Chuck Wendig, the best-selling author of the Aftermath trilogy of Star Wars novels and multiple Star Wars-related comics, has been fired by Marvel Entertainment. Wendig took to Twitter to share the reasons for his termination, and it basically boils down to the fact that the company didn’t like his tweets about politics. Read on for much more about this situation.

Chuck Wendig Fired By Marvel

Wendig – who was in the middle of working on a five-issue miniseries called Shadow of Vader and a still-unannounced Star Wars novel – went on Twitter today to explain that Marvel fired him “because of the negativity and vulgarity that my tweets bring. Seriously, that’s what Mark [Paniccia], the editor said. It was too much vulgarity, too much negativity on my part.”

Presumably, he’s talking about tweets like this (click on the tweet and read the full thread):

help I fell down a weird rabbit hole of shitty Star Wars fans oh my god these people — Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) May 31, 2018

The Hollywood Reporter also dug up a deleted tweet in which he wrote, “Winter is coming, you callous fucknecks, you prolapsed assholes, you grotesque monsters, you racists and rapists and wretched abusers, you vengeful petty horrors.”

You can read Wendig’s lengthy statement in its entirety at the bottom of this article.

In his first Aftermath novel in 2015, Wendig introduced a canonically gay Star Wars character and became a subsequent target for loud conservative “fans” online. But even more crucially, Wendig is an outspoken liberal who often tweets about current events, making his firing my Marvel a familiar echo of the firing of Guardians of the Galaxy writer/director James Gunn, who was equally unflinching with his political views on social media. Conservative extremists orchestrated an effort to get Gunn fired by dredging up old tweets for which he had already apologized, and they managed to convince Disney and Marvel to part ways with Gunn a few months ago – a decision the companies stuck to even in the face of vocal backlash from many in Hollywood, including the Guardians of the Galaxy cast.

A report this summer uncovered that Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter – a wealthy Republican who is a close friend of Donald Trump’s and a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida – is the leader of a shadow group who have secretly been running the Department of Veterans Affairs, despite not being a veteran or even holding an official government position. Perlmutter is a longtime conservative, and this series of events is starting to feel less like a coincidence.

Here’s the full transcription of Wendig’s tweets, which reference “creepy” YouTube videos (like this one, for example) and Comicsgate, an online campaign from the alt-right that criticizes “social justice warriors” in the comic industry and, among other things, diversity in comics storytelling.