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This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.
I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.
Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?
The point isn’t the proportion of fanfic writers but that there is a lot of SW fanfiction and the majority of it is written by women, so clearly there are a lot of female SW fans.
I don’t see how writing Anakin/Obi Wan fanfiction makes one not a real fan. Elsewhere you call it a superficial engagement with the series but I’m not sure what a non-superficial engagement with Star Wars looks like. SW is about the good guys beating the bad guys with lasers, it’s not exactly Tolstoy.
Also, I think you picked the least ‘Star Wars-y’ story on the front page of Ao3 as an example.
Star Wars also isn't about hot young men having romantic relationships with each other. For most of the fanfiction that's being talked about here, someone who enjoys such fanfiction might be equivalent to someone who produces or consumes a porn parody featuring actors who look like Carrie Fischer or Mark Hamill boning each other while wearing costumes while being on sets that look like Star Wars. Producing or enjoying such films doesn't preclude one from being a "real" Star Wars fan for whatever "real" means (or more broadly fan of any particular franchise, with Star Wars just being the example here), but it's also not what I'd consider a particularly meaningful indication of being one, either. Particularly if it's their primary interaction with the Star Wars franchise - it's impossible to know how much this applies to fans of Star Wars fanfiction, though, of course.
Elsewhere in the thread people have talked about the SW fandom as people who play X-wing flight simulators or game out whether this or that piece of fictional tech would beat this or that piece of fictional tech. This sort of hard, numbers-crunching stuff may be more masculine-coded, but it isn't really any more Star Wars than writing about Luke and Han Solo making out. SW isn't a hard sci-fi pseudo documentary about Imperial military hardware. Nobody would have gone to see that movie. Lucas and his crew didn't put a fraction of the thought that 90s teenagers did into the actual mechanics of an AT-AT or the military doctrine of the 501st Legion. All that matters is that the empire are scary bad guys with big scary weapons. The fans have made that stuff up, as much as the fans have made up romances between Anakin and Obi Wan.
I'd argue that since space battles are a central theme to Star Wars while romantic or sexual relationships are, at best, tangential, that there's actually something more Star Wars about obsessing about power levels of fictional space fighter tech than about writing slash fiction of 2 or more of its characters. That said, indeed Star Wars isn't hard scifi, and I'd also argue that delving into the hard scifi aspects that it does have isn't automatically a meaningful indicator of being a "real" fan for whatever "real" means. If there were some massively popular website that hosted millions of fictional diagrams and spec sheets of fictional tech from thousands of fictional franchises, which catered to people who get great enjoyment out of seeing carefully laid out diagrams and pictures of screws and circuit boards and tables of numbers, then I'd argue that the being a consumer of Star Wars content in such a website doesn't meaningfully indicate being a Star Wars fan; rather, it'd be a greater indication of being a diagram fan. It could be either for any individual case, of course, and whatever website like this might exist, there isn't nearly the same volume of fans of fictional diagrams as fans of slash fiction, and as such the route that almost everyone will follow that ends with them obsessing over X-Wing fuel tanks or whatever is through being fans of Star Wars itself. The world of fanfiction, like with porn parodies, lends itself better to people who enjoy the genre of fanwork for its intrinsic qualities, with the specific franchise being spice that adds extra flavoring.
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My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
I don't know if I agree with this. Now it's true that people who write fanfiction for one thing probably also like other things, and if they're the type of person who likes to write and read fanfiction then they will probably also write and read fanfiction about the other things they like, but that doesn't make them fans of fanfiction rather than fans of those particular stories. Obviously it varies from person to person, and some people have a deeper attachment than others, but my experience is that people who write fanfiction do it because they genuinely love the story and the characters, they've seen all the episodes/movies several times, they want to see those characters in new situations. Some people just move on when the show doesn't get renewed, but some people complain about the cancellation for months and years and keep watching the old episodes over and over.
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That probably heavily depends on the type of fanfiction, and that depends on the audience and the series.
I actually write for Worm, which as fanfiction is very unusual. It has a majority male fandom doing the writing and even though there's a noncanon (female) gay couple that appears in a lot of fanfic, I've never seen a fic which is mainly based around shipping them.
Out of curiosity, what is the general direction/thrust of Worm fanfic?
"author did it wrong, I'll fix it"?
"explore another character's perspective"
"I just want to play with these toys some more"?
Recommend any high quality ones?
1 and 3 mostly, but you see everything. Worm is also a very pessimistic setting so you see lots of stories that import powers from other series, or other kinds of overpowered ideas. Worm fanfics notoriously focus on Taylor a lot, though sometimes you'll see someone else.
Recommending anything would be controversial, and there are a couple of notorious cases of very long, popular, fics where nothing happens.
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Why not?
Granted it's not absolute proof that someone is a "real" fan of the series - they could just be using the characters without knowing much about the wider series itself - but it certainly doesn't count against them being a real fan either. In general I'd say that writing fanfic about a series does count as evidence for being a fan of the series.
Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.
Is it possible that they're a fan of the series anyway? Sure, but it's not the way to bet.
The girls who write that stuff have pored over thousands of Star Wars Wiki articles, watched every show and movie and combed through comics and books to get even the most obscure incidental backstory elements of their fanfic correct.
There's a spectrum. On the other end of that spectrum are those who put generic yaoi characters into SW skinsuits.
It happens with straight porn writing too and I don't assume that gay porn fics are any better about it.
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I'd say if you're at the point of writing fan fiction about a setting you're past the point of being "superficially" a fan of something.
A fan is not defined by how much they "get" their chosen obsession, it is defined by the level of enthusiasm/passion for it.
