as a priority, over noncanon. So while I’ve still got a lot of EU Legends to buy, my focus is definitely [on] Tarkin and Heir to the Jedi and all that sort of stuff, the new ones.” Logan’s prioritization of the new Disney EU over the Legends content that he had been collecting indicates that, regardless of the availability of the Legends reprints, the new Disney content would be inherently more valuable to him because it will help him keep up with the new films as they are released. Even though Logan saw the old and new EUs as existing firmly outside of the “real” Star Wars universe, he still felt compelled to buy into Disney’s new “hyperdiegetic macro-­structure” so that he could use the new stories as “gateways” into this new narrative universe and better understand where Disney might take the story next (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 227, 236). So if these fans, for the most part, do not engage with the EU in a way that informs their understanding of Star Wars canon, what does the undercurrent of anxiety projected onto Disney’s Star Wars really reflect? Perhaps it has little to do with seeing beloved characters and narrative elements being contradicted or superseded by new official content and more to do with the idea that their generation’s accrued cultural knowledge may become irrelevant to future generations of fans. Their comments revealed a fear that the original trilogy, looking and feeling four decades old, might slowly be forgotten in the wake of the newer (big-­budget) films, as Amy emphatically stated: “If you show [kids] Return of the Jedi, they’re gonna be like, ‘This is boring as shit.’ . . . You’re in a generation that’s full of CGI.” In short, the idea of younger fans dismissing the original trilogy as boring, dull, or—worse—narratively irrelevant, poses a direct threat to the fannish identities of the entire group because they all troop in original trilogy costumes. Amy tried to sympathetically reconcile the canon restructuring as Disney just “trying to keep things fresh” for all Star Wars fans, but the threat of cultural irrelevance still surfaced in her rather dejected admission, “I guess I’m kind of jealous in my own way that Han Solo and Leia will be forgotten—so will the Ewoks, so will C-­3PO, R2-­D2.”

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When David casually commented that he wasn’t particularly worried about these changes affecting him personally, Amy sharply reminded him that his main costume, crowd-­favorite Boba Fett, had a hugely popular character arc in the original EU that is completely erased by Disney’s restructuring: “You die! You know that right? You don’t come back! . . . Your character’s gonna become an action figure on the shelf getting dusty!” The vehemence of her rebuke shows how deeply these costumers are attached to, and feel a sense of kinship with, their favorite characters and the characters beloved of their fellow club members. Therefore, if new fans are unfamiliar with the stories about the characters these fans embody through costuming, then they will be unfamiliar with an integral part of these fans’ identities. In this sense, the act of physically embodying certain characters has become part of their “ongoing grammar of self-­identity” (Hills 2014b: 14), and their ontological security is tied to bringing those characters to life through the mimetic practice of costuming and the performative practice of cosplay (costume role-­play) as a way to forge connections with other fans.

From Abstract to Concrete: Canon Policing and Civic Participation One reason that fans enjoy creating screen-­accurate costumes (as well as replica props and scenery pieces) is because they “convey a sense of boundary crossing, of moving from textuality to reality [in which the act of] prop making represents an ontological bridging of the branded story world or hyperdiegesis and the fan’s everyday life” (Hills 2014a: 3.3). The final tactile product of this process acts as a portal to that object’s narrative universe, which can be accessed by its creator at any time. Hills suggests that prop building might achieve a closer textual “ontological unity” than cosplay, because “prop replicas are far less likely to be contradicted by issues of embodiment” (2014a: 3.3). However, I contend that these fan clubs overcome any of these embodiment issues by linking their strictly observed mimetic practices to the concept of canon, which enables them to “materialize” (Rehak 2012) their fandom’s narrative objects to obtain this ontological unity. To help individual fans achieve this goal, the costumers have formed a decentralized knowledge community that has spent years compiling and updating an exhaustive list of costume building guidelines in databases that are accessed from their websites. Like the Doctor Who and Daft Punk fan communities Hills observed (2014a), these clubs actively promote the practice of sharing and developing the skills needed to produce costumes of the

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highest canonical standard and share this knowledge online through dedicated forums and in person at “armor parties” and “build days.” Club members collectively pursue these mimetic practices not only because they want to reproduce narrative objects or embody characters, but also to “understand and replicate techniques of manufacture” (Hills 2014a) that are used in professional costume production. At this point, the way that these costuming clubs interpret and enforce the concept of canon must be clarified in order to understand the way in which Disney’s alterations to the Star Wars canon impinge on the everyday fan practices of this group. Throughout this chapter, the term “canon” has been used in reference to the narrative elements of the Star Wars franchise—the stories that have been officially sanctioned as Star Wars “fact” (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 239). However, within the specific operation of these clubs, the term canon is used in a highly restricted sense: membership guidelines on the 501st website state that a “character must be represented visually by an officially authorized Star Wars publication” (“Character Approval” 2016) to legitimately “pass the canonicity test” and therefore be an “approvable” costume for participation in club activities. Within the context of club participation then, these fans interpret canon as an almost exclusively visual concept that is quite removed from any sense of narrative context. This is antithetical to the idea of fans resisting authorial narrative control and individually or collectively negotiating what constitutes Star Wars canon from the welter of Star Wars paratexts. Not only does this condition of club membership rely implicitly on deferring to the authority of  Lucasfilm as the fan object’s indisputable seat of authorial governance, every costume submission is individually reviewed and approved by a committee of senior club members and a Lucasfilm staff member. It is here that the abstract concept of canon is made manifest and here that Disney’s authorial influence could directly alter mimetic fan practices—and by extension, civic participation. This is because troops are designated as being either canonical or noncanonical, and only those members with approved canon costumes are allowed to participate in designated canon troops, many of which are major public events that raise the bulk of their charity donations. The clubs’ insistence on stringent attention to detail ensures that all members’ costumes are virtually identical to their original on-­screen counterparts, and, crucially, that they appear consistent across the global costuming community. The costuming uniformity achieved by club members also creates a shared space for this ontological bridging to occur for all the costumers as well as for the general public who encounter them. As Emma explains, “You can see the benefit

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of it when you see the quality of the costume [because] it keeps it consistent, so you can have the same Snowtrooper in Brisbane as you will in London as you will in Los Angeles, because it’s the same standard.” This collective fastidiousness addresses the shortcomings of physical embodiment potentially impeding the process of ontological bridging between the fan-­made object (costume) and its textual counterpart, particularly from the perspective of the general public who encounter the costumers at events. But if approved members have already built their costumes and achieved this ontological bridging between Star Wars and their lives, what might be the reason for anxieties related to Disney’s canonical decision-­making? The answer arguably lies in the political purpose of these clubs: the 501st and the RL are not just platforms for inwardly facing fan interaction; they are also a nexus for wider civic engagement through philanthropy. The tenets of the clubs reflect that charity work is central to their communities: the RL proudly stands for “Costuming, Charity, Community,” while the 501st revel in being “Bad Guys Doing Good.” While they are always aware of their ambassadorial role in the “grassroots promotion” of the Star Wars brand (Hills 2014a), most club members seek out opportunities to publicly use their fandom for civic engagement. In recent years, scholars have begun exploring the civic implications of fandom-­based community outreach, with much attention focused on how fans use the narrative themes of their fan text to frame their political purpose. For example, Andy Ruddock (2007: 91) contends that the act of occupying public spaces allows for “fan cultures [to] become ‘political’ as they insert ordinary voices into discussions of how public cultures should work,” and this was neatly illustrated by Jonathan Gray’s (2012) personal account of witnessing spontaneous fannish play at a protest in Wisconsin in 2011. Gray concluded that those fan activists used the “political utility” of pop culture images to “foster community among both fans and a broader public” (2012: 3.1) within an already established political context, to occupy media and public spaces and affect political change. Unlike other fan activist groups, like the Harry Potter Alliance or the Browncoats, instead of using fandom to rally individuals to engage in political agitation or campaign for series reinstatement, the exclusive focus of the 501st and the RL has always been civic engagement through philanthropy and charity work. So, while they don’t necessarily use the narrative elements of Star Wars to frame their civic engagement, these clubs provide a pragmatic way to use fandom to make the lives of others, particularly children, more enjoyable (for more on fan activism and the civic imagination, see Jenkins and Shresthova 2012).

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These fans insert their “ordinary voices” into everyday spaces like local fairs, charity drives, hospitals, schools, and libraries, using the novelty of their instantly recognizable costumed presence to engage in civic advocacy on behalf of charitable organizations. Most members primarily join the clubs to participate in their mimetic practices, and of course some never feel inclined to move into civic advocacy; as Emma remarked: “There are definitely people who are just in it for costuming. That’s all they wanna do: dress up and look awesome.” But most members find a meaningful real-­world purpose through this new cultural membership because they can see their fandom and their fan practices genuinely helping people. As Logan explained, his investment in the clubs encompasses both elements: “I enjoy Star Wars to the point where I suit up in armor, but that’s only 50 percent of the appeal: the other 50 percent is the charity work that we can do . . . helping raise awareness and money for kids.” Similarly, Emma “absolutely fell in love” with the club ethos because being involved “takes your interest to another level and you can use it for good in the community to raise money. Last year the clubs in Queensland raised over AU$30,000 for charity. The year before it was AU$52,000.” By appropriating and physically embodying the imagery of such a culturally pervasive franchise, these costumers are consciously tapping into Star Wars to effect positive social change on a local, national, and global level. For this reason, the operation of the clubs relies on the Star Wars characters being readily identifiable by the general public, the tacit support of their charitable work from Lucasfilm, and the continued popularity and stability of the franchise. For members who have built original EU costumes that were previously accepted as canonical, Disney’s changes could mean that those costumes might not be accepted for trooping at canon events in the future. While most members don’t tend to build EU costumes, those who do have often chosen to create them because they feel a strong affinity with those characters. For example, Eric had several EU costumes planned, but was worried his effort might be wasted if the club rules changed: “I invest a lot of emotional energy into it all because they mean something to me. But it will be interesting to see how Disney brings in the new Expanded Universe . . . and how they affect how we troop.” The rich diversity of characters that were loved by original EU readers were also valuable to costumers, allowing individuals to differentiate themselves from other local members and showcase the variety of mimetic skills that the community has developed together. Disney’s canon restructuring might be casually dismissed by nonfans as an economic streamlining of future products and a by-­ product of “commodity braiding” (Freeman 2014), but at the grassroots level of

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fan activism it could prove catastrophic. If the clubs choose—or are forced—to strictly adhere to Disney’s new canon in the future, this might ultimately lead to the political disempowerment of those EU costumers who are already occupying a fringe position within the clubs by further restricting their access to a platform that affords them meaningful civic engagement.

Conclusion In recent years, scholarship has shifted away from framing fan activism as a predominantly private act of resistance and toward examining how fans mobilize by tapping into fan objects to frame acts of political and civic engagement. But it is not only the politics and ethics of these “content worlds” (Jenkins 2012) that drive this engagement. Kligler-­Vilenchik et al. (2012) found that fan activism gives group members a strong sense of community purpose, which is often the reason that they choose to participate in these activities. My participants were adamant that their fan practices mattered because they made the lives of children better, and this outcome was framed as being the primary purpose of the clubs. While this form of fan activism is “outwardly focused” (Kligler-­Vilenchik et al. 2012: 2), it is also predicated on their support and promotion of the commercial apparatus that ensures that these children will recognize them in their costumes. That recognition is fundamentally tied to the continued legitimacy of the costumes and the characters that these fans have built and brought to life. While a great deal of academic attention has been paid to fan communities that take a subversive or adversarial stance against the companies that control their fan objects, it is just as important to critically consider those fans whose practices tacitly support industrialized systems of cultural production. By focusing on how the concept of Star Wars canon is defined and negotiated by both the fans and Lucasfilm, this brief study signals the collateral damage being done to this highly active segment of the Star Wars fan community by the franchise’s new rights holders. The decanonization of the original Star Wars EU will affect more than book sales, royalties, and library collections; it could also significantly disrupt the way that these fans use Star Wars as a cultural object to enrich their lives through acts of civic engagement. The anxiety that was projected onto Disney’s canon restructuring and The Force Awakens can be read as a demonstration of their fannish relationship to canon: these fans occupied a complex and emotionally tenuous space in the lead-­up to the film’s release, as their sense of ontological security depended on the transitional objects of Star Wars texts (old and new) remaining part of a stable and noncontradictory canon. As Disney

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continues to produce stories that rewrite Star Wars history, analyzing the effects of their brand management and “fanagement” strategies will expose how their authorial decisions and developing relationship with these prominent fan communities will reshape the future form and function of Star Wars fandom and fan activism.

16 William Proctor

Fear of a #BlackStormtrooper Hashtag Publics, Canonical Fidelity, and the Star Wars Platonic

O

n November 28, 2014, the first Star Wars live-­action film trailer for almost a decade was released online and swiftly became a hot topic. Offering audiences a sneak peak at The Force Awakens a full year prior to its cinematic release was certainly a promotional gamble, especially given director J. J. Abrams’s usual strategy of “keeping footage from his films under wraps” (Graser 2014). Abrams’s penchant for secrecy aside, the eighty-­eight-­second teaser trailer formed part of a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign that discursively constructed The Force Awakens as an authentic continuation of the Skywalker saga while also strategically withholding information from wide circulation. By summoning the original trilogy as blueprint—and symptomatically devaluing the maligned prequels by simply ignoring them—Abrams and Lucasfilm aimed to paratextually envelop Disney-­ era Star Wars with an “auratic resonance” (North 2007: 165) as a ward against potential criticism (see Hassler-­Forest in this volume). Indeed, that the fallout from the prequels—what Henry Jenkins describes an “open wound for the original Star Wars faithful” (quoted in Peterman 2012)—had been so pronounced, prolonged, and, more pointedly, public, meant that the Force Awakens marketing campaign functioned to rehabilitate the value of the franchise for both fans and general audiences:1 as McDermott (2006: 243) argues, “The worldwide popularity of the Star Wars franchise has assured that criticism of [the prequel trilogy] would expand beyond the purview of nitpicky fans and affect the public at large.” In the hours following the trailer’s debut, fans turned to the affordances of cyberspace and began utilizing their affective energies in creative ways. As I have written elsewhere,

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I am not sure if I have ever bore witness to such a flurry of fan activity and creativity within such a short period of time. . . . Within hours of the trailer’s release, fan vids and art began to surface in cyberspace. Live reactions were filmed and uploaded to YouTube: some of these were intensely emotional, while others were fan parodies of fan reactions (usually of those who visibly wept), and others were negative or indifferent (like the Amazing Atheist who maintained that caution was the best approach citing the prequel trilogy as evidence of how things could go horribly wrong). ZachFB Studios uploaded a homemade version of the trailer as homage created entirely with LEGO, and numerous others followed suit. (Proctor 2014b) From this network of performativity, productivity, and affect emerged reports of a disturbance within the Force, signaled by an awakening of fandom’s dark side; of the good (progressive) fan pitted against the bad (reactionary) nonfan as binary enemies drawing battle lines between the politics of prodiversity and strategies of racist exclusion. A series of news reports (professional, amateur, and pro-­am alike) castigated “geeks” for turning to social media—for the purposes of this chapter, Twitter—to question the opening salvo of the teaser trailer: John Boyega dressed in the uniform of a First Order Stormtrooper. Fans, we are told, let loose with a barrage of racist invective on Twitter given voice by the creation of the hashtag, #BlackStormtrooper. This chapter examines this so-­called controversy. From the outset, I would like to admit that I followed the stories about #BlackStormtrooper with a grim and cynical view of fan cultures. Faced with a variety of media representations telegraphing fans as racist, sexist, and homophobic, I started to reevaluate the way I think about fan cultures generally. I strongly believed (incorrectly, I should add) that the political and ideological bent of fandom had been misrepresented by the fan studies discipline; or, at least, not fully wrestled with in any meaningful way. Of course reactionary fans exist, I monologued internally; of course the heightened visibility provided by new media would shine a discerning light on what Adrienne Massanari (2015) terms “toxic technocultures.” For if fan cultures are not homogeneous, but, instead, “are often enormously heterogeneous with values and assumptions that fragment along axes of class, age, gender, race and sexuality” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013: 54), then it would surely stand to reason that reactionary fans exist. But once I started to examine data retrieved from #BlackStormtrooper, I was faced with an altogether different narrative, one which significantly problematized the online discourse and the representation of fans within related news stories.

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In this chapter, I will show that the inclusion of a black Stormtrooper is less about race than it is about what I call canonical fidelity. For a minority of fans, the Boyega sequence was viewed as a perceived violation that disrupted preestablished continuity, largely based on arguments relating to canonical Clone Troopers being genetic replications of Jango Fett, who was played in Attack of the Clones (2002) by Polynesian actor Temuera Morrison. From this perspective, I will demonstrate how these fan interpretations are “not ‘merely’ or ‘simply’ about race” (Deis 2007: 102), but, in the main, about issues related to canonical authenticity. To me, this convincingly demonstrates that scholars, like audiences in general, are not immune to the power of the paratext. What I have unveiled through the research process is that the formation of online racist discourse communities, as a discursive civil war between progressive and reactionary fan politics, is far too reductive, too simplistic, and, put simply, quite wrong. This is not to pretend that racist audiences do not exist or that this is principally an issue within geek culture (see for example, literature on racism in sports such as Farrington et al. 2012; Kilvington 2016). Clearly, the range of academic literature that examines the activities of online audiences illustrates that there is a widespread concern regarding cyberbullying, cybersexism, and other “technopanics” (Marwick 2008): from the rise in online gambling (Kruse 2011) and the widespread availability of cyberporn (Lillie 2011) to the issuing of rape and death threats, as well as the troubling reality of online suicide (see, e.g., Hardaker 2010 and 2013; Chess and Shaw 2015; Hardaker and McGlashan 2015; Massanari 2015; Burgess and Matamoros-­Fernandez 2016; Luce 2016; Poland 2016).

Background The online release of The Force Awakens’s teaser trailer on November 28, 2014, was generally met with excitement and anticipation. According to Digital Trends, the trailer was viewed over eighty million times within the first twenty-­ four hours (Marshall 2016). As the debut footage of the first live-­action Star Wars film in almost a decade and the first to be produced under Disney’s corporate umbrella, the purpose of the trailer—at least according to Disney executive, Bob Iger—was to attend to “the rabid Star Wars fan base” (quoted in Graser 2014). As mentioned, many fans felt burned by Lucas’s prequel trilogy (Brooker 2002) and effectively shrouded the franchise in an “intertextual pall” (J. Gray 2010: 131). Given that “texts can also cast dark shadows when they have been panned and hated,” as Jonathan Gray (2010: 131) puts it, the promotional discourse surrounding The Force Awakens, of which the teaser trailer was a “first

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reading head,” can be viewed as a kind of paratextual rehabilitation. From this perspective, any new—and postprequel—Star Wars text, especially one that is embedded within the canonical architecture of the film series, would be “faced not only with the task of winning audiences, but of winning them back” (135). The teaser trailer certainly did its job, not least because of  “the chill-­inducing John Williams score and seeing the Millennium Falcon soar through the air” (S. Gray 2014), a formal shorthand that hearkens back to, and activates, the authenticity of the original trilogy (read: not the prequels). However, in the hours following the teaser’s debut, fans turned to the internet to celebrate, while a minority corpus questioned the veracity of a black Stormtrooper in canonical terms. Various news outlets interpreted this discourse as clear evidence of fan racism. For example, Matthew Rozsa writes that “the racist #BlackStormtrooper backlash shows the dark side of geek culture”: There is a deeper lesson to be learned by the racist backlash against the casting of John Boyega as a major character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s cliché these days to point out that “geek is chic,” but 2014 may be remembered as a turning point for the nerd subculture once associated with social marginalization—namely, the year it was held accountable for its own dark side. The Boyega controversy began after the British actor experienced racist backlash following the premiere of the new Star Wars teaser trailer. Soon there was even a Twitter hashtag, #BlackStormtrooper, which went viral. (2014, emphases added) Writing for the Atlantic, Kriston Capps (2014) states that some fans were “alarmed” and “registered mere racist shock” when confronted by the “sight of a black man’s head emerging from the white plate armor of an Imperial Stormtrooper.” Some commenters on social media platform Reddit “compared the trailer to a scene from the 1987 Mel Brooks spoof Space Balls [sic], a gag that plays up a black Stormtrooper as jive talkin’ ” (Capps 2014). Other fans set the grounds for canonical fidelity and “turned to the internal logic of the Star Wars universe to appeal the presence of a black Stormtrooper. Didn’t the prequels reveal that all Stormtroopers were white clones?” Capps then proceeds to offer a (fannish) rebuke of such canon arguments by first explaining that actor Temuera Morrison, he of the genetic template, is Polynesian, not white, which she problematically interprets as a clear indication of fan racism. Even then, “the Empire has been recruiting from general populations for years,” fansplains Capps smugly. (The Atlantic article was the most widely shared link on #BlackStormtrooper as a way to silence and shame those who would actively challenge or ask questions about Star Wars canon.)

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These initial news stories were a minor skirmish, but this reached a crescendo on November 30, two days following the trailer’s premiere, when Boyega “responded calmly to an online backlash” (D. Wyatt 2014) on his Instagram account by thanking fans for their support and concluding with a message for fan racists: “To whom it may concern. Get used to it.” Most major news outlets picked this up. In the right-­w ing Daily Mail, Charlie Carballo (2014) writes, “The inclusion of a black Stormtrooper in the seventh installment of the franchise became so controversial that it led to the hashtag #BlackStormtrooper to surge as a trending topic on Twitter, leading to some writing overtly racist statements” (emphases added). Similarly, Rebecca Hawkes (2014) for the Telegraph writes, “While most fans were pretty excited to see Boyega in the trailer, others took to Twitter to voice their dissatisfaction that a black man had been cast as a Stormtrooper.” Here, Hawkes includes an admonishment from another cast member, Oscar Isaac, who plays X-­Wing pilot Poe Dameron: “What I loved about the trailer too is, like, the giant middle finger of the first thing you see, right off the bat: John’s face—BAM! So it is, yeah, ‘Just deal with it’ ” (quoted in Hawkes 2014). What these select examples illustrate is that the Twitter hashtag #Black Stormtrooper is drawn upon as a key source within which exists a loud and angry (fan) public united by a racist politics. It is a “discursive event,” an “issue public . . . born of friction” (Rambukkana 2015a: 30; see also Bruns and Burgess 2011: 7) that clearly evinces that there is something rotten in the state of fandom. The hashtag #BlackStormtrooper is presented as the chief, originating site of “a racist backlash,” a lightning rod or “affective amplifier” (Rambukkana 2015b: 2), spearheaded by an assemblage of reactionary fans protesting John Boyega primarily because of his ethnicity. This is problematic, even erroneous, not least because #BlackStormtrooper was already in operation and had been active since September 5, 2010—more than four years prior to the premiere of The Force Awakens teaser trailer—and in no way functioned as a discursive assemblage of a racist-­fueled fan fever. Rather, the hashtag was created to promote former Scrubs actor Donald Faison’s series of animated LEGO parodies featuring an eponymous “black Storm­ trooper.” To date, Faison has produced three of these parody sketches, all of which were promoted on the hashtag in question. From this perspective, then, reports treating the #BlackStormtrooper hashtag as reputable news source material are undoubtedly questionable, raising fundamental concerns about the ways in which such discourses are framed, produced, and circulated—and indeed reframed, reproduced, and re-­circulated—by online news platforms. As Nathan Rambukkana explains (2015a: 31): “As researchers, to understand the

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power and embeddedness of a specific discourse, we need to trace it, to discover both its conceptual relevance and its temporal arc—to trace both its affects and its points of origin, points of change.” The next section moves to examine the hashtag #BlackStormtrooper as a “discursive event” (Foucault 1972; Rambukkana 2015b).

Methodology In Rambukkana’s edited collection #Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (2015), a series of essays examine the political potential and extant uses of social media platforms, especially the affordances provided by Twitter hashtags, as discursive assemblages of “techno-­social events” (2015b: 3). Twitter can thus be viewed as “a platform for the emergence of publics, where publics are understood as being formed, re-­formed, and coordinated via dynamic networks of communication and social connectivity organised primarily around issues or event” (Bruns and Burgess 2015: 13). Given that hashtags “have the ability to mark the discursive flows of an event” (30), the analysis of #BlackStormtrooper was carried out through the lens of discourse analysis which, following Perreault and Vos (2018: 558), “brings to the foreground the discursive strategies and techniques used by speakers and writers to create meaning” (see also van Dijk 1988). In so doing, the discursive mechanics of meaning-­making are of especial interest for the purposes of this chapter. Data from hashtag #BlackStormtrooper was scraped manually and was bound between November 28, 2014, when the teaser trailer debuted, and December 10, 2014, which marked the end of peak involvement in the hashtag. All tweets quoted in this article have been anonymized. The limitations of binding the research within these spatial and temporal parameters, and indeed by analyzing the hashtag as paradigmatic or emblematic of a wider discursive apparatus that inevitably extends beyond the Twitter echo chamber, should be noted. While such analyses can certainly “piece together a picture of this discursive event” (Rambukkana 2015a: 33), it pertains only to a partial portrait, given the tendrils of discourse stretching and interpenetrating other sites on-­and offline. However, the central thrust of this research is located primarily within an analysis of the hashtag #BlackStormtrooper as a method of excavating what was summoned as source material—as “proof”—of toxic fan practices. To reiterate, in no way am I suggesting that fandom, whatever its fan object of choice, is bereft of reactionary politics nor is it a harmonious collective of like-­minded individuals. I do not intend to either defend or excoriate fandom as such in this chapter. Furthermore, it is entirely plausible that racism was masked or coded in debates

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about canonicity but, as Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner (2017) have argued, “not knowing who created what, what the(se) creator(s) meant to accomplish, or what a given text ‘really’ means, forces one to stay empirical and focus on the things that can be known and confirmed” (emphasis added). The tweets were examined qualitatively and manually coded. These were then categorized as belonging to a series of discursive clusters as follows: Discursive Clusters a. Affirmative Positive b. Parody, Jokes, Captions c. Canonical Statements, Questions, and Answers d. Challenges to Perceived Racism (Nonhostile) e. Challenges to Perceived Racism (Hostile) f. Links (News, Blogs) g. Links (Trailer) h. Links (Boyega’s Response) i. Donald Faison (LEGO black Stormtrooper) j. Anxieties About the Fate of Character k. General Enthusiasm l. Challenges to Manufactured Controversy m. Overt Racism Example Tweets

a. “We made it.”—earliest tweet celebrating diversity b. “When you gotta piss and forgot to install a flap in your cos-­play”— ironic captioning c. “I thought all Stormtroopers were clones of  Jango Fett?”— earliest tweet regarding canonicity d. “when did #StarWars fan become so racist?” e. “If you’re upset about a #BlackStormtrooper you need to 1. Die slowly. 2. Don’t watch the damn movie” f. Most commonly linked source: the story in the Atlantic about racism in Star Wars fandom (Capps 2014) g. Links to trailer h. Links to Boyega’s response to perceived racism (“Get over it.”) i. “@donald_faison made #BlackStormtrooper cool before the new Star Wars trailer” j. “Better not die first or I’m going to be pissed” k. “I may wet the bed with joy”

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l. “So I’ve seen a lot of talk about #BlackStormtrooper outrage . . . but not a single example of anyone complaining . . . manufactured tears?” m. “You fucking peckerwood” Although each of the discursive clusters is worthy of investigation in its own right, this is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I shall focus on examples of perceived racism and responses to such. In the main, the so-­called fan backlash centers on canonical fidelity and thus is not an example of toxic fan practice. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully recognize the identity of the Twitter corpus as a fan public—indeed, the evidence indicates a larger “coalition audience” (Hills 2002) marked by hashtag activism generally—the way in which questions, statements, and counterstatements regarding canonical fidelity are presented seem to demonstrate a fannish desire for continuity logic and an exchange of fan cultural capital. Effectively, the collaborative appeals of a user-­generated minority are certainly performative utterances “imbued with affect” (Rambukkana 2015b: 5), those of fans acting as “textual conservationists” (Hills 2002: 4) and protectionist gatekeepers. To begin with, analysis of the data demonstrates that there are two possible examples of racism from Twitter users, one of whom provided only a link to a meme on Reddit—thereby transferring an example from one platform to another—and another whose intentions, personal context, and racial identity cannot be determined (“WHAT IF THE #BlackStormtrooper AIN’T RUNNING FROM SHIT IN #StarWars #TheForceAwakens? A NIGGAS GOTTA DO WHAT A #NIGGAS GOTTA DO”).

Textual Conservationism, Protectionism, and Fan Cultural Capital Fandom may be a many-­splintered thing, but “affective alliances” (Jenkins 2013: 55) might also be formed to work through what are perceived as “possible threats to textual authenticity” (Hills 2012a: 114). In Using the Force, Will Brooker (2002) examines the “civil war” between competing factions of Star Wars fans that discursively coalesced around the first prequel film, The Phantom Menace. The resulting online “scrap,” as Tom Shone (2004: 284) describes it, drew lines in the sand between those who loved the film—the “gushers”—and those who vehemently disliked it—the “bashers.” The argument thus constructed a binary opposition between The Phantom Menace as a “good” object to be celebrated and deified or as a “bad” object to be vilified and hated. Hence, the so-­called

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“Gusher-­Basher Wars” are marked not by communal solidarity harmoniously congregated around the fan object, but by open hostility, “fierce, prolonged, passionate and not without an element of ironic role-­play” (Shone 2004: 284). This kind of conflict has risen in prominence since the inception of Web 2.0: from dial-­up connections and relatively slows speeds, to the fiber-­optic, broadband capabilities of the contemporary moment. Indeed, the advent of social media has led the figure of the fan out of the marginal chat-­room dungeon and into the popular mediasphere. Writing about the release of The Phantom Menace (1999), Matt Hills (2003a: 74) explains that “having the Star Wars franchise alive again through a contested but canonical film text presents its fans with new possibilities for communal in-­fighting and factionalism.” Despite the belief that Lucas had finally completed his galactic space opera with the release of third prequel, Revenge of the Sith (2005), the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 again opened up new possibilities for conflict and confrontation, possibilities that have since become enacted. That said, these kinds of conflict and combat are not necessarily what we might describe as “toxic fan practices” (Proctor and Kies 2018). As discussed, the central issues regarding the inclusion of Boyega as a First Order Stormtrooper largely relied on canonical information developed in Episode II: Attack of the Clones (which features Polynesian actor Temuera Morrison as Jango Fett). In the film, Obi-­Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) is led to the world of Kamino to investigate the assassination attempt on Senator Amidala (Natalie Portman). Kenobi discovers that the Kaminoans are engineering an army of clones based on the genetic template of Jango Fett. Hence, Star Wars “fact”—that is, Star Wars canon—dictates that all of these Clone Troopers are exact genetic reproductions of Fett, and thus, by extension, Temuera Morrison. This side of the debate on Twitter, then, pivots on questions—and answers— regarding Star Wars canonicity, providing grounds for the promotion and exchange of fan cultural capital. Canonical Statements and Questions “it’s not about a #BlackStormtrooper . . . it’s that troopers are clones of Jango Fett. We want to see the storyline continue and be true” “I thought they were all clones of Jango Fett and he was definitely Latino, did the Empire become ethnically diverse?” “I’m confused. If Stormtroopers are clones (non black I thought), who is the black Stormtrooper? Inner nerd needs to know!”

