“It’s really very frustrating when it’s an actor or actress that you look up to who has this huge platform,” Justice said. “For them to use it to do things that might be seen as divisive…or just not even compassionate, and not even listening to the fan base or to your costars who are trying to tell you, ‘Hey, maybe you’re not aware of the effects that you can have a lot of people.’”
Kent thinks left-leaning pileups and hashtags like #FireGinaCarano are partially responsible for escalating tensions: “These newest tweets, expressing doubt and resentment about COVID and masks and the election, there’s nothing new here.” But, Kent added, “Gina Carano’s not making things better for conservative fans who want to feel welcome when they go to fan conventions and mingle with their fellow lovers of Star Wars. She’s not making things easier for anybody. She’s making things just dramatically more dubious and sad and divisive.”
Even so, he hopes the critics who have aligned against Carano will consider easing back. The fans speaking out against her, Kent said, react just as harshly against moderates who have right-of-center leanings, even if they share some common cause. “People who might represent polite conservatism, they always got the same treatment,” he said.
What many Star Wars fans are looking for is a space where they all can feel welcome and included. That’s been the case since feminists chose to look past the gold slave bikini to find a hero in both Carrie Fisher and her outspoken Princess Leia. It’s why younger fans have eagerly embraced George Lucas’s prequel films despite their evident narrative flaws. “One of the only universally loved things about them was that they doubled the amount of women and people of color in the onscreen canon,” Vineyard wrote.
Much to the agitation of some of the right-leaning Star Wars fandom, that world has only gotten more inclusive in the franchise’s most recent films—which put the likes of Diego Luna, Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, Felicity Jones, Oscar Isaac, and Daisy Ridley at their center—and The Mandalorian itself, which has Carano, Weathers, Pascal, and a little green puppet as its core cast. “Anyone can say what they will about the way Disney is handling Star Wars now, but when they took over, suddenly the human cast looked almost as diverse as the aliens,” Vineyard wrote. “That’s a beautiful thing, and we’ll never understand why people that call themselves ‘fans’ have such a problem with it.”
Green isn’t sure Star Wars is as far along as it might be: “Inclusion is a journey more than a destination, and certainly Star Wars has taken steps in that direction in recent years. That’s great!… I just wish Star Wars loved marginalized folks as much as we love Star Wars,” she said. Boyega has spoken out about the ways in which he felt let down by the franchise, and Tran’s harassment at the hands of racist and misogynistic fans has been well documented.
“I think that there’s so much depth here, and it goes way beyond one person who was lucky enough to be able to speak the lines into existence,” Justice said of her determination to still love The Mandalorian and Cara Dune. “There’s just so much in this tapestry that we’re not going to let one loose raggedy thread ruin it.”
But even as Disney/Lucasfilm continue to grapple with a divided fandom, one thing that Star Wars will never be is apolitical. Politics is baked into Lucas’s original story about a band of scrappy rebels taking on an evil empire. It’s possible, in this case, that Carano views herself as a rebel—even if many of her previous admirers would say she’s gone to the dark side.
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