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Notes -
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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