I still remember when I found that story. I was fifteen, queer, voraciously nerdy and, at the time, obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. Amidst devouring all the books and rewatching the films, I also read “fanfic,” stories written and shared for free by other fans featuring the characters we all love a little too much. Fanfiction is as diverse a genre as any other, but its most popular iteration remains “shipper fic,” stories that place two or more characters in a non-canonical romantic (and, very often, sexual) relationship. Occasionally, fans will invent an original character (an “OC”) to interact with their canon favorites. The author of the Tolkien fanfic I came across as a teenager had created such an OC — and the OC was a black woman.
A sizable percentage of fan outcry against The Rise of Skywalker, Disney’s final installment in its Star Wars sequel trilogy, has declared the film “misogynistic” against female fans because its protagonist Rey ends the series alone instead of in the arms of Kylo Ren. But this discourse, and its attendant claim that fandom spaces are inherently progressive and subversive, erases the experience of women of color in fandom.
For women of color, even transformative spaces in fandom are fraught with racialized misogyny, as fandom attention invariably gravitates to white men and women. What conversations about fandom might we have if we demystified fandom as a haven for female desire, and began acknowledging the power white women fans possess when they demand and receive the kind of respect and acknowledgement women of color subcultures are still struggling for?
The Tolkien fanfic was abandoned and I never established contact with the writer despite many attempts. Over the years, I forgot her pen name, the name of her OC, the name of the story. But I never forgot that jolt of recognition, that rush I felt in my gut and at the edges of my fingers and toes. While the Star Wars universe broadly speaking is more racially diverse than Tolkien’s legendarium, it wasn’t until The Last Jedi’s introduction of Rose Tico that a woman of color not in a CGI alien suit had a speaking role in a Star Wars film. The actress Kelly Loan Tran was eventually forced to leave Instagram after hateful fans swarmed her comments with racist vitriol, and her screen time in The Rise of Skywalker was reduced to just one minute and sixteen seconds. Another woman of color, a black woman named Jannah played by Naomie Ackie, was introduced in TROS and given five minutes and thirty seconds of screentime. Meanwhile Rey, the white female lead, commands fifty-four.
The women who love Kylo and Rey will not only see their fannish desires immortalized in the mountain of fanart, fanfic, and gifsets that proliferate on Tumblr, Twitter, and Archive of Our Own — but also in the film itself, where Rey and Kylo mystically bond through the Force and share a kiss before the latter’s death.
For those of us, however, who adore Rose Tico and Jannah, who come from a long history of fighting both show writers and our fellow fans for a chance at a story that affirms our existence, there is no such easy reprieve.