Being moved to write gay fanfiction that completely misses the point of the setting makes someone as much a fan as a person that memorises pointless trivia (who also misses the point of the setting, but in a male way rather than a female way).
See my other comment - I'd say that they are not superficial, but fanfic writers engage "across" the media, not "with" the media.
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Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of romance between attractive famous male actors that take place in an exotic setting? Star Wars, or any other IP, may be the vehicle here, rather than the object.
"Are they fans of Star Wars or are they fans of explosions and swordfighting?"
What exactly constitutes really liking Star Wars?
Once upon a time, I would have said it requires meaningfully engaging with the core themes of the work. The Zen-like sayings of Yoda which are some of our only glimpses into Jedi philosophy. The broad conflict between the light side and the dark side, and all the things those sides represent. With the light side representing love, friendship, individualism, courage and heroism, and the dark side representing fear, anger, hate, conformity and cowardice.
Star Wars wasn't queer. Star Wars wasn't commie or capitalist. Star Wars wasn't feminist and/or against the patriarchy. I get that people point to certain lines or characters and try to spin it at "Star Wars was really X" all along. But no. They were not core themes of Star Wars. You can see anything in anything if you are willing to squint hard enough at 6 hours of footage.
I do wonder sometimes what made Star Wars nerdy. In the sense that when I was a kid in the 90's, being a Star Wars fan was weird. I wasn't alive for it, but it was a massive nationwide phenomena when it came out. It's not like only nerds saw it. But I guess it was the nerds that stuck around for 20 years, watching the original Trilogy over and over again. Playing the West End Games RPG because they just didn't want to let go of the world. The EU didn't really start proper until the 90's. Return of the Jedi came out in 83! None of the Video Games were that good until Lucas Arts was finally allowed to make some, and that was in the 90's as well. Being a Star Wars fan in the late 80's and early 90's must have been profoundly lonely and boring.
I mean, Christ, I was hoping to find some documentation, but look at this downright quaint blog talking about Star Wars Celebration in 1999. Or this threadbare article about a 10 year anniversary convention for Star Wars in 1987.
Anyways, the point I was winding to, is that Star Wars has no core themes anymore. There is no longer anything there for a true fan to intellectually engage with. So the teen girl diddling herself to 80's Luke and modern Kylo Ren dicking down may as well be just as much a fan as anyone else geeking out over laser swords, cool looking space ships, or pausing the VHS at their favorite frame of the Twilek in the slave dress dancing and rubbing one out.
I would agree with this as regards the sequels. I only saw The Force Awakens, but the lack of any depth or engagement made it instantly absurd. Everything that happens in the original trilogy is instantly made redundant. You could skip straight from RotS to TFA, and anything you missed is covered by the opening crawl. Episodes IV-VI, the classics, the strongest entries in the series, the ones that made Joseph Campbell best friends with George Lucas, are actually the least important in the series, reduced to side quests.
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Maybe you need to like the unique aspects of Star Wars to count as a Star Wars grognard. Telepathic monks with laser swords? But then there's the rest of the setting that doesn't feature Jedi at all.
Not an accusation against you in particular, but this strikes me as an isolated demand for rigor. A male fan who loves lasers won't be asked to recite "There is no death, there is the Force" before he's allowed in the tree house. This accusation is only used to police female fandom. The main reason being that fandoms are so full of incels that a woman gets outsize attention, which is resented.
I've dated two functionally very straight women in my life who were huge (like tells me about why Kyber(?) Chrystals are symbolic levels of fandom) Star Wars fans. Maybe that's just an odd sample, but it's a real thing that happened. Gender does not strike me as a useful filter, outside of people who just kind of hate women and don't want them around.
Idk, I shouldn't chime in, I haven't watched or consumed any of the Disney content after seeing the first sequel in theaters. Maybe the whole thing has changed by now.
This falls under "killed his parents and then demands mercy for being an orphan". There used to be gender-neutral standards in fandom that said that people should know something about the fandom before being considered a fan. (For instance, I suggest you look up trekkies versus trekkers.)
It was women who said that fans had to stop "gatekeeping" and forced them to get rid of those standards.
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Honestly, yeah, that's pretty much how it works. I remember a time before the wider internet when things were far more niche, and getting two star wars(or your niche topic of choice) together and watch the sparks go. There was very much a sense of 'Okay, exactly how much can I let my freak flag fly around this person' with alot of this stuff, alongside the simple passionate releif of 'Holy shit, this is someone who UNDERSTANDS'.
Statistical outliers. Growing up, I never once encountered a fan of Star Wars who was a woman.
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One of the very early culture war battles against nerd culture was exactly against fans demanding these sort of things from each other. This was deemed "gatekeeping", and supposedly sexist because of the disparate impact on women / girls.
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They are now. Which is why I'm not.
Back in my day, Star Wars fans played the West End Games version of the Star Wars RPG, the miniatures game, and fantasized over the source books. The latest and greatest Star Wars video games were X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were super nerdy and demanding flight sims. Dark Forces had just come out too, and was super heavily teen boy coded. It was a 90's FPS after all.
That was the fandom.
Funnily enough, all the source material written for West End Games Star Wars RPG was sent to Zahn, and he used it to bootstrap his Thrawn trilogy.
So yeah, there was no "slash fiction". A lot of the creativity of the young fans I interacted with as a young fan myself was spent coming up with RPG ideas, sharing Star Wars total conversion WADs for Doom, using the source books to try to game out if a Wampa could defeat an AT-ST walker, etc. Or, since nobody had read all the EU fiction because there were no online book stores, or ebooks, or even a wikipedia of what all the EU books even were, we'd hear tales of this or that awesome droid or alien from the random jumble of EU books our parents had haphazardly found on a shelf for one of us.
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