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“But I thought Stormtroopers were clones . . . What happened to the saga?” “Pretty sure galaxy is patrolled by bad ass Polynesians” Based on this sample, which is representative of the cluster, there is no evidence of racism. Fan tweets of this type function, at least partly, as advertisements of storyworld knowledge and expertise. Such canonical deliberations are significantly challenged by those who provide textual evidence in order to prove that Clone Troopers and Stormtroopers are, in fact, different kinds of soldiers altogether. This exchange of textual evidence is generally typical for various fan cultures, Star Wars included. As North (2007: 166) explains, fans are often “protective of what they see as the coherent and immersive Star Wars universe— they police the texts, branding as abject those elements which seem either incongruous or destructive of that immersion.” Brooker (2002: 101–14) dedicates an entire chapter to a series of factionalist quarrels—dubbed “The Canon Wars” in Star Wars fandom—in relation to the canonical authenticity (or not) of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) of novels, comics, video games, and so forth. These canon wars between EU fans and Star Wars film purists are an often heated and hostile terrain wherein “the overriding impression” is of an arena like the Galactic Senate in The Phantom Menace: a hubbub of voices speaking in turn but with little agreement save for temporary alliances, and little progression as the participants stick to their deeply held beliefs. If nothing else, it reminds us that to talk of the fan reaction or the fan viewpoint—in cases such as this, at least—is to impose an imagined consensus on a community that thrives on debate. (Brooker 2002: 113) (See also Proctor 2013; Proctor and Freeman 2016.) As part of the discursive cluster that focused on canonical fidelity, fans responded to the Jango Fett–Clone Trooper tweets armed with textual evidence drawn from multiple sources, including the Star Wars wiki, the animated tv series, Star Wars Rebels, and, on one occasion, the video game Star Wars Battlefront II. First, the Star Wars Wookieepedia entry on Stormtroopers explains: “the clone’s accelerated aging process began causing their physical skills and abilities to deteriorate [and] they were replaced by non-­clone volunteers and conscripts” (“Stormtrooper” [1] n.d.). In the Star Wars Rebels episode (1.4 “Breaking Ranks”), this is represented explicitly by the inclusion of a black character, Zare Leonis, as a Stormtrooper-­in-­training. The Star Wars Rebels wiki explains it clearly:

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The clone troopers were grown on the world of Kamino, being cloned from a single cell of Jango Fett. During that period, they served for the Grand Army of the Republic alongside Jedi Knights, and were deployed to fight against the Confederacy of Independent Systems in the intergalactic conflict that became known as the Clone Wars. In the last months of the war, the Kamino Clones were supplemented with other troops grown from various templates. Following the formation of the Galactic Empire and the end of the Clone Wars, the clones were rebranded as Imperial Storm­ troopers, serving as the first generation of the Empire’s new soldiers. In the years to come, the Empire would gradually phase out cloned troops and transition to human recruits as their primary infantry. (“Stormtrooper” [2] n.d., emphasis added) One fan posted a video from Battlefront II that is subtitled with the following information: “After the Kamino Uprising, the Emperor decided that an army of genetically identical soldiers was susceptible to corruption; future troopers would be cloned from a variety of templates. . . . The Imperial Army gradually became more and more diverse.” The process is analogous to a high-­stakes poker game, but fans gamble not with playing cards but with storyworld information, placing bets in the pursuit of winning fan cultural capital. Fans that challenge the notion that black Storm­ troopers simply cannot exist within the storyworld thereby raise the stakes, placing counterbids to defeat their opponents and win the match. The winning bet, then, successfully accumulates fan capital while seeking to convert the opposing team’s hand into fan bankruptcy—that is, when bids for fan capital are repelled and the player’s bank is emptied. Such bankruptcy may also be seen as evidence of being a bad fan or used to portray losers of the game as nonfans. Discursive conflicts such as these also illustrate that tensions often form between factions within (constructed) fan communities, shifting “continually due to internal arguments over authenticity, taste, and displays of [canonical] mastery” centered on the fan object in question (van de Goor 2015). These internal tensions can be hostile and inflammatory, especially when fans employ strategies of intra-­or interfandom “othering” as a way to shame those who do not fit into a framework of what is perceived as the correct way to “do” fandom (Bennett 2011; Hills 2012d; Stanfill 2013; R. Williams 2013; van de Goor 2015; Bethan Jones 2016). Conflict, then, can be seen as the sine qua non of the fan experience in general terms, and not necessarily a form of toxicity. As Brooker (2002: 101) puts it, “Debates over what constitutes an official text in the fictional

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universe, as opposed to quasi-­official or apocryphal material, are not unique to the Star Wars community.” From this perspective, playing the high-­stakes game of fandom can lead to fan-­shaming or intrafandom othering: “By embodying a specific performance of [Star Wars] fandom on Twitter, fans cement their place in the fandom while defending the object of fandom” (Bethan Jones 2016: 55). By extension, “geek hierarchies” (Busse 2013) can be formed via the construction of binaries— Hills’s “moral dualisms” (2002)—between “good” fan winners and “bad” fan losers—or here, between real fans and nonfans. Real Fans versus Nonfans “Real Star Wars fans know that Mandalorian clones were phased-­out at the end of The Clone Wars. #BlackStormtrooper is not unusual” “If you were a real Star Wars fan you would know the Empire doesn’t use clones” “Upset about a #BlackStormtrooper? Even by the time of Ep. IV the Empire was recruiting from the general population. Get a clue. Also racist” “All the fuss over #BlackStormtrooper isn’t about purist sticking to the canon, it’s about ‘fans’ not knowing the canon in the first place” “Like racist whites aren’t even real fans you’ve done no research” This cultural exchange highlights the discursive cluster as one of debate and deliberation as opposed to racism. In fan discussions of this kind, then, “the importance of secondary evidence is stressed . . . as is attention to dates, sources and correct citation that approaches academic standards and is valued more than accurate spelling or punctuation” (Brooker 2002: 113). Fans may be “textual conservationists” but they’re also protectors and completionists, the latter quality being utilized as a method of fan-­shaming those who are unaware of the wider hyperdiegetic tapestry that makes up Star Wars. From this position, those fans who play their cards first open themselves up to communal challenges and thus run the risk of losing the game. Moreover, fans not fluent in the wider parameters of the Star Wars universe may be shamed for not being up to scratch, with their incomplete knowledge signaling bankruptcy and nonfandom. If I may speculate for a moment, it is possible that discussions about canon are part of broader discourses around Disney’s Star Wars and anxieties about the transitional fan object (Proctor 2013). Given that the Lucasfilm Story Group, an official body of continuity cops, has already rebooted EU continuity to prevent

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chronological clashes with new Star Wars material—such as the sequel trilogy, the anthology spin-­offs, and a new canonical series of Star Wars comics and novels—it is hardly surprising that there might well be a degree of anxiety about canonicity. As “the idealized fan-­object is potentially threatened” (Hills 2012a: 114) by an infantilized “Disney-­fication” (J. Scott 2017), this discursive cluster can be interpreted as “working through” such threats, “not because [fans] are somehow neurotic or pathological, but rather because these fans’ sense of self-­identity . . . is so firmly enmeshed with the narratives of their beloved [fan object]. Threats to diegetic narrative can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-­narratives” (Hills 2012a: 114). This should not be viewed as a new phenomenon or, indeed, a “new breed of fan” (Proctor 2016a). Those factional disputes between EU canonists and cinematic purists—gushers versus bashers—were evidently more venomous and uncivil than #BlackStormtrooper, at least among the fans themselves. What is especially troubling about #BlackStormtrooper is that the most hostile tweets were not written by racists at all, but, rather, by those challenging—and othering—an imaginary and imagined corpus of reactionary fans. Challenges to Perceived R acism “The proper response to people who don’t like the #BlackStormtrooper is, GO FUCK YOURSELF!” “GET. A. FREAKING. LIFE. And who’s complaining? white dorks” “Dear Fanboys, if you are raising hell because John Boyega is a #BlackStormtrooper, please throw yourself off a cliff. #YesYoureRacist” “I take #Suicide seriously but . . . If you have a problem w/a #BlackStormtrooper go ahead and #KillYourself” “If you’re genuinely angry because of a #BlackStormtrooper please jump off a goddamn bridge. Jesus. You people make me sick” I am certain that the majority of tweets are not serious, whether originating with Star Wars fans or not—meaning that, hopefully, such death wishes are indeed performative utterances (which is still not to condone them). As Bethan Jones (2016: 56) argues, “Twitter accounts are expressions of fan capital—the more extreme the response to a threat against the object of fandom, the more subcultural [fan] capital.” To this I would add that comments such as these might not simply (and solely) be appeals for fan capital, but for politically progressive cultural capital, especially for users who do not self-­identify as fans at all. (Incidentally,

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bids for progressive cultural capital have been described pejoratively as “virtue signaling.”) Indeed, given the anonymity provided by Twitter pseudonyms, it is difficult to distinguish fans from general commenters, those that may have been attracted to the hashtag from other sources, such as the much-­publicized Boyega reprimand, in order to lambast discursively constructed racist fans and, in turn, to construct themselves as healthy, ideologically moral citizens (Butsch 2008). The wealth of tweets demarcating racist fans as principally male (“fanboys”), indicates that it is not only “fangirls,” for instance, that are stereotyped within the representational spaces of media and fan discourse, but that male fans continue to be pathologized and—like female fans who are “negatively feminized” (Busse 2013)—ultimately to be negatively masculinized, or in some cases, emasculated (see Proctor 2018c). I am certain that racist fans exist, but I am equally certain that this is not easily binarized into “good” fangirls versus “bad” fanboys, as I point out elsewhere (Proctor 2017). At the same time, however, rather than admonish those users who respond to perceived fan racism with open aggression, it is necessary to understand the sociopolitical context of broader discursive instantiations. In his analysis of “race-­activist hashtags,” Rambukkana (2015a: 29) exhibits the way in which the hashtag generally has been utilized as a form of political activism within the “new regimes of discourse and communication” accommodated by the proliferation of computer-­mediated technologies. Here, Rambukkana focuses on #RaceFail and #Ferguson. The former emerged out of an online quarrel regarding representations of race in the genre of contemporary science fiction and fantasy just as the “sad puppies” were hijacking the Hugo Awards (Stevens and van der Merwe 2018). Thus, #RaceFail worked as a solidarity movement that “turned up the heat on an unaddressed issue” and can be viewed as prosocial (as opposed to antisocial) (Rambukkana 2015a: 37). The formation of such a “racialized hashtag public” (39) addressed and criticized artifacts of popular culture via a flurry of tweets directed at producers, such as the infamous “yellow-­face” episode of sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014)—for which the showrunners, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, issued a public apology (38). The latter, #Ferguson, emerged in 2014, following the tragic shooting of teenager Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri. Rambukkana writes: “The shooting in Ferguson and its continuing aftermath have found a powerful articulation through social media discussions and in particular through the mobilization of #Ferguson” (39). Moreover, the online emergence of the so-­called “alt-­right” and the discourse surrounding the U.S. presidential election in 2016, with reality TV villain

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Donald Trump taking the White House, has assuredly ratcheted up tensions both at home and abroad. To this, we could also add the highly public and visible infractions symbolized by #Gamergate, #SadPuppies, #Comicsgate, etc. (see Proctor and Kies 2018). Thus, the hashtag #BlackStormtrooper should not be addressed in isolation from wider discursive contexts about race and racism. Twitter hashtags “emerge out of, are part of, and can shape events in the wider online and offline world” (Rambukkana 2015a: 39). It would be equally reductive to castigate Twitter users for failing to check the validity of online discourses, whether in mainstream news outlets or across the blogosphere. Clearly, anxieties and tensions around race relations in Western culture are emblematic of an ideological conflict that extends way beyond the minority confines and concerns of Star Wars fandom. The analysis provided by Rambukkana demonstrates a rising tide of internet counterpublics: that is, users and commenters who utilize the social mediasphere to speak out against reactionary actors and who are galvanized by a hashtag activism that collectively forms “an activist critical objection—a quarrel—levelled at unjust abuses of power” (43). Given that the discursively constructed furor about #BlackStormtrooper emerged within the same time period as #Ferguson and, later, #BlackLivesMatter, one can view the hostile “tweeting back” as part of a wider public debate centered on issues of racism (and, by extension, misogyny, homophobia, and other political issues). Certainly, the contemporary landscape is populated and “pervaded with discourses about diversity” (Vertovec 2012: 287). I believe that the canonical struggles of a minority of Star Wars fans is interpreted as racist, at least in part, because of the sensitivity around such issues in the current historical moment, and that Twitter can be an integral instrument for general audiences to respond to, and criticize, conservative ideologies and the reactionary politics of neoliberal capitalism. Still, this is rather too neat and should not be tidied up so readily. Hashtag publics are often messy, complicated, and complex while simultaneously offering provisions for “digitally networked individuals” to create “counternarratives to build community online” against invidious inequalities and “dominant interpretative publics” (Korn 2015: 129). What the discursive assemblage of #BlackStormtrooper reveals is that the “dominant ideology” it is contained within is emphatically and overwhelmingly antiracist and “super diverse” (Korn 2015), rather than a viper’s nest of reactionary neoliberalism. This side of the story has been completely sideswiped in press and academic discourse hitherto.

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Conclusion I do not claim that this chapter has solved this thorny aporia but, hopefully, that this might serve as a spark for further debate. The influx and impact of social media is clearly a minefield for researchers to contend with, and this chapter can only pretend to tell part of the story. For instance, what might the impact have been following the volume of news articles that featured John Boyega’s statement to toxic fans (“get over it!”)? Is it feasible to speculate that general audiences may have read these reports as proof that #BlackStormtrooper was a “racial uproar from your basic American bigot” that proves “the delusion of post racial America,” as one commenter put it and in turn, logged onto Twitter to join in the vocal protestations? What potential effect might a celebrity repudiation of racist fans have on other tweeters? While I would not expect Twitter users to research the hashtag prior to commenting, it is interesting that several commenters expressed difficulty in finding evidence of a racist backlash and that some accused the (monolithic) media of “race-­baiting” and manufacturing a controversy, whether in order to attract readers or as a social justice conspiracy marked by excessive political correctness. It is hardly surprising that professional media outlets did not pick this up, especially given that the hashtag had become a cacophony of protest against discursively constructed racist Star Wars fans and difficult to parse with any rigor. At the time of writing, I have yet to find a mainstream media news story that either redresses #BlackStormtrooper or otherwise fails to treat it as axiomatic that the hashtag is brimming with racist banter. By the same token, should people turn to the Twitter echo chamber to join in the melee of antiracist hate and criticism, even in the face of contrary evidence, then it behooves the academic community to wrestle with some important questions rather than contribute to the discursive binary constructed between the moral, ethical, politically progressive antiracist “good” fan and the appalling reactionary politics of racist “bad” fans. How do we, as scholars, determine who is actually speaking, what is being said, and within what context? As researchers are currently “grappling with a potentially indefinite range of communicative behaviours . . . influenced by any number of contextual variables” (Hardaker 2010: 217), what methods and methodologies can we develop to test the validity of claims that Twitter users are either fans or general audiences? What about the phenomenon of “trolling,” which has “become a catch-­all term for any number of negatively marked online behaviours,” as a method of “posting incendiary comments with the intent of provoking others into conflict” (217)? How can

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one distinguish trolling from genuine discourses of fan affect, whether toxic or benign? What are the effects of cyberspace’s anonymity and the “online disinhibition effect” (Suler 2004), an elemental factor that may “encourage a sense of impunity and freedom from being held accountable for inappropriate online behaviour” (Hardaker 2010: 215)? How can fan studies wrestle with these challenges given that fans continue to be stereotyped and often represented unfairly? “How are journalists appropriating fans’ tweets?” (Hills 2016: 272). These questions, and many more besides, challenge the academic community, both inside and outside fan, audience, and reception studies, to check the validity of journalistic claims, whatever their cachet, rather than accept a priori the choruses of disapproving social media users. For if “the media” are powerful enough to manufacture consent, as famously argued by Herman and Chomsky (1988), or to serve as moral and ethical watchdogs that have discursively constructed “moral panics” (Barker and Petley 2001), how should the academic community confront the challenges of internet-­based communication technologies and the extant discourses that show that controversy may also be manufactured? How shall we address—and indeed redress—the construction of social media issue publics (Rambukkana 2015a; Bruns and Burgess 2011), territories marked by aggressors and transgressors on both sides of a discursively constructed divide? Although this is often viewed as a binary conflict—as, for example, “alt-­right” activists versus left-­w ing social justice warriors—the challenge for scholars is to move beyond such reductive denunciations and rigorously examine the apparatuses that render discourse manifest.

17 Tom Phillips

Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying Reacting to the Force Awakens Trailer

A

s trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens were released, online retro spectives began to look back to the 1998 debut of the Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace trailer, when, famously, Star Wars fans purchased tickets for screenings of The Waterboy (1998), The Siege (1998), and Meet Joe Black (1998) in order to view the preceding previews (Weinraub 1998). As Andy Greene (2015) notes, it had been fifteen years since any new Star Wars footage had appeared on the big screen, “so paying $8.00 for a two-­minute trailer seemed quite reasonable.” Keith Johnston (2008: 148) notes how during this time Lucasfilm discourse made a point of lauding the cinematic experience of trailer consumption in order to combat piracy, and how “the widescreen visual spectacle of CGI special effects offered by the teaser were somehow more cinematic, designed and suited only for the big screen experience.” Despite this, however, bootleg copies of the trailer found their way online. One such video (Mola Yam 2008) was filmed discreetly within a cinema, opening with the Lucasfilm logo accompanied by rapturous applause from the (unseen) audience, with audible reactions throughout hinting at fans’ excitement and anticipation. Reflecting on the video, Eric Eisenberg (2014) notes: “What this video doesn’t show you is the comedic after affect. . . . After the two minutes of footage played, many . . . left the theater in droves before the feature actually began.” Fans’ process of viewing (or re-­v iewing) a trailer in 1998—in its “intended” form—was a truncated and potentially costly endeavor. In contrast, the accessibility currently afforded by contemporary online video portals has led to a resurgence of interest in trailer releases (Johnston 2008: 151). In addition, the experience of viewing a trailer at home has led to a phenomenon, as hinted

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at by Eisenberg, previously inaccessible: the ability to view fans’ responses to a trailer in real time. Comparing consumption habits around the trailers for The Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens highlights the different cultural mores in fans’ viewing, reviewing, and re-­v iewing strategies, particularly as facilitated by video sharing sites such as YouTube. Johnston cites figures that indicate that the Phantom Menace trailer broke internet download records with an estimated 1.5 million within the first week, a total that would eventually rise to 3.5 million (148). In stark contrast, the second teaser trailer for The Force Awakens garnered 88 million views on YouTube alone—within the first twenty-­four hours. While such figures only reflect viewings of the officially uploaded video on one particular site, the importance of video-­sharing sites to contemporary trailer consumption is signaled nonetheless. In seeking to understand the appeal of trailers, Kathleen Amy Williams (2012) notes, “Anticipation is key to our understanding of cinema. Film trailers embody (or show our lack of) enthusiasm for the release of an upcoming feature film. . . . Buzz follows films, and films follow hype; digital spaces . . . allow this anticipation to be a visible trace of a network of audience anticipation.” Fans that upload personal reaction videos to trailers aid this culture of anticipation. These reaction videos adhere to a similar template: the participants film themselves face-­on as they view an offscreen trailer; with no cuts or edits we watch the subjects’ reaction to the trailer in real time. Often, but not always, a picture-­in-­picture feed of the trailer appears in the frame, allowing the viewer to watch along with the subject and map the reaction accordingly. The reaction videos analyzed here are in contrast to those where the subject may be unaware they are being filmed—for example, in Game of Thrones “Red Wedding” reaction videos where an omniscient camera operator documents the response of persons unaware of the forthcoming narrative events (Horrorcirdan 2013). Rather, the reaction videos consulted here are those in which the subjects are consciously being filmed and are aware they are participating in a reaction video. This chapter examines examples of such reaction videos for each of the trailers for The Force Awakens. First, reaction videos for the two teaser trailers are considered, which demonstrate the ways in which fans of contemporary media can demonstrate a number of viewing and anticipatory strategies. These videos were chosen by searching YouTube using the terms “Force Awakens teaser trailer 1 reaction” and “Force Awakens teaser trailer 2 reaction.” The first ten (noncompilation) reaction videos in the search results were then analyzed. To avoid prioritizing videos with a higher view count (and therefore to ensure a spread of amateur and professional productions), videos were sorted according to their

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relevance to the search criteria. As a result, the videos showcased a variety of production values and popularity, ranging from view counts of a few hundred (Nerdsmerized 2014) to the low millions (Tyrone Magnus 2014). Second, videos from The Force Awakens actors Daisy Ridley and John Boyega (each reacting to the full theatrical trailer) are examined. These videos were published to the actors’ social media accounts, and they allow a consideration of the way in which the mediation of fan-­producer identities is considered in a reaction video production context. By comparing the activities of these Star Wars professional personnel to fan reaction videos, it is possible to see the extent to which fannish discourses were used in the promotion of The Force Awakens as an act of reassurance for audiences and a perpetuation of the film’s culture of anticipation.

“There Has Been an Awakening . . .” The first The Force Awakens teaser trailer premiered online on November 28, 2014 (see also Proctor in this volume). Lasting eighty-­eight seconds, the teaser is split into seven short sequences, featuring the first (and dialogue-­free) appearances of Finn, BB-­8, First Order Stormtroopers, Rey, Poe Dameron (with a fleet of  X-­Wings), Kylo Ren, and a returning Millennium Falcon. A new character, Supreme Leader Snoke, provides a short voice-­over (although he was “off camera”). What is striking about the reaction videos for this teaser is the assortment of physical and verbal responses on display throughout the duration of the trailer. Julia Kennedy and Clarissa Smith (2012: 244) discuss the popular viral reaction videos to extreme pornography clips “Spankwire” and “2 Girls 1 Cup,” noting that within such reactions “we see individuals or groups who are demonstrably aware that what will be shown is a representation which requires a dramatic reaction at the same time as seeming to respond entirely spontaneously.” Here, Kennedy and Smith suggest that reaction videos require an element of hyperbolic activity; to be an effective reaction video requires a discernable affective reaction on display. We can see such performative hyperbole in the reaction videos for The Force Awakens teaser. For example, Chainsaw Reacts (2014) begins his video by jumping with a start as Finn enters the frame (accompanied by a shout of  “Dammit!”). He nods along and clenches his fist, exclaiming, “Yes!” as the Stormtroopers appear on screen. The clenched fists and verbal affirmations continue: “Sweet!” at the X-­Wings; “Holy crap!” as Kylo Ren ignites his lightsaber; “Yes! Millennium Falcon! Yes! Yes!” as Han Solo’s ship makes its return. Nic&Nacs (2014) is similarly vocal. Excitedly smiling, she remarks, “Oh fuck!” as Finn

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appears, and shakes with excitement throughout and, as the Millennium Falcon appears, her eyes well with tears: “Yes! Yes.Yes.Yes.Yes.Yes. Oh my god!” The videos from Reaction Man (2014) and The Coolest Kid Ever (2014)—neither of which feature a picture-­in-­picture feed of the trailer—show their subjects narrating the trailer by stating what exactly they are seeing, explicitly acknowledging the shared experience with their unseen audience. As Kennedy and Smith note, an element of knowing performance is present in reaction videos, where a reflexivity about the sensational visual experience is present, and the “dark space of the auditorium is replaced by brightly lit domestic spaces—usually a bedroom, and the stage replaced by a computer screen, but the screams are pure Grand Guignol” (2012: 244). We can see this performance in The Force Awakens reaction videos particularly in moments when the subjects acknowledge their audience while the trailer is playing. Gattor Martin (2014), for example, ends the trailer by dancing along to the Star Wars theme, picking up his dog and holding it up to the camera. Tyrone Magnus (2014) answers Snoke’s rhetorical question (“There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?”) by looking at the camera and exclaiming, “Yes!” He again looks at the camera as the X-­Wings appear (“Woo, that was hot!”); and once more upon seeing the Millennium Falcon (imitating Chewbacca and exclaiming, “I’m ready!”). And Nerdsmerized (2014) spends the duration of the trailer on his feet, moving around the frame, and dividing his time between watching the trailer and looking at the camera. Notably, Nerdsmerized titles his video “Star Wars The Force Awakens Teaser Trailer Reaction Very Funny,” suggesting that he is aware of its function as entertainment. Much like viewers of pornographic shock videos, Nerdsmerized is aware that he is watching something that ought to elicit an extreme response (Kennedy and Smith 2012: 245). The kinds of knowing performances on display can evoke Middleton’s (2013: 126) anxiety of authenticity that accompanies watching such videos: “Are the responses real and spontaneous or staged, faked, acted? This anxiety is rooted in viewers’ expectations that displays of affective intensity indicate a more authentic reality in the representation.” One could, for instance, conceive that the video uploader has already watched the trailer prior to the recording in order to document an affective performance for the purposes of accruing some form of fan cultural capital (i.e., demonstrating a “true fan’s” response to the trailer). However, such pessimism regarding authenticity would rely on framing these uploads as cynical attempts to garner views (and, by extension, potential advertising revenue). While one cannot possibly know the true intent of the video uploader, it is possible to consider their activity within a wider context of fannish practices on YouTube.

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For instance, it is striking that the Force Awakens teaser trailer warrants a video reaction, particularly as—unlike in 1998—this teaser is available to all rather than a select few in theaters. A cursory search on YouTube for “trailer reaction” appears to suggest that only particular kinds of film text warrant a reaction video in the first place; franchises with a tangible fan community such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Hunger Games, and Twilight are those which are more commonly constructed as “events” that, on the occasion of new releases, are shared through “multiple spheres in a culture of anticipation” (K. Williams 2012). The scholar Leisha Jones, for example, frames the “Twi-­ hard” NuttyMadam as a representative YouTuber who articulates her fandom in an emotional and vocal manner. Although NuttyMadam is the sole subject in her Twilight reaction videos—seemingly talking into the ether—she receives and responds to feedback, meaning that although her videos are a personal account of her fandom “she possesses, creates, and participates through the force of a fan pack” (L. Jones 2011: 459). As a result, an anticipatory culture is cultivated through her activity. The potential for the perpetuation of fan culture through YouTube is unsurprising. While YouTube has been variously theorized as a site for specifically teenage participation (Chau 2010), an educational tool (Waldron 2013), and a site for social activism (Van Zoonen, Vis, and Mihelj 2010; Lim and Golan 2011), it is most commonly depicted as a social media portal for online community development. As Patricia Lange (2007: 368) notes, for many users who create and upload videos, the goal is not to make a high-­quality video “but rather to encode an interesting, affective experience that they could share.” Rotman, Golbeck, and Preece’s (2009) study of YouTube users supports this notion, identifying that despite quantitative data of friendships and subscriptions suggesting the reverse, in qualitative terms users “asserted that YouTube is a social space that offers the conditions needed to cultivate a community, such as emotional support, joint interests and communal culture” (43). The potential for YouTube to offer users a feeling of emotional support or community helps us to understand the processes behind uploading reaction videos. Middleton (2013: 124) argues that reaction videos “are certainly less creative and critical than other types of fan productions.” However, the reaction videos discussed here demonstrate that although the videos are minimalistic productions, they function critically as a reflection on the nature of fandom itself, recording and documenting the performative affect routinely conceptualized in definitions of fandom, such as Cornel Sandvoss’s (2005: 8) understanding of fans’ “regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text.” The videos demonstrate that the tangible articulation of a reaction is

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required in order for fandom and fan community to be perpetuated—a lack of reaction means that fan culture cannot be cultivated. So where Middleton goes on to argue that reaction videos for pornographic clips “represent a near-­ complete lack of engagement with or consideration of the profilmic event—the conditions that allowed for the making of the . . . clips themselves” (2013: 128– 29), reaction videos for The Force Awakens exist solely in response to the conditions that have allowed a new Star Wars trailer to be made. The fans depicted in the videos celebrate that which the footage represents—a new entry to a beloved saga—rather than necessarily the footage itself. Building on the work of Chin and Gray (2001), William Proctor (2013: 203) noted that “the textuality of Star Wars Episode VII [had] already begun” well in advance of the trailer—and even before the Disney acquisition itself—and so it is that the trailers here do not exist in a vacuum: knowledge of the wider production discourses surrounding The Force Awakens is already known.

Returning “Home” Proctor (2013: 218) identifies the feeling of Star Wars fans in viewing the franchise as analogous to that elicited by the Winnicottian transitional object: one of his fan participants refers to the world of Star Wars as feeling “like home,” with a cast of “old friends.” Such reflections might be considered prescient: although the return to the series of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill had already been rumored at the time of the Lucasfilm sale to Disney (Leonard 2013)—and in his article Proctor adeptly captures fan uncertainty over the actors’ involvement—the inclusion of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker (as well as Chewbacca, C-­3PO, and R2-­D2) in The Force Awakens was finally confirmed in April 2014 via an official casting announcement on StarWars.com. Consequently, the Force Awakens trailers were released when knowledge of thematic and narrative “returns” were already known—it was unlikely that fans would be surprised or any narratives spoiled by the inclusion of the original trilogy characters in promotional materials. While the first teaser trailer featured only new characters (albeit with some familiar iconography), the second teaser trailer marked the first new appearances from Hamill as Luke (in voice-­over), Ford as Solo, and Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca. The trailer was released online on April 16, 2015, and Han Solo’s utterance of  “Chewie . . . we’re home”—the final shot of the teaser—quickly became the locus for a frenzy of fan celebration and nostalgia. Writing for the Huffington Post, blogger Graham Milne (2015) remarked of the moment: “Three little words. . . . A clarion call to uncounted legions of dreamers, young and old

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alike, waiting in what often seemed merely vain hope for thirty-­t wo long years. We’d seen the Falcon fly in the first teaser, but this was different. This was an affirmation of something that we’d long been told was never going to happen. This was a gift. This was faith rewarded.” The fervor with which “Chewie . . . we’re home” was met is striking, particularly when considering that the characters’ return had already been confirmed. Yet the act of seeing Han and Chewbacca embodied on screen, portrayed by their original actors, was clearly a significant moment for fans, and this significance is reflected in many of the reaction videos examined in this study. In comparison to the reaction videos for the first teaser, which appear to prioritize an element of reactive performance, here the responses to Han and Chewbacca appear more emotive. Rather than being “demonstrably aware that what will be shown is a representation” (Kennedy and Smith 2012: 244), the fan reactions on display appear to depict the raw emotions felt when being reunited with beloved characters. Middleton makes a distinction between the performative reaction video and the emotional reunion video, typified by the surprise homecomings of American soldiers from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Middleton argues that while the former is often designed to provoke a humorous response in the viewer (2013: 109), reunion videos function as miniature “tearjerkers” that “intend a relation of mimicry between subject and spectator” (110). In considering the stark emotion on display in Star Wars fans’ reaction videos, what emerges here is a way to interpret the joy of seeing Han and Chewbacca within the context of these reunion videos that are, as Lisa Silvestri argues in her analysis of surprise military homecoming videos, “among the most sentimentally satiating videos on the web today” (Silvestri 2013: 101). Silvestri notes that such videos establish a juxtaposition of the surpriser and the surprisee: “The dialectical pairing of a professional public servant and a naive, emotional child animates these videos. The warrior is usually male, white, clean-­shaven, physically fit, with broad shoulders, a crew cut, and a square jaw. Like a life-­size GI Joe, he never cries. His healthy body and unwavering stoicism stand in as an indicator of the nation’s health” (105). A similarly dualistic image is present in the teaser trailer reaction videos. While not quite cutting the figure of a “life-­size GI Joe,” Han Solo, the “swashbuckling Space Pirate, the good-­bad rogue” (Poulos 2012: 489), here represents the returning hero, surprising the emotionally animated fan. At the point in the video at which the reunion occurs, the fans in the second teaser reaction videos are candid in their emotional responses, in contrast to Han’s reserved stoicism. For example, within the reaction videos we can see elation, as skylenox (2015) cheers and waves his arms in the air; Eric Neely (2015) and his friend laugh together with cries of “Yeah!” and “That’s so awesome!”; and two men from

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PixelTalk (2015) come together in a celebratory embrace. We also see surprise: fans scream (John Wu 2015) or let out exclamations like “Ha!” (The Reel Rejects 2015) or “Harrison Ford! I’m gonna die!” (Christine Tyler 2015). And we see tears of joy: a man, although vocal throughout the teaser with comments such as “Oh my god!” and “Whoa!” begins crying as Han and Chewbacca appear on screen (Grissle’s World 2015). Another man silently cries throughout the teaser, quietly repeating, “We’re home,” as it concludes (Marcelo Eduardo da Cruz 2015). These various responses of elation, surprise, and tears of joy help to affirm the coding of fans as the recipients of a surprise reunion. Silvestri’s continued analysis of reunion videos signals that the teaser trailer reactions might be considered in the same manner: “Although the warrior/father is an important figure, the surprised child is the central, most salient figure. The videos’ style and composition encourage viewers to focus on the child’s emotional reaction. . . . Unlike the father who does not outwardly perform his emotion, the child is much more candid. Her face visibly registers shock of the surprise and promptly crumples into tears” (2013: 106). The teaser trailer reaction videos, while by their nature making the fan the most salient figure, make evident the emotional juxtaposition between Han Solo and the surprised subject. Ford’s performance, only lasting a few seconds in the trailer, is relatively reserved, with no excessive emotion on display. In contrast, the reactions from fans see explicitly, outwardly emotional responses, with images of shock, surprise, and tears that are evocative of those Silvestri draws upon in her analysis. As a result, while the videos in response to the first The Force Awakens teaser can be considered performative reaction videos, those in response to the second teaser can be interpreted as reunion videos, with the dialectical pairing between Han Solo and the animated fan allowing for the candid display of emotion associated with the return of a heroic figure. While not wanting to infantilize fannish responses to Han Solo, nor to reuse Silvestri’s label “naive,” it can be argued that—similarly to the depiction of children in surprise military homecoming videos—the fans’ affective display coupled with the reaction video’s composition invites the spectator to identify with the fan and attend to their emotion (Silvestri 2013: 106). The fans in these reaction videos are responding to the “gift” of their “faith rewarded” (Milne 2015)—that Han and Chewbacca have finally arrived home, both figuratively and literally. For the families discussed by Silvestri, “home” literally means a return from a warzone, with the videos functioning as reflections of “homogenous, idealized images and narratives rooted in hegemonic notions of home, family, and community” (2013: 101). Yet for the fans that have recorded trailer reaction videos, the notion of home is slightly more abstract. Especially with regard to the fans interviewed by Proctor who demonstrate the relevance of the

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idea that Star Wars can be understood as a transitional object, it is interesting to consider how the “home” referred to by Han might be interpreted. One interpretation revolves around a desire to return to the “spirit” of the original trilogy, attempting to reach the heart of the Star Wars experience after the turbulence caused by the prequels. This discourse was present when the sequel trilogy was announced (Proctor 2013: 223) and was continued as part of the promotion for The Force Awakens (see Hassler-­Forest in this volume). Director J. J. Abrams reflects on this pointedly in his discussion of the use of practical effects in the film: This was really important, that the movie, in a way, go backwards to go forwards. . . . I wanted it to look and feel the way the original trilogy did— which is to say, when I saw those two droids in the desert of  Tatooine, that was real. Like, I knew it. . . . It helped in countless ways, mostly for the actors, to be able to be on sets and interacting with creatures and droids and things that were physically, tangibly there. (Quoted in Kaye 2015) As John Fiske (1992: 33–36) notes, authenticity, when validated as the production of an artistic individual such as Abrams, can be a criterion of discrimination normally used to accumulate official cultural capital but is readily appropriated by fans in their “moonlighting” cultural economy—what Fiske describes as the process by which fandom “offers ways of filling cultural lack and provides the social prestige and self-­esteem that go with cultural capital.” In this instance, Abrams’s invocation of authenticity functions to validate laudation of the original trilogy and therefore the views of the fans that felt “betrayed” (Brooker 2002) in their disappointment with the prequels. As a result, the appearance of Han Solo and Chewbacca in the teaser trailer embodies the reemergence of the classic Star Wars “spirit” and symbolizes a reunion with the auratic prestige of the original trilogy at large. In this case then, the home that Han references— and which prompted such overt displays of emotion—might be interpreted as the authentic Star Wars experience.

