Brand Loyalty Vs Fan Loyalty

“How can you call yourself a fan of Star Wars if you don’t like this?”

Ah, the old fan debate. How can you call yourself a fan of this or that franchise if you don’t like everything that comes from that franchise? This was the cry of the fan who liked everything that had the name attached to it. Slap Star Wars on a pencil case and they want it to “support the franchise”. The game is terrible, but we never expected our favorite show or comic to have a video game so you have to love it. Oddly, Superman fans don’t say this about any Superman game, especially Superman 64. It’s like they’re so worried that we’ll never get another one because the company will think it’s the brand that’s not popular and not the crappy game or side story that there won’t be another one.

Recently years another group has found a way to use this stupid argument to support their cause, the corporate overlords. I used Star Wars as my example because this “argument” by DisneyFilm and their willing accomplices in the shill media have used this as their rallying cry, which was brought up in a discussion on the Morning Nonsense podcast and the example was boosted by the Just Some Guy video I posted earlier today and other videos on the latest hit to the IP, The Acolyte. If you don’t like this show then you aren’t a “true fan” of Star Wars, and you probably only hate it because you’re a racistsexisthomophobe. You aren’t happy with women in Star Wars, despite all the women in Star Wars under the George Lucas era and “wilderness years” movies, shows, comics, novels, and games both in an out of canon. LucasFilm didn’t always make the best stories and characters. Jar-Jar Binks isn’t being given a second chance even though the prequels are for not being the sequels or the “High Republic” periods. The claim is that you have to like it because it’s Star Wars. The name is right there, so you must love it…except for Jar-Jar, but today’s defenders will include the High Republic. The only High Republic stories that at all interested me was Young Jedi Adventures, and it’s hardly going to fit into canon. Not too many lesbian moms are going to let their daughter fly around the universe with her Padawan youngling friends in her own non-Falcon starship.

What is in a name? A Rose Tico by any other name would still be a lousy character, even if it was a straight white male. We’re supposed to believe it was due to anger against an Asian woman and that they chased Kelly Marie Tran off (pre X) Twitter despite her own declarations to the contrary. Does simply having the name mean you have to like it, or is the bigger picture being missed here, like why were fans so in love with the brand but aren’t now? Is it the brand, or is it the reason the brand became so popular that the usual suspects wanted it because it was popular, or as they’re referred to here at BW, the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd.

She knows what they did to her show.

Why does a brand become popular. Why did Star Wars, its sequels, tie-in but not canon comics and novels, the extended universe of comics, novel, games, and the occasional audio drama, strike a cord with fans back in 1977 onward? Was it the name? Would calling it Blue Harvest or Revenge Of The Jedi kill the series? What about James Bond movies? None of the titles have his name in them, with only some movies and games slapping a 007 into the logo in more recent years. Do we then just acknowledge it’s part of the James Bond brand and go with the same argument? You’re not really a James Bond fan if you reject the TV movie version of Casino Royale? Tell a James Bond fan they have to accept James Bond Jr. as part of the canon if you really want to hear the sound of laughter.

When the Kamen Rider franchise was being considered for a full US home video release instead of just being part of some streaming option, the calls to support all Kamen Rider shows was put out there out of fear missing one would mean the rest wouldn’t get out. Sorry, but while I’ll happily buy Kamen Rider Black if I have the funds, I can’t even watch Kamen Rider Amazon. Is Ultra Q part of the Ultraman continuity or it’s own thing apart from the franchise that spun off from it? I thought I new, but this “support everything” call makes me wonder.

Back when X-Play was good, they would trash the various Naruto games because the reviewers didn’t like the game and the writers and hosts were snarky types. Naruto fans, worried we wouldn’t get another Naruto game, came to the game’s defense not because they thought it was good but because they wanted more Naruto games without thinking that the game developer and distributor being convinced they didn’t have to try would not result in better games to the point that you might wish you WERE being ignored. Even the video game format itself had to be defended against the Jack Thompsons and Joe Libermans of the world, even though Night Trap and the reimagined NARC were terrible games. Defending Grand Theft Auto should come from enjoying the games (I don’t), not because you want to “protect gaming”.

In the same vein, defending The Acolyte because you want to protect the Star Wars brand isn’t really being a Star Wars fan, it’s being a fan of the branding. Fans (“fan” being formerly short for “fanatic” before carving its own definition and yet still somewhat accurate) fell in love with the characters, with the adventures, with the lore, with the “world” of Star Wars. To see new shows and movies reject all that to reach a “new audience” separates them from those characters, adventures, lore, and “world”. In The Acolyte, which I haven’t watched and probably wouldn’t based on everything I see and hear even if I had Disney+. those things are missing. The activist arm of the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd saw something popular that didn’t care to their tastes and sought to change it, convinced that fans would embrace their “superior” version based simply on the brand. They didn’t, because it’s not the brand that makes a story popular, it’s the story that makes the brand popular.

“No, I’ve never heard of planet Albuquirky.”

Three movies, two cartoons, two or three made-for-TV movies based on what you consider the TV movie Droids story “The Great Heap”, and numerous comic books, novels, and video games allowed the franchise to continue to build fans based on the stories they told, or in the case of games, stories you wanted to play and see the end result of. Knights Of The Old Republic didn’t become a successful game series because it had the trappings of Star Wars but because it fit in with what was established while still being a great story you wanted to play through, either having your character join the Light Side or the Dark Side depending on decisions you made. Grand Admiral Thrawn because a fan favorite villain not because he was in a trio of Star Wars novels but because Timothy Zahn crafted a memorable villain that gave our former Rebel heroes a challenge as if not greater than the Emperor and Vader. Shadows Of The Empire is a good story not because it was a multimedia Star Wars event but because it was a good one. I reviewed the novel for Chapter By Chapter and did the sequel comic for “Yesterday’s” Comic, as the android assassin tried to cut her final ties with Black Sun and Xizor’s legacy. It was the stories that built the brand, not the other way around.

