#and it becomes a vicious cycle where writers are now trying to 'outsmart' their audience and consequently writing garbage

[reachexceedinggrasp]

There's something that's always made me wonder back when I was still in the SW fandom.How did the majority of the fanboys and fangirls have such a profound misunderstanding of the thematic theme it represents?Like I remember finding MANY of this people on my insta feed talking about different types of spaceships,where do the J*dis get their lightsaber crystals from,characteristics of several planets,etc YET when confronted about the actual theme of the movie,they "What do you think my entire blog is about?"🤦‍♀️These are the type of people who just hate Ben in general, think TLJ did L*ke dirty,and genuinely believe V*der and An*kin to be two different people.How did this happen?Was it partly Lucas' own fault?Was it because of the Legends books?I'm just so confused...like how did these people become a fan for 20+years yet managed to misread something most integral to its storyline?

Yeah, I used to talk about this a lot. I think it's mostly two things. It's that a lot of people don't care about themes no matter how obvious they are and will just mentally paper over a message they don't agree with. Any incurious audience will also often assume the things they like must agree with them and will read their own worldview into media regardless of intent. See the bizarre mental contortions from fans, such as claiming Vader wasn't actually redeemed or that 'everyone' ignores that aberrant moment because the movie is otherwise good (as if RotJ isn't exclusively built around Luke's moral victory in choosing love and refusing to submit to the idea of a necessary evil). See also TPM alt-right crypto fascists identifying with the Rebellion and reading the story as an allegory for their fight for 'freedom'. Assholes don't see themselves as the villains, they see themselves as the heroes.

And the second thing is that sw attracted a large audience of people who just have wildly different priorities than the original narrative. People who love space ship blueprints and detailed lore, people who want sci-fi rather than fantasy/fable storytelling conventions, who want to break down the vague, emotional mysticism of the Force into a D&D magic system with two flavours of power and specific rules. People who aren't that interested in the deeply character-driven and self-contained plot of the saga, but want to play with a kind of worldbuilding that focuses on minutiae. This is of course fine for them to enjoy, but it's totally incompatible with the films and how the entire canon universe runs so it shouldn't be canonised- yet those are usually the kind of people who want to write tie-in novels. Inevitably, this shifts the tone and conventions of the universe away from the message around which they were originally built.

The fandom was also full of insecure dudebros who wanted a fairy tale built on a completely uncompromising idealism to be instead gritty and ~realistic~ and cynical so they could keep liking it as adults without their masculinity being threatened. Without their worldview being challenged. So we end up with the EU theme-rot and aggressive Wrong About Star Wars takes from the people who are now in charge of the canon. The rare vision of idealism gets pulled down and replaced with the same bloodthirsty American monomyth bullshit you get everywhere else in Hollywood.

There's nothing you can really do as the author to prevent this kind of thing. SW's message is so uncontrovertible and without subtlety that five year-olds get it no problem, but that has never stopped anyone from wildly misreading it. You can't control the audience. Having a fun action-adventure movie with super appealing characters and a vibrant world is going to reach far more people than are willing to accept a truly challenging message about unconditional compassion. I mean, kids will and do, and that's who Lucas says he wanted the films to be for, so he did all right on that.