Star Reactions The final trailer for The Force Awakens was a full trailer, released online on October 19, 2015. At two minutes and thirty-­five seconds in duration, this trailer was the longest of the three official previews for the film. In a manner similar to the way they had received the teaser trailers, fans offered their filmed reactions to the full trailer and uploaded the videos to YouTube. However, in response to the full trailer there were two reaction videos in particular that gained popularity:

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those from The Force Awakens stars Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, who each released a reaction video on Instagram depicting their first viewings of the footage. Ridley’s and Boyega’s star status and insider relationship to the text proffers an opportunity to examine a third facet of trailer reaction videos: how those involved with the production of The Force Awakens registered their interest in the film; and the discourses within which their videos were released. Daisy Ridley’s video was posted on her official social media channels, and contrary to the usual real-­time format without cuts or editing, Ridley truncates her reaction into three shots lasting a total of fifteen seconds. Though no picture-­in-­picture trailer appears, the sound indicates the moments of the trailer she experiences in the clip. First, we hear the opening shot of the trailer, as Ridley’s Rey salvages in an abandoned Star Destroyer. Ridley, lying in bed with the duvet pulled up and watching the trailer on a phone, screams with delight and holds her hand up to her mouth. In the next shot, Ridley watches wide-­eyed as Kylo Ren tortures Poe Dameron and the music rises to a crescendo. Finally, the trailer comes to a close, and Ridley is in tears exclaiming, “Oh my God, it’s amazing!” Like Ridley, Boyega initially posted a short clip to Instagram, featuring his reaction to the climax of the full trailer, seeing himself (as Finn) ignite a lightsaber. The following day, however, Boyega released the full video of his reaction via his official Facebook page. Sitting with a friend, Boyega watches a screen as the sounds of the trailer can be heard. Smiling throughout, he punctuates moments from the trailer with excited comments: “Come on!” at the musical crescendo during the Poe–Kylo Ren scene; “Damn right,” as Finn appears while Han Solo’s accompanying voice-­over mentions the Jedi; “Woo!” as Finn and Rey witness an explosion. And as the trailer ends with Finn igniting a lightsaber, Boyega and his friend wildly celebrate—Boyega falls over the back of the couch, he and his friend embrace, and Boyega mimics Finn’s lightsaber fighting stance, excitedly commenting, “Come on, Kylo Ren!” Both Ridley and Boyega made it clear that viewing the trailer was a special event for them, with Ridley noting that she “set an alarm to watch the trailer” (daisyridley 2015), while Boyega made a point of waiting to arrive home to watch the footage in order to watch it on a suitably large screen (Boyega 2015). The subsequent release of these reaction videos functions to make the star personas of Ridley and Boyega conform to a more general celebrity trend afforded by social media, reflecting Sean Redmond’s (2006: 36) assertion that “contemporary fame speaks and is spoken about through the language of intimacy . . . [drawing] stars/celebrities and fans/consumers into ever decreasing circles of affective connectivity.” Through the publication of their reaction videos, Ridley

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and Boyega craft intimate star personas instilled with fannish tastes—the excitement for and anticipation of The Force Awakens is a common element shared between producer and fan and works to collapse the distinction between the two positions (Ferris 2001: 32). Yet despite this apparently knowing mediation of the producer-­fan, powerful-­ powerless binary (McKee 2004: 169), the success of Ridley’s and Boyega’s “boundary breaking” can depend on extratextual factors beyond the reaction videos themselves, factors that again evoke the anxiety around reaction videos’ authenticity (Middleton 2013: 126). For even though Ridley’s and Boyega’s behavior can be interpreted as that of Star Wars fans (both within the videos and in the act of recording them), interviews with the actors signal the extent to which their respective emotional investment in The Force Awakens can be considered fannish. For example, in an interview given shortly before the release of the film, Ridley declared that fandom was not an important aspect of her cultural life and that her performance as Rey was not predicated on any preexisting relationship with the Star Wars saga: “I’m not really like a fangirl of anything. . . . I’m not really a fan person, as it were. Which I think is nice, because like Rey is in the film, I wasn’t trying to fit into anything. I was just trying to do the thing that was going to speak to me and was going to speak to the people I was acting with. So yeah, I’m one of the few . . . in the world” (quoted in Cornet 2015). In highlighting her lack of engagement with fan culture, Ridley removes the fannish connotations of her emotional reaction to the trailer and instead marks her response as one more personal to her position as an actor (and particularly one starring in her first major feature film). Ridley confirmed her personal-­professional investment as a guest on The Tonight Show, where she noted that her tears were in recognition of the collaborative effort of thousands of professional personnel (The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon 2015a). While just as emotional as Ridley, Boyega’s reaction video offers a more fannish perspective in line with the teaser trailer reaction videos discussed above, chiefly because of his discursive articulation of himself as a Star Wars fan, noting that his fannish enthusiasm should be ranked “10 out of 10. My grades have been absolutely phenomenal” (quoted in Bishop 2015). Boyega’s fandom for the saga was articulated via reports of his fannish activity, such as his efforts to seek out costar Harrison Ford to autograph a Han Solo doll (Fullerton 2015), his love for the Star Wars Expanded Universe of novels and comic books, and his enjoyment of playing with lightsabers around the house (Bernardin and Siegel 2015). As a result, Boyega’s act of recording a trailer reaction video sees him more explicitly mediate a line between producer and fan. Reflecting on his approach to engaging fans via social media, Boyega notes:

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For me, my main approach with this movie is that fans haven’t been able to have an insight into Star Wars the way they’d like to, and so the way in which I’ve used social media—and especially in terms of my Snapchat and Instagram—I’m basically trying to just remove the veil on the process, so fans can have more of an appreciation for the work that goes into the film. Because all they do is see the trailers, and then see the movie. So it’s good for fans to kind of go on this journey with me and see how things work. (Quoted in Bishop 2015) In referencing fans’ prior engagements with Star Wars, Boyega here is making a clear indication that he is drawing on producer-­fan discourses—like Brooker’s (2002) “betrayed” fans—that have shaped Star Wars fandom. However, in referencing the kinds of insight Star Wars fans may have preferred, Boyega demonstrates his knowledge of the particular “gross imbalance between the individual viewer and corporate producer” (Brooker 2002: 98) that has categorized George Lucas’s relationship with fans. In acknowledging this division, Boyega frames his fannish activity as part of The Force Awakens’s broader discourse of recapturing the spirit of the original trilogy. In effect, Boyega’s reaction video helps to reaffirm the return home. Yet, of course, Boyega’s reaction to the Force Awakens trailer is naturally extraordinary, by sheer virtue of the fact that he is reacting in part to his own inclusion in the text. When Boyega mimics Finn’s fighting stance, he is not solely a fan like Tyrone Magnus, Gattor Martin, or Nerdsmerized, expressing their fandom through physicality; rather, Boyega is Finn, re-­creating a diegetic moment in the nondiegesis of his living room. Rather than a Star Wars fan re-­creating a favorite moment in an act of fan play, this is the star of the film that is also able to have mock lightsaber battles with celebrities such as David Beckham (BBC 2015). Middleton (2013: 121) reflects on moments when there is a power imbalance between subjects of reaction videos and the viewer, noting that “the viewer can perceive the situation as the character perceives it but also has a broader understanding of the situation that is not available to the character.” This omniscience is available to viewers of the Star Wars reaction videos who may have seen the trailer themselves before watching the reaction of others; as a result, they may know of particular moments in the trailer likely to elicit a strong reaction, such as the ignition of a lightsaber or the return of  Han and Chewbacca. However, although Boyega’s reaction video was the first time he had seen particular moments accompanied by visual effects, in this moment he still has a greater degree of knowledge than the viewer; when he says, “Come on, Kylo Ren!” it is with a deeper understanding of The Force Awakens’s narrative and that

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particular moment in the text. Boyega’s extratextual activity surrounding the promotion of The Force Awakens (including surprising fans at theatrical screenings upon the film’s release), adheres to activity considered fannish, but his position as producer is never in doubt. Although Boyega closely mediates the line between producer and fan, he is unable to fully embrace a fannish identity in the same manner as many YouTubers.

Conclusion As each trailer for The Force Awakens showcased different moments from the film, so too do the trailer reaction videos showcase different kinds of fan activity. Yet while it is possible to broadly categorize the reaction videos as, respectively, performativity intended to build community, the emotional capture of a reunion, and producorial attempts to blur the line between fan and cast, the productivity on display in all of the reactions functions to strengthen a notion of Star Wars fan culture as a whole. The very notion that reaction videos exist signals the franchise’s cultural relevance and offers a more optimistic fan outlook than those discussed by Proctor (2013). The Force Awakens trailer reaction videos appear to invite an opportunity to share in the fannish experience rather than to simply experience it vicariously. In Proctor’s conclusion, he wonders whether Disney would adopt “the tyrannical position that Lucas has now relinquished; or if fans can make themselves heard among the cacophony of voices across the internet” (2013: 222). The enthusiasm on display in the reaction videos, as well as the activity from Ridley and Boyega, would appear to suggest the latter. Thoughts now turn to the role that fan response will play in coming years. The reaction to the Force Awakens trailers—particularly to the reunion with Han and Chewbacca—emphasize fans’ delight at seeing a new entry to a dormant film franchise. Yet with Disney’s proposed schedule of a new Star Wars feature film each year, one might ask whether such levels of excitement can be maintained or whether franchise fatigue might mean fans may not bother joining the cacophony of voices at all.

18 Bridget Kies

“I Should Have Seen It Coming” Spoiler Culture, Marathon Screenings, and Affective Responses to The Force Awakens

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hen my friends and I attended a screening of The Force Awakens on December 17, 2015, it was an emotional experience. We had spent two hours waiting to enter the theater and, before that, fourteen hours viewing the previous six Star Wars films. We were in such a state of heightened anticipation that we responded to each part of the cinema-­going experience with unbridled joy. When the theater lights dimmed, the entire audience cheered. When the previews began, we cheered. We cheered for commercials for cell phones, trailers for action films, and the “please turn off your cell phone” notice.1 When the first note of the Star Wars theme sounded and the yellow block lettering hit the screen, my friend Jeremy and I shot our fists into the air as we screamed. Our boisterous reactions continued throughout the film. We applauded the first appearance of the Millennium Falcon, cheered for each returning character, laughed aloud at the jokes, and made “aww” sounds at the adorably anthropomorphized movements of BB-­8. But during Kylo Ren’s confrontation with Han Solo, we grew quiet. After the close-­up on Han’s stunned face as his own son pierced him with a lightsaber, I started to cry. It is important to the point I wish to make in this chapter that the reader understand what I mean here. I wept inconsolably. I sobbed audibly. I used an entire stash of paper napkins to wipe my dripping nose. My friend Molly tried to soothe me, but every time she thought I had calmed, a new wave of anguish would hit, and I would begin sobbing again. I cried through the remainder of the film and the final credits. When the theater lights came up and the audience began leaving, I remained glued to my seat. Most of my friends shuffled out, our twenty-­hour adventure together concluded, but a few returned to check on me. They were concerned I wasn’t going to be

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able to get home by myself as if I was suffering from a trauma of some sort. And I suppose I was: a cinematic trauma. I knew I needed to leave the theater, since a crowd was waiting for their turn at a screening. I also knew that if I walked past them, my face wet and red with the visible signs of grief, that I would spoil what for me had been the biggest surprise of The Force Awakens. Molly and the others arranged themselves around me while I walked out sideways, my face hidden. My friends smiled to assure the waiting crowd that The Force Awakens was a good movie. I begin with this embarrassing personal tale to highlight the twinned forces that can affect our reception of films like The Force Awakens. Having spent the day participating in a marathon of Star Wars films put me in an emotionally charged state. Having remained spoiler-­free, especially because I spent the day of the film’s release cloistered in a marathon screening, I was unprepared for the emotional impact Han Solo’s death would have on me. In this chapter, I use the phenomena of marathon viewing and spoiler culture as means to understanding affective fan responses to The Force Awakens. Drawing from my personal experience, as well as from interviews, emails, and blog posts from other fans, I have found that the two developments in the Star Wars canon that have produced the greatest emotional response were the death of Han Solo and the discovery of new character Rey. Among those who longed for the return of the original cast, Han Solo’s death signifies both a return to the “hero’s journey” that the original trilogy patterned itself after, but it also means the loss of a beloved character and the end of actor Harrison Ford’s involvement in the franchise that effectively launched his career.2 For those who have felt uneasy about Star Wars’s treatment of women, the introduction of Daisy Ridley’s Rey was a welcome breath of fresh air, attesting that Disney and J.J. Abrams are aware women and girls are Star Wars fans as well. Neither of these developments, I contend, would have produced the same intense reaction for me if I had been “spoiled” prior to screening The Force Awakens. Furthermore, marathon viewings, in addition to sequestering fans from potential spoilers, fostered an emotionally charged environment in which The Force Awakens was nearly guaranteed positive reception.

Marathon Screenings: Proving Fan Credentials through Suffering The group screening is a cultural event that has been studied by media scholars in recent decades. Constance Penley (1991), Camille Bacon-­Smith (1992), and Henry Jenkins (1992) all document the process by which Star Trek fans bonded

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together over screenings. Will Brooker (2002: 31) describes a group screening of The Empire Strikes Back in 2002 as “communal viewing” in which fans are “touching base with something familiar and precious to them, and by doing it together they are cementing their own friendships.” In the digital era, group screenings can also unite distant fans. Lynette Porter (2012: 133) observes how use of Twitter during home screenings can “provide a forum for communal viewing among fans, no matter where they live in the world.” I have participated in “watch and chat” parties, at times with a film in one window of my computer desktop and a chat room open beside it. At other times, I’ve watched a film or television episode while on a Skype video call with a long-­distance friend. Just as we might “glance at a friend to see if they have laughed at a joke” in the theater, Skype can help facilitate what David Shamma et al. (2008) describe as a “feeling of intimacy and closeness” (2932), a return to the social experience that digital content has replaced with individuated viewing (2936). In the cases of the previously studied screenings among Star Wars and Star Trek fans or of the digital “watch and chat” sessions within fan communities, the group screening reinforces the individual’s connection to the media text as much as her connection to other fans. For many Star Wars fans, one of the most important things to do before seeing The Force Awakens was to screen the previously released films as a canonical refresher course. Pop media critics urged fans that they would not be able to fully appreciate The Force Awakens otherwise: “You need to watch the original Star Wars movies first, or else you’re going to be hopelessly confused. The Force Awakens isn’t called Episode VII for nothing. You’re going to want to know what led up to it” (Brayson 2015). Although maintaining encyclopedic knowledge of the canon is one of the ways that fans build cultural capital, refreshing oneself can jog the memory while also building anticipation for the latest installment. Several respondents to a question on the Q&A website Quora (on a thread that was then pasted and reblogged to other sci-­fi and fan sites) emphasized how watching the six previous films was necessary to ensure maximum pleasure during The Force Awakens (“Do I Need to Watch Previous Star Wars Films to Watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens?” 2015). Prior to the release of The Force Awakens, many movie theaters offered screenings of the previous six Star Wars films stretched over days or compacted into one-­day, marathon viewing sessions (R. Lewis 2015; Prendergast 2015). Other fans, like my group, opted to host their own home marathons, punctuated by group screenings of The Force Awakens at local theaters. The marathon group screening, which serves as the springboard for this chapter, was not intended to be exclusive to longtime Star Wars fans. Rather

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than sharing a common love of Star Wars, we were united as colleagues and friends. Among us, some were Star Wars devotees who wanted to partake in the marathon while playing Star Wars board games and debating the films’ broader political themes; some (like myself) wanted to watch in silence to absorb as much plot and dialogue as possible. Others participated because the release of The Force Awakens was a major cultural event; the group marathon enabled them to be part of it. Our marathon consisted of the six existing films screened at an apartment, followed by a screening of The Force Awakens at a nearby theater. To cater to the devotees and the casual viewers—and the many who fell somewhere in between—our host, Ali, posted the screening schedule to Facebook the day before, so we could elect when to arrive at her apartment. Throughout the day, as the schedule adjusted due to unplanned breaks, she posted updates along with a picture of the projected title scrawl for each film. These photos documented our progress, alongside actual versus predicted starting times, and served to entice absent group members to show up. One participant remembers the photos as an important ritual that he later mimicked in a marathon screening of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After soliciting the group’s opinions, Ali determined to screen the films in order of narrative chronology, rather than release date. In other words, we would watch the more recently produced films first but follow the timeline within the Star Wars universe. Since The Force Awakens was set after Return of the Jedi, we assumed it would be better to see the original trilogy last, to have it fresh in our minds when we left the apartment for the movie theater. This schedule served a practical function as well. Because the original trilogy is more popular among our group (and among many Star Wars fans), it was more convenient to screen it in late afternoon when those who had to work could attend. This also meant only the true devotees would lose sleep and lose a day of work to screen all six films.3 As one of those devotees, I arrived at Ali’s apartment at six o’clock in the morning in a pair of lounge pants and an R2-­D2 shirt. Though the sun was not yet up, the curtains were drawn, and the lights were out. The living room had been turned into a makeshift theater with one bare wall for the projection and chairs, benches, and floor cushions for the audience. Ali described it as “kind of exhilarating starting the first movie with what would become the core group of the day.” As part of that core, I remained at Ali’s house throughout the day, leaving twice briefly to check on my dogs; the other members of the core never left. The majority of our group of twenty-­five arrived later in the day. While only five or six of us watched The Phantom Menace, Return of the Jedi played to a living room so crowded we could barely move or hear the film.

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I include these details to give a sense for how one event can reflect different kinds of audiences and fan experiences. We talked throughout all six films, but the kind of conversation varied as the group blossomed in size. For instance, during Attack of the Clones, the small core group debated Padmé Amidala’s transition from queen to senator and argued over whether the romance narrative between Padmé and Anakin Skywalker was inconsistent with the rest of Star Wars.4 During the crowded screening of Return of the Jedi, conversations ranged from what time we needed to get in line at the theater to how different people had spent their days. Although our reason for screening Return of the Jedi last was a canonical refreshment, I was able to pay less attention due to the large, talkative crowd. Nonetheless, the atmosphere was far more convivial than it had been early in the morning when we were still sleepy and dreading the prequel films. Because the core group was quite familiar with the original trilogy, the distractions were aggravating but did not necessarily impede our refresher course. Those who had arrived later in the day were not self-­identified as devoted fans, so the influx of people and swell in noise worked against them. In arriving in time for the original trilogy to brush up on canon or learn about it for the first time, they were assured an environment in which it would be difficult for them to do this. One participant, Allain, recalls sitting next to someone who had never seen The Empire Strikes Back. She continually asked questions about the plot because she couldn’t hear the film over the noise and, in his words, “did not seem impressed with Darth Vader.” The varying degrees of engagement our group experienced during the marathon also affected our reception of The Force Awakens. As someone who had been watching Star Wars all day and had planned participation in the marathon for a month, I was in a more emotionally charged state than Molly, who had not planned to see The Force Awakens on opening night and only arrived for the last hour of Return of the Jedi. Ali remembers staying up late the night before hanging the blackout curtains and setting up the projector, so that by the time we adjourned to the movie theater, she could barely keep her eyes open. By the time The Force Awakens began, at least an hour after its advertised time, I too was tired and, as a result, susceptible to mood swings. To speak plainly, I cry more easily when I’m tired, as do many adults and nearly every toddler. Several recent studies have examined the heightened emotional state produced by intense, prolonged viewing sessions known as “binge-­watching.” The moniker “binge-­watching” itself has a negative connotation, suggesting an unhealthy overconsumption. Indeed, a recent study by public health researchers at the University of Toledo attests to the effects of binge-­watching on mental health and cautions that “binge-­watching is a growing public health concern

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that needs to be addressed” (Karmakar et al. 2015). The study received widespread attention from the mainstream press, who interpreted binge-­watching as both a symptom and cause of depression (Venable 2015; N. O’Neill 2016). A similar study from the University of Texas at Austin found that the more lonely and depressed people felt, the more likely they were to binge-­watch (Sung, Kang, and Lee 2015). Serial television’s tendency toward end-­of-­season cliff-­hangers can be a source of frustration, if not disappointment, in contrast to the typical narrative closure of film. Film franchises like Star Wars, however, often deliberately leave open threads for sequels. The Force Awakens accomplished this with the appearance of Luke Skywalker in its final minutes and the suggestion that Rey is the first female Jedi—or, at least, the first female Jedi protagonist in a Star Wars film. These open threads also affect emotional responses to the film, leaving a fan in a state of unknowing and anticipation. While the aforementioned studies indicate some of the outcomes of individual binge-­watching, the group marathon is different for its emphasis on the collective experience. As the group participates in shared viewing, one member’s intensity and enthusiasm may build on another’s. The possibility for exhaustion resulting from hours spent in front of the screen is the same; however, the different name for this kind of viewing implies our different perception of it. A marathon requires dedication and stamina to complete. In understanding affective responses to The Force Awakens, it is important to consider the similar physical and mental exhaustion resulting from prolonged screening. In my case, the marathon made me more sensitive to my emotions. Though I sobbed for Han Solo’s death, I still concluded the marathon believing that I had seen a good, albeit sad, movie, and this conclusion was driven by the excitement that fomented within the group over the prolonged period.

Midnight Releases and Advance Screenings: The Importance of Being First For many fans, “firstness” is a manifestation of their passion. Being first in line to buy a ticket, seeing a screening first, and so on, are ways to prove dedication and exhibit power over other fans through the accumulation of (fan) cultural capital. Being first is also a strategy to avoid spoilers and, conversely, potentially for spoiling others. The midnight release and advance screening are two ways fans can express this “firstness.” My friends and I attended a 10:30 p.m. advance screening on December 17, with the general release in the United States scheduled for the next day, but we were not first. There were prior screenings in the

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same theater and across the United States, not to mention the film’s earlier release in Europe. Hence there was the potential that our experience could be “spoiled” by others. While our screening was not a midnight release screening, it had all the hallmarks of a media event: tickets were sold far in advance for a different price than the regular box office, velvet ropes stretched across the lobby in anticipation of long lines, and audience members arrived in costume. As media events, blockbuster film releases are “framed by a constellation of institutions, texts, and practices” (Austin 2002: 3). The film may be “the centerpiece of cinemagoing,” but it is just one factor in the experience, which includes comfortable seats and popcorn, as well as affection and enthusiasm shared among cinemagoers and cinema staff (Elsaesser 2001: 15; Acland 2003: 145; McCulloch and Crisp 2016: 190). Standing in line for hours to get the best seat in the house is another way to demonstrate devotion, not only of time but also of place: to have the best seat is also a marker of being a dedicated fan. My group demonstrated our firstness by arriving at the theater over an hour before the screening so that we could occupy the first positions in line and secure the best seats in the cinema. Thus, our screening took on many of the characteristics of a midnight blockbuster release. For decades, certain cult films were screened at midnight, when the late hour reiterated the film’s cult status and lack of respectability in opposition to those exhibited at more traditional hours (Grant 2000: 13–27; Hollows 2003: 42). The midnight blockbuster release originated with The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 at a few select theaters (Moulton 2014: 359). It remained an underground, cult phenomenon until the rerelease of the original Star Wars trilogy with updated special effects in 1997 and, finally, with the release of the three prequel films. Following the successful midnight box office returns for The Phantom Menace in 1999, the midnight screening surfaced as a common exhibition practice that has grown to encompass a greater percentage of box office revenue (359). With the release of Twilight: Eclipse in 2010, the midnight screening began to account for ten or more percent of a blockbuster’s total domestic revenue (Robbins 2012). As midnight screenings of certain blockbuster films become bigger media events, attendance becomes another marker of fan devotion. In his interviews with fans of The Lord of the Rings, Carter Moulton (2014: 363) finds that attendance at a midnight screening reinforces expertise within the fan community through being the “first” to see a particular film. Attendance at a blockbuster release is often markedly different than attendance at a film at any other time. A multiplex may dedicate every screen to the same film, so the entire crowd at the multiplex is involved in a similar cinema-­going experience. Additionally, the patterns of ritual often change. As

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J. P. Telotte (1991: 103) notes, “the theater itself quickly shifts in character” to encompass ritualistic activity: cosplay, interaction among strangers, and, as I noted in my screening, collective responses such as applause and cheering. This shift in ritual is often what makes participating in midnight releases—or advance screenings of films like The Force Awakens—so fun. As Molly explained in an email, “I don’t think I would have been compelled to go on opening night [without a group of friends]. But I am so happy I did! I felt like I experienced a cultural moment.” While the nature of certain cult films, or the “cultification” of a special screening, may alter the cinema experience, often rituals fade following the midnight release or big opening weekend. Once the experience of firstness passes, so does some of the collective enthusiasm. During my December 17 screening, there was a sense of community among the audience, who laughed aloud and cheered together. When I saw The Force Awakens in a theater a month later, there was no cheering for the opening theme and no applause during the final credit roll. Allain, who had been part of the core group, reported that the audience at his second screening in late December still applauded for the opening theme, but otherwise the theater was so quiet he could hear two audience members whispering about the accent of Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o). “They saw Luke Skywalker for the first time in thirty-­three years,” he lamented, “and they’re talking about an alien’s accent. Oy.” The sense that it was “just any film screening” came from the decrease in secrecy and hype that comes with spoilers, film reviews, and social media buzz, not to mention the experience of individual audience members who may have already seen the film. To attend an advance or midnight screening is to demonstrate that one is a “true fan.” During my experience awaiting The Force Awakens, crowds of people celebrated each other’s costumes and Princess Leia hairstyles. We tweeted about being in line to see the film before most Americans would. And once having seen the film, we had knowledge of plot elements we could choose to disclose or withhold—either option reiterating our power in different ways.

“I Just Won’t Go on the Internet”: Avoiding Spoilers for the Ultimate Viewing Experience Having access to spoilers puts one in the powerful position of being able to share them or withhold them. To borrow from another fan object, “with great power comes great responsibility”: a fan has either a responsibility to share with the community or a duty to ensure everyone else’s viewing pleasure by safeguarding her secret knowledge. Whether fans see spoilers as contributing to or detracting

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from their experience of a media text is a contentious debate. The fan wiki for the television series Supernatural prides itself on remaining “spoiler-­free” until after an episode airs, at which point plot summary, musical selections, and guest cast are all posted (Kaplan 2010). At the same time, many cult media texts foster what Amelie Hastie (2007: 89) calls an “epistemological economy” in which fans are invited to participate in the construction of knowledge about the textual world, resulting in what Matt Hills (2002: 138) calls a “hyperdiegesis” that encourages fan speculations, spoilers, and discussion. The Force Awakens’s release was timed so that, outside the red-­carpet premiere in Los Angeles, audiences in the United States had to wait until audiences in Europe and other parts of the world had already had the opportunity to screen it (McClintock 2015). American fans could attend advance screenings on December 17, as I did, but owing to time zone differences, these screenings still occurred after screenings in France and the United Kingdom. Additionally, advance screenings sold out quickly, leaving many to wait until the official release on December 18 (or later). The staggered release meant the possibility of audiences in the United States being “spoiled” on the plot through social media and other outlets. To prevent this, Disney and J. J. Abrams remained secretive about the film, and critics largely echoed this strategy. For instance, during National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in the United States on December 17, film critic Bob Mondello (2015) kept his review to analyses of the film’s formal qualities and broad themes. There was no mention of even the existence of new characters Rey, Finn, or Poe Dameron. The review did, however, discuss what producers, screenwriters, and director J. J. Abrams “owed” fans: a film that would satisfy them in a way the prequel trilogy had not (see also Proctor 2016b). Despite such heavy precautions against spoilers, the realities of digital culture mean spoilers are often easily accessible. Many fans understand this, and some actively work to shield themselves. One British user on the website Reddit commented upon the earlier European release date for the film by saying, “Those are going to be 2 very dangerous days on the Internet for you Yanks” (eh1end 2015). An American responded: “I just won’t go on the internet, or go outside, or leave my room, or my bed.” The post demonstrates familiarity with film industry practices, including staggered release dates, and it speaks to the greatest concern for some American Star Wars fans. “I just won’t go on the internet” is the safest option to avoid accidentally stumbling upon a spoiler. Indeed, I adopted a similar approach: blanket avoidance of the internet and other potential “spoiler zones.” Typically, I read plot summaries prior to watching a film and especially before beginning a long-­r unning television series, and

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I like consuming as many spoilers as I can. I did not intend to change my practice for The Force Awakens, but I somehow missed watching the second trailer when it was released. All I knew was that Han Solo and Chewie appeared and Han Solo said, “Chewie, we’re home.” As time passed and the film’s release date approached, it seemed unlikely that someone who seeks out spoilers had not encountered any, and so I decided to see how long into the prerelease marketing period I could make it without learning anything about the film. Once I bought my ticket for Ali’s group screening, I decided to expend as much energy avoiding spoilers as I had previously spent seeking them. By December 17, my knowledge of The Force Awakens had not extended beyond, “Chewie, we’re home.” By remaining spoiler-­free, I unknowingly set myself up to be shocked by Han Solo’s death. Or perhaps more accurately articulated, by having only been spoiled on Han Solo’s reappearance, I was naturally upset by his subsequent death. Speculation on the internet before the film’s release homed in on Solo’s potential fate and, in many ways, Han Solo’s death was an obvious plot point. Actor Harrison Ford had reportedly wanted out of the Star Wars franchise after A New Hope (O’Connell 2015), so the franchise’s return to the narrative of the original trilogy should have logically indicated that Ford would somehow be written out of the story. In addition to his desire to leave Star Wars and his commitment to many other projects, Ford is an expensive marquee name. By the time tickets for The Force Awakens had begun to sell in late 2016, Harrison Ford had become the “American box office king,” having grossed more at the U.S. box office than any other actor (Robinson 2016). While I may not have known Ford’s precise box office figures, I am a sophisticated enough media consumer to know that economics often determine story as much as, if not more than, fan desire. Additionally, I am versed in Star Wars mythology, which has always been about how the death of a father figure inspires the younger generation (A. Gordon 1978). Once we learned Kylo Ren was Han Solo’s son, it was logical, predictable even, that he would kill Han. Despite its rich mythology, I have never found Star Wars to be an especially emotionally engaging universe. Every time I watch the original trilogy, I am also struck by the emphasis on action over character. Elsewhere I have written about the more contemplative kind of science fiction that the Star Trek universe represents and how J. J. Abrams’s position as producer and director of the rebooted film series corresponded with a shift in Star Trek to action-­adventure (Kies 2016). Abrams at the helm of Star Wars felt more fitting to me. My prejudice about his style no doubt also influenced my expectations for The Force Awakens, leaving me to presume there would be no poignant character moments to tug at my heartstrings.

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In hindsight, the fact that I presumed wrongly was likely as much a cause for my emotional reaction as was the death of a character I never knew I cared so much about. “I should have seen it coming,” I sobbed as I sat in the car with my friends. We had managed to leave the theater, but I was still unable to drive. “I should have seen it coming” was a sentiment that expressed my sadness at not being a good enough fan. Despite the fact that I had so arduously avoided spoilers, I should have been able to predict the plot based on my knowledge of the canon’s larger mythology and extratextual factors. Grieving for Han Solo thus became a contradictory emotion: at once signaling my fandom through this intense reaction to a character’s death but also grieving the reality that perhaps my fandom wasn’t as intense as I had believed. By avoiding spoilers and spending fourteen hours revisiting Star Wars with my friends, I sought to put myself in the most receptive state to enjoy The Force Awakens. While this did happen, I was also unable to predict that I would be so receptive to grief and that all my efforts to position myself as a good Star Wars fan would finally fail in the face of this missed prediction. This chapter has attempted to demonstrate how fans can attempt to engineer their experiences through access to or avoidance of spoilers and behind-­the-­ scenes information, the time commitment of a screening marathon, and the shared collective energy of group events. Yet, as my experience with The Force Awakens reveals, our affective responses can sometimes transcend our very best efforts.

19 Lucy Bennett

“Someone Is Someone’s Father!” An Autoethnography of a Non–Star Wars Viewer

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his chapter opens with what might be regarded by some to be a bewildering confession: until relatively recently I had never seen a Star Wars film. Despite being a film enthusiast and a keen scholar of media and fandom, these films, which for many constitute a canonical and “important cultural text” (Brooker 2002: xii), had evaded me throughout my life. However, this study will realign this omission, autoethnographically tracing my belated exposure to the series of films from, in narrative chronology, The Phantom Menace to The Force Awakens. In essence, this autoethnographic chapter will raise and explore the processes and meanings that can occur when an individual remains unexposed to a key cultural text or “generational object” (Bollas 1992). Building on observations by Adam Roberts (2013), it will trace the experience and repercussions of a (positively inflected) shame that can be fostered by, and often anchored to, unexposure to canonical work. As a gateway into this avenue of investigation, this study will unravel my relationship with, and eventual exposure to, Star Wars through two distinct lenses. First, my pre-­ viewing anticipation and knowledge of the film (hinged on scant grasps of the narrative, such as my understanding that “someone is someone’s father”) will be traced, examining how the awareness and expectation of an unseen text can be charged through popular culture. Secondly, after watching the series of Star Wars films, I reflect on my first viewing experiences of the texts, exploring possible dissonances and connections between my pre-­v iewing expectations and the actual experience of what I term out-­of-­sync canonical viewing. Overall, this chapter argues that positively inflected cultural shame, involving being singled out for not being familiar with a canonical text, can sometimes also be alluring, since it also constructs and maintains a sense of difference for the individual. This chapter will also argue that with key canonical or generational cultural

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texts—even if they are eventually viewed—there may still be a sense of separation and a residue of shame held within the individual. It suggests that the silences in research surrounding nonfandom or complicated relations with texts should be contested so that a wider range of voices and experiences can be heard.

Exploring Shame and Abstinence I was born in October 1977, the year that Star Wars was released. I grew up in the 1980s and from the age of six became transfixed by media and culture— music was my first love, but literature and film also spoke to me greatly. The first Back to the Future (1985) film remains my favorite to this day and was the first video that my parents and I watched after purchasing a VCR in 1987. I used to rent videos from a video shop in Caerphilly, South Wales, called Music Man, which was next to a petrol service station (turn left for Betamax, right for vhs), from our local newsagent, and also from a video rental van that used to visit our street once a week. I remember seeing the original Star Wars trilogy on these shelves but was never compelled to rent it. I’ve often wondered why I have never watched Star Wars. I am a media academic: I study audiences and fans, and Star Wars has a particularly rich and vibrant fan culture (Johnson and Brooker 2005; Geraghty 2014). I have maintained that it was not a conscious decision, but, upon reflection, perhaps it was. Abstinence from a key cultural or generational text, I would argue, is somewhat paradoxical: there is the feeling of being left out culturally and being left behind by a generation, but conversely also the strong pull of being different and preserving this difference. When this difference fades after I watch the films, it seems that I might become just like the rest and lose this element of distinctiveness. Star Wars is positioned as such a canonical popular film series that admitting to not having viewed any of the films can place an individual as an object of curiosity. In 2005, while reviewing Will Brooker’s (2002) book on Star Wars fandom, Amie Rose Rotruck (2005: 72) declared: “I nearly had a heart attack my first year at college when I found not one, but two girls on my floor who had never seen Star Wars. How is it possible that some people go through life without having seen Star Wars?” On BBC Radio 4, similarly, there has been a series titled “Never Seen Star Wars” (2008–2011) that involves listeners confessing and admitting to things they have never done. Chris Taylor (2014) also outlines how a member of the Mashable news team was shown the film and wrote a live blog as the process unfolded, with the hashtag #StarWarsVirgin also receiving attention on Twitter. In this sense, Star Wars is often regarded as a rite of passage that has not been embraced and could be interpreted as what Christopher Bollas terms a

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“generational object.” Bollas (1992: 260–61) writes that “each generational object . . . gives rise to a complex character of experiences peculiar to that time. They sit inside us even when we aren’t thinking of them, within our unconscious in an internal world where each object serves as a generating link to the people of our time.” Star Wars, then, could be viewed as an object within my internal world that works to generate a link to people of my time. Adam Roberts (2013) has explored the positively inflected cultural shame that “un-­exposure” to key works of science fiction can foster. I want to build on this and to explore more fully the processes at work surrounding abstinence toward a key cultural text, or “generational object,” and the intricacies at work when the abstinence dissolves, with the viewer engaging in out-­of-­sync canonical viewing. Roberts himself builds on Silvan Tomkins’s (1987: 143) work surrounding shame, which posits it as “an innate auxiliary affect and a specific inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment. As disgust operates only after something has been taken in, shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated; it inhibits one, or the other, or both. The innate activator of shame is the complete reduction of interest or joy.” Roberts suggests that “it is the gap between the strangeness of a text and the wider expectation that it be familiar that generates the affect in question,” which he argues will either result in the individual withdrawing from, or becoming engaged with, the canonical text (A. Roberts 2013: 202). In this sense though, the positive inflection of this shame is key: as he points out, the shame involved in confessing to never having viewed A New Hope is not on the same level as that felt about committing a criminal act; but what the confession does do is re-­cement the text’s placement in film canon and deliver a positively inflected shame, “an acknowledgement that it is something you probably should have done” (203). In this sense, as my engagement with the Star Wars films will demonstrate, I will argue that abstinence from key cultural texts can provoke feelings of positively inflected cultural shame in some individuals. However, building further on Roberts’s work, what I also want to argue here is that this form of positively inflected cultural shame, of being singled out for not having viewed a key cultural text, can sometimes also be alluring, since it also constructs and maintains a sense of difference within and toward the individual. This chapter will be comprised of an autoethnography, the most apt method with which to deliver a critical firsthand account and reflection surrounding a specific experience. Autoethnography has been drawn on for these particular reasons within fan studies (Couldry 2007; Jenkins 2007; Sturm 2014) and audience studies more widely (Briggs 2006). Nick Couldry (2000: 126) specifically pinpoints the value of autoethnography in that there should be within research

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“a dialectic between the way we think about others and the way we think about ourselves.” Matt Hills (2002: 43) draws on this and builds upon it further by suggesting: Autoethnography also displaces the problems of assuming that the “real” is always primarily discursive. This is possible because autoethnography asks the person undertaking it to question their self-­account constantly, opening the “subjective” and the intimately personal up to the cultural contexts in which it is formed and experienced. As a form of voluntary self-­estrangement, autoethnography confronts the subject with a variety of possible interpretations of their self-­accounts, and their self-­accounts of their self-­accounts. Thus, the questioning at the root of autoethnography rightly complicates notions of attempting to grasp what is deemed to be “real” or “true” within ethnographic fan studies research, with this analytical “self-­estrangement” offering needed criticality and reflection. Jeanette Monaco (2010: 132) also raises a similar standpoint in the conclusion of her autoethnographic work on fandom of The Sopranos (1999–2007), where she argues that the method “differs from any simplistic notion of the confessional through its questioning of how the self is mediated and constrained through language, culture, socio-­economic historical conditions and through its ability to connect this questioning with the experience of others. Autoethnography must always aim to create a critical path that can help us to understand our own partialities.” This chapter then, although positioning me as a Star Wars nonfan (due to lack of engagement), will attempt to trace my “critical path” in an effort to unravel and “understand [my] own partialities” surrounding my relations with the Star Wars texts and my placement in culture at large.

Never Seeing Star Wars: Exploring My Preknowledge of the Films Chris Taylor (2014) laments that “every supposed Star Wars virgin has actually picked up an extraordinary number of spoilers in their lives” since the larger Star Wars phenomenon pervades so many aspects of media. Overwhelmingly, my preknowledge of the Star Wars series was gleaned from these media and popular culture references. This awareness was primarily hinged on the premise that there was a catastrophic twist in the earlier films. I knew that “somebody was somebody’s father”—a statement I made in conversation with members of the World Star Wars Project that produced mirth and laughter—but not who was

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involved or the implications that this would carry. I was also aware of Ewoks, the Princess Leia bikini and signature hairstyle (primarily through an episode of Friends), lightsabers, a “gold robot” (which I would later identify as C-­3PO), a hairy creature named “Chewiebacca,” an “animal” named Yoda, and the dulcet tones of Darth Vader. Generally, I also understood that the series had a strong importance for fans and collectors, sometimes founded in a wild nostalgia and fondness for the 1980s. In fact, I remember well the prevalence of Star Wars merchandise and toys while growing up (especially in the playground at school), such toys being “the first beloved set of characters, the first narrative possession” (Sandvoss 2005: 91) that many engaged with, and I know that “life course” fandom (Harrington and Bielby 2010b) was very common as many individuals grew up through the decades with the series (Brooker 2002; Proctor 2013; Geraghty 2014). Undertaking a study in 1981, Miller and Sprich (1981: 203) revealed that they had “talked with some pre-­school children who have never seen Star Wars but who can discuss its plot in detail because their peers spend so much time talking about it among themselves.” In this sense, it became for some individuals as they grew up an “exciting triumvirate of texts that remains a key component of . . . psychology and cultural memory” (Proctor 2013: 200). However, one prospect that may have affected my exposure to the films was that the toys seemed very much gendered, thus aimed at boys rather than girls, and I do wonder about the degree to which this shaped my interest in the films from a young age; they did not appear to be aimed at me—even though, had I watched the films then, I think I would have drawn much inspiration from Princess Leia (on the gendering of merchandise and the reception of Princess Leia, see Jowett’s and Booth’s chapters in this volume, respectively). As Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen (2012: 228) observed in their work on the television series Supernatural (2005–), “A strong sense of internalized shame pervades many segments of fandom, especially for female fans.” Reflecting on my memories as a young girl in the 1980s, it is possible that I saw myself as not fitting into the Star Wars universe—due to the toys’ popularity among and association with boys—and the shame my entry into that universe may have provoked. As Jonathan Gray (2010: 185) argues, “To its fans, Star Wars has not only extended itself but at times resided in toys/paratexts. . . . We as analysts should recognize the role that toys likely played in gendering Star Wars and hence in directing the text’s address to boys in particular.” The notion of gender surrounding the text prevails today: when conducting the research for this chapter I found that the work I cite and draw upon is overwhelmingly authored by male scholars, a prospect that makes me

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concerned about the intricacies and implications of this scarcity of female voices surrounding Star Wars. I also sensed that there was a strong feeling among many viewers and fans that the prequels were not as good and had been somewhat of a disappointment, but that they still had some value. Some even suggested to me that I should not watch the later three films as part of this project and instead focus solely on the original trilogy. These suggestions alone made me wonder what elements of the prequels bothered fans so much. I had no idea as to their content, especially since I’d never watched the TV series Spaced (1999–2001) and was then unaware of the character Jar Jar Binks. Overall, I was very curious as to how my disparate and fragmented bits of knowledge surrounding the films would fuse together upon my first viewings, toward which the next section will turn.

Reflecting on the First Viewings: Connections and Dissonances A question that many people would ask upon learning about this project was: “In what order will you watch them?” This confused me initially, as I had been unaware that the later films took place narratively before the original trilogy. I then discovered I had two options—either the order they were released or narrative chronological order. After some consideration I decided to view the films in order of release date, primarily in an attempt to capture a sense of the experience of viewing audiences as the franchise unfolded throughout the years. I wanted to complete the viewing of the series in time to attend the cinema to see The Force Awakens; I did not want to watch them in a “marathon” setting, as I specifically wanted time to reflect upon and process each one. Instead I chose to watch one film each day across six consecutive days. Watching the first Star Wars film, I had a strong sense of excitement about finally discovering and entering the world that so many found resonant, rich, and lasting. I recognized the music right away, though I had never realized that it originated from Star Wars. I was anticipating the much-­discussed twist, and I was startled when it concluded without this. It was not until watching The Empire Strikes Back that I realized the twist was actually in the second film. Overall, I found the first Star Wars film very enjoyable, though not as strong in terms of its narrative as I had hoped and expected. On the whole, I found the first three films extremely impressive—the characters began to feel like familiar friends and I continued to wonder why this series

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had evaded me for so long—or why I had evaded it. My favorite film from the original three was The Empire Strikes Back, which I found highly amusing and engaging (even more so, I felt, than the first film). Ultimately, it was during viewing this film that the characters began to feel like old friends—a prospect that might have been even more powerful if I had viewed the film at a much younger age. When the twist finally came in this film, surrounding Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker’s father, I was shocked—I knew that “someone was someone’s father,” and in attempting to surmise the intricacies of this, I had assumed that Han Solo would be involved somewhere and that he was the son, or father. However, what surprised me most of all was the revelation that Princess Leia was Luke Skywalker’s twin sister! I had no knowledge at all surrounding this twist. Overall, the age of the films was not an issue. I did expect to bring strong feelings of nostalgia toward the 1980s with me when watching it, which was particularly resonant when watching the second two films of the trilogy and enjoying their use of robots and puppets. The lack of heavy CGI felt much simpler and more effective than some of the films made today, but then again, I do concede that we are in the 2000s and not the 1980s any longer. Brooker (2002: 56) found in his research that The Empire Strikes Back also provoked among his participants a sense of nostalgia “based partly on shared memories of what it meant to be a Star Wars fan in 1980: the first wave of toys compared to more recent models, the limited scope of home computer games, the discussions in the playground where everyone else had seen the film and you only had the figures.” However, even though I experienced some similar longing for the 1980s, these films did not feel dated to me or from another time. Strangely, they felt very “now,” which is perhaps part of Star Wars’s appeal and development as a canonical science fiction text. However, this could also be due to the films being rereleased in 1997 by George Lucas with new CGI and extra scenes. It was only much later, after viewing them, that I was made aware of this. At the time, I was under the impression that the film versions I viewed were the original releases, as I did not know they had been reissued. During my viewings of these three films, I thought a great deal about how many people (and especially those around my age) have watched these many times through the years but how I was viewing these classical texts with somewhat fresh eyes, albeit twenty-­fi rst-­century ones. Watching films from the late 1970s and early ’80s with this kind of retroactive gaze usually carries its own interpretative difficulties and charges of out-­of-­date-­ness. I also wondered what my younger self would have made of these films—I have more knowledge of narrative conventions now, and perhaps the films would have been a revelation to me during the 1980s. I was very interested to view the later-­released trilogy of the series (Episodes

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I–III), to see the narrative surrounding Anakin Skywalker, and to understand the warnings I had experienced from some fans who knew I was about to watch the prequels (these warnings were effectively my only knowledge of them). Hate and dislike is an important element in the study of fandom and viewership, and so I was extremely curious as to what provoked these sentiments, shared by so many within Star Wars fandom (Shefrin 2004)—Jenkins describes the prequels as an “open wound” in the fan community (quoted in Peterman 2012). Regardless of this, I approached these films with an open mind and was willing to enjoy them, especially since I was sure that somewhere, out there, there would be some fans and viewers that may appreciate these films (and I was right—for an outline, see Brooker 2002 and Proctor 2013). However, upon viewing, I understood the prevailing negativity, as all three films stirred a common emotion at my core: disappointment. I found it quite hard to fathom how they were of the same series as the films I had seen before them. It was technically the same world, but they were just different, and I felt lost within it. The world of the later Star Wars films just felt empty and unfamiliar, a prospect which may have been heightened by my viewing of these later films after recently watching the original trilogy for the first time. At times, it felt like an attempt was being made to recapture the sense of Return of the Jedi, especially with the frequent appearances of puppets, but the effort was executed in a completely ineffective manner that seemed at odds with the original trilogy. My reaction here was very much based on tone and feeling. I kept imagining the anticipation of the fans and viewers around the time when the prequels were released and wondering how some of them responded to these texts upon first viewing. I did watch them all, but I found this more of a chore than a pleasure. As Forrest Phillips (2012: 3.2) outlined, some fans made their own edits of The Phantom Menace, which very interestingly resulted in them reediting “a film directed by George Lucas to make it adhere to the style of a film directed by George Lucas.” As I discovered afterwards, the inclusion of the character of Jar Jar Binks also provoked similar negative responses within me as it had in some other fans (Brooker 2001; Hills 2003a; Hunt 2003), and I was completely unaware of this prior to viewing. I found Binks gravely unfunny, annoying, and distracting as a character. Overall, watching these last three films did make me nervous as to how Episode VII would fare, and I feared that it would similarly evoke the empty universe I felt constituted these prequels. I completed my viewings of the films with the specific goal of viewing The Force Awakens “in context” at the cinema in 2016 shortly after its release. My excitement had built during this project, and I saw the film during early January 2016 at a cinema in Cardiff with one of my dearest friends, Ellen Kirkpatrick, who had already viewed the film at the cinema once and expressed great

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excitement at seeing my reactions. I would say that this was the film I most connected with out of the seven Star Wars titles, possibly because I was viewing it in sync with the rest of the Star Wars audience and so felt much more anticipation and excitement. When the film began, it felt like returning home again, back to the Star Wars universe I experienced in the original trilogy—and that I felt had seemed to vanish from the prequels. The new characters of Rey and Finn, I felt, worked so well and added a whole new invigoration to the Star Wars world that had been tarnished for me by the previous films. I really cared about, and felt connected to, both of these characters. Kylo Ren also worked well, I thought, as a new Darth Vader, with his complicated evilness simultaneously frustrating and compelling—a gesture of darkness that interjects further suspense into the film. In terms of the narrative, I had no idea what to expect beforehand as I had purposely and successfully avoided all major spoilers surrounding the film and did not watch the trailer—all I knew in advance was how the two main characters looked. I did have some concerns about Disney’s involvement and what direction this would take the films in, perhaps towards softened or more accessible narrative or characters. However, I knew nothing about what the narrative would involve, whether any established characters would return, or within what time frame it would take place. Thus, the surprise killing of Han Solo near the end really startled me (see Kies in this volume), and I was relieved that I had successfully avoided all spoilers. I felt a particular sense of disappointment since I had only been introduced to this character recently—while others of course were familiar with them since first viewing the early films, I had only become aware of all of these characters within the past week. What struck me the most was how much I felt part of something while watching the film—I could now cheer with the others when “Chewiebacca” came onto the screen (one of my favorite moments of the film), and this of course represents an advantage of viewing something in sync. However, even though I was attending the screening of the latest film having now viewed all the preceding ones, I still continued to feel a sense of shame, propelled by late exposure to these and also my overall lack of knowledge surrounding the wider Star Wars universe. Although I was technically now up to date with the films, there remained huge gaps in my knowledge due to only engaging with the texts in a single week—some of the more minor characters’ names I could not recall, and some elements of the prequels I would merge into one, unable to remember distinctly what occurred in each specific film. Sitting there in my cinema seat, I reflected on the four-­decade span of films that I had engaged with across the week. The Force Awakens felt like it put things back on track, and it compelled me after the franchise lost me slightly with the

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prequels. Although as a woman I had really not felt excluded from the world within the actual films (as I outlined above, such exclusion was more a result of the male dominance of the toys and merchandising as well as, later, of academic scholarship on the topic), the strong female lead in Rey really offered powerful new possibilities for the series, and as the credits closed I felt proud to finally call myself a Star Wars fan. Overall, my exposure to the Star Wars film series evoked much pleasure. Ultimately, I really enjoyed some of them, and I was genuinely excited to see The Force Awakens in the cinema. Thinking critically over my experience, however, I noticed that even after watching them and no longer having to consider myself a Star Wars nonviewer, I still felt some separation due to having watched them out of sync with the generation I belong to. I had caught up, in theory, but I could always be a bit behind everyone else, and I did not feel like an authentic viewer. There was still some difference left there. Perhaps this was due to my tendency to equate knowledge surrounding a text with authenticity, possibly as a result of being a fan studies scholar and also a fan of other texts. In this sense, I will argue that—with key canonical cultural texts—even if they are viewed eventually, there may still be a sense of separation and a residue of shame held within the individual. For example, throughout my experiences of viewing the films, I kept imagining Star Wars fans and audiences, but it was difficult to feel myself placed and belonging among them, since I was experiencing everything out of sync and out of context. Ultimately, my viewing of the series—although greatly pleasurable and opening up a universe to me that I will definitely continue to follow and to consider myself a fan of—could not completely eradicate my sense of cultural shame and displacement. However, reflecting on this project in the year since it took place, despite these feelings of separation I have felt my fandom growing, and for Christmas 2016 I received some wonderful Star Wars gifts that made me feel very happy. My “Chewiebacca” pencil case and LEGO keyring are at my side on a daily basis. Generally, when I see Star Wars characters or merchandise now, it makes me feel something wonderful. Perhaps, in this sense, how I self-­define as a fan and the pleasure it brings me will eventually become more important and gradually erode the shame that I felt.

Conclusion This chapter has given an autoethnographic insight into the processes that can occur surrounding exposure to a canonical, “generational object” (Bollas 1992) that was previously abstained from. I have shown how what I term out-­of-­sync

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canonical viewing can result in a viewer experiencing elements of shame and difference that may on one hand be alluring but on the other difficult to diffuse. Ultimately, I define myself now as a Star Wars fan, but I still feel a sense of difference and residual shame. I did enjoy the films immensely and am excited to watch all of the forthcoming Disney productions, but the prospect of playing catch-­up has erected barriers surrounding the level to which I can define myself authentically as a fan, and I still feel separated from others who experienced the series across a longer time span. This study then has raised some implications surrounding cultural shame and the textual abstinence from canonical or generational objects. It demonstrates that some out-­of-­sync viewings can be complicated, not simply leading to viewers achieving feelings of belonging but instead fostering more fractured engagement with the texts, the wider viewership, and fan culture. Refusal to engage with key texts that have become imbued with generational and canonical status can also be revealing—just as examining why individuals become and maintain their fandom is a rich object of study, exploring why others do not become fans or viewers of these texts can also tell us much about belonging and personal identity. It also demonstrates that texts need to be enduring ones that retain their resonance both with the initial generation of viewers and the ones that follow for them to be worthy and capable of conjuring up powerful feelings of shame and difference for some nonviewers. In addition, we may be likely to see similar patterns of rejection of and abstinence from key popular texts in the future, especially with regard to changing notions of the popular. Although in the 1970s audiences were less fragmented than today and generational texts were perhaps more achievable, the growth of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are fostering compelling new notions of value and “must-­see TV”—as with Stranger Things (2016–), to give a recent example—which may provoke similar sentiments or abstinence from some viewers. Although this may not have the same impact as it would if this behavior were directed to such key, earlier generational texts as Star Wars, audiences may similarly position themselves in multiple ways towards these newer texts—either adopting the consensus view regarding such modern must-­see TV phenomena or taking an oppositional stance and rejecting them on the basis of hype and conformity. Future research could thus speak to more nonviewers of key generational texts in order to understand how they articulate their own abstinence from engagement. Just as popular texts should be studied in order to examine what they tell us about a society and the individuals within it, such silences and such abstinence from key texts can also be powerful and revealing and thus demand more attention in research.

20 Mark J. P. Wolf

Beyond Vader The Franchise Reawakens

I

n October of 2012, George Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to The Walt Disney Company, an indication that he wanted the franchise to continue even if he would no longer be the one to continue it. This chapter examines the first four post-­Lucas Star Wars feature films—namely, The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)—from a world-­building perspective, particularly looking at the direction the franchise and world are taking as they move beyond Darth Vader, the central character in the first six episodes overseen by Lucas. In the original Star Wars (1977), Luke Skywalker was the main character, though the film’s mysterious villain, Darth Vader, quickly became a fan favorite. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) gave us more Vader, and the “Imperial March Theme” as well, and ended with him showing a softer, more personal side of himself as he reveals himself to be Luke’s father and offers to rule the galaxy with him “as father and son.” And by the end of Return of the Jedi (1983), Vader redeems himself, and his death becomes a tragic event. Looking at the original trilogy as one, we can see Luke gradually being ever more upstaged by Vader, until at the end, Vader’s character arc is more extreme and dramatic than Luke’s. The prequel trilogy fills us in on the rest of Vader’s life—his childhood, coming of age, and turn to the dark side—so that anyone who now watches all six films in numerical order cannot help but see Vader (Anakin Skywalker) as the protagonist of the entire six-­fi lm story—and he is, in many ways, the raison d’être of the entire world of the Star Wars galaxy. Thus, the appearance of a seventh film naturally made one ask: With Vader gone (and without plans for a flashback trilogy), how will the series continue? George Lucas, though he had earlier considered doing nine films—or twelve, depending upon which version of history Lucas is evoking (see editors’

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introduction)—decided that he would only make six films, since another trilogy would mean another ten years of his life. But there is also the fact that Vader was at the heart of the series, and a third trilogy would be without him. Lucas still served (initially, at least) as a creative consultant for the seventh film, but mainly consulting on universe “dos and don’ts”; and although he sold Disney what Disney CFO Jay Rusolu called “a pretty extensive and detailed treatment for what would be the next three movies” (Jagernauth 2015), these ideas were later discarded and not used. According to an article on Slash Film, George Lucas was quietly developing Star Wars VII when he decided to sell Lucasfilm to Disney. He passed along his outlines and work on the movies, which screenwriter Michael Arndt began adapting. J. J. Abrams came on board as director, but he and the writer didn’t see eye-­to-­eye. Arndt left the project, Abrams took over writing duties with Lawrence Kasdan, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens went into production. The rumored disagreement between Arndt and Abrams was over Lucas’s vision. Apparently, Lucas and Arndt wanted Episode VII to focus more on the younger characters, while Abrams wanted the younger generation to be secondary to the old guard like Luke, Han and Leia. We still don’t know precisely how that balance worked out. In a new interview, Lucas himself admitted Disney abandoned his Star Wars VII ideas, adding fuel to this fire. (Lussier 2015) While Lucas seemed to be confident in focusing on new characters, it seems the franchise’s new owners wanted, understandably, to make use of the existing characters and tie Episode VII to the first six episodes as much as possible, providing a strong sense of continuity. Discussing his outlines for Episodes VII through IX during an interview, Lucas stated: “The ones that I sold to Disney, and everything, they came up to the decision that they didn’t really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it’s not the ones that I originally wrote” (Romano 2015). For Lucas to say that they “made up their own” makes it sound as though he considers the new movies to be no more than fan fiction (and thus, to him, noncanonical). But Lucas sold the franchise, along with the authority to declare what is canonical, to Disney—though he naturally expected them to honor his ideas and not replace them with new ones. In any event, the Disney Star Wars films are apparently not the ones Lucas would have made. To clear the way for the new episodes, the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (the “EU,” which surrounded Lucas’s six films and extended from them, growing in size from 1978 to 2012) was dumped and declared noncanonical, opening up more possibilities while no doubt alienating a number of fans (see Kent in this volume); although even hardcore Star Wars fans would probably acknowledge

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that the Holiday Special of 1978 and the early comic books with Jaxxon, the giant green rabbit Jedi, should not be given the same level of canonicity as the first six films (see Hills in this volume). Of course, Lucas never considered the EU to have the same level of canonicity as his six films. And Lucas himself even changed his films when the digitally enhanced rereleases of Episodes IV through VI appeared in 1996, and he continued making small changes in them right up to the release of the Blu-­ray version of the films in 2011. This demonstrates that there is a continuous spectrum of possible changes between small retcons (retroactive continuities, which change already established facts) and complete reboots: as little or as much of a franchise can be redone as its owner may desire. With different writers and directors for the sequel trilogy, along with anthology films like Rogue One and Solo appearing outside of the sequence, one may wonder if the continuation of Star Wars will become like the surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” game; or perhaps, due to overly conservative studio executives who, in the bid to balance novelty and familiarity, tend to lean toward familiarity as a way of erring on the side of caution (though they are still erring), we will merely see a “more of the same” mentality applied to the franchise. The Force Awakens gives us some indication of this direction. Consider the following storyline: vital information needed by an oppressed group is hidden in a droid, just before the oppressors’ army arrives, who are looking for it. A battle ensues, but the droid escapes into the desert. There, a marginal, unimportant desert native finds the droid, and ends up becoming pursued as well. At last, with help, the desert native is able to escape the oppressors and leave the desert planet in the Millennium Falcon. Of course, the story’s main female character is captured by the oppressors and interrogated by the main villain, a masked, dark-­suited figure with a low voice who occasionally reports in to his deformed, pale-­headed master who is seen as a giant holographic projection. Despite the villain’s attempts, she resists giving up the information requested, but will need rescuing from the oppressor’s gigantic, sphere-­shaped superstructure, which is able to destroy whole planets with a shot. Soon a rescue party, which includes Han Solo and Chewbacca, secretly enters the superstructure and finds the captured female, who is a pretty good fighter herself. After she is found, they all have to fight their way back out of the superstructure, and on the way out, the main character (the desert native who was given a lightsaber and is learning to use the Force) watches as the old mentor figure who talked about the Force earlier is killed by the masked villain, who, it turns out, knows the old mentor from a previous relationship that has gone sour. The rest of the rescue party is horrified by the mentor’s death but manages to escape in time. In the end, the evil superstructure is destroyed, just before it is about to fire its death

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ray. With no one to return to on the desert planet, the former desert native then goes off to seek a reclusive Jedi Master for training (presumably already using the Force to find him, since there’s nothing to go by for the search except for the name of a planet). While the aforementioned storyline could be seen as a summary of The Force Awakens, it could just as easily be used as a summary of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (although Luke doesn’t go to seek Yoda on Dagobah until the next film), showing just how derivative The Force Awakens is of Lucas’s original film (pace Gray in this volume). Moreover, part of Episode VII’s story could also be compared to the ending of The Empire Strikes Back: a father and son (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker/Han Solo and Kylo Ren) meet on a metal walkway suspended high above a chasm (in Cloud City/Starkiller Base); the father reasons with the son and urges him to change sides and come join him, but the son refuses. The meeting goes badly, with the good character (Luke/Han) getting a lightsaber injury and falling into the chasm. Of course, the original trilogy was also highly derivative, taking a number of story points from The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which was released as a trilogy of three books. The first part of each trilogy finds an orphaned main character (Frodo/Luke) forced out of his rural home when henchmen (Black Riders/Stormtroopers) sent by the main villain, who is a Dark Lord (Sauron/ Darth Vader), come looking for something he has (the Ring/the Death Star plans) that could potentially be used to destroy the Dark Lord’s plan, though it would require actually going to the Dark Lord’s superstructure (Mount Doom/ the Death Star) and throwing something into it (the Ring into the Cracks of Doom/the shots fired into the exhaust port). With three companions, the protagonist (Frodo/Luke) leaves home and travels to a tavern (the Prancing Pony in Bree/the Mos Eisley Cantina) where he and his friends enlist the help of a scruffy-­looking man (Strider/Han Solo) who is good with weapons and agrees to travel with them. Toward the end of the trilogy’s opening installment, they wander around deep inside a dangerous superstructure (Moria/the Death Star), where they end up fleeing the Dark Lord’s evil minions (Orcs/Stormtroopers), almost getting caught until the old, sage-­like member of their group (Gandalf/ Ben Kenobi), known for his magical powers, sacrifices himself so that the rest of them can escape (though he will return later in resurrected form in the second and third parts of the trilogy). In each trilogy’s second part, the evil enemy makes some advances and wins a major battle, and by the end of the second part has captured one of the good characters (Frodo/Han). The final part of the trilogy, thematically centered on a “return” (of the King/of the Jedi), includes the rescue of the good character who had been captured at the end of the second

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part, and the third part ends with three key characters, one evil (Gollum/the Emperor), one good (Sam/Luke), and one who totters on the brink between good and evil (Frodo/Darth Vader), in a final battle in the heart of the evil faction’s superstructure (Mount Doom/the second Death Star), with the character torn between good and evil even losing a body part (a finger/a hand) during the fight. Although the good character (Sam/Luke) fails to stop the evil one and becomes somewhat helpless, the evil one—a very old, small, wizened character who is more powerful than he looks (Gollum/the Emperor)—ends up dying after falling into an abyss, while the character on the brink between good and evil finally decides on the side of good, though he will never fully recover from his wounds. Although Episode VII was not a reboot of Star Wars in the way that director Abrams rebooted Star Trek, it was close enough to Episode IV that one can almost imagine what such a reboot would have been like. But The Force Awakens was not supposed to be a reboot; it was “Episode VII,” implying a continuation of an ongoing series; a new, numbered, canonical addition to the franchise, extending it forward into a new time period, part of the backbone of the franchise. This is unlike the films Rogue One or Solo, or other side stories like the The Clone Wars (2008–2014) or Star Wars: Rebels (2014–2018) animated TV series, which take place alongside or in between the numbered Star Wars episodes. Thus, The Force Awakens steered the franchise, determining the future ground into which the franchise would move. As the first real move into post-­Lucas and post-­Vader territory, The Force Awakens was a glimpse into the franchise’s future (and future health) as well. It is not surprising, then, that it was such a tentative one, afraid of giving us anything radically new in the Star Wars galaxy. At first, one gets the feeling that, despite all the efforts of the original heroes, not too much has really changed since the days of the original film trilogy. After all, the conflict between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance is now carried on by the First Order and the Resistance; the Emperor has been replaced by Supreme Leader Snoke; Kylo Ren is the new Darth Vader; the Starkiller Base is the new Death Star; Stormtroopers still go around killing and setting fires to settlements; Luke has become as reclusive as Yoda was; and so on. Not much has really improved for anyone, either on the side of good or on the side of evil. The only evidence that thirty years or so have passed since the end of Return of the Jedi is that Han, Leia, and Luke have all aged, and C-­3PO now has a red arm. At least the film ends with something unexpected, when Han Solo is killed; but we could still see Han in future flashbacks and, of course, in Solo. The fact that the storyline of The Force Awakens is so derivative might have been easier to overlook if the film had offered us a good dose of new

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world-­building, but even this was a little disappointing. True, there were six new planets—Jakku, D’Qar, Takodana, Hosnian Prime, the unnamed planet of the Starkiller base, and Ahch-­to, where Luke is found at the end of the film— but there’s nothing particularly unique about them. Hosnian Prime, the city-­ planet that is the Republic’s new capital (following Coruscant), is destroyed by the Starkiller base after only a few shots set on the planet itself, giving us only the briefest glimpse of the place. Starkiller Base itself, as a planet, is shown to be mostly ice and snow-­laden forests (apart from the superweapon it contains). D’Qar, the location of Commander Leia Organa’s base, is made up of forests and bodies of water, and a roughly similar description could be applied to Takodana, the location of Maz Kanata’s castle-­like cantina, or Ahch-­to, where Luke is found. None of these planets look much different from typical Earthly settings. And Jakku is all desert sands, even more so than Tatooine—at least the latter had some greenery appearing in long shots and shots of the canyons, making the planet a more feasible location for sustaining life. So not much new, planetarily speaking. Compare this with the last Star Wars film to appear before Episode VII, which was Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005): besides scenes set on Tatooine, Coruscant, and Naboo, planets that were seen before in earlier episodes, there are also scenes set on Utapau, Kashyyyk, Felucia, Mygeeto, Saleucami, Cato Neimoidia, Mustafar, Polis Massa, and Alderaan. While most of these are only given a few shots each, the amount of detail present in those shots still gives us a richly detailed and suggestive glimpse of exotic worlds unlike others in the galaxy we have seen so far. Freeze-­frames from the films and ancillary materials also reveal the level of detail that was put into these new planets. There is some world-­building in The Force Awakens on a smaller scale in the form of new vehicles and character designs. The rolling droid BB-­8 is perhaps the most notable new design in the film; but as a character BB-­8 is developed less than R2-­D2 was in the opening scenes of A New Hope, which gave R2-­D2 a definite attitude and personality. Most of the new character races and designs can be seen in Maz Kanata’s cantina, just as the Mos Eisley cantina suddenly broadened the world well beyond Tatooine with momentary glimpses of many different races of beings. A few new vehicles appear here and there in The Force Awakens, but nothing particularly notable or unique: the First Order’s spaceships look like variations on the Empire’s ships, while others, like Rey’s desert speeder, fail to introduce many new features or concepts. Whereas Lucas was not afraid to world-­build well beyond the needs of the story, for the sake of the experience of the world itself (as one can see, for example, in the detail of the worlds glimpsed in Revenge of the Sith), Abrams seemed to be less concerned with new world experiences, relying more on variations of known details to create speculation

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as to what happened during the thirty or so years between episodes: for example, the rectangular sensor array added to the hull of the Millennium Falcon or C-­3PO’s red arm. While very little that is new is offered with regard to the planets and technologies, at the same time we also do not revisit very much from the six previous episodes. We do not return to any of their planets; only the crashed Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon are places we’ve seen before. Curiously, then, there is not much old and likewise a limited amount that is really new: just new things that are similar to, or merely variations of, older ones, referencing them without taking us back to them to see how they have changed over time. So as regards narrative and world-­building, The Force Awakens is in some ways both too cautious and too constrained, trying as much as possible to extend the central conflict of the past episodes, leaving us with the Empire’s legacy, a lingering shadow that still needs to be swept away before the infestation reoccurs; at times it feels like only a collection of remaining loose ends to tie up, rather than a bold move into new storylines. Part of the reason for this may be the lack of a single controlling creative force behind The Force Awakens—or indeed the Star Wars films under Disney as a whole. Whereas Lucas had been the writer, director, idea man, and ultimate voice and decision-­maker shaping and approving (and rejecting) the work of others and giving the Star Wars films a consistent form and feel, the franchise is now owned by a company rather than an individual. The authority, therefore, as to what appears next and what becomes canon is divided among writers, directors, producers, and studio executives, all of whom have now been tasked with extending something which is another man’s work. That their first collective step in taking the franchise into the post-­Vader, post-­Lucas era should be a very cautious one, then, is be no surprise. As I have described in detail elsewhere (Wolf 2012; Wolf forthcoming), long-­ running world-­based franchises, as they continue to grow, must eventually move away from the original characters and situations that established them and brought them their initial success. While some character-­based franchises keep rebooting (like Batman) or are unconcerned with consistency (like The Simpsons), most world-­based franchises are dependent on the uniqueness of their worlds—with all the details, designs, and concepts they contain—and are therefore much more difficult to reboot than character-­based franchises. As franchises grow, they tend to extend their original characters and storylines temporally in both directions, moving them forward in time with sequels, or backward in time with backstory, origin stories, and prequels. Spatially, new parts of the world tend to be revealed in subsequent works, and even old familiar places will usually change over time as well, developing a sense of history as

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changes accrue. “Midquels,” which fill in gaps between or within previous works (as do The Clone Wars, Rogue One, and Solo) can allow an audience to return to the time and place of the original or earliest works, but such positioning of a work usually limits what can be done with it. The more they reference other works, the more constrained they will be by those works, and the audience will already know most of the events surrounding the story and their outcomes. The numbering of episodes thus also limits the direction of storytelling to that of a movement into the future; apart from a few flashbacks, numbered episodes generally have to continue to advance the storylines and world into the future.1 So move into the future they must . . . .

