This article contains considerable spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If you want to go into the film pure as the driven salt on the mining planet of Crait, you should wait until later to read this. Otherwise, join us for some insight into the Last Jedi controversy that has apparently caused a rift between the Star Wars fandom and the critical community. The biggest question of all, however, is whether this divide is representative of how the fandom truly feels.

For those who spend any given movie’s opening weekend trying to immediately determine what, if any, place it has in film history, the process has become something of a numbers game that relies upon three vital metrics. The first: what did the critics think of it? Thanks to the popular aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, you don’t even need to read reviews anymore to find out. Before the film opened, The Last Jedi’s sky-high critical score (hovering around the mid-upper 90s) became a story in itself. Second: what did the fans think of it? Here, again, Rotten Tomatoes claims to have the answer, with a controversial “rotten” audience score currently sitting around 56 percent. (More on that in a second.)

The third and final metric is box-office numbers, which allow us to quickly contextualize the film’s financial standing. In this case, The Last Jedi can boast the second-biggest opening ever, just behind The Force Awakens. With a muscular $450 million in tickets worldwide and $220 million in the U.S. alone, the latest Star Wars has earned more, domestically, than Warner Bros.’ Justice League did in an entire month.

Put these three numbers—critical score, audience score, box office—together and a convenient, hot-take-able narrative begins to form. According to this interpretation, The Last Jedi is A) a hit with critics, B) reviled by Star Wars fans, and, above all, C) too big to fail. That last point is kind of a given—but the most interesting friction, here, exists between points A and B.

The divide between critics and “true fans” has been a long-running narrative surrounding the superhero films over at Warner Bros., but this is the first time Lucasfilm has really had to grapple with it. As Forbes points out, when it comes to Star Wars, this appears to be by far the biggest gap between critical and popular opinion. Or is it?

First of all, it should be noted that the audience members most likely to register their opinions on Rotten Tomatoes are a very specific, very reactionary kind of fan. In the less self-selected space of CinemaScore—where general audiences are polled as they leave the theater—The Last Jedi earned an “A.” Yes, the very same rating as the well-liked Force Awakens. Furthermore, there’s someone on Facebook who claims to have maliciously and single-handedly manipulated the Rotten Tomatoes score in order to “keep it dropping.”

Whether or not this claim is true (and there’s no way to verify it at the moment), that Facebook post reveals how easy it might be for a vocal minority to manipulate a metric such as this and create a false narrative. Yes, there is a ticked-off splinter of the Star Wars fandom angered by The Last Jedi. These MAGA–esque fanboys—the same that called Rey a “Mary Sue” or lost their marbles over the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot before it even hit theaters—have been spreading their overblown hatred all over social media. As you might imagine, those “fans”—who seem to take their cues from First Order supremacists Hux and Kylo rather than Resistance heroes Rey, Finn, and Poe—aren’t very comfortable with the film’s more progressive messages. Their hysteria-tinged reactions are best ignored.

But there’s another, more thoughtful corner of the fandom that also holds a less-than-rosy view of The Last Jedi. And though I don’t share their opinion, if you take a longer lens on this franchise, it’s easy to see how they got there. The first factor to consider is a specific way that fandom has changed since the rise of the Internet. Though the prequels certainly felt some of its scorch, this is the first Star Wars trilogy to truly contend with the full force of the Internet’s attention. As franchise filmmaking becomes more and more like serialized TV, eagle-eyed Redditors have started subjecting movies to one of the trickiest crucibles for any piece of entertainment to survive: crowdsourced fan theorizing.

The Force Awakens was dished up by mystery-box-loving J.J. Abrams—co-creator of Lost, the most famous example of a story failing to stick the landing for its theory-hungry audience. The Abrams installment of this Skywalker trilogy whipped up a few tantalizing questions for its fans to chase: who are Rey’s parents? What’s the story with Snoke? But the answers delivered by The Last Jedi, disappointingly for some, were “nobody” and “nothing much.” There’s no shock-inducing “Luke, I am your father” twist—a reveal that never would have made it to the screen unspoiled in this era of online leaks. Last Jedi director Rian Johnson didn’t seem too interested in mystery boxes or enormous “gotcha” reveals, though his film does seem to truck in another famously popular element of serialized TV fandom: shipping. So at least some of the angry Last Jedi viewers are fans upset that all of their theorizing was for naught.

Disappointed theorizers aren’t the only sort of good-faith fans resistant to The Last Jedi’s charms. The humor in the film has also proven quite divisive. Some see the comedy—best represented by Domhnall Gleeson’s punching bag Hux—as consistent with the franchise’s legacy of wisecracks.

But for those who don’t like it, each joke lands with a clang. This is a criticism that Johnson himself saw coming; he told Vanity Fair that he was especially worried about how the Hux-based humor would play at the film’s L.A. premiere: