If you’re active on social media, especially on Instagram and TikTok, you might be seeing a bunch of videos made by and featuring women celebrating their love of Star Wars — all set to the same audio of another woman talking for about 20 seconds about how we don’t need more female characters in Star Wars because “women don’t even watch Star Wars.”
If you’re puzzled over the hubbub — obviously women watch Star Wars — an X (formerly Twitter) thread explains the situation. (The thread already has over 2.5 million views as of this writing.) The kerfuffle took off after a popular Star Wars YouTuber had a guest on his channel who said the above quote about women not watching Star Wars.
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When some prominent women Star Wars fans pushed back against these comments, some of them found some of their social media accounts mass reported, and even in a few cases suspended or deleted altogether.
That in turn inspired female Star Wars obsessive from all walks of life to take the original audio of the expert claiming “women don’t even watch Star Wars” (her words, definitely not ours!!!) and use it as the soundtrack of their own videos, featuring stills and clips highlighting their own love of Star Wars: Visiting Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland or Disney World, watching the shows, playing the games, collecting the merchandise, or dressing as their favorite characters.
Here are just a couple of the many, many examples:
It shouldn’t need to be said, but maybe it does: Everyone watches Star Wars. Young and old, men and women, wookies and droids; everybody. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Absurdly so!
As always, follow the first rule of fandom: Enjoy what you enjoy, and leave others to enjoy what they enjoy as well. If you don’t like a particular Star Wars movie or show, that’s totally fine. But don’t blame others for that.