Letting the Past Die? Leaving Vader and Friends Behind The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi . . . let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be. —Kylo Ren to Rey, in Episode VIII

So the move away from the initial material that made the Star Wars galaxy popular in the first place is inevitable. In the epigraph above, Kylo Ren almost sounds like he is talking to fans about the franchise. The Last Jedi, with the death of Luke and most likely the last appearance of Leia (although more recent reports maintain that she will feature in Episode IX in material shot for The Last Jedi), certainly continues this movement from old to new (although Luke could still reappear as a Force ghost as long as Mark Hamill is still alive—just as Yoda continues to appear—and both could continue to help Rey as she rebuilds the Jedi). The rebuilding of the Jedi Order seems a storyline worth pursuing (especially to keep lightsabers on-­screen), and the actors playing Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren, and the others are young enough to carry forward the franchise for many more episodes (if audiences like them enough). But to remain interesting, the storylines and world will have to keep from being too derivative of past episodes (certainly The Last Jedi has numerous parallels with Return of the Jedi), while still retaining the Star Wars spirit and feel and extending the Star Wars galaxy in ways that will keep it fresh. New planets and civilizations must contain enough invention to avoid looking too much like Earthly locations, and there must be enough integrated detail to suggest how these worlds operate, giving them enough plausibility for fans to be able to speculate about them (a very important part of keeping a franchise alive). The experience of something new and different is found in all six of Lucas’s films and is one of the features that sets Star Wars apart from other

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science fiction franchises, which tend to focus around the same groups of peoples or races. The fact that Jedi (and Sith) can come from any race makes them useful formal devices for the central organization and focus of the franchise, one that already includes a good-­versus-­evil conflict within it (as well as lightsabers, one of the franchise’s best inventions). On the other hand, bringing back the Sith could also contradict the prophecy that Anakin will “bring balance to the Force” (which, incidentally, is a strange thing to begin with, anyway—why would a balance between good and evil be better than a victory for good?). At any rate, there is no reason why the Jedi could not have a new enemy if the franchise is done with the Sith; at the same time, it seems that there must be an enemy, and some kind of ongoing war as well, since wars are an essential part of Star Wars (to the point of making up half of its name). Thus, it seems as if the future success of the Star Wars franchise, post-­Lucas and post-­Vader, will depend on the degree to which the franchise can remain true to its core essentials: some war in space (and elsewhere); the experience of an exotic yet now-­familiar lived-­in world, which audiences want to keep returning to and which has its own well-­established set of accepted technologies and ideas; stories that place emotion before technological explanation, making Star Wars a “space opera” with all the adventure and melodrama that implies (which is also why John Williams’s score has been so important to the franchise); and the visual design and attention to detail (and amount of detail) that makes the films as watchable (and rewatchable) as they are (this must also be done at a rather high level, if it is to match the level of detail in the first six episodes). Lawrence Kasdan, a writer on Episodes V, VI, VII, VIII, and Solo, has even called the films “goofy,” in a good way: “A New Hope is brilliant in every way. You’re always in awe of how economical it is, how tightly wound it is. There’s not a wasted shot. The movie just moves so fast and is so funny—and goofy. Whenever there’s a moment that can be just pure fun because George felt like it, it’s in there. And that’s what I hope The Force Awakens has” (quoted in Rottenberg 2015). With the wait between episode films decreased to two years instead of three (Episode VII came out in 2015, Episode VIII came out in December 2017, and Episode IX is due in 2019), with other Star Wars anthology films appearing in between (Rogue One and Solo), there’s much less time for hype to build up, and with a new film out every year, there is even a chance that audiences may become, if not tired of the films, a bit jaded with them (or at least with the kind of relentless merchandising that preceded and surrounded The Force Awakens). This could also have the effect of putting less pressure on any particular film: if audiences or critics don’t like one film, the next one is only a year away. So now that The Force Awakens has reawakened the Star Wars franchise and

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The Last Jedi has passed the torch to a new generation, the move into the post-­ Vader era will refine the essence of what makes Star Wars what it is—and without Vader it will become even more dependent on its world than it was before. Sure, Rogue One and Solo filled in some of the gaps, providing familiar material reframed in a new light, but such gap-­fi lling cannot continue indefinitely if the franchise is to remain interesting. The world must evolve; too little invention, and Star Wars will become just one of many science fiction franchises. New material will not only have to balance novelty and familiarity, but will also need to fit in as a logical extension of all past episodes and films (and whatever other media have canonical works set in them). Eventually the lingering shadow of the Empire will have to give way to new villains, and there will need to be new approaches to the wars promised in the franchise name. The box office success of the four post-­Lucas films demonstrates that the franchise is not only still viable but healthy, and it should have a good chance of revitalizing itself without Vader and Lucas. It also may well begin to morph into something else than what we were used to seeing in Episodes I through VI, but this is probably inevitable. The real question is how those early episodes will be reframed as pieces of a much larger puzzle and what the feel and identity of that much larger puzzle will be. So perhaps The Force Awakens is only a transitional piece in a much larger narrative structure, with The Last Jedi tying up remaining loose ends and resetting the stage for the younger generation of actors and characters—or at least a bridge to a new conception of the Star Wars universe. Either way, we may become more aware of its existence as a franchise since the motivation behind the first six episodes—the story of  Darth Vader—is now gone. If the franchise does not come up with a new long-­term narrative goal, its continuation may appear to be for merely commercial reasons, and if so, its popularity will likely wane. Its popularity is still high enough so that even a few failed attempts to find a new direction will be tolerated, but fortunately the world is varied and detailed enough to suggest many new courses of action and conflict. And there’s always the possibility of something entirely new appearing as well. Perhaps the next main dramatic conflict will come in the form of a new enemy arriving from distant reaches of the galaxy, or even another galaxy: in the Expanded Universe, further conflicts were developed with the Yuuzhan Vong, who originated in another galaxy where they had killed off all the other sentient races and then came and invaded the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, starting the next major war. The current problems of errant Jedi like Kylo Ren and the First Order may work for a while as a transitional device until a new enemy is established, but these seem like the leftovers of the Empire, next to which they

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pale in comparison (just as Kylo Ren fears, and rightfully so, that he will not measure up to Darth Vader). Finally, we should not assume that the franchise is entirely done with Darth Vader. He has appeared in the television series Star Wars Rebels, he has already had two well-­placed and interesting cameo appearances in Rogue One, and further films set during or between Episode III and Episode VI could feature him as well (at least while James Earl Jones is still around to voice him). But apart from cameos, any future roles for him are somewhat limited—enough of  his story has been told that any new writings would be fairly constrained by existing canonical material. And his life isn’t that long, either. According to the official canon, Anakin becomes Darth Vader thirteen years after Episode I takes place and dies thirty-­six years later, meaning that he is actually Darth Vader for only twenty-­ three years (and thus only forty-­seven when he dies, if he was nine in Episode I). Apart from the films, some of this time is already covered in the ongoing series of canonical comic books entitled Star Wars: Darth Vader (2015–2017). But the major parts of his story have already been told, and at this point, anything more might serve only to diminish his stature. Really, the droids R2-­D2 and C-­3PO are the only characters who have unlimited potential to appear in film after film (so long as Anthony Daniels is around to voice C-­3PO). Solo demonstrated the move away from Vader, as it was the first Star Wars feature film to have no mention of him at all, even though it takes place between Episode III and Episode IV and could easily have referenced him. It was also the first Star Wars theatrical feature film not to feature any Jedi or even any lightsabers (unless you want to include the holographic projection of the one Maul is holding at the end). So Solo, despite containing many links to the other films, with world-­building that fleshes out details only mentioned in previous films (like the Kessel Run), does move away from Vader and the Jedi-­Sith conflicts to some extent. Whatever direction the franchise takes, it still has enough popularity to give it time to find its way, despite the box office results of Solo (see next chapter), but those in charge of it must recognize the need for new world-­building and an expansion of the world and story that will make Episodes I through VI fit into a new larger structure, just as the prequels recontextualized the original trilogy by shifting the emphasis from Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader. Certainly, Rogue One and Solo, both of which feature more world-­building in their first twenty minutes than Episode VII had altogether, showed how gaps in the existing storylines could be filled in while still delivering new and interesting material. Other such paraquels, with action running parallel to the main storyline of the Skywalker family, could themselves begin new and continuing storylines parallel

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to those of the numbered episodes, or could act as further backstory like Solo does. We could still have plenty of tales set during the reign of the Empire, while the numbered episodes take us further into the future of the franchise’s world. If Disney applies the same long-­term planning to Star Wars that they applied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, perhaps they will find success. At the same time, though, Disney has typically been involved mainly in character-­based franchises—like Marvel Comics, The Muppets, or Disney’s own cast of animated characters—as opposed to world-­based franchises; the world of Tron is one of the few such properties Disney owns, and they dropped the ball somewhat with Tron: Legacy (2010). So there’s always the risk that Star Wars will evolve into more of a character-­based franchise, with its world becoming less important and less exotic and invented (one could argue that The Force Awakens represents a step in this direction). It is still too soon to tell what final fate awaits the franchise, and of course, this will also depend on which writers and directors are hired and how much freedom they are given by the studio. Star Wars could simply end up as just another science fiction franchise, one among many, no longer standing out as it once did. Whatever the case, Episodes I through VI will always stand as a complete unit and work of art unto itself, representing “the Lucas Era” and the First Age of a detailed and influential imaginary world that will stand the test of time, regardless of where the rest of the franchise ends up in the future.

21 William Proctor

A New Hate? The War for Disney’s Star Wars It is a battle that has been raging for more than four decades. No, not Team Luke vs Team Vader but the ongoing war for the soul of Star Wars.—Ben Child (2017), The Guardian Boycotting Star Wars is like boycotting the sun. It will do nothing. The sun will keep on shining. Its heat will remain radiant and globally present. It will remain at the center of this space and we will continue to orbit it in an elliptical manner. Your efforts will have no meaningful result except to reveal yourself as a cruddy dingleberry dangling from fandom’s ass-­hairs. —Chuck Wendig (2015) The internet is . . . the largest experiment in anarchy that we’ve ever had.—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google (quoted in J. Taylor 2010: 4)

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ince the theatrical release of The Force Awakens in December 2015, Disney has continued to expand and extend the Star Wars imaginary world across various media platforms, sparking a frenetic groundswell of franchise activity that has since been criticized in entertainment journalism for “oversaturating” the cinema market (Cotter 2018; Rubin 2018; Sims 2018). By the time the final episode of the Skywalker saga is released in December 2019, Disney will have produced five new live-­action Star Wars films in four years, with perhaps a sixth to follow hot on their heels in 2020 should Rian Johnson’s trilogy continue as planned (Bui 2018). With another trilogy announced, spearheaded by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B Weiss, as well as the return of the canceled animated show The Clone Wars, the anime-­styled

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Star Wars Resistance series, and Jon Favreau’s live-­action television series, there certainly seems to be an unusual amount of Star Wars media planned for the immediate future, at least compared to the history of the franchise under George Lucas’s reign. Taking into account the fact that Lucas produced six films across almost three decades, albeit with a sixteen-­year interregnum period between the original and prequel trilogies, it has since become a matter of debate whether or not Disney’s annual release strategy has—in cinematic terms—backfired. Since the enormously divisive The Last Jedi hit theaters in December 2017 and the disappointing box office performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in May 2018, entertainment critics have been hard at work hypothesizing whether the cultural and economic health of the brand is lately undermined by so-­called “franchise fatigue,” or “toxic” fan boycotts. Since at least the debut of The Force Awakens teaser trailer in December 2014, a substantial amount of entertainment journalism and fan blogs has focused on what has been viewed as a salient proliferation of “toxicity” within Star Wars fandom, a criticism that more often than not has overamplified and exaggerated the quantity of racist and misogynist rhetoric by excluding other voices that have been pushing back vigorously against a (very loud) vocal minority taking place across various online territories (which is in no way an attempt to claim that they do not exist). In this final chapter of Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception, I want to address the way in which the franchise has become ensnared in the “new culture wars,” considering the way in which a certain “regime of truth” has been constructed in entertainment press discourse. As Michel Foucault (1980: 131) explains: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

The Flame Wars Saga It is hardly surprising that Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm would spark new infarctions, rifts, and quarrels over the Star Wars franchise as “a ‘transitional object,’ with a new phase or new hope being offered to audiences, [which] then

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seems to very much become a moment of heightened fan feeling, and anxiety” (Hills quoted in Proctor 2013: 206). The major difference between past and present, however, would be provided by the inception and impact of domesticated internet technologies, especially the more recent emergence of social media platforms and portals that afford media audiences the means with which to participate in cultural dialogue in more significant ways than ever before in human history. The internet and the participatory affordances of Web 2.0 would inaugurate radical shifts in contemporary communication in all sorts of ways, including the way in which fan “communities” migrated from marginal ghettos and into mainstream awareness and heightened visibility. This so-­called “mainstreaming” of fan cultures has also served to demonstrate quite convincingly that the idea of fan community or culture as a homogeneous, singular, and coherent body is less fitting than an understanding of fandom as “a network of networks, or a loose affiliation of sub-­subcultures, all specializing in different modes of fan activity” (Hills 2017: 860). In this light, the projection of Star Wars fandom (or any fandom, for that matter) as a coherent community can no longer withstand scrutiny—if perhaps it ever could, considering what almost three decades of fan studies has revealed—despite its commonality across fan studies. As the war for Star Wars moved into cyberspace and onto forums and message boards two decades ago, the notion of community was radically punctured as fans reacted to Lucas’s first Star Wars film in eighteen years, The Phantom Menace. As discussed in this volume’s introduction, Will Brooker captured a snapshot of fan debate and discord during this period by showing the way in which hostility and aggression between first generation Star Wars fans and younger fans of The Phantom Menace became heated. Thus, “to talk of the fan reaction or the fan viewpoint is to impose an imagined consensus on a community that thrives on debate” (Brooker 2002: 113). Although Brooker’s use of the term “community” here, and in the title of the monograph from which this comes, is surely problematic given the lack of consensus he describes, it is assuredly early evidence of spirited and often heated fannish quarrels occurring in online quarters. However, this is not an intrinsic symptom of fandom per se. “Flame wars,” that is, “vitriolic online exchanges,” have been a characteristic of cyberculture since the internet’s earliest days, as was examined by authors in Mark Dery’s (1994: 1) edited collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture twenty-­five years ago. This does not necessarily mean that impassioned fans enact toxic behaviors, however: “As an innate part of fan experiences, ‘thriving on debate’ is not necessarily a signifier of toxicity . . . unless it falls into the realm of bullying, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, or other types of ad hominem attacks,”

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such as rape or death threats (Proctor and Kies 2018: 137). For instance, African American actor Ahmed Best has recently opened up about the fan reaction to his role as the CG character Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace, stating that the fan backlash was so fierce that he considered taking his own life (Raftery 2017). Fans complained in droves and even started a website, Jar Jar Must Die; as reported by Eric Harris (1999) of the Los Angeles Times, an internet discussion group on deja.com included 13,000 commenters angrily railing against the character. Moreover, entertainment critics added to the storm by accusing Lucas— and by extension, Best—of racial stereotyping, with the Wall Street Journal describing the digital character as “a Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen” (Harris 1999). At the time, Best claimed that he didn’t “pay attention to that stuff” and recognized its “stupidity” (S. Smith 1999), but it has since become clear that the backlash affected his psychological wellbeing more seriously: “I think the people who are saying those things are very much in touch with the racism inside themselves. They sense African-­A merican descent, and all they can think of is Stepin Fetchit. They can’t compare it to Jerry Lewis or Buster Keaton or even Jackie Chan” (S. Smith 1999). What is noteworthy here is that the majority of fans were calling out The Phantom Menace for its perceived racism, for stereotyping and “othering” ethnic minorities, examples of which also included the Neimoidian race caricaturizing Asian people or the money-­grubbing Toydarian, Watto, portrayed as an offensive Jewish stereotype (Brooker 2001). Sending death threats tagged with antiracist sentiment to Best means that toxicity does not always come from reactionary quarters but potentially from more politically progressive avenues, complicating the notion that toxic fan practices are invariably right-­w ing in nature. That said, Best says that he “was shocked with the racial implications, but always knew they had little to no merit” (Raftery 2017). From this perspective, whether Binks is racist or not becomes a matter of debate and interpretation, indicating that the war for Star Wars shouldn’t be oversimplified by a neat semiotic split into binary camps of good versus evil. I now want to move on to the way in which Star Wars under Disney’s aegis has been paralleled by the emergence of the so-­called “alt-­right,” a period that is being described in discourse as “the new culture wars” and a battleground where popular culture has become a site of ideological conflict and negotiation.

Gamergate, the New Culture Wars, and the Alt-­R ight Although often criticized for romanticizing the power of fan audiences, Henry Jenkins has on numerous occasions attempted to clarify his argument. In his

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afterword for the 2008 paperback edition of the seminal Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasized that: Those of us who care about the future of participatory culture as a mechanism for promoting diversity and enabling democracy do the world no favor if we ignore the ways that our current culture falls short of these goals. Too often, there is a tendency to read all grassroots media as somehow “resistant” to dominant institutions rather than acknowledging that citizens sometimes deploy bottom-­up means to keep others down. Too often, we have fallen into the trap of seeing democracy as an “inevitable” outcome of technology change rather than as something which we need to fight to achieve with every tool at our disposal. Too often, we have sought to deflect criticisms of grassroots culture rather than trying to identify and resolve conflicts and contradictions which might prevent it from achieving its full potential. Too often, we have celebrated those alternative voices which are being brought into the marketplace of ideas without considering which voices remain trapped outside. (Jenkins 2008a: 293–94) Likewise, in “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture,’ ” Jenkins (2014: 270) explains that the long history of participation “should be sobering, as we encounter such a record of bold predictions, promises delayed and deferred, partial successes and unintended consequences [that] should make us slow to construct triumphant narratives of technological inevitability.” What is assumed to be “inevitable” in this context is the belief that progressive grassroots movements would eventually metastasize into a political powerhouse capable of toppling “Governments of the Industrial World,” as was pronounced confidently by John Perry Barlow in 1996. In this article, Jenkins clearly articulates a “growing concern that networked communications would not necessarily result in a more progressive, inclusive, or democratic culture” (270). Indeed, both the elections of Barack Obama (Sandvoss 2013) and Donald Trump were energized, at least in part, by waves of support from online territories, evincing a dialectical struggle for political hegemony. In many ways, Jenkins could be read here as prophesizing the emergence of the so-­called alt-­right, an umbrella term for “an amorphous, ideologically diffuse, and largely online movement” (Heikkilä 2017: 2) that became visible in mainstream media and political discourse in the run up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Naturally, the alt-­right did not suddenly spring up from out of nowhere: “White nationalism had been lurking on the fringes of the American political right for a couple of decades before the alt-­right came along to give it fresh new life, rewired for the twenty-­fi rst century” (Neiwert 2017: 220). A series

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of forces and factors contributed to this very loose-­k nit dispersion of neo-­Nazis, white supremacists, mens’ rights activists (MRAS), white tribalists, and “other ideological groups” (Heikkilä 2017: 2) achieving that which they desired most of all: mainstream recognition and validation. One of the ways that so-­called alt-­right agents attempt to infiltrate the mainstream with ideology is through “metapolitics,” a strategy “that would gradually transform the political and intellectual culture as a precursor to transforming institutions and systems” (Lyons 2017: 10; see also Proctor 2019). In other words, attacking artifacts of pop culture that are viewed as “politically correct” (PC) becomes one of the ways that the alt-­right can spread ideological messages, and the mainstream news media’s “constant churn of outrage and spectacle” (Beckett 2017) has been enormously beneficial to this metapolitical strategy—as has been admitted by neo-­Nazi and anti-­Semite Andrew Anglin: “This is why I love the media so much—they cover my site with outrage, in turn I get more traffic and more on board with my agenda, in turn the media produces more spectacle. . . . The coverage only has one effect, which is the normalization of our ideas. And it doesn’t take a political scientist to figure that out” (quoted in Beckett 2017). As Matthew Lyons (2017) emphasizes, turning to (what the alt-­right sees as) PC-­inflected pop culture facilitates a proliferation of reactionary ideological currents, and the mainstream news media has become complicit in making this so by willingly providing a platform for otherwise marginal voices to be heard in public, mainstream spaces—making them marginal no longer as a result. The most widely publicized outcome of this strategy is what became known as #Gamergate in 2014, which has been viewed as a touchtone of both the rise of the alt-­right and the new culture wars. Emerging out of the “toxic technocultures” (Massanari 2015) of 4Chan, 8Chan, and Reddit, this was a flame war unlike any other. Ostensibly centered on ethics in video game journalism, #Gamergate mushroomed into a pugnacious cyberwar between feminist and conservative video game fans, the majority of them male (although not entirely): “On one side were feminists and other liberals who believe the gaming world is dominated by males, both as game developers and as members of the target audience. This group . . . argued for greater inclusion of games appealing to female audiences. On the other side were males who found such talk not merely threatening but a declaration of a ‘culture war’ against white males by a nefarious leftist conspiracy” (Neiwert 2017: 214). Computer game developer Brianna Wu received a series of tweets from the pseudonymous “Death to Brianna,” with death, rape, and other violent threats becoming commonplace: “I’ve got a K-­Bar and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your cunt”; or “your mutilated corpse will be on the front of page of Jezebel and there isn’t jack shit you can do

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about it” (quoted in Mantilla 2015: 87). Anita Sarkeessian fled her home after one commenter released her address on Twitter—a strategy known as “doxxing”— along with the message that he would “come to her apartment and rape her to death [and] after I’m done, I’ll ram a tire iron up your cunt” (quoted in Frank 2014). Other scholars have written extensively about #Gamergate, and I don’t want to rehearse the entire sordid affair here (see Massanari 2015; Todd 2015; Salter and Blodgett 2017: 91–94). But what I will say is that #Gamergate should not be viewed as somehow separate from other reactionary discourses that have since been awarded the “alt-­right” label. What is certain is that the controversy was in many ways the spark that lit the fuse, with fascist villains such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Roosh V, and Vox Day achieving a level of fame and infamy as key mouthpieces of #Gamergate and, later, the alt-­right. In this way, the #Gamergate controversy “heralded the rise of the alt-­right and provided an early sketch of its primary features” (Neiwert 2017: 215). It is not only video games that have been attacked for political correctness and progressive biases. The #Gamergate incident may have been an early shot across the bow of pop culture, but as an instrumental characteristic of rightist metapolitical warfare, other cultural artifacts have been at the center of such conflicts, much of them without any success whatsoever (a fact that is often sadly missing from many journalistic accounts). The controversy surrounding the science fiction genre’s Hugo Awards was centered on the same type of metapolitical warfare, with reactionary fans hijacking the nomination for so-­called “message fiction”—that is, sci-­fi literature with a left-­w ing bent. Commonly referred to as “the sad puppies” and led by Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), the campaign involved attempting to ensure that such message fiction did not receive any award nominations, a strategy that largely failed (Sandifer 2015; Stevens and van der Merwe 2018). As the alt-­right started to gain mainstream recognition, the metapolitical lens has been turned onto other aspects of pop culture, often mobilized through what we might describe as “boycott culture”—many of which also failed (often spectacularly so). For example, novelist Stephen King has used Twitter to heavily criticize U.S. President Donald Trump, and this led to cries from “Redditers” to boycott Andy Muschietti’s new film adaptation of King’s 1986 novel, It (2017): “Okay, Everyone. Please DO NOT go see Stephen King’s new It movie this weekend when it opens. If you have to see it, wait till after opening weekend so he has a lousy showing this week. Trump stands up for us, so we should stand up for him!” (Seelinger 2017; Shapiro 2017). However, as the film quickly smashed box office records for horror cinema (in unadjusted dollars), it became evident that the boycott wasn’t an efficacious strategy.

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The same can be said of calls to boycott the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. In November 2016, Vice President-­Elect Mike Pence was confronted with catcalls and jeers from an energetic crowd during a performance of Hamilton; this was followed by a direct address at the end of the show from cast member Brandon Victor Dixon, who said, “We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. But we hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values, and work on behalf of all of us” (Kelley 2016; Walters 2016). Following a series of angry tweets from Donald Trump demanding apologies for Pence, conservative supporters started the hashtag #BoycottHamilton, which, as with It, achieved little impact, as tickets sold out (and continue to do so). That said, it is noteworthy that boycott campaigns such as these and many others do not necessarily include identification with alt-­right membership, a fact indicating that anti-­PC discourses of this nature tend to automatically be awarded “alt-­right” status, thus discursively overamplifying and overtly validating the alt-­right as a coherent ideological collective when in reality it is nothing of the sort. What is difficult to quantify in these cases, especially for academic study, is whether or not these boycott campaigns—if we can even describe them as orchestrated campaigns at all—were comprised of fans, neo-­Nazis and other reactionary agents, general right-­w ing sympathizers, or nasty trollers out to provoke and terrorize “for the lulz” (W. Phillips 2015). This is something that academia has not yet quite gotten to grips with in methodological and epistemological terms. That is not to say that #Gamergate, the “sad puppies,” and other campaigns and boycotts are but a storm in a teacup—clearly, the war waged against feminism and SJWs (a pejorative term for “social justice warriors”) and what gamergaters described as “cultural Marxism” (whatever that means) was virulent and vicious, with some women living in fear that threats would be carried out. But how many people were involved in sending horrific threats of this sort? How can this be quantified through research? I have asked these questions on a number of occasions, including in this volume (see chapter 16), but I should clearly articulate that I am not attempting to defend fans nor argue that there has not been an insurgence of radical right-­w ing rhetoric in cyberspace. Ultimately, what I am saying is that mainstream journalism has been complicit in tipping the discursive scales enormously by focusing primarily on the spectacle and sensation enacted by so-­called toxic agents, while being less interested in users that push back against discourses of this type—so much so that the “regime of truth” built up around the new culture wars has skewed the portraiture in favor of reactionary ends, inadvertently or not. Mainstream entertainment media and

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journalism in general (including fan blogs and websites) have tended to offer much more space to right-­w ing ideologies, if only to express outrage and virtue as a way to demonstrate progressive ideologies and worldviews. But one of the severe consequences of this imbalance is that it appears that, in their many guises, the new culture wars are a lost cause for progressive politics, with the radical right seemingly standing triumphant. The situation, however, is more concretely the antithesis of what is being reported in mainstream journalism; the most hateful, violent rhetoric—the rape and death threats, doxxing, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on—emanates from a minority; a very loud minority, to be sure, but a minority nonetheless. As video game fan Jennifer Reed put it: “We” including countless women are not harassing Anita and Zoe. A SELECT MINORITY within the gaming community are harassing her, and that is extremely offensive to people such as myself who love the gaming community and have never been harassed for being female. Those people do not represent gamers. We do not hate women. This hasn’t even been about Anita or Quinn for the past several days. If you want to see some positivity, check out the #Gamergate tag. (Quoted in Frank 2014) It is within this context that Disney’s Star Wars became a lightning rod for the new culture wars and the metapolitics of the alt-­right, largely because of representations of equality and diversity in Disney’s Star Wars films, to which I now turn.

The Boycott Wars Saga As with the various boycott campaigns, there has been a continuation of the regime of truth about toxic fan practices (Proctor and Kies 2018), an overamplification of right-­w ing rhetoric in mainstream news discourse operating in parallel to a kind of progressive neutering (or, at the very least, a palpable quietening). I have already examined the #BlackStormtrooper “controversy” in this book, and I don’t want to regurgitate that argument here except as a reminder that the hashtag in question was overwhelmingly replete with attacks on an imagined and imaginary population of toxic, racist fanboys, with many progressive messages performing a brand of what can be viewed as toxicity of a more progressive nature. The Force Awakens was criticized by a vocal minority for political correctness and liberal identity politics, with several amorphous boycott campaigns achieving widespread media attention and resulting in further amplification and

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fermentation of the regime of truth. However, what is strikingly absent across press discourse is a quantitative examination of boycotts enacted through social media hashtags, most of which explicitly contain a minority of reactionary agents compared with a critical majority pushing back, as with #BlackStormtrooper. Consider #BoycottStarWarsVII, a hashtag that was activated on October 11, 2016, and swiftly became the number one trending topic on Twitter the following day. Introductory comments included complaints like, “The Star Wars movie . . . barely has any whites in it”; “J. J. Abrams’s political correctness is a code word for anti-­white”; and “white children deserve wholesome movies, not PC anti-­white diversity crap.” Another anonymous commenter tweeted, “Let’s get #BoycottStarWarsVII trending.” However, as was reported by Josh Dickey (2015) for entertainment website Mashable, “Of everyone who tweeted the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII on Monday, 94 percent were merely expressing outrage over its existence, according to a statistically relevant sample examined by social media and analytics firm Fizziology for Mashable. The other 6 percent were ‘racist trolls trying to get people mad,’ the firm told Mashable, adding that many of them also used their rants to campaign for Donald Trump.” Over on 4Chan’s “ ‘politically incorrect’ /pol/ thread,” Dickey recounts, the trolls were relishing the impact of the hashtag, with one user instructing: “EVERYONE GET ON TWITTER THE ALT-­R IGHT IS TRIGGERING SJWS” (quoted in Dickey 2015). Numerous mainstream news outlets accepted the trolling operation at face value, with the Hollywood Reporter’s Graeme McMillan (2015) describing the hashtag as a “social media movement” (my emphasis), and Anna Silman (2015) in Salon describing it as the work of “a bunch of white supremacists,” both of which were commonly hyperlinked on social media. The trolls rejoiced. On 4Chan: “WE DID IT AGAIN.” On Twitter: “We made a racial issue out of thin air!” (quoted in L. O’Neil 2016). In fairness, Silman (2015) later pointed out that “the hashtag seems to have been mostly co-­opted by reasonable people at this point,” but leading with emotive headlines is freighted with sensation and bias: the headline of Matt Kamen’s (2015) piece for Wired announced that “racists want to #BoyCottStarWarsVII because it’s ‘anti-­white,’ ” while explaining only later in the article that “the vocal minority sincerely using BoycottStarWarsVII is just that—a minority.” However, Kamen’s claim that the hashtag is “equally being used to deride those actually calling for a boycott” is problematic given that the contents were not equal at all but skewed in favor of antiracist commenters by a wide margin. Writing for Esquire, Luke O’Neil (2016) expressed concern about the hyperbole and sensation underpinning a lot of news reports indignantly focused on

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the hashtag at the expense of real news, a passage which is worth quoting at length: For almost the entirety of the hashtag’s run, it was dominated by people commenting on how terrible it was, with very little noise coming from actual racists, the thing we were supposed to be upset about in the first place. That’s because there weren’t that many of them involved. . . . No reporter would file a story based solely on the deranged ramblings of an anonymous, obviously disturbed person screaming on the street, so why do so many of us continue to do this when it comes to isolated pockets of  Twitter users? Group of Assholes Says Something Stupid just isn’t a newsworthy story. But, when you can affix that angle to a mention of Star Wars, then it makes more sense. People are hungry for any sort of news about the film, and when you add in the element of outrage, it’s an orgy of clicks for everyone, including the inevitable dénouement when we get to write shaming anti-­reaction-­reaction pieces like this one. In many ways, then, the regime of truth constructed around boycott campaigns of this nature, not only by professional entertainment channels but also by fan websites and blogs, are validating these kinds of viewpoints by airing them publicly and are thus being complicit in the metapolitics of the alt-­right, whether trollers involved in campaigns of this kind identify as such or not. That said, my argument here is not that Star Wars fandom is a homogeneous, progressive community and that trolls are inherently nonfans by default. What I am saying is that the widespread focus on toxic fan practices, if indeed such boycotters are fans (which isn’t to claim that they’re not either), augments the regime of truth in favor of reactionary ends. This has, unfortunately, become a common feature of entertainment criticism in professional and fan spheres across online territories. The boycott discourse gathered steam again prior to the release of Rogue One in 2016, which was enmeshed with the U.S. presidential election. The hashtag #DumpStarWars protested the multiracial cast and the second female protagonist in Star Wars history with Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso, less than a year after Daisy Ridley’s Rey received a similar backlash from a minority of complainers—which didn’t prevent the film from raking in more than $2 billion in box office receipts and becoming the second-­largest grossing film in history in unadjusted dollars (Carissimo 2016). Rogue One was, however, accused of antiwhite propaganda well in advance of the film hitting theaters in December 2016; but as the race for the White House heated up, a series of tweets by the film’s screenwriter Chris

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Weitz ended up drawing fire from alt-­right mouthpieces such as Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich. Weitz tweeted his support for Hillary Clinton with the words “more female heroes” branded upon an image of the Rebel insignia and followed this with another tweet comprising a photograph of Jyn Erso above the message: “Are you with her?” As reality TV star and real estate mogul Donald Trump declared victory in November 2016, Weitz again incensed right-­w ing ideologues on Twitter by equating Trump and his supporters not with the Rebels, as they preferred to see it, but with the villains. “Please note,” tweeted Weitz, “the Empire is a white supremacist organization.” This was followed up with an addendum from Gary Whitta: “Opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women” (E. Ellis 2016; Siegel 2016). In the days that followed, these tweets were taken down and replaced with an image of the Rebel insignia with a safety pin attached—the pin being a symbol of solidarity among diverse and disenfranchised publics in the United Kingdom after the Brexit referendum and coopted by anti-­Trump sympathizers in the United States—and an incendiary message guaranteed to raise the hackles of alt-­right sympathizers: “Star Wars against hate. Spread it” (McMillan 2016). It is within this context that right-­w ing troll par excellence Jack Posobiec launched hashtag #DumpStarWars. Whether it was Lucasfilm executives that requested Weitz and Whitta take down these political tweets is difficult to ascertain; Disney CEO Robert Iger tried to neuter the conflict in an interview by insisting that Rogue One “is not a film that is, in any way, a political film. There are no political statements in it, at all. [Rogue One] has one of the greatest and most diverse casts of any film we have ever made and we are very proud of that, and that is not a political statement, at all” (Galuppo 2016). It is more than likely that Iger was anxious that the politicization of Rogue One could negatively impact the film’s box office, as was pointed out by Tatiana Siegel (2016) for the Hollywood Reporter: “What Disney and Lucasfilm might not be thrilled about is that a Trump ‘Empire’ versus Hil­ lary Clinton ‘resistance’ narrative might alienate the 61 million–plus voters who backed the real estate mogul, a group too large to ignore when a company is in the tent-­pole business. . . . In the Trump age, if the right-­leaning media can help tip a presidential election, it’s reasonable to assume it can impact grosses.” As with the boycotts discussed earlier, Rogue One’s theatrical release demonstrated that #DumpStarWars hardly mattered. Although the film’s box office paled in comparison with the record-­breaking haul of its predecessor, The Force Awakens, Rogue One managed to capture over $1 billion dollars in box office receipts. Given that The Force Awakens was the first Star Wars film in a decade, the

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first since the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm, and the first installment of the Skywalker saga since Lucas had dictated that the series was complete (see editors’ introduction in this volume)—and given that Rogue One was a litmus test for the anthology series of films—it is highly probable that the film was unlikely to achieve a similar level of box office traffic. Yet as liberal news media rejoiced that the #DumpStarWars boycott had failed (Friedman 2016; Hathaway 2016; Peyser 2016), alt-­right identifiers claimed that the campaign was successful. Jack Posobiec, for instance, retweeted Matt Broady’s comment that Rogue One’s “opening weekend was roughly 40 percent, or $100 million less than [The Force Awakens]” (Friedman 2016), while Mike Cernovich celebrated that the film was “not a huge hit, lost money compared to last Star Wars” (Peyser 2016). It is more illuminating perhaps that the contents of #DumpStarWars contain over 50 percent more tweets mocking the very few boycotters within, with a significant uptick in traffic following news of Rogue One’s successful box office returns (which were used as a way to bait the complainers). Indeed, the vast majority of comments were from antiboycotters, regardless of what Posobiec and Cernovich claim about the campaign’s success. Like #BlackStormtrooper, scraping the contents of hashtags and conducting a discourse or content analysis is certainly one of the ways that academic study can challenge the overamplication and hyperbole that has become central to mainstream media discourse. It is during this period that the radical right were given a brand makeover as the alt-­right, and use of this label has accelerated in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election when Donald Trump proved to be “a particularly unifying force for the Ku Klux Klan, splinter white nationalist groups, and the cacophony of reactionists, antagonists, and neo-­supremacists that have come to be known as the alt-­right, all of whom have declared, publically and enthusiastically, their support for a candidate who ‘gets it’ ” (Phillips and Milner 2017: 180). It should hopefully be clear at this juncture that the “alt-­right” and “toxic fandom” labels are intrinsically and nebulously intertwined in a discursive Gordian knot of excessive proportions—of which Star Wars is but one element. To complicate matters further, “toxic” Star Wars fans do not all identify as alt-­right ideologues, and many complaints can be framed as fidelity criticisms, conservative though they may be. It is not a new phenomenon that fan audiences tend to cry foul when beloved franchises and storyworlds adapt and shift in accordance with social and cultural mores, such as in accommodating a marked uptick in multicultural and female representation in pop culture. Naturally, this is not to argue that manifestations of reactionary viewpoints should be condoned, but to ask that more meaningful exegeses take place as opposed to descriptions of toxic fandom being framed as legitimately emanating from the alt-­right.

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Consider the brouhaha surrounding The Last Jedi, a film that was not only critically heralded as “transporting entertainment” (Dargis 2017), “an emotional wallop” (Freer 2017), “a tidal wave of energy and emotion” (Bradshaw 2017), and “a blockbuster movie packed with invention, wit, and action galore” (Gompertz 2017), but one that also saw a ferocious backlash of a kind not seen since The Phantom Menace. I have written about the critical discourse surrounding The Last Jedi at length elsewhere (Proctor 2018b and 2018c), but it would be helpful to summarize the way in which news media seemed to want to illustrate that an alt-­right conspiracy was afoot, primarily because of the lack of consensus regarding the film’s quality. Ultimately, the notion of fan community becomes continuously invoked as having been “broken” by The Last Jedi and thus a firm indication that journalists—and fans as well—have projected a utopian portrait of Star Wars fandom as a homogeneous collective.

The Last Jedi Prior to the global release of The Last Jedi in cinemas on December 17, 2017, the film was premiered to select audiences and critics on December 9 in Los Angeles and on December 12 in Europe. With a review embargo in place until the film’s official release, some fans took to social media to champion the film and, once the embargo was lifted, critics joined in the chorus of celebrations as well, although not invariably (for example see Brody 2017; Gleiberman 2017; K. Taylor 2017). However, in the days following the film’s general release, a different critical outlook began to surface, with many entertainment critics, journalists, and fans eagerly querying the legitimacy of the reception metascoring site Rotten Tomatoes, which indicated a gulf between professional reviews and audience reception. Since then, this gulf has only increased: at the time of this writing (September 2018), the critical score stands at 91 percent against an audience score of 46 percent. This rapidly became a cause for concern as journalists and bloggers could not accept that The Last Jedi could simultaneously be both critically praised and vilified by audiences. “It became clear for the world to see that something was seriously amiss when a huge discrepancy opened between the critical and audience scores for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes,” explained Jordan Zakarin (2018) for SyFy.com: Critics largely showered it with praise, while registered moviegoers gave it a failing grade; right now, it stands at 91 percent “fresh” from professional film critics, but has just a 50 percent audience score. The gulf is an

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anomaly, which we know both because moviegoers gave largely positive assessments of the film to the polling firm ComScore and because a member of an alt-­right fan group proudly told HuffPost that dissatisfied fans sent bots to deliberately lower the Tomatometer. In Zakarin’s account here, polling by ComScore is constructed as an efficacious and accurate reflection of audience tastes, while Rotten Tomatoes is not. Naturally, I do not intend to argue the obverse—Rotten Tomatoes is not an accurate barometer of popular opinion either—but the fact that “moviegoers gave largely positive assessments to ComScore” tells us little about the wider parameters of audience reception. (And I am certain I do not need to go into statistical flaws about polling in general, especially regarding the recent results of the Brexit referendum, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or the U.K. “snap election” of May 2017.) But what is noteworthy in Zakarin’s article is the final sentence claiming that Rotten Tomatoes had been infiltrated by “a member of an alt-­right fan group [who] proudly told HuffPost that dissatisfied fans sent bots to deliberately lower the Tomatometer.” On December 20, 2017, the Huffington Post’s Bill Bradley headlined: “Surprise, Surprise: The ‘Alt-­R ight’ Claims Credit for Last Jedi Backlash.” In this article, Bradley writes that the Facebook group “Down with Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys” was responsible for sending bots to torpedo the Rotten Tomatoes score, the evidence of which was discussed with the “Down with Disney” group through Facebook Messenger (Bradley provides screenshots of this conversation). When asked by Bradley to provide evidence of the way the bot attacks were orchestrated, Down with Disney replies, “that’s confidential,” then later explained that a tech-­savvy friend assisted with the “review bombing” (note the semantics of terrorism used here and in the headline “Claims Credit”). At no point does the poster identify with, or use, the term “alt-­right.” The story did not begin with Bradley, but the alt-­right angle certainly did. The first news story to mention Down with Disney appeared on Deadbeat, albeit with no mention of alt-­right membership (D’Alessandro 2017). This was then picked up by Julia Alexander (2017) of Polygon, who initially wrote that Down with Disney is “a Pro-­DCEU [DC Expanded Universe] community,” but later added an update following Bradley’s “alt-­right” article: “After reports of the attack being organized by a right-­w ing group began to circulate, a Rotten Tomatoes representative told Polygon that its security team and database experts ‘haven’t determined there to be any problems.’ ” As the story began to be reproduced across cyberspace, the discourse gathered steam and mushroomed into a regime of truth whereby Down with Disney

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was discursively awarded alt-­right status and whereby The Last Jedi’s Rotten Tomatoes score was the clear result of alt-­right orchestration, as emphasized in Zakarin’s article but then reproduced in publications as varied as (but not limited to): the Chicago Tribune (Page 2017), NME (Trendell 2017), Indiewire (Sharf 2017), Newsweek (Ahmed 2017), Slash Film (Bui 2017), The Wrap (Verhoeven 2017), GQ (Darby 2017), Nylon (Manders 2017), Complex (Pimentel 2017), AV Club (Rife 2017), Pajiba (Preston 2017), and many more besides. (One might wonder why other news outlets such as, say, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so on, chose not to run this story.) On Down with Disney’s official Facebook page, a different narrative emerges. First, over 98 percent of commenters on the page were pillorying the poster for espousing misogyny and racism—a fact that is entirely missing from Bradley’s account. Second, the anonymous Down with Disney is not representative of the alt-­right at all, but of an anonymous male individual who is widely known as a Facebook troll. Third, and perhaps most pointedly, is that other Star Wars fan groups challenged Down with Disney by claiming that they impacted the Rotten Tomatoes score, such as the “Star Wars Anti-­Disney Pro-­Canon” Facebook group, who wrote: “WE DID THIS! Not the fake page Down with Disney. We brought the Rotten Tomatoes score down. And we didn’t have to use bots either. You claim to do something you never did. . . . You sit on a throne of lies! We had our supporters go down vote the movie without seeing it. We are the ones should be getting praise not you” (quoted in Proctor 2018b). Whether or not either of these groups orchestrated a “review bombing” campaign matters less in this context than the regime of truth that developed around the alt-­right being responsible. It is entirely possible—even plausible—that a certain number of fans attempted to downgrade the audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes as a protest against Disney’s Star Wars and what may be viewed as a politically correct shift toward equality and diversity. It is not only that the press “has erred on the side of overexposure” regarding stories about the alt-­right, as has been emphasized by Wired’s Issie Lapowsky (2017), or that this ends up shining “too bright a light on them and risk[s] amplifying their message—or worse, attracting new acolytes to the cause.” More pointedly, it appears that the mainstream media has been complicit in constructing Down with Disney as a legitimate chapter of the alt-­right when, in reality, this Facebook “community”—a community of one—is a notorious troll without much in the way of support at all. More recently, both the Star Wars Anti-­Disney Pro-­Canon and Down with Disney Facebook pages have been taken down. In place of the former, a new page has surfaced called the “Star Wars Anti-­Disney Pro-­Canon Parody” group, which contains commenters teasing the person who launched the original page

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(whose real name is revealed) in no uncertain terms, as well as several attacks on Down with Disney’s misogynist and racist rhetoric and his lack of fan cultural capital. But Down with Disney’s infamy would live on and proliferate once again in February 2018, this time around Marvel’s Black Panther, and again led by Bill Bradley (2018) of the Huffington Post, headlining: “ ‘Alt-­R ight’ Group Takes Aim at Black Panther. Ryan Coogler Responds.” On this occasion, more reputable news outlets did run the story, including the Guardian (Virtue 2018), the International Business Times (Gander 2018), Variety (Fernandez 2018), and the Washington Post (Cavna 2018), to name a select few. All of this kerfuffle because of a Facebook post comprised of the following words: “Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes.” (One should presumably wonder what has happened to Down with Disney’s bots on this occasion, or perhaps simply query the Rotten Tomatoes score, which is at 97 percent approval among critics and 79 percent among audiences.) And it didn’t stop there either. In June 2018, the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard ran an article about Down with Disney, who had been kicked off Facebook in February but had returned after a ban to claim responsibility for the online abuse leveled at The Last Jedi actor Kelly Marie Tran, who left social media as a result and to which she has since responded in the New York Times (Tran 2018). Unlike Bradley, Shoard doesn’t evoke the “alt-­right” label, preferring “pro-­ ‘straight white male hero’ group”—a description that was reproduced by Mel Evans (2018) in Metro—while in the Washington Post, Michael Cavna (2018) reverts to type with “the now removed ‘alt-­right’ Facebook page.” At this point, there have been over sixty articles written about Down with Disney as an “alt-­right group.” That one anonymous and infamous social media troll should be able to attract such a massive amount of publicity is astonishing and worrying, not least because it works to publicize alt-­right philosophies even when deployed by a single social media troll. Kelly Marie Tran has certainly been the recipient of racist and sexist abuse on websites such as Instagram and Wookieepedia, so I am in no way attempting to argue that Star Wars is somehow immune from skirmishes in “the new culture wars.” But how would we know if these attacks were orchestrated by the alt-­right, whose metapolitical strategy is not to mask political affiliation and identity but, rather, to openly evoke alt-­right branding to infiltrate mainstream discourse and spread ideological currents. As for The Last Jedi, I would argue that it has become academically urgent to explore and examine discourses of this nature with rigorous research protocols to test and measure more effectively the regime of truth. Perhaps the best way of checking the veracity of Rotten Tomatoes scores and whether or not audience

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reviews are aligned with right-­w ing ideologies, political correctness, and the new culture wars is to fully examine the entire contents therein (which of course would be time-­consuming). It is possible that reviewers may mask their political viewpoints, but it is better than relying on supposition, conjecture, and imputation. As the current regime of truth is heavily weighted in favor of reactionary ends and agents, it is becoming an essential scholarly endeavor, I would argue, to better examine these new culture wars with as much accuracy as possible rather than to embrace press discourse unequivocally. The specifics of this regime of truth may well illustrate that the left is losing the new culture wars but, as I have hopefully started to show in this chapter, once we begin tapping into hashtags, forums, comments sections, and other online, user-­generated portals, the picture becomes evidently more complex and less reactionary than we might think. Put differently, with all of the energy spent on Down with Disney, there have been considerably fewer news articles on positive aspects of Star Wars fandom, such as the #ForceOutHate campaign or the Expanded Universe Movement’s Twin Suns charity initiative, both of which have received little mainstream media attention. From this perspective, entertainment journalism enacts a kind of cultural rubbernecking, attracted to drama, sensation, and the car crashes of pop culture. This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and “information disorder” (Wardle 2017) in the twenty-­fi rst century.

Conclusion: Fracture, Fallout, or Fatigue? The regime of truth that has since emerged regarding the impact of The Last Jedi’s divisiveness has had many news and fan sites announcing that the Star Wars fandom is “notoriously toxic, and you don’t have to look very far for evidence,” as Joshua Rivera (2018) puts it. “It’s embarrassing to share a passion with . . . a small yet splenetic subsection of so-­called ‘fans,’ ” writes Luke Holland (2018) in the Guardian. For Brandon Katz (2018), writing for the Observer: “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.” Wired’s Adam Rogers (2018) offered the “three tenets of Nerd,” illustrating that this notion of “fan-­as-­community” is a common discourse among journalists and fans themselves (or “journalist-­fans”):

1. A nerd must not harm another nerd, or through inaction allow a nerd to come to harm.

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2. Nerds must cooperate with other nerds, except where such cooperation would violate the previous tenet. 3. Nerds must protect the existence of nerddom, except where such protection violates the first two tenets.

While these tenets are certainly aspirational, it is worth remembering that fandom is most often a site of savage argument rather than a utopian community built on the principles of solidarity. Naturally, harming another “nerd” is as morally despicable as harming anyone, fan or not; but this notion of cooperation and protection is not usually how fandom functions in general. Again, it is certainly an honorable philosophy, however unlikely to be practiced. Star Wars fandom isn’t “broken,” nor is it “fractured” (Reinhard 2018)—as an abstract concept that cannot be quantified substantively or entirely, fandom has never been in a state of unity from which it might be broken and in need of repair. The Last Jedi certainly became a hot spot for these kinds of arguments, primarily because the film was so divisive among fans (although “division” again implies a rupturing of community). As mentioned earlier, what seems to be surprising to many critics and fans is that The Last Jedi might be loved and hated simultaneously, but by different kinds of fans. The lack of fannish consensus became a gateway to all sorts of theories and suppositions, resulting in the construction of a reductive and oversimplified binary, a “moral dualism” (Hills 2002) between “good” progressive fans of The Last Jedi that loved the film and “bad” reactionary fans that hated it. As the Hollywood Reporter’s Marc Bernardin (2018) put it: Some loved the bold liberties of writer-­director Rian Johnson . . . but others hated it. Hated everything it stood for. Hated what they saw as a social justice warrior remix of the Star Wars they grew up with. And they hated [Kelly Marie] Tran’s role most of all because they decided that she was the avatar for what was wrong with the franchise. Those fans—a minority but a loud one—found their “them” [their opponents] in the very thing they used to love. For all the talk about toxic fans being a minority faction of a wider fan community, it is puzzling to read vaunted claims that this minority might well have impacted the box office for Solo: A Star Wars Story, the first Star Wars film following The Last Jedi and the one that “officially became the first Star Wars movie to flop” (Stefansky 2018). But Solo was nothing if not a turbulent production almost from the start. First, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired due to creative differ-

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ences with Ron Howard, who was stepping in as director. Second, numerous reports claimed that young Han Solo actor Alden Ehrenreich required lessons from an acting coach (hardly an indicator of confidence in the film). Third, replacing Harrison Ford was always going to be a risky proposition, and Star Wars prequels don’t have a positive history. And finally, marketing for the film was exceptionally belated, with the first teaser trailer premiering only a few months before Solo’s theatrical release (compared to the teaser trailer for The Force Awakens, which arrived a full year before the film was distributed). If The Force Awakens’s Comic-­Con reel operated to paratextually rehabilitate the franchise and steer negative criticisms away from prequel territory, then it stands to reason that unpoliced negative reports may achieve the opposite by functioning as a paratextual “red flag” (see Hassler-­Forest in this volume). Numerous articles also suggested that Solo’s box office failings indicated that audiences were “fatigued” with Star Wars (Cotter 2018; Coyle 2018; Rubin 2018; Sims 2018), but in comparison with Marvel, one of Disney’s other twenty-­fi rst-­ century acquisitions, this makes little sense. Since 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has rapidly grown into a franchise powerhouse, spreading transmedially across film, television, and streaming platforms. In cinematic terms, Marvel Studios has released twenty MCU films theatrically in ten years, with a schedule that has not slowed down over time but accelerated. In 2018, the films Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Ant-­Man and the Wasp have all performed well, both in critical and commercial spheres—with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War both crossing the $2 billion line. Between 2015 and 2018, Disney’s Lucasfilm produced four Star Wars films—The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Last Jedi, and Solo—while during the same period Disney’s Marvel released eight MCU films—Captain America: Civil War (2016), Doctor Strange (2016), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Spider-­Man: Homecoming (2017), Thor: Ragnarok (2017), and the aforementioned triumvirate of films in 2018. Rather than indicating signs of exhaustion and fatigue, or the law of diminishing returns, the MCU certainly seems to be in rude health, with Avengers: Infinity War now standing as the most successful film in the franchise at the time of this writing. With no new Star Wars films on the release roster until J. J. Abrams’s Episode IX in December 2019, Marvel Studios in the meantime will have added yet another three films to the MCU line-­up, with Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-­Man: Far from Home (all scheduled for 2019). By the time the conclusion of the Skywalker saga is distributed theatrically— if indeed Episode IX will conclude the story or lead into another trilogy at a later date—the ratio between Lucasfilm’s and Marvel Studios’ cinematic outputs will be five films to eleven. Put differently, Marvel’s cinematic output will be more

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than double the number of Star Wars films produced within the same four-­year period. Of course, Star Wars and Marvel are very different beasts, and I do not mean to claim that the former simply cannot fatigue audiences because the latter continues to attract significant critical praise and box office receipts; although I will say that it seems to be clear that Marvel is healthier than Star Wars at this juncture, both commercially and critically. It is entirely possible, however speculative, that one of the reasons that Star Wars has been a crown jewel of franchise cinema is precisely because less content has been produced, at least in filmic terms, which has thus marked it out as somehow unique. The case of Solo is particularly interesting given that it has been viewed as the first theatrical failure in the franchise’s history—all the more remarkable considering the venomous fan backlash against the prequels. I contend that there is so much more going on here than mere “franchise fatigue,” although we will need to wait and see how the “final” installment of the Skywalker saga is received in December 2019 to explore whether or not the Star Wars brand remains a vibrant franchise property. The key argument in this chapter is that news media’s preeminent focus on the most virulent and toxic elements of Star Wars fandom has undoubtedly constructed a biased narrative, a concretized “regime of truth” whereby a minority of digital users, be they fans, trolls, or “alt-­right” identifiers, are made to look as if they represent a majority. In producing—and indeed reproducing—this regime of truth, I would argue that it is also news media that is “toxic,” or at the very least, dedicated to unduly dramatizing toxic narratives at the expense of a fan majority. There is much work to be done in this area and the digital environment will continue to be an enormous challenge for scholars to examine rigorously and robustly as the war for Disney’s Star Wars continues.

Contributors

Lucy Bennett is lecturer in media audiences at The School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC), Cardiff University, United Kingdom. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Media and Society, Journal of Fandom Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, Social Semiotics, Continuum, Cinema Journal, Celebrity Studies, and Participations. She is cofounder and cochair of the Fan Studies Network and is coeditor of Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (with Paul Booth, 2016) and Crowdfunding the Future (with Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones, 2015). Paul Booth is author or editor of ten books, including Playing Fans (2015), Game Play (2015), Crossing Fandoms (2016), Digital Fandom 2.0 (2016), Seeing Fans (with Lucy Bennett, 2016), and Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (2018). He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee. Douglas Brown is head of subject at the Games Academy, Falmouth University, Cornwall, United Kingdom. Fascinated by games of all kinds, his main research interests center around how games tell stories, how they work with the imagination, and how the suspension of disbelief functions in the medium. Matthew Freeman is reader in multiplatform media at Bath Spa University, United Kingdom. He is codirector of Bath Spa’s Media Convergence Research Centre and acts as Research Excellence Framework (REF) champion for the university’s communication, culture, and media submission to REF. His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media, industries, cultures, and histories, and he is author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-­Century Transmedia Story Worlds (2016) and Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (2016); coauthor of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (with Carlos A. Scolari and Paolo Bertetti, 2014); and coeditor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with William Proctor, 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies (with Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, 2018). His forthcoming books include Genre/Transmedia: Rethinking Genre in a Multiplatform Culture (2019) and The World of The Walking Dead (2019). Ross Garner is lecturer in media and cultural studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, United Kingdom. His research interests include television studies, mediated forms of nostalgia, transmediality, franchising and transmedia storytelling, and media tourism. He is the author of the monograph Nostalgia, Digital Television and Transmediality (2018).

324 | Contributors Lincoln Geraghty is reader in popular media cultures in the School of Media and Performing Arts, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. He serves as editorial advisor for the Journal of Popular Culture, Reconstruction, the Journal of Fandom Studies, and the Journal of Popular Television and maintains research interests in science fiction film and television, fandom, and collecting in popular culture. He was recently appointed as senior editor for the new online open access journal Cogent Arts and Humanities. He is author of Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (2009), and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (2014). He has edited The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture (2008), Channeling the Future: Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (2009), The Smallville Chronicles: Critical Essays on the Television Series (2011), and The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Film, Television Shows and Media (with Mark Jancovich, 2008). He is currently serving as editor for the multivolume Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood (2011 and 2015), and his most recent collection, Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, was published in 2015. Jonathan Gray is professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (2006), Television Entertainment (2008), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010), and Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz, 2012) and coeditor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington, 2007/2017), Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-­Network Era (with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson, 2009), The Companion to Media Authorship (with Derek Johnson, 2013), and Keywords in Media Studies (with Laurie Oulette, 2017). Colin B. Harvey is a writer and narrative designer working across multiple media and specializing in digital storytelling, transmedia narrative, world-­building, and shared storyworlds. He has previously worked for Sony and for Rebellion Developments on their Sniper Elite franchise, as well as helping develop British company To Play For’s new storytelling platform. As a freelance journalist he has written for the Guardian, Edge, Develop, RetroGamer, and PopMatters, among other publications. Aside from games, Harvey’s original short fiction won the first Pulp Idol award, jointly conferred by SFX Magazine and Gollancz Books in 2006. He’s written licensed tie-­in fiction for franchises such as Doctor Who, Highlander, and Judge Dredd and comic material for 2000AD and Commando. He also contributed the novella “Dead Kelly” to the collection Journal of the Plague Year (2014). Harvey is the author of the academic book Fantastic Transmedia (2015), an exploration of crossmedia storytelling in science fiction and fantasy franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Halo, as well as smaller independent projects. He has written and presented extensively on game narrative and transmedia storytelling in a variety of international contexts. His PhD, exploring the interrelationship of storytelling and play in video game media using ideas of affect and memory, was conferred in 2009. He is a visiting professor with the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College, London, and a visiting professor with The Manchester Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom.

Contributors | 325 Dan Hassler-­Forest is assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. He has published books and articles on superhero movies, comics, science fiction, adaptation studies, critical theory, and zombies. His most recent book is Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). Matt Hills is professor of media and film at the University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom, and codirector of the Centre for Participatory Culture. He is the author of six monographs, beginning with Fan Cultures (2002), and editor or coeditor of two further books, the most recent of which is Transatlantic Television Drama (2019). Matt has published widely on media fandom. Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom. Her thesis examines cult television, fandom, nostalgia, and the X-­Files and Twin Peaks revivals. Bethan has published extensively on fandom, gender, and new media, with her work appearing in the journals Sexualities, Transformative Works and Cultures, and New Media and Society, as well as in several edited collections. She is coeditor of the collection Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics, and Digital Society (2015). Bethan is a board member of the Fan Studies Network and a principal researcher on the World Star Wars Project. Lorna Jowett is a reader in television studies at the University of Northampton, United Kingdom, where she teaches some of her favorite things, including science fiction, horror, and television, sometimes all at once. She is author of Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (2005) and Dancing with the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the Doctor Who Universe (2017); coauthor of TV Horror (with Stacey Abbott, 2013); and editor of Time on TV (with Kevin Lee Robinson and David Simmons, 2016). She has published many articles on television, film, and popular culture, and her next book is a collection of essays on Joss Whedon and horror, coedited with Kristopher Woofter. Michelle Kent is an independent audience and cultural studies scholar based in Melbourne, Australia. Her contribution to this book was written during her postgraduate studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Bridget Kies is visiting assistant professor of English and media studies at the College of Wooster, Ohio. Her research examines masculinities in film, television, and audiences. Her work has been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, Science Fiction Film and Television, Feminist Media Histories, Intensities, and the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-­M ilwaukee. Richard McCulloch is lecturer in film and cultural studies at the Centre for Participatory Culture, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom, and a board member of the Fan Studies Network. In addition to coediting this anthology, he is codirector of the World Star Wars Project and coeditor of The Scandinavian Invasion: The Nordic Noir Phenomenon and Beyond (2019), both with William Proctor. He has published numerous articles and book

326 | Contributors chapters on media audiences and reception, and his current book project is a monograph on unfolding reputations and the Pixar animation brand. Emma Pett is lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. She has published in numerous journals, such as Transnational Cinemas, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Cultural Trends, and is coauthor of Love Seats, Ciggies and Kia-­Ora: Memories of Cinema-­going in 1960s Britain (with Melvyn Stokes and Matthew Jones, forthcoming). Tom Phillips is lecturer in humanities at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. He is the cochair of the Fan Studies Network and has been published in Participations, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Celebrity Studies. He recently coauthored the monograph Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie (with Martin Barker, Kate Egan, and Sarah Ralph, 2015). William Proctor is senior lecturer in transmedia, culture, and communication at Bournemouth University, United Kingdom. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia (forthcoming). He is coeditor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman, 2018) and The Scandinavian Invasion: The Nordic Noir Phenomenon and Beyond (with Richard McCulloch, 2019). William is director of the World Star Wars Project. Rebecca Williams is senior lecturer in communication, culture, and media studies at the University of South Wales, United Kingdom. She is author of Post-­Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-­Narrative (2015) and Theme Park Fandom (forthcoming) and editor of Torchwood Declassified (2013) and Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fandom (2018). Her work on fandom and media audiences has been published in journals such as Participations, Cinema Journal, Continuum, Popular Communication, Celebrity Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Television and New Media. Mark J. P. Wolf is professor of communication at Concordia University, Wisconsin. His books as author or editor include Abstracting Reality (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2 (2003 and 2008), The Video Game Explosion (2007), Myst and Riven (2011), Before the Crash (2012), Encyclopedia of Video Games (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies (2014), Video Games around the World (2015), Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), and The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2019). He has been invited to speak in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life and has had work published in a wide variety of journals.

Contributors | 327 Joshua Wucher is a PhD candidate in the English at Michigan State University, where his research interests include film and media theory, special and visual effects, and contemporary Hollywood cinema. He has published in the Journal of Popular Culture and is the author of chapters in the edited collections Marvel Comics into Film: Essays on Adaptations Since the 1940s (2016) and A Companion to the Action Film (2018). His dissertation examines the economic, cultural, and ideological structures of stunt performance and labor in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.

Notes

2. Transmedia Spectacle and Transownership Storytelling as Seen on TV 1. Following the completion of this chapter, Disney-­Lucasfilm announced that a new Star Wars TV series would be launched in 2019 as part of Disney’s streaming service.

4. Selling The Force Awakens 1. Abrams’s position here is markedly different from his public statements relating to Star Trek, a reboot for which he was positioned via multiple industrial texts as a nonfan who would be able to revive the ailing franchise by injecting it with a fresh perspective. 2. A small but vocal group of white fans launched a Twitter campaign calling on fans to boycott The Force Awakens. Following the trailer’s revelation that the film would feature a black actor in the role of a Stormtrooper, campaigners made the ridiculous claim that the film would be “anti-­white propaganda” and even that it promoted “white genocide.” (See McMillan 2015.) 3. A famous early instance of this common type of fan speculation appeared in the 1994 indie hit Clerks, which featured an elaborate discussion between the two main characters about the ethics of blowing up the unfinished Death Star in Return of the Jedi, as it would be populated not only by soldiers, but also by a large number of innocent construction workers. 4. Even though neither of the latter two was produced by Disney or Lucasfilm as promotional material, both feature participating cast members, copyrighted characters from the franchise, and audiovisual material from the film series. We can therefore safely consider them to be industrial texts that, despite not being centrally organized or produced, do require the approval and active cooperation of copyright holders and creative personnel. 5. The SNL sketch is even less satirical than the already harmless Star Wars–themed episode of The Muppet Show that aired near the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and featured Mark Hamill, C-­3PO, R2-­D2, and Chewbacca as guest stars.

5. Rebellions Are Built on Realism 1. Other cameos include Cornelius Evazan and Ponda Baba, the thugs in the Mos Eisley Cantina who confront Luke Skywalker in Episode IV. A Blu-­ray special feature, “Rogue Connections,” highlights Rogue One’s “easter eggs”—visual hints regarding the Star Wars universe.

330  |  Notes to Pages 154–192

10. “Always Two There Are” 1. Data taken from Box Office Mojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=star wars7.htm.

11. “Real Life Is Rubbish” 1. Various definitions circulate around this category of cinema exhibition (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016). This chapter doesn’t attempt to define the type of exhibition practice Secret Cinema offers but instead addresses the question of why one blockbuster event was more successful than its predecessor. 2. Data taken from Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/uk/yearly /?yr=2015. 3. One of the posters focused on the recognizable imagery and logo of The Empire Strikes Back, but this was an exception in the event’s overall branding. 4. The newspaper articles were sourced by searching for “Secret Cinema The Empire Strikes Back” on the Nexis database. The online reviews were sourced by performing the same search on Google. 5. Based on data current at the time of writing; see also Malloy 2016. 6. A Google search for “Star Wars costumes” generates approximately 10,700,000 results. In addition to those sold by Disney, Star Wars costumes are sold by many mainstream retailers, such as Argos, Amazon, and Tesco.

12. Disney’s Princess Leia 1. He later retracted the statement, claiming exhaustion, and clarified that Star Wars was for everyone. 2. Indeed, in a discussion with a Star Wars friend while I was writing this chapter, he took pains to differentiate between fan theories, that is, the (masculine) valued engagement with the franchise’s world, and fan fiction, a more frivolous (and feminine) encounter with the text. 3. After I wrote this chapter, news emerged that Star Wars toys were in economic dire straits, perhaps due to market saturation caused by the annual release dates of films and associated merchandise.

13. Rey, Mary Sue, and Phasma Too 1. The director of Frozen, Jennifer Lee, says she “was happy that we were doing a film like this [with] two female leads” (quoted in August 2014). She notes that the two protag­ onists, Elsa and Anna, “are very different from Cinderella. . . . Their wants and goals and dreams are much more, I think, contemporary. And I think you’ll keep seeing that shift” (quoted in H. Lewis 2014). Idina Menzel, who plays Elsa, even calls Frozen “a bit of a feminist movie for Disney” (mchance 2013). 2. The TV Tropes wiki describes “Mary Sue” as “a derogatory term primarily used in

Notes to Pages 193–224  |  331 Fan Fic circles to describe a particular type of character,” though the “particular type” is not mutually agreed upon. In the case of Rey, critics seem to mean “a character who is important in the story, possesses unusual physical traits, and has an irrelevantly over-­skilled or over-­idealized nature” (“Mary Sue” 2017). 3. Warner Bros.’s DC Entertainment appears to be responding to such criticisms in its launch of the Super Hero Girls line, though arguably this maintains a gendered distinction in the target market and potentially infantilizes female superheroes and their consumer fans. 4. See, for instance, Sarah Maria Griffin (2015), whose article on The Force Awakens reveals that her life has been “compromises. I wrote stories where girls were adventurers because I couldn’t find enough of them in my own life—I still write these stories, to this day. Because I have been sick of compromising for too long.” 5. According to one Marvel ex-­employee, after Disney acquired Marvel it excluded females from its desired demographics for Marvel products. The employee reports being told, “That’s not why Disney bought us. They already have the girls’ market on lockdown” (quoted in Davis 2015). It’s also worth remembering that manufacturers may guess wrong about who the popular characters will be since they unavoidably start toy production before a film’s release. 6. Peter Krämer (2004) outlines the evolution of this kind of commercial thinking in his article on Star Wars and children’s entertainment. 7. In Using the Force, Will Brooker (2002: 203–5) suggests that Boba Fett offered a gender-­neutral figure of identification for female fans, but by Attack of the Clones (2002) Boba Fett is revealed to be the male clone of the (male) bounty hunter Jango Fett, thus closing down the opportunity for such gender-­crossing. Phasma seems to be in this tradition. 8. One fan wrote, “Everything I loved about Doctor Who is gone. I’m selling all my merchandise and I’m NEVER watching Doctor Who again” (quoted in Tapley 2014). 9. Rumors of a boycott by mens’ rights supporters, based largely on a piece by Aaron Clarey in Return of Kings, played well in the media. Clarey concluded that “Fury Road was not going to be a movie made for men. It was going to be a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick” (Clarey 2015).

14. Jafar Wars 1. “Sporking” is a term taken from fandom to describe the practice of mocking bad fan fiction. A typical use is the statement, “It was so bad it made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork.”

15. “You Die! You Know That, Right? You Don’t Come Back!” 1. For further examination of the apprehension stemming from Disney’s ownership of the Star Wars franchise and the announcement that J. J. Abrams would direct The Force Awakens, see Proctor 2013 and 2016b.

332  |  Notes to Pages 237–296

16. Fear of a #BlackStormtrooper An earlier version of this chapter was previously published in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 15, no. 1, with the title “ ‘I’ve Seen a Lot of Talk about the #BlackStormtrooper Outrage, But Not a Single Example of Anyone Complaining’: The Force Awakens, Canonical Fidelity, and Nontoxic Fan Practices.” This revision is reproduced here with permission. 1. It should be noted that although the prequel trilogy is commonly perceived to have been widely condemned, preliminary data collected by the World Star Wars Project in December 2015 indicates that this disappointment may not actually be widespread among Star Wars fans.

18. “I Should Have Seen It Coming” I would like to acknowledge the generous feedback I received from Lucy Bennett and colleagues at UWM, especially Matt Schneider. I also thank the participants of the group screening, especially Ali, Allain, Kal, Molly, and Eric, for sharing their reflections with me. 1. The audience at my screening remained silent during and after the much-­anticipated trailer for Star Trek Beyond. It was the only thing that we didn’t cheer for, preferring to celebrate even Samsung and Coca-­Cola over Star Trek. It is outside the scope of this chapter but worth further examination whether this was the result of a longstanding feud between Star Wars and Star Trek fans (in the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of both) or of the disastrous cutting, which even actor Simon Pegg denounced as being a misrepresentation of Star Trek’s narrative world and philosophy. 2. Despite speculations and insinuations by the cast before the film’s release, Ford did not return in Episode VIII. 3. For the record, I did not miss any teaching that day, which in any case would have been a research day. 4. This debate skewed along gender lines. Though not a romance studies scholar, I found myself defending scenes that the men in the core group found irrelevant to the film’s plot, arguing that they advanced the romance trajectory.

20. Beyond Vader 1. Except in the case of time travel, though the Star Wars franchise has, so far, never used it. Most franchises that include time travel do so as part of their initial premise, and, even then, it is usually rarely used to change what is considered canonical. A study of the effects of time travel on franchise canonicity would be interesting.

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Index

AAA games, 125–26, 132–33 ABC network, 56, 110, 113, 121, 130 Abrams, J. J., 73, 75, 83, 153, 164–65, 184, 214, 227, 237, 262, 268, 275–76, 290, 294–95, 310, 320 Ackbar, Admiral Gial, 66, 76, 88 action figures, 1, 3, 45, 113, 189–91; female, 116–19, 184, 200–201 action playsets, 189, 196 Activision’s Skylanders (video games), 129 Adorno, Theodor, 72, 157 adult fans, 59–60, 115–16 advance screenings, 272–75 Aeschylus, 156 aesthetic fidelity, 84–96, 169 Afghanistan War, 260 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV series), 26 Ahmed, Riz, 88 Aladdin, 32 Alderaan, 155, 182, 187–88, 210, 294 Alexander, Julia, 315 Alien franchise, 9, 111 All Terrain-­A rmored Transport (AT-­AT), 87, 89, 127, 130, 141–42, 159 Allen, Paul, 90 Alternate Reality Games, 101 alt-­r ight, 19, 253, 304–17, 321 Amazon Prime, 288 Amazon.com, 191 Amidala, Senator/Queen Padmé, 119, 182, 198, 202, 218, 245, 271 analog vs. digital technologies, 14, 84–85, 91–92, 95–97 Andor, Cassian, 87 Anglin, Andrew, 306 animatronic creatures, 84, 87–89, 96 Anna (Frozen), 215, 218–19

anticipation, 11, 17–18, 59, 207, 239, 254–56, 258, 264, 267, 269, 272–73, 285–86 Antilles, Captain, 94 Ant-­Man and the Wasp (film), 320 Archive of Our Own (AO3), 207 Ariel (The Little Mermaid), 180, 183, 190, 210, 213 Arndt, Michael, 153, 290 Aron, Joel, 47 Arthur, Bea, 42 Assmann, Jan, 14, 97–98, 101 Atari video games, 102–3 Atkinson, Sarah, 168, 170, 177 Atlantic, 240, 243 Attack of the Clones (Episode II), 5, 30, 31, 49, 239, 245, 271 Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), 180, 183–84, 186, 210 Auster, Carol, 196, 198–200 authenticity, 12, 24, 28, 32, 42, 44–48, 51, 68–69, 83, 87, 92–93, 95, 104, 115, 126–27, 138, 257, 262 autoethnography, 18–19, 280–81, 287–88 Avalanche Software, 125, 129–30 Avengers: Age of Ultron (film), 189, 193, 197, 198, 204 Avengers Assemble (film), 26 Avengers films, 154, 196 Avengers: Infinity War (film), 320 Back to the Future (film), 16, 167–69, 172, 279 Bacon-­Smith, Camille, 268 Baker, Kaysee, 120 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 158 Barbie Boy (film), 196 Barbie Dolls, 181, 184

378 | Index Barlow, John Petty, 305 Barnes, Brook, 112 Bartyzel, Monika, 181 bashers vs. gushers, 4, 244–45, 249 Batman franchise, 23, 26, 56–47, 295 Battlefield II (console game), 86 battles: Endor, 59, 214; Hoth, 62, 92; Jakku, 128; Scarif, 92; Yavin, 92 Battlestar Galactica (TV series, 2004– 2009), 203 Battlestar Galactica franchise, 104 Bays, Carter, 250 BB-­8 (droid), 58, 75, 76, 141, 154, 202, 256, 267, 294 Beale, Theodore (Vox Day), 307 Beauty and the Beast, 216 Beauty and the Wookiee, 147 Beckham, David, 265 Beddows, Emma, 101 Belle (Beauty and the Beast), 180, 183 Benedict, Dirk, 203 Benioff, David, 301 Bennett, Lucy, 19, 278–88 Bernardin, Marc, 319 Best, Ahmed, 304 Binks, Jar Jar, 4–5, 137, 141, 160, 212, 227– 28, 283, 285, 304 BioWare, 134 Bird, Brad, 73 Black Hawk Down (film), 89 Black Panther (film), 317, 320 Black Riders, 292 Black Widow, 189, 192, 197, 204 Black-­ish (TV series), 159 #BlackLivesMatter, 251 #BlackStormtrooper, 18, 237–53, 309–10, 313 Blade Runner (film), 16 blaster, 127, 132, 180, 186, 201 “Blood Fugue” (Dexter fan vid), 214–15 bluescreens and greenscreens, 82–83, 87, 91–93 Blum, Steve, 111 Boboltz, Sara, 189, 197–98

Bollas, Christopher, 279–80 Bond, James, 89, 158 Booth, Paul, 16–17, 54, 64, 179–91, 193, 197, 282 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 Box Step Production, 213–14 #BoycottStarWarsVII, 310–12 Boyega, John, 18, 75–77, 238–41, 243, 245, 249–50, 252, 256, 263–66 Boyles, Tom, 33 boys, 109–10, 112–13, 117–18, 121, 180–81, 184, 189, 196–201, 205 Bradley, Bill, 315, 317 Brady Bunch, The (TV series), 75–76 branding, 12, 23–38: convergence and synergy and, 24–26, 54–58; rebranding and, 23, 30–34, 37–38, 80–81, 228; unbranding and, 33–37; Wren and, 115–16, 119 Brave (film), 192 Bray, Adam, 53, 58 Breha Organa, Queen, 182, 187 Brexit, 312, 315 Bridger, Ezra, 47–49, 111, 118, 120 Brin, David, 1 Broady, Matt, 313 Brooker, Will, 85, 89, 93, 170, 244, 246–48, 265, 269, 279, 284, 303 Brooks, Mel, 240 Brown, Douglas, 15, 123–35 Brown, Michael, 250 Brown, Tom, 130 Brown, Tracy, 33, 175 Buckingham, David, 60 Buerkle, Robert, 54 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series), 101 Bulloch, Jeremy, 111 Busch, Jenna, 204 Busse, Kristina, 193 C-­3PO, 30, 33, 47, 64, 75–76, 94, 101, 108, 127, 131, 140–41, 162, 175, 179, 230, 259, 282, 293, 295, 299 C-­3PO (Marvel comic), 131

Index | 379 Caldwell, John T., 25, 70, 81 callout culture, 194–97, 205 Campbell, Joseph, 32, 157 canon, 13, 17–18, 31–32, 187; black Stormtrooper and, 239–51; C-­canon, 50–51; costuming fans and, 221–36; decanonization and, 33–37, 221–22; G-­canon, 39, 46–51; ghosted hierarchies of, 46–52; legitimacy and, 31–32; LEGO and, 53– 67; Lucas vs. Disney and, 290–91; marathon screenings and, 269, 271; memory and, 99–108; new, 45, 49–50, 54; nonhierarchical, 39; out-­of-­sync canonical viewing and, 278, 280, 284–86; reset in 2014, 53–55; T-­canon, 39, 46, 48–49, 51; Vader and, 299; wars, 229, 246 Capaldi, Peter, 203 capitalism, 71–73, 77, 80–81, 137 Capps, Kriston, 240 Captain America: Civil War (film), 320 Captain America merchandise, 189 Captain America: The First Avenger (film), 26 Captain EO (3-­D film), 6, 139 Captain Marvel (film), 320 Captain RibMan, 209, 213 Carballo, Charlie, 241 Cartoon Network, 39, 46, 48 Case, Kim, 118 Cavna, Michael, 317 Cerasi, Chris, 35 Cernovich, Mike, 312–13 CGI, 4, 5, 39, 41, 43–45, 47, 49–52, 69, 82– 83, 85, 87–90, 93–96, 206–7, 230, 254, 284 Chainsaw Reacts, 256–57 Chang, Justin, 153 Chaos Bleeds (video game), 101 Character Encyclopedia (Dolan and Last), 53, 61 character-­based franchises, 49–50, 295, 300 charity work, 233–35, 318 Charles, Eric, 39 Charming, Prince, 210, 217

Chee, Leland, 226 Chewbacca, 28, 30, 33, 39–40, 42, 48, 58, 68, 76, 88, 106–7, 141, 144–45, 158, 161, 164, 179, 216, 257, 259–62, 265–66, 276, 282, 286, 291 Chewbacca Mom, 175 Chiang, Doug, 43, 86 Child, Ben, 186, 301 children: merchandising and, 195; theme parks and, 138; Wren and, 112–20. See also boys; girls Chin, Bertha, 259 Chomsky, Noam, 253 Chopper (droid), 111 Chou, Kevin, 31 Christie, Gwendoline, 75, 200–201 Cinderella, 32, 183, 210, 217–18 Clan Wren, 120 Clarke, M. J., 2, 115 Clinton, Hillary, 312 Clone Army, 101 Clone Troopers, 134, 239, 245–49 Cole, Karen, 196 Cole, Maggie, 196 collaborative fandom, 71–73, 77–81 collectability, 133, 135, 189, 193 comic books, 1, 9, 27, 30, 34, 55, 104, 291 Comic-­Con (San Diego): Force Awakens panel at, 75–76; Force Awakens reel and, 13–14, 68–70, 74–76, 79, 83, 320 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 100 Condis, Megan, 182 Connecting the Galaxy (Rebels Blu-­ray/ DVD), 49 connective digital media, 99–100, 102, 107 continuity, 115–16, 290, 293; -­multiplicity models, 24, 26–30, 33–37 Convergence Culture (Jenkins), 305 Cook, Brendan, 131–32 Coolest Kid Ever, 257 Coppa, Francesca, 214 Corbould, Neil, 89 Cosby Show, The (TV series), 159

380 | Index cosplay, 108, 149, 175–77, 231 costuming fan clubs, 222–36 Couldry, Nick, 280–81 “Creature Featurette” (Rogue One video promotion), 88 crossover texts, 207–20 Crouse, Megan, 50 Cruise, Tom, 9 Cult Collectors (Geraghty), 61, 193 cultural capital, 245–47, 249, 262, 269, 272 cultural Marxism, 308 cultural shame, 248, 280, 282, 287–88 Cummings, Jim, 114 Cushing, Peter, 44, 47, 52, 94–95, 206 CyuBee, Weeteef, 88 da Vinci, Leonardo: Mona Lisa, 156 Daft Punk, 231 Dagoba, 163, 175, 292 Daily Mail, 241 Daily Telegraph, 176 Daley, Brian, 27 Dameron, Poe, 58–59, 66, 106, 154, 159, 198, 241, 263 Daniels, Anthony, 106, 299 Daredevil (TV series), 26 Dark Force Rising (Zahn), 27 Dark Horse comics, 105 Dark Knight, The (film), 35 Dark Universe, 9 Darksaber, 119–21 Darth Plagueis the Wise, 64 DAsObiQuiet, 218 Davies, Cath, 169 Davies, Máire Messenger, 116 Day of the Tentacle (video game), 123 Day, Vox, 307 DC Comics, 9, 23, 61 de Semlyen, Nick, 175 Deadbeat, 315 Death Star, 41, 63, 85–86, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 107, 119, 140, 155, 160–61, 182, 203, 292–93 Death Star (Reaves and Perry), 86 Deila, Ingvild, 94–95, 206

deja.com, 304 Del Rey Publishing, 34 del Toro, Guillermo, 73 Dena, Christy, 101 Dery, Mark, 303 Dexter fan vids, 214–15 Dickey, Josh, 310 digital effects, 43–45, 69, 82–96 Digital Trends, 239 Discoveryland (Paris), 139 discursive clusters, 243–44, 246–49 discursive event, 242–43 Disney: purchase of Lucasfilm, 6–11, 15, 17, 23, 55, 74; decanonization and, 33–37, 221–22; gendered fandom and, 180–82; Marvel and, 32; rebranding and, 30–33, 37, 80–81 Disney carousel, 147 Disney Consumer Products, 56 Disney Digital Media Summit (2008), 174 Disney Expo D23 (2015), 142, 144 Disney Fairies, 56, 200 Disney Infinity 3.0 (video game), 15, 125–26, 128–32, 134–35 Disney Institute, 32 Disney Interactive, 129, 131 Disney on Ice shows, 183 Disney Parks Blog, 145 Disney Princes, 184 Disney Princesses, 16, 56, 109, 112, 148, 179–91, 197, 208–11, 216–19, 227 Disney Research Zurich, 95 Disney stores: online, 189, 196–98, 200; street, 56 Disney theme parks, 6, 15, 33, 56, 130, 136–49, 184, 209; Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge land, 15, 142–44, 147–48 Disney, Walt, 7 Disney XD (channel), 39, 46, 48, 51, 66, 109–10, 112–13, 121 Disneyfication, 147–48, 167, 180, 209–10, 227–28, 249 Disneyland, 6, 15, 33, 138–40, 142, 144–46 Disneyland Paris, 139, 140, 144, 146, 148

Index | 381 Disneyland Paris Today blog, 146–47 Disney-­Lucasfilm Press, 58 Disney-­MGM Studios (later Disney’s Hollywood Studios), 139 diversity, 77–78, 102, 137, 159–60, 192, 238, 205, 251, 316 Dixon, Brandon Victor, 308 Do Rozario, Rebecca-­A nne C., 184, 190 Doctor Strange (film), 320 Doctor Who (TV series), 99, 200, 203, 231 documentary aesthetic, 92–93, 95 Dodonna, General Jan, 94 Dodson, Terry, 186 Dolan, Hannah, 61 Donnellan, Jimmy, 204 Dooku, Sith Lord Count, 31 Dorling Kindersley (DK), 13, 53–58, 63, 66 Down with Disney, 315–18 doxxing, 307, 309 Dr. Martens, 169–70 Driver, Adam, 75, 77–78 droids, 42–44, 111 “Droids in Distress” (Rebel episode), 47 Duffy, Michael, 87 #DumpStarWars, 311–13 Dwyer, Michael D., 163 Eakin, Paul John, 99 Edutopia, 7 Edwards, Gareth, 83, 86–87, 89, 92, 94 Ehrenreich, Alden, 320 8Chan, 306 Eisenberg, Eric, 254–55 Eisner, Michael, 6 Electronic Arts (EA), 56–57, 124–28 Eliot, T. S., 155 Elsa (Frozen), 129, 184, 215, 218–19 “Emo Kylo Ren” (Twitter parody account), 79 Emperor’s New Groove, The, 147 Empire, 48, 59, 89–90, 110, 119, 155, 162, 247, 293, 295, 298–99 Empire Academy, 117 Empire magazine, 175

Empire Strikes Back, The (Episode V), 1, 2, 10, 27, 30, 35–36, 58, 87, 88, 92, 103, 161–63, 187, 269, 271, 273, 283–84, 289, 297; Battlefront and, 127; Force Awakens and, 292; Secret Cinema and, 16, 143, 167–78 Enchanted (film), 36 Endor, 65, 127, 139–40 Episode IX (2019), 10, 227, 296–97, 320–21 Erso, Galen, 86 Erso, Jyn, 86–87, 90, 111, 121, 203, 311–12 Esmeralda (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 214 ESPN, 112 Esquire, 310 Etsy, 202–3 Euripides, 156 Evans, Mel, 317 Everdeen, Katniss, 158 Evil Queen (Snow White and the Seven Dwarves), 190 Ewok King, The, 147 Ewoks, 127, 139, 144, 211, 212, 230, 282 Expanded Universe (EU), 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 17, 21–24, 27–35, 38–39, 46–47, 50–51, 55, 62, 66–67, 86, 97, 104–5, 134–35, 221–31, 264, 298; decanonization of, 21–22, 224–31, 234–35, 246–49, 290–91; Holocron archive, 226 Expanded Universe Movement, 318 Fables (comic books), 218 Facebook, 78, 125, 168, 175, 189, 201, 209–10, 263, 270, 315–17 Faison, Donald, 241, 243 “Fall of Maul, The,” 63 Fallon, Jimmy, 75, 76 familiarity, 32, 36, 59, 157, 175–76, 291 fan art, 108, 182, 186, 207, 209–11 fan fiction, 17, 57, 64, 79, 106, 108, 158, 193, 207, 209, 216 fan films, 106, 108 fan service, 46, 50–52, 153, 158, 163 fan videos, 57, 64, 207, 213–15, 256–66 fanagement, 79, 222, 236

382 | Index fans: activism and, 233–36; boycott campaigns, 308–13; cross-­overs and, 208–11; firstness and, 272–74; gender and, 17, 109, 181–82, 185–86, 189–205, 250, 268; group screenings and, 268–71; Force Awakens promotions and, 68–81, 254–66; paratexts created by, 17, 49, 73, 202–3, 206–20; Star Wars meets Disney and, 137–39, 141, 143–49, 177–78; toxic practices and, 19, 242, 245, 252, 302–21; transformational practices, 16, 167, 169–70, 200, 209 fantagonism, 146–47, 211, 227 Fantastic Four, 138 Favreau, Jon, 302 female characters, 110, 188–92, 195–205, 209–10, 272, 311–12 female fans, 113, 190–91, 193, 199–200, 202, 282 femininity, 116, 184, 186, 188, 190, 196, 199, 202–3 feminists, 190–91, 194–97, 203–5, 306, 308 #Ferguson, 250–51 Ferrell, Will, 135 Fett, Boba, 28, 106–7, 111, 116, 124, 144, 174, 176, 191, 231 Fett, Jango, 111, 114, 116, 239, 243, 245–47 Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, 212 Filoni, Dave, 43, 45, 50 Final Fantasy franchise, 130 Finn, 58, 141, 154, 157–59, 192, 198, 202, 256–57, 263, 265, 286, 296 First Order, 66, 154, 159, 200, 293–94, 298 firstness, 272–74 Fisher, Carrie, 1–2, 42–44, 50, 52, 76, 94, 106, 109, 158, 183, 185–86, 206–7, 210, 259 Fiske, John, 262 501st Legion, 17, 222–23, 232–33 fixed objectifications, 98, 102 Flame Wars (Dery), 303 Flanagan, Martin, 132 Flash Gordon franchise, 155 Fleming, Dan, 53

Flueckiger, Barbara, 91 Forbes, 181, 194, 206 Force, 14–15, 32, 110, 118–22, 134, 159, 161, 203, 217–18, 291 Force Awakens, The (Episode VII), 8, 11, 17– 19, 31, 34, 102, 106, 124, 207, 222, 278, 299, 301–2, 320; advance screenings, 272–75; animated shorts and, 66; #BlackStormtrooper and, 237–53; box office, 154, 311, 312–13; canon and, 222–36; Comic-­Con reel, 68, 69–70, 74–75; critical responses, 15–16, 153–65; derivative nature of, 292– 95; Disney theme parks and, 144, 146; diversity and, 18, 192; DVD/Blu-­ray, 126; fan boycotts and, 309–11; fan reaction videos, 256–59, 261; fan responses to, 215, 267–77, 283, 285–87; franchise reawakening and, 289–98; gender and diversity and, 17, 77–78, 109, 111, 113, 192; gender and merchandise and, 184, 189, 191–205; legitimacy and, 74–78; LEGO books and, 53, 57–59, 66; Leia and, 179, 183–85, 187–88, 191; marathon group screenings and, 267–72; Marvel comics and, 30; myth and legend and, 37; nostalgia and, 162–65; novels and, 106; promotions and, 13–14, 68–81, 169; repetition vs. originality and, 105, 153–65; SNL Undercover Boss and, 78–80; spoilers and, 275–77; star reaction videos, 262–66; Star Tours ride and, 141; trailers, 18, 77, 203, 254–66, 320; transitional piece, 298; video games and, 124–26, 128, 131–35; world-­building and, 19, 294–95, 297, 299–300 Force Unleashed, The (console game), 86 #ForceFriday, 200 #ForceOutHate, 318 Ford, Harrison, 1, 2, 42, 76, 106, 158, 185, 259–61, 264, 276, 320 Ford, John, 155 forward-­narrative trajectory, 27–30, 32, 295–96 Foster, Alan Dean, 10, 55, 103

Index | 383 Foucault, Michel, 71, 302 4Chan, 306, 310 Fox Entertainment, 9, 61, 181 franchise fatigue, 302, 320–21 Francoeur, Betsy, 32 Frankenstein (TV series), 208 Freeman, Matthew, 12, 23–38, 34, 46, 100, 226 Freeman, Stuart, 88 French New Wave, 83 Frennier, Casey, 210–13 fresne, 216–18 Friends (TV series), 282 Frodo, 157, 292, 293 Frollo, Judge Claude, 214 Frozen (film), 36, 129–30, 146, 192, 215, 218–19 Furious 7 (film), 154, 198 Game of Thrones (TV series), 255, 301 #Gamergate, 306–9 Gandalf, 157, 292 Garde-­Hansen, Joanne, 65 Garner, Ross, 14–15, 109–22 Gattor Martin, 257, 265 geek culture, 73, 75, 240, 248 Gellar, Sarah Michelle, 122 gender, 14–15, 17–18, 77, 109–22, 137, 159–60, 179–205, 217, 268, 282–83, 287 gender-­swapping, 203, 216 generational object, 278–82, 287–88 Genette, Gérard, 206 Geraghty, Lincoln, 13, 53–67, 179, 189, 193, 200 Gerrera, Saw, 45, 47, 51, 88 Ghost, The (Rebel freighter), 111, 119, 122 Ghost VFX, 90 Ghostbusters (film), 193 Giddens, Anthony, 225 Gilbert, Jeremy, 72 girls, 112, 121, 180–81, 184, 189–90, 196–201, 282 Giroux, Henry, 183

Godfather II (film), 158 Golbeck, Jennifer, 258 Golden, Christie, 31 Goldman, Katie, 196 Gollum, 293 Gomez, Michelle, 203 Good Morning America (TV series), 184 Google Chrome, 125 Gray, Jonathan, 15–16, 19, 53, 74–75, 102–3, 153–65, 174, 187–88, 206–8, 212, 214–15, 217, 220, 225, 229, 233, 239, 259, 282 Gray, Taylor, 111 Greedo, 4 Greene, Andy, 254 Guardian, 28, 31, 171, 173, 186, 301, 316, 317, 318 Guardians of the Galaxy (film), 320 Guardians of the Galaxy (ride), 138, 146 Guide to the Dark Side (Lipkowitz), 53 Gullet, Bor, 88–89 Gungans, 141, 160 Gunn, James, 73 Halbwachs, Maurice, 98, 99 Halo (video game), 127 Hamill, Mark, 1, 10, 42, 68, 69, 83, 106, 163, 259, 296 Hamilton (Broadway musical), 308 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 156 “Han Shot First” T-­shirts, 4 The Han Solo Adventures, trilogy (Daley), 27 haptic fandom, 136, 143–44 Hardt, Michael, 72 Harman, Sarah, 212 Harris, Eric, 304 Harry Potter Alliance, 233 Harry Potter franchise, 61, 216 Harvey, Colin B., 14, 38, 39–40, 54, 97–108, 225 Harvey, Zak, 97, 104, 106–7 Hasbro, 181, 184, 191, 195, 197 #Hashtag Publics (Rambukkana), 242

384 | Index Hassler-­Forest, Dan, 13–14, 68–81 Hastie, Amelie, 275 Haunted Mansion, 147 Havens, Timothy, 113 Hawkes, Rebecca, 241 Hawkeye, 189 Heir to the Empire trilogy, (Zahn), 3, 27, 50, 55, 67 Henley, Drewe, 92 Henry, Guy, 94–95, 206 Hentges, Beth, 118 Herman, Edward, 253 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell), 157 Heroic Girls, 204 hero’s journey, 32, 268 heteronormative structures, 17, 102, 199, 202–3, 205 Hickel, Hal, 94–95 Hidden Fortress, The (film), 155 High School Musical franchise, 56–57 Hills, Matt, 12–13, 29, 33, 39–52, 66, 75, 79, 110, 116, 129, 137, 222, 225, 231, 245, 248, 275, 281 Hilton, Perez, 198 Holiday Special (TV show), 12, 39–45, 106–7, 291 Holland, Luke, 318 Hollywood Reporter, 310, 312, 319 Holmes, Jonathan, 176 Holmes, Sherlock, 100 Holt, Jennifer, 55 homophobia, 238, 309 Honey I Shrunk the Kids franchise, 139 Hong Kong Disneyland, 144 Horkheimer, Max, 157 Hoskins, Andrew, 14, 97, 99, 106, 108 Hoth, 65, 92, 127, 141 How I Met Your Mother (TV series), 250 Howard, Ron, 320 Huffington Post, 180, 259, 315, 317 Hugo Awards, 250, 307 Hulk merchandise, 189

Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (film), 214 Hunchback of the Jedi Temple, The, 147 Hunger Games: Catching Fire (film), 195 Hunger Games franchise, 195, 258 Hux, General, 160 Hypable, 199 Hyperspace Mountain, 146, 148 “I am the Rebel Spy” pin badge, 142 I Dream of Jeannie (TV series), 208 “I only date Rebels” nightwear, 199 Iger, Robert, 8, 109–10, 123, 138, 239, 312 immaterial labor, 13, 70–73, 78, 80 immersion, 15, 142–44, 167–69, 172, 174, 176–77 Imperial Star Destroyer, 90 Inch, Rob, 89 Independent, 172 Indiana Jones franchise, 6, 30, 61, 123, 139, 180 Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), 6, 84, 87, 90–95, 123, 181, 206 Inquisitor, The, 119, 122 Instagram, 263 intellichick, 210 International Business Times, 317 International Radio and Television Society, 174 intertextuality, 208, 210, 214, 216, 218 Into the Woods (film), 36 Iraq War, 260 Iron Man (film), 26, 138 Iron Man (game), 132 Iron Man merchandise, 189 Isaac, Oscar, 75–77, 241 Isaacs, Jason, 119 It (film), 307–8 Jabba the Hutt, 4, 65 Jackson, Michael, 139 Jackson, Peter, 73, 75 Jade, Mara, 175 Jafar Wars, 206–20

