But the mix of passion and controversy surrounding Reylo stands out for what it can reveal about the dynamics around fandom and Star Wars in 2016. Depending on who you ask, envisioning Rey and Kylo together is a textbook response to a movie like this, a problematic fantasy based on regressive tropes around gender and race, or a glorious embrace of two complicated characters whose duality embodies everything great about Star Wars and might hint at the story of the next two sequels. Maybe it’s all of the above: an old phenomenon rendered in a new way, like The Force Awakens itself.

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There have been very few fandoms as large or as influential as the one Star Wars first gave rise to in 1977, and the common narrative around that fact gives a lot of credit to George Lucas’s savvy creative control. Lucas, rather than 20th Century Fox, famously retained the merchandising rights to the original movie and proceeded over the following decades to feed the Star Wars cult with action figures, video games, comic books, novels, and other ephemera that expanded the story’s universe.

But there’s another narrative to be told about grassroots, independent Star Wars fandom. After the first film arrived, viewers began sharing their own stories about the Rebellion and the Empire in “zines” distributed through the mail or at fan events. Today, this kind of engagement remains more commonly associated with Star Trek, whose fervent fan base helped rescue the TV show from cancellation in the ’60s, produced zines that were read and endorsed by the creator Gene Roddenberry, and gave rise to possibly the most important imaginary gay couple of all time: Kirk and Spock. Though the two franchises are often now seen as rivals, much early Star Wars fan fiction was initially published in publications devoted to Star Trek.

In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”

Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia.