The Fan, the Pro, and the Spaces In Between
Writing for Star Wars challenges me to interrogate fandom power dynamics—and figure out where I fall in a rapidly shifting landscape.
Star Wars is my oldest fandom. I was born into it, thanks to parents who absolutely loved it; one of my earliest memories is watching The Return of the Jedi at a drive-in in southern California when I was four years old. For a year afterwards, I wore a teddy-bear onesie and a plastic Ewok mask, and apparently only answered to the name Wicket. Eventually I changed my loyalty to Princess Leia, and then to Carrie Fisher herself. I read all the tie-in books from the ’90s. My high-school graduation party in 1999 was Star Wars-themed.
As an adult, I’ve been more of a casual fan, enjoying the movies and some TV shows enough to write meta on Tumblr. I only dipped into fanfiction to seek out a few Stormpilot fics as a balm in the wake of the sequel trilogy’s no-homo; I’ve never written a Star Wars fic myself.
But in 2021, twelve years into my professional writing career, I was approached to write for Star Wars: The High Republic, an ongoing initiative including novels, comics, manga, audio dramas, and eventually a TV show. As a fan, I was excited, and as a writer, I was intrigued. But as both, I was trepidatious: I’d be jumping into a massive fandom with a reputation for occasionally awful behavior, not because I fell for a blorbo, but because I’d be a creator of blorbos.
For most of my life—and all of my career as a professional writer—it’s been relatively easy to navigate between the me that writes original novels for traditional publication and the me that writes fanfiction. Sometimes the pro writer/fan writer roles have been in greater opposition to each other, while other times, they’ve fallen very much in line.
When it comes to creating Star Wars, almost everybody involved is a fan. That line between fan and pro is often blurry, occasionally non-existent. Writing for Star Wars challenges me to interrogate the power dynamics between writer and reader: as a pro writer engaging with readers, as a fan engaging with other fans, and as the creator of the actual canon. It’s asking me to be everything at once.
To hold it all at the same time, the kind of questions I ask myself aren’t just about where I find joy in fandom, or who I want to be as a professional. They involve integrity and the nature of complicity, especially in this changing landscape—fanscape?—where the lines between fan work and professional work are being forcibly changed by power players with the resources to assign and reassign value.
I haven’t found a lot of answers yet, but my most successful moments have come when I acknowledge not only the shifting dynamics between fan and pro writing, but how that shift relates to my queerness—and to fandom as queer space in opposition to power.
