Having been a tabletop role-play gamer since 1979 I have seen my fair share of cheaters. People who produced character with fantastic statistics, math errors that always break in the players favor, and fudged die roll. One thing that seems to exist as a common trait among these varied cheaters over the decades is that the invested considerably in the game as part of their identity. Doing well at the game was not simply fun for them but a validation of their self-worth and confirmation of their superiority. Of course the fact that had to cheat to achieve these aims undercuts the effect. For everyone who was aware of the cheater the effect was quite the opposite and it is only with a heaping serving of denial and delusion can that ultimately weak faced me erected and maintained.
What does this have to do with Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
People invest more than just games with a sense of their identity. People do it with spectator sports, it’s part of why rioting occurs both for victories and defeats, they do it with religion, they do it with their artistic creations. And of course people take popular culture and make it part of their identity.
Several years a national news story centered on a woman who had arrived for her Jury duty wearing a starfleet costume from the Star Trek franchise. She insisted it was not a costume but a uniform and that it represented the high ideals and morality of the United Federation of Planets. She had taken the themes of Star Trek and incorporated them into her identity, binding them so tightly to her sense of self that she simply could not envision performing her civic duty in any other mode than the one she had adopted from the fictional Star Trek setting. Star Wars too has themes and ideals that it presents as a moral good, all fiction does this, and there are fans that take those ideal and meld them into their identity.
Let’s return to gaming for a moment. A strange thing often occurs when you confront someone who has been cheating, they get angry, really really angry. They’ll wail that it has been themselves who have been wronged, they’ll try to divert attention to the misdeeds of others, they’ll lash out at their accusers and not at all uncommon they’ll make it impossible for the game to continue, destroying the enjoyment for everyone. Attacks on the cheating are in effect attacks on their identity and this provokes powerful overreactions. It is far easier to displace that anger than to confront the awful truth of why it mattered so much to the cheater.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
It’s clear to me that there are a sizable number of Star Wars fans that have built a significant amount of the self-identity from the fantasy franchise. It’s perfectly okay to dislike a movie, to me disappointed in a franchise, Alien 3, and Star Trek V both leap to mind, but this sort of anger, vitriol, and poison indicates an unhealthy attachment to the fictional characters. There is something about the character Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo that strikes these fans right at their cores and is irreconcilable with their self-image.