We can totally see this in many of the modern franchises and universe that have been ruined or damaged by poor stewardship. Nobody knew who Iron Man was outside of comics and cartoon fans until the first movie dropped. Being Iron Man didn’t help it and neither did having Robert Downey Jr. The man’s made a few stinkers I’m sure. It worked because of a great story properly told that drew the audience in, excited longtime comic fans like me while giving casual superhero movie fans a good two+ hours of entertainment. This led to more films for that character and other Marvel characters a chance to escape the comics to varying degrees of success. Daredevil, whose first attempt at escaping the four color page was the second Incredible Hulk TV movie, faced a second failure in the Ben Affleck movie because the man cannot get a break when it comes to nighttime city vigilantes in costumes with bumps on the head whether its horns or bat ears. Then came the Netflix series, which was the Man Without Fear’s first success. Too bad it was followed up with The Defenders and She-Hulk, and now the new Disney+ series isn’t sounding that promising.

Getting excited for a name is a rarity…and then you get Snakes On A Plane and Sharknado. The name does not necessarily make for a good story. A brand only becomes popular because the story finds an audience that loves it, even if it isn’t the audience it was designed for. Nobody changed My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic after the college age “bronies” and “pegasisters” got into it. It was always designed for little girls, just like the versions that came before and after it. The adult fans don’t like those versions but it’s not about them because they weren’t the target. I can look down on the Lauren Faust version of DC Super Hero Girls as inferior in my eyes to Shea Fontana’s take, but both of them did not include me as part of the target audience as an adult male. Nor have I ever asked for them to reflect my tastes and interests. There have been shows that should draw my attention but for one reason or another don’t. You don’t get to decide what’s “made for me”, only what your target audience is.

In the case of Star Wars the target audience has shifted in some mistaken concept of what open and diverse are. There have been strong women in the franchise prior to LucasFilm becoming DisneyFilm. There have been some people of color, but humans only made up a small portion of the galaxy’s inhabitants. Plenty of non-humans exist, and you could easily stack them all together and decide who is or isn’t a “minority” like we do right now in the current sociopolitical discussion. It doesn’t matter. In that galaxy unless you’re with the Empire, Sith, or First Order only Droids are mistreated despite being given personalities and possible emotional responses. This seems an odd choice to me but at the time, Lucas just wanted R2-D2 and C-3PO to be comic relief, not representing this or that social or racial group. These are ideas that came later as the universe expanded.

Hero vs hero fights I don’t care about. Villain vs. villain? Bring it on!

Now the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd has decided that making something for a target audience that isn’t them is “gatekeeping” and seek to make everything popular more “inclusive”, which really just means something made for them instead of someone who isn’t them. As geek favorited media has gotten more mainstream with better science fiction and fantasy productions gaining a wider audience of people who might actually like those stories for one reason or another, but do not want to be excluded from the current popular thing. Even fans of the previous works are guilty of this, just happy to see something with the brand they love putting out something new and ignoring that what’s coming is not as good as what came before and may even be a slap in the face to what came out before. They’ve become attached to the brand, to the friends they made in the fandom, and to the memories of what was to the point of ignoring what is. They liked it before so they have to like it now, even if what they loved about it is slowly or quickly replaced with something they might like but isn’t (insert series here) as far as how the continuity, lore, and stories are pursued.

So no, we don’t have to like the latest Star Wars product simply because its Star Wars. If the stories are terrible, the characters bland, and more retcon bombs dropped on the lore than that ship at the start of The Last Jedi had real bombs dropped on them…in gravityless space from ships who suddenly have fuel concerns, you don’t have to like it. Maybe you even shouldn’t, but if you do I won’t think of less of you. The Holdo Maneuver did look cool until you thought about her full plan and how many ships were destroyed and Resistance people lost getting to it. However, I don’t like it, and many other fans share that sentiment. Star Wars was about amazing space battles, struggles between good and evil and being able to recognize one from the other, funny Droids who still helped out their masters, mysterious magical somewhat sentient energies–all inspired by classic sci-fi serials and old Japanese samurai movies. The current productions are unrecognizable thanks to stereotypes creating a false “representation” for bad activists and creative teams more interested in their likes and “improving” what wasn’t for them, because making it for them is what makes it better.

Unless you ask an actual fan who is part of the group that made that thing popular in the first place because they loved the stories so much. The Terminator franchise died because the stories went downhill. Doctor Who and Star Trek are shadows of their former selves, and Star Wars fans are convincing themselves that retconning Disney Wars out of the lore would save the franchise despite now being unable to do what fans wanted with actors dead that we’ll never see working with their living comrades again. All you can really do is ignore what you don’t like and create your own headcanon with the stories you do. Those are the stories that made and kept you a fan, and what you want to see in future properties and stories. That’s what created a fan, and the fans are what made a brand popular. It wouldn’t have happened without the right creators involved, but in the end it was the stories that made fans and fans that made the brand. Lose the stories, lose the fans. Lose the fans, and the brand is no longer what Disney wanted when they bought it, unless ruining the brand for their “superior” product was the goal all along. Granted they’re failing that too because the non-fans are not grabbing because even they know what the brand should be and are already fans of other brands that do reflect what they like. So all you end up with are dead brands as the fans you chased off aren’t replaced and what you have now isn’t what the fans wanted.

So why did Disney want Star Wars anyway?