Index | 385 Jakku, 141, 154, 202, 294 Jameson, Frederic, 6 Jarrus, Kanan, 47–48, 111, 120, 122 Jasmine (Aladdin), 183 Jaxxon, 291 Jedha City, 87–89 Jedi, 14, 28, 48, 64, 101, 108, 110–11, 120, 122, 133, 144, 155, 163, 175–76, 213, 219, 247, 263, 292, 296–97, 299 Jedi Dawn (book), 86 Jeffersons, The (TV series), 159 Jenkins, Henry, 4, 24–29, 33, 37, 55, 57–58, 62, 71, 100–102, 108, 134, 187, 194, 208, 215, 237, 268, 285, 304–5 John Carter (film), 228 Johnson, Catherine, 25 Johnson, Derek, 32, 41, 54, 56, 62, 196, 199– 200, 203 Johnson, Rian, 301, 319 Johnston, Joe, 86 Johnston, Keith, 254–55 Joker, 35 Jones, Bethan, 17, 185, 206–20, 249 Jones, Bruce, 30, 32, 38 Jones, Felicity, 86, 311 Jones, James Earl, 44, 122, 299 Jones, Leisha, 258 “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens” strategy, 58–59, 62, 106 Jowett, Lorna, 17, 118, 189–90, 192–205, 282 Jurassic World (film), 154, 198 K-­2SO, 88 Kael, Pauline, 6 Kain, Erik, 184 Kamen, Matt, 310 Kamino, 245, 247 Kaminski, Michael, 2 Kanata, Maz, 154, 162–63, 274, 294 Kaplan, Deborah, 217, 219 Kasdan, Lawrence, 153, 290, 297 Kashyyyk, 106, 294 Katz, Brandon, 318

Kennedy, Helen, 168, 170, 177 Kennedy, Julia, 256–57 Kennedy, Kathleen, 8–11, 94, 205, 226 Kenner action figures, 102, 107–8 Kenobi, Obi-­Wan, 2, 3, 35, 51, 63, 147, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 175, 202, 219, 245, 292 Kent, Michelle, 17–18, 221–36 Kidd, Jenny, 98 Kies, Bridget, 18, 267–77 Kinder, Marsha, 57, 100 Kinect Star Wars (video game), 133 King, Stephen, 307 Kingdom Hearts (video games), 130 Kirkpatrick, Ellen, 285 kitbashing, 84, 90–91 Kligler-­Vilenchik, Neta, 235 Klinger, Barbara, 65 Klink, Madeline, 212 Knight, Christian, 210 Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) (video game), 105, 133–34 Knoll, John, 83, 86, 90–91, 93–94, 206 Krämer, Peter, 49, 193–94 Kristoff (Frozen), 215 Krzywinska, Tanya, 124 Kurosawa, Akira, 155 Kurtz, Benjamin W. L. Derhy, 25 Kyle, Tariq, 199 Lamont, Neil, 89 Lando, 30 Lane, Carly, 203–4 Lange, Patricia, 258 Lapowsky, Issie, 316 Larsen, Katherine, 282 Last Command, The (Zahn), 27 Last Jedi, The (Episode VIII), 11, 19, 35, 141, 289, 296–98, 302, 314–20; comic adaptation, 30 Last, Shari, 61 Lauwaert, Maaike, 60 Ledger, Heath, 35 Lee, Benjamin, 171–72

386 | Index “Legacy” (Rebels episode), 117 “Legacy of Mandalore” (Rebels episode), 119–20 Legends novels, 51 Legion of Leia, 195, 204 legitimacy, 31, 70, 74–78 LEGO, 53–67 LEGO Black Stormtrooper parodies, 241, 243 LEGO Dimensions line, 129 LEGO Movie, The, 135 LEGO Star Wars, 13, 53–67, 104–5, 107–8; books, 13, 53–67; Days, 167; minifigures, 53, 57, 61–65, 67; sets, 45, 54, 64, 67, 104; website, 66 LEGO Star Wars in 100 Scenes (Lipkowitz), 53–54, 62–65, 66 LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens (video game), 15, 126, 131–32 LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game, 104–5, 124 LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (video game), 60 Lehtimäki, Vesa, 53, 64–65 Leia Organa, Princess/General, 16–17, 28, 30, 33, 35, 43–44, 58, 85–86, 103, 109, 119, 127, 141, 144, 148, 155, 160–64, 213, 219, 230, 259, 284; Disney Princesses and, 179–91, 208–11, 227; Force Awakens and, 179, 185–86, 192, 290, 293–94; Last Jedi and, 296; merchandise and, 188–91, 198–99, 202, 282; Rebels and, 49–50; Rogue One and, 94–96, 206 Leonis, Zare, 246 Let It Go, You Must (fan fic), 218–19 licensing, 7, 27–29, 31, 39–40, 57, 130–31 lightsabers, 125, 132–33, 144, 163–64, 176, 263–65, 282, 291, 297, 299 Lightyear, Buzz, 130 Lindelof, Damon, 174 Lion King, The (musical), 213 Lipkowitz, Daniel, 53 Little Mermaid, The (film), 213 LiveJournal, 212

Livingstone, Andrew, 132 Lone Ranger, 61 Look Up Table (LUT), 91 Looper, 153, 160 Lord of the Rings films, 41, 75, 216, 270, 273, 292–93 Lord, Phil, 319 Los Angeles Times, 304 Lost (TV series), 174, 212 Lucas, George, 1–4, 23, 26, 66, 74, 182; aesthetics and realism and, 83, 86–87, 89, 92–93; amount of production by, 302; Campbell and, 157, 182; Disney and, 6–11, 31, 58, 136, 139, 140; EU and, 29, 39, 103, 291; fans and, 226–28, 265; films envisioned by, 9–10, 289–90; Force Awakens and, 10, 290; gender and, 109; Leia and, 182–83; world-­building and, 295–97 Lucas Licensing, 226 LucasArts, 6, 15, 123–24, 126, 133–34 Lucasfilm, 6–11, 13, 15, 17, 23, 30, 46, 55, 74, 109–10, 113, 123, 124, 130, 134, 136–39, 147, 177–81, 184–85, 197, 207–36, 245, 320–21 Lucasfilm Story Group (LSG), 30, 46, 51, 102, 106, 226–27, 248–49 Luna, Diego, 87 Lyons, Matthew, 306 MacInnes, Angus, 92 Mad Max: Fury Road (film), 203 Madame Tussauds, 143, 167 Magic Kingdom, 139 Main Street, U.S.A., 130 male fans, 112–13, 189, 193, 198–99, 203–4, 250 Maleficent (film), 36–37 Mandalorian Mercs, 223 Mandalorians, 111–12, 114–20 Maniac Mansion (video game), 123 Mansbach, Claire, 196, 198–200 Marshall, Vanessa, 111 Marvel, 9, 26, 32, 34, 58, 61, 320–21; Disney acquisition of, 112, 123, 138, 181, 186, 197; Disney theme parks and, 138; films and,

Index | 387 228; gender and 181, 191–92, 196–97; Universal Studios and, 138; video games and, 125, 130 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), 9, 26, 74, 132, 138, 181, 189, 258, 300, 320 Marvel Comics, 16, 30, 33, 35–36, 102–3, 105–7, 179, 186–88, 300 Marvel Super Hero Island, 138 Mary Sue, 195–96, 201, 203–4 masculinity, 181, 196 Mashable, 279, 310 mash-­up, 78–79, 208. See also crossover texts Mass Effect game series, 134 Massanari, Adrienne, 238 Matrix franchise, 101 Mattel, 56–57, 180, 181 Maul, Darth, 51, 63, 119, 144, 299 Mayhew, Peter, 68–69, 259 #MayTheForceBeWithKatie, 199 McDermott, Mark, 237 McGregor, Ewan, 245 McKenny, Mike, 132 McMillan, Graeme, 310 McQuarrie, Ralph, 44, 48, 86, 90 Mebberson, Amy, 209–10 media convergence, 24–26, 30, 37, 55, 73 Meet Joe Black (film), 254 memory, 14, 35–38, 60, 65, 97–108, 163 merchandising, 1, 8, 12, 80, 183–84, 188–205, 287; Disney theme parks and, 147–48; overdesign and, 41–42; screen-­accuracy and, 45 Merida (Brave), 183, 184, 191, 209–10 Metro reviews, 171, 317 Middleton, Jason, 257–60, 265 Mikkelsen, Lars, 115 Mikkelsen, Mads, 86 military homecoming videos, 260–61 Millennium Falcon, 42, 63, 103, 127–28, 130, 142–43, 164, 179, 189, 197, 240, 256–57, 260, 267, 291, 295 Miller, Chris, 319–20 Miller, Martin, 282

Milne, Graham, 259–60 Milner, Ryan, 243 Minecraft (video game), 61, 135 misogyny, 194, 302, 317 Mittell, Jason, 54, 61, 101, 212, 213 Monaco, Jeanette, 281 Monaco, Paul, 163 Mondello, Bob, 275 Monopoly (Force Awakens edition), 189, 197–98 Mooney, Andy, 183 Moore, Roger, 154 Morning Edition (NPR show), 275 Moroff, 88 Morrison, Temuera, 111, 239–40, 245 Mos Eisley Cantina, 4, 87–88, 102, 108, 133, 155, 175, 210, 292, 294 Mothma, Mon, 87, 94 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 195, 198 Moulton, Carter, 273 Movie Nation website, 154 Mulan, 183, 186, 209–10 multiplayer online games (MMOG), 124, 133–35 Mummy, The (film), 9 Muppets franchise, 9, 181, 300 Murdoch, Rupert, 181 Muschietti, Andy, 307 music, 43, 48, 75–77, 101, 127, 213–14, 283, 297 My Little Pony line, 181, 185 myth, 16, 24, 36–38, 62, 157, 163 Naboo, 63, 141, 182, 227, 294 Neely, Eric, 260 Negri, Antonio, 72 Neimoidians, 5, 216–17, 304 neoliberalism, 71–72, 77, 251 NeonicFilm1138, 215 Nerdsmerized, 257, 265 Netflix, 9, 46, 288 Neubauer, Doug, 104 “Never Seen Star Wars” (BBC series), 279

388 | Index new culture wars, 19, 302, 305–6, 308–9, 317–18 New Hope, A (Episode IV, first Star Wars film), 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9–10, 15, 27, 30, 35, 44, 58, 102, 108, 182, 187, 202–3, 228, 276, 280, 283, 289, 297; Force Awakens and, 128, 154–55, 157–60, 162–63, 165, 185, 188, 292–94; Holiday Special and, 40, 42; Rebels and, 47, 49, 51, 110; Rogue One and, 50, 83–96; special effects and, 40–41, 45 New York Times, 190, 316, 317 Nickelodeon, 112 Nightmare Before Christmas, The (film), 130 Nintendo amiibo (video games), 129 North, Dan, 87, 246 nostalgia, 32–33, 36–37, 54, 61, 69, 74, 76–77, 84–85, 92, 96, 127, 132, 135, 153–54, 162–65, 225, 284 novels, 1–3, 27–28, 31, 34, 55, 103–4, 106 NPR, 86, 275 Nyong’o, Lupita, 75, 274 Obama, Barack, 305 Obi-­Wan and Anakin (Marvel comic), 30, 106 Observer, 318 O’Hehir, Andrew, 153, 159 Ohnaka, Hondo, 114 Olaf (Frozen), 130 Old Republic, The (role-­playing game), 134–35 Once Upon a Time (TV series), 130 O’Neil, Luke, 310–11 Orcs, 292 Order 66, 101 O’Reilly, Bill, 185–86 Orenstein, Peggy, 183, 190 Organa, Bail, 182, 187, 210 orienting paratexts, 212–15 original film trilogy, 23, 27, 46, 102, 167, 182, 230, 262, 265, 268, 276, 283–86; Force Awakens and, 68–69, 74–78, 83, 185, 191, 237, 240, 291–94; Lord of the Rings and, 292–93; marathon screenings of,

269–72; narrative trajectory and, 30, 33; nostalgia and, 13, 33, 162; post-­Lucas films and, 296; prequel vs., 285–86, 299; Rebels and, 47, 51; Rogue One and, 83–85, 88–89; Star Tours ride and, 140, 141; toys and memory of, 103–4; video games and, 127–28, 131; world-­building and, 297 originality, 16, 154–58, 164–65 Orrelios, General Zeb, 111 #OscarsSoWhite, 192 out-­of-­sync canonical viewing, 19, 278, 280, 284–88 overdesign, 41–45, 51 overlays, 146, 148 Owen, Uncle, 163 Palpatine, Emperor, 64, 210, 214, 218, 219 Parkin, Lance, 99–100 Parramore, 183, 185 participatory culture, 71–73, 79–81, 183, 303, 305 pastiche, 153, 155 patriarchal discourses, 117–22, 182, 190–91, 193 Paul, Russell, 90–91 Peach, Princess, 211 Pegg, Simon, 4–5, 69 Pence, Mike, 308 Penley, Constance, 268 Perreault, Gregory P., 242 Perrone, Michael, 153 Pett, Emma, 16, 167–78 Phantom Menace, The (Episode I), 4–5, 5, 11, 30, 160, 165, 221, 244, 245, 246, 270, 273, 278, 299, 303; fan backlash and, 285, 303–4, 314; LEGO and, 60, 63; trailers, 254–55; video games and, 133 Phasma, Captain, 17, 192, 193, 200–202, 204 Phillips, Andrea, 101 Phillips, Forrest, 285 Phillips, Tom, 18, 254–66 Phillips, Whitney, 243 Phoenix Squadron, 116, 120 Pirates of the Caribbean series, 61

Index | 389 Pixar Animation, 9, 123, 181 PixelTalk, 261 Plastic Reality (Turnock), 40 Playing Fans (Booth), 64 Pocahontas, 183, 186 “Pocket Princesses No. 36” (Mebberson), 209 Poe Dameron (Marvel comic), 30 political correctness (PC), 306–7, 309–10, 316, 318 Polygon, 315 Porter, Lynette, 269 Portman, Natalie, 119, 245 Posobiec, Jack, 312, 313 possible worlds, 24, 33–38 postmodernism, 36–38, 137, 155 Potter, Harry, 158 Preece, Jennifer, 258 prequel film trilogy, 3–5, 11, 13, 30, 44, 46, 51, 57, 69, 76, 86, 87, 105, 128, 137, 170, 182, 202, 221, 227, 237, 239, 262, 275, 283–86; Darth Vader arc and, 289; disappointment in, 285–86, 320; fan crossovers and, 211–15; marathon screenings and, 270–71; midnight releases and, 273; original trilogy vs., 285–86, 299; Star Tours ride and, 140–41 presidential election of 2016, 250–51, 311–13, 315 Prevue magazine, 2 Primark, 199 Prince, Stephen, 95 “Princess and the Governor, The” (Blu-­ray special feature), 94 Princess Leia (Marvel five-­issue comic), 16–17, 179, 186–88, 191 Prinze, Freddie, Jr., 111 Proctor, William, 11, 18, 19, 26, 28, 32, 34, 46, 147, 192, 223–24, 226–27, 229, 237–53, 259, 261, 266, 301–21 Propp, Vladimir, 156–57 Purse, Lisa, 118 Quora website, 269

R2-­D2, 33, 47, 75, 86, 94, 101, 108, 127, 155, 162, 202, 209, 230, 259, 294, 299 #RaceFail, 250 racial minorities, 5, 18, 112, 115, 159–60, 189–90 racism, 238–53, 302, 304, 309–10, 317 Raddus, Admiral, 88 Radio Times, 171, 176 Rambukkana, Nathan, 241–42, 250–51 Rancor, 62 Raney, Arthur A., 120 Rapunzel (Tangled), 130, 183, 209–10 Rathtars, 131 Reaction Man, 257 Reading, Anna, 101 realism, 83–85, 87–89, 92–96 Rebel Alliance, 59, 84, 86–87, 111, 140, 162, 169, 293 Rebel Legion (RL), 17, 222–23, 233 Rebel spy, 140–42 Rebellion, 111, 155, 187–88 Rebels, 46–54, 63, 86, 89–90, 109–22, 128, 131, 312 Rebels Recon (behind-­the-­scenes extra), 50 #RebelX, 168 Reddit, 240, 244, 275, 306–7 Redmond, Sean, 263 Reed, Jennifer, 309 reference books, 53–54, 57–58 regime of truth, 19, 302, 308–11, 317–18, 321 Rehak, Bob, 87 Ren, Kylo, 66, 78–79, 105, 144–45, 154, 157–58, 160–64, 189, 198–202, 215, 256, 263, 265, 267, 276, 286, 292–93, 296, 298–99 repetition, 16, 105, 153–63 Republic, 186, 294 Republic Commando video game, 134 Resistance, 154, 293 “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/ Culture’ ” (Jenkins), 305 Return of the Jedi (Episode VI), 1, 3, 19, 23, 27–28, 31–32, 50, 58, 102, 106, 139, 160, 162, 186, 202, 211, 230, 270, 271, 285, 289;

390 | Index Return of the Jedi (Episode VI) (cont.) Disney theme parks and, 147; EU and, 34; Force Awakens and, 293; Last Jedi and, 296; Rogue One and, 87–88 reunion videos, 260–61, 266 Revenge of the Sith (Episode III), 1, 5, 31, 44, 47, 49, 64, 86, 245, 294 Rex, 140 Rey, 17, 37, 58–59, 109, 111, 121, 129, 141, 154, 157–60, 162–63, 256, 263–64, 268, 272, 286, 287, 294, 296, 311; merchandising and, 184, 189, 192–205 Ridley, Daisy, 75–76, 109, 192, 256, 263–64, 266, 268, 311 Riggall, Fabien, 177 Rinzler, J. W., 9, 11 “Rise of the Old Masters” (Rebels episode), 119, 122 Rivera, Joshua, 318 Roberts, Adam, 278, 280 Roffman, Howard, 26 RogerEbert.com, 153 Rogers, Adam, 318–19 Rogue One (film), 11, 14, 43–47, 50–52, 111, 113, 144, 203, 206, 207, 221, 320; aesthetics of, 82–87, 89, 91–96; boycott and, 311–13; franchise reawakening and, 289, 291, 293, 296–97, 299 Rook, Bodhi, 88–89 Rose, Steven, 99 Rosenberg, Adam, 1 Ross, Sharon Marie, 49 Rotman, Dana, 258 Rotruck, Amie Rose, 279 Rotten Tomatoes, 314–17 Rozsa, Matthew, 204, 240 Ruddock, Andy, 233 runDisney, 145 Rusolu, Jay, 290 Sackhoff, Katee, 203 sad puppies, 50–51, 307–8 Salon, 153, 204, 310

Samutina, Natalia, 209, 219–20 Sand, Jadon, 135 Sandvoss, Cornel, 258 Sarkeesian, Anita, 307 Saturday Night Live (SNL), 13, 70, 78–81 Sauron, 292 Saving Private Ryan (film), 89 Scanlan, Neal, 87–88 Scar (The Lion King), 213 Scarlet Witch, 197 Schmidt, Eric, 301 Science Fiction Museum, 90 Sciretta, Peter, 185 Scolari, Carlos A., 23, 37 Scott, Ridley, 16 Season of the Force, 146 Secret Cinema, 16, 143, 167–78 Sencio, Bill, 200 sequel film trilogy, 9–10, 110, 192, 221, 249, 262; originality and, 157–58; reawakening of franchise with, 289–300 Serafino, Jason, 28, 31 Sesame Street, 216 sexism, 185–86, 194, 309, 317, 238 sexuality, 137, 192, 196 Shakespeare, William, 156 Shamma, David, 269 Shan, Bastila, 134 Shapiro, Shelly, 34 Shigetani, Michael, 210 Shklovsky, Viktor, 156 Shoard, Catherine, 317 Shone, Tom, 244 “Shroud of Darkness” (Rebels episode), 49 Sidious, Darth, 213 Siege, The (film), 254 Siegel, Tatiana, 312 Silman, Anna, 310 Silvestri, Lisa, 260–61 Simpsons franchise, 295 Sircar, Tiya, 110 Sith Lords, 53, 217, 297 Sith’s Rule of Two, 165

Index | 391 Skellington, Jack, 130 skylenox, 260 Skype, 269 Skywalker, Anakin (later Darth Vader), 2, 48, 64, 162, 164, 182, 203, 213–14, 271, 285, 289, 297, 299 Skywalker, Luke, 2–3, 27–28, 30, 32–33, 37, 58–49, 62, 82–83, 86, 103, 107–8, 119, 128, 144, 155, 157–59, 161–63, 182, 187, 202–3, 213–14, 259, 272, 274; Darth Vader and, 284, 289; Force Awakens and, 290, 292– 94; Last Jedi and death of, 296; Lord of the Rings and, 292–93 Skywalker Ranch archives, 92 Slant, 153 Slash Film, 185, 290, 316 Sleeping Beauty (film), 36–37 Small Scenes from a Big Galaxy (Lehtimäki), 53–54, 64–65, 66 Smith, Clarissa, 256, 257 Smith, Sidonie, 99 Snaggletooth, 107–8 Snoke, 154, 160, 257, 293 Snow White, 180, 183–84, 190, 209–10, 216–18 Snowtrooper, 65 social justice warriors, 308, 319 social media, 78, 79, 101, 169, 194–95, 201, 205, 242, 245, 251–53, 256, 258, 263, 303, 317 Solo: A Star Wars Story (film), 11, 19, 221, 289, 291, 293, 296, 297, 299–300; box office, 302, 319–21 Solo, Han, 4, 27–28, 30, 33, 35, 58, 103, 127, 131, 141, 154–55, 157–59, 161–64, 175, 179, 182–83, 185, 187, 199, 202–3, 230, 259–68, 284, 320; death of, 18, 105, 157–58, 161–62, 164, 185, 267–68, 272, 276–77, 286, 292–93 Sophocles, 156 Sopranos, The (TV series), 281 Space Balls (film), 240 Space Mountain, 145–46

Spaced (TV series), 5, 283 Spark of Rebellion (Rebels episode), 48 special effects (SFX), 40–43, 45, 51–52, 83–89, 92, 96 Spider-­Man: Far from Home (film), 320 Spider-­Man: Homecoming (film), 320 Spielberg, Steven, 6 Spinoza, Baruch, 98–99 Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (Foster), 55, 103, 105 spoilers, 18, 63, 268, 272–77, 281–82, 286 Sprich, Robert, 282 Stanton, Stephen, 47 Star Destroyer, 85, 140, 263, 295 Star Princesses of Long Ago and Far Away (fresne), 216–18 Star Raiders (computer game), 103–4 Star Tours (ride, 1987–2010), 6, 15, 93, 136, 139–40, 144, 147–48 Star Tours: The Adventures Continue (ride, 2011-­present), 15, 136, 140–42, 144, 148 Star Trek franchise, 41, 104, 268–69, 276, 293 Star Wars (Japanese video game, 1987), 133 Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know (Bray), 53, 58 Star Wars: Aftermath (Wendig), 102 Star Wars Anti-­Disney Pro-­Canon (Facebook page), 316–17 Star Wars Arcade Game (predigital), 103 Star Wars: Battlefront (video game), 15, 125–28 Star Wars Battlefront II (video game), 126, 132, 135, 246–47 Star Wars Celebration: 2016 (London), 50, 82, 87, 143; 2017 (Orlando), 142–43, 145 Star Wars: Dark Disciple (Golden), 31 Star Wars: Dark Forces (computer game), 86 Star Wars: Darth Vader (comic books), 299 “Star Wars Disney Musical—Part 1 & 2” (Box Step Productions), 213

392 | Index “Star Wars: Episode VII Trailer (Disney Frozen Version)” (Bad Mosquito), 215 “Star Wars: Episode VII Trailer (Disney Toy Story Version)” (Bad Mosquito), 215 Star Wars: Force Collection (video game), 133 Star Wars Galactic Nights, 145 Star Wars Galaxies (video game, 2003), 133 Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (video game, 2015), 133 Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park land, 15, 142–44, 147–48 Star Wars Identities (exhibit), 143 Star Wars: Insurrection (mobile game), 132 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (video game), 124 Star Wars Launch Bay attraction, 144–45 Star Wars Legends, 12, 23, 33–34, 47, 50, 86, 105, 221, 229–30. See also Expanded Universe Star Wars Light Side Races, 145–46 Star Wars Lightsaber Escape (browser game), 125 Star Wars Rebels (Disney XD CGI-­ animated TV series), 28, 39–41, 43–52, 67, 105, 109–22, 246, 293, 299; Disney theme parks and, 144; wiki, 246–47 Star Wars: Republic Commando (video game), 124 Star Wars Resistance (anime series), 302 Star Wars: Shattered Empire (comic), 59 Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Cartoon Network, CGI animated TV series), 1, 3, 5, 12, 26–27, 31, 39, 41, 43–49, 51, 53–54, 63, 88, 104, 106, 124, 221, 293, 296, 301 Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer— Frozen Edition” (NeonicFilm), 215 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (video game), 124 Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures (shorts), 66 Star Wars: The Old Republic (online game), 124

Star Wars: The Resistance Rises (shorts), 66 Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition (1997), 4, 44, 82, 86, 89–90, 273, 284, 291 Star Wars: Underworld (live-­action TV series), 1 Star Wars: Uprising (mobile game), 31 Star Wars website, 226 Star Wars Weekends, 144–45, 149 Star Wars wiki, 246 Star Wars: X-­Wing (computer game), 86 Star Wars YouTube channel, 88 Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), 203 Starkiller Base, 131, 154, 159, 160–61, 292, 293, 294 Starlog, 29 StarWars.com, 9, 11 #StarWarsVirgin, 279 Stein, Louisa Ellen, 65 Stephens, Isaiah, 186 Steranko, Jim, 2 Stormtroopers, 42, 44, 68, 77, 82, 86–87, 89, 105, 108, 121, 128, 144–45, 147, 161, 200–201, 256, 292–93; #BlackStormtrooper and, 237–53; Disney Princesses as, 186 Stranger Things (TV series), 288 subcultural branding, 16, 167–70, 174, 177–78 subcultural capital, 141, 167, 170, 211–12, 249 Suddath, Claire, 180, 181 Super Mario Brothers (video games), 211 Supernatural (TV series), 275, 282 Svonkin, Craig, 7 Sweet, Derek, 48 SyFy.com, 314 Syndulla, Hera, 111 synergy, 12, 55–56, 138, 147–48, 168 synthespians, 94–96 Takodana, 129, 294 Talpini warriors, 88 Tangled (film), 36, 130 Tano, Ahsoka (later Fulcrum), 48–50, 122

Index | 393 Target, 189, 197 Tarkin, Grand Moff, 44, 47, 85, 94–96, 155, 163, 206 Tatooine, 65, 85, 87, 89, 107, 127, 141, 143, 155, 159, 203, 213, 294 Taylor, Chris, 279, 281 Taylor, J., 301 Tech Times, 28 Tekka, Lor San, 160 Telegraph, 241 “Tell No One” brand, 167–68 Telotte, J. P., 274 Temperton, James, 171–72 Tesco “Fun Gifts for Boys,” 195–96 TheForce.net fan site, 4, 147 Thelma and Louise (film), 159 ThinkGeek online store, 200 Third Floor, The, 93 1313 (video game), 124, 134 Thomas, Craig, 250 Thompson, Kristin, 56 Thor: Ragnarok (film), 320 Thrawn, Grand Admiral, 28, 50–51, 67, 105, 115 Thrawn Trilogy, The (Zahn), 3, 27, 50, 105 Tiana (The Princess and the Frog), 183, 186, 209–10 TIE fighters, 48, 116, 140 tie-­ins, 57–58, 102–3 Tikal National Park, 90 Time, 2, 10 Time Warner, 56 Times of London, 28 Tinker Belle, 183 Titan Books, 55 Tokyo Disneyland, 138–40 Tomkins, Silvan, 280 Tomorrowland, 139 Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon medley, 13, 70, 75–79, 81, 264 Tower of Terror (ride), 146 Toy Story (film), 130, 139, 215 Toy Story Etch-­A-­Sketch, 200

Toydarians, 304 toys, 1, 3, 53–57, 59–61, 103, 282; gendered, 181–85, 188–89, 191, 196–205, 282, 287; nostalgia and, 225, 284 Toys “R” Us, 189, 197 toys-­to-­l ife, 125, 129–30, 135 Trade Federation, 160, 203, 217 Tran, Kelly Marie, 317, 319 transitional object, 225, 235, 248, 259, 262, 302 transmedia economy, 12, 32, 51 transmedia memory, 51, 101 transmedia spectacle, TV and, 39–52 transmedia storytelling, 13, 25–26, 51, 57, 100, 101, 101–2, 187 transmedia world-­building, 115–16 transownership storytelling, 13, 39–52, 66 Traveller’s Tales, 104, 126 “Trials of the Darksaber” (Rebels episode), 119–20 trolling, 252–53, 310, 312, 316–17 Tron franchise, 228, 300 Tron: Legacy (film), 300 Trump, Donald, 251, 305, 307–8, 310, 312–13 Tryon, Chuck, 59 Tudyk, Alan, 88 Tulving, Endel, 98–99 Tumblr, 207, 210 Turnock, Julie, 40–41, 83, 85, 92 Tuscan Raiders, 159 “Twihard” NuttyMadam, 258 Twilight: Eclipse (film), 273 Twilight franchise, 185, 212, 258 “Twilight of the Apprentice: Part Two” (Rebels episode), 49, 122 Twin Suns, 318 Twitter, 79, 168, 189, 192, 196–98, 238, 242–44, 248–53, 269, 279, 307, 310, 312–13 Tyrone Magnus, 257, 265 Ultimate Spider-­Man (Disney XD animated series), 112 uncanny valley, 44, 52, 206

394 | Index Uncharted (video game), 127 Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base (SNL sketch), 13, 70, 78–81 Unduli, Luminara, 122 Universal Studios, 138 unseen text, 278–81 Uricchio, William, 23 Ursula (The Little Mermaid), 190 USA Today, 206 Using the Force (Brooker), 244 U-­w ing starfighter, 93, 96 Vader, Darth (formerly Anakin Skywalker), 2, 30, 43–44, 48–50, 63, 94, 106–7, 122, 128, 133, 141, 144–45, 147, 155, 157–58, 160–62, 175, 185, 189, 210, 214, 271, 282, 286; death of, 19, 289, 292; Lord of the Rings and, 292–93; as Luke’s father, 284, 289; merchandising and, 199, 202; move beyond, 289–300; as protagonist, 289, 298–99 Valero, Geraldo, 153 Variety, 153, 317 Veale, Kevin, 134 Vercellone, Carlo, 71–72 Verlaine, Evaan, 187, 188, 191 Verne, Jules, 146 video games, 1, 9, 15, 27, 34, 54, 57, 60, 104–5, 123–35; Gamergate and, 306–7, 309 “Visions and Voices” (Rebels episode), 120 visual effects (VFX), 41, 47, 83, 87, 90, 95–96, 265–66 Vos, Tim P., 242 Vulture, 206 Vye, Eustacia, 217–18 Wadi Rum, Jordan, 87 Waid, Mark, 186 “Walker Assault” game mode, 127 Wall Street Journal, 304 Walt Disney World (WDW), 93, 137–39; Epcot Park, 146; Hollywood Studios Park, 15, 139–40, 142, 144–45; Star Wars Dark Side Races, 145

Wampa of Hoth, 88 Warner Bros., 23, 129 Washington Post, 316–17 Waterboy, The (film), 254 Watto, 5, 213, 304 Wayne, Bruce, 157 Weapon of a Jed, The (Fry and Noto), 59 Weiss, D. B., 301 Weitz, Chris, 311–12 Wells, Fran, 6 Wendig, Chuck, 301 Wetmore, Kevin, 43 Whedon, Joss, 73 #WhereIsNatasha, 192 #WheresRey, 17, 189, 193–95, 197, 200, 204–5 #WheresWidow, 192, 197–98 Whitaker, Forest, 45, 51, 88 White, Crystal, 48–49 white supremacy, 305, 311–13 Whitta, Gary, 312 Whittaker, Jodie, 203 Williams, John, 48, 101, 127, 240, 297 Williams, Kathleen Amy, 255 Williams, Rebecca, 15, 136–49 Williams, Walter Jon, 104 Wilson, Darren, 250 Wilson, Shaun, 65 Winsor, Rachel Mary, 33 Winston, Stan, 42 Wired, 171, 310, 316, 318 #WithYou, 168 Witwer, Sam, 119 Woledge, Elizabeth, 214 Wolf, Mark J. P., 11, 19, 63, 86, 289–300 Wood, Robin, 6, 193 Wookieepedia, 134, 246 Wookiees, 2, 39, 42, 106–7, 211 Worden, Daniel, 28, 31, 35 World Star Wars Project, 281 world-­based franchises, rebooting, 295–96 world-­building, 19, 23, 25–26, 41, 43, 58, 62, 72, 115–16; crossover paratexts and, 209; post-­Lucas era and, 289, 294–300

Index | 395 Wren, Sabine, 14–15, 110–11, 113–22 Wu, Brianna, 306 Wucher, Joshua, 14, 82–96

YouTube, 18, 40, 64, 75, 78–79, 88, 198, 207, 213–14, 238, 255, 257–58 Yuuzhan Vong, 298

X-­Files franchise, 9, 61, 208 X-­w ings, 82, 90, 92–93, 140, 164, 257

Zahn, Timothy, 3, 27–28, 31, 50, 55, 105 Zakarin, Jordan, 314–16 zap aesthetic, 41–43, 45 “Zero Hour: Part Two” (Rebels episode), 120 Zinman, Gregory, 87 Zubernis, Lynn, 282

Yavin 4, 84, 89–90 Yeti Cave, 127 Yoda, 48, 51, 58, 141, 147, 165, 282, 292– 93, 296

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