Before Doctor Who’s second-season finale debuted on May 31, 2025, a leak about Billie Piper's return as Rose Tyler surfaced online. It spread like wildfire on media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, with content creators eagerly discussing and dissecting everything they could about the leaks, regardless of whether they took the information with a pinch of salt or not. Within days, the discussion around Doctor Who shifted from the leaked ending to how the new direction had ruined the sci-fi family show forever by making it a “casualty of the culture war.” In an excerpt from his book, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T.
Davies argues that leaks, and the small element of science fiction fandom that uses them to spread hate through monetized YouTube content, are “affecting the whole genre” of science fiction. He's right, and Star Wars just might be the biggest victim of an industrialized online hate economy that encourages fan divides, terrorizes actors and creatives, and pressures corporate behemoths like Disney into running away from anything bold or ambitious. There’s an ongoing joke that, if you look hard enough, almost every fan in any fandom repeats: “Nobody hates X more than X fans.” I’ve heard it used several times in fandom, from niche anime and video games to HBO Max’s The Pitt.
Yet the phrase seems to come from one fandom in particular: Star Wars. A quick Google search will show hundreds of threads asking whether it’s true: Is there anyone who hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans? The answer seems to be a resounding no; the biggest Star Wars fan you know will also be the quickest to bash whatever part of the franchise they dislike.
While George Lucas’s original trilogy, focused on Luke, Leia, and Han, changed sci-fi forever, it also inspired a fanbase so devoted to that era that any departure from Lucas’s vision was seen as disrespectful to the source material. The irony was that this volatility extended even to Lucas himself. After years of waiting for a trilogy that would explain Darth Vader's rise, Lucas’s prequel trilogy felt like a slap in the face to older fans of the franchise.
Now that years have passed, hindsight has softened fans' view of the prequel’s shortcomings. Even so, it doesn’t negate the years of toxicity and abuse from the fandom that led to the deterioration in the mental health of actors such as Ahmed Best, who played Jar Jar Binks. Even Hayden Christensen, now a well-loved name among Star Wars fans, faced intense hatred for his portrayal of Anakin Skywalker.
You would think Star Wars fans would have learned their lesson, but the reaction to the sequel trilogy under Disney ownership (especially to The Last Jedi) shows that the Dark Side of this fandom has only grown stronger over the years. You’d have to live deep underground with zero internet access to miss the wave of hatred following Disney’s Star Wars sequel trilogy. Even before The Force Awakens debuted on the silver screen in 2015, loud, egregious hate surrounded it — seemingly kickstarted by Finn's presence, played by John Boyega.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
