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You can't keep the politics out of 'Star Wars,' or any other pop culture story

It's a day ending in "y" in the year 2018, so angry fanboys across social media are yelling at Disney, Lucasfilm and anybody tangentially related to them with the demand to "keep politics out of Star Wars." Recently, a significant amount of that hate has been directed toward author Chuck Wendig, who wrote the trilogy of Star Wars: Aftermath novels as well as an upcoming comic about Darth Vader. That comic is being boycotted by fans who dislike Wendig's previous Star Wars work and dislike the blunt, often uncensored ways in which he interacts with readers on social media. There has been no shortage of fans asking (or, sometimes, demanding) that he "keep politics out of Star Wars books."

This isn't new, nor is it exclusive to Star Wars. Every pocket of popular culture has encountered pushback from fans asking creators (some politely, many not) to keep their medium free from commentary and agenda. "Keep politics out of music," "keep politics out of comics," "keep politics out of video games," and so on.

It's a confusing and even frustrating argument coming from Star Wars fans, though, because of how contradictory it is to the series itself. You want to keep politics out of Star Wars? You know that the Emperor, the series' biggest bad guy, was a senator, right? You remember that the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace is all about taxation and trade disputes? And surely you've realized that the entirety of the original trilogy was about a group of people trying to overthrow a government? Without politics, you don't have Star Wars.

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Don't just take it from me. Take it from Star Wars creator George Lucas. "It was really about the Vietnam War," he said of the original Star Wars trilogy, "and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships? Because the democracies aren't overthrown; they're given away."

Star Wars isn't alone in this confusing disparity between the source material and the things fans sometimes demand from it. Certain Star Trek fans also ask for that series to stay away from political issues, ignoring the fact that the first interracial kiss in television history happened on Star Trek. If you don't think that was a political move back in 1968, you're ignoring the context of its time.

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X-Men is political. Captain America is political. Lord of the Rings is political. Whether you like it or not, all entertainment has something to say.

Even children's television is political, and always has been. Ignoring the fact that a message as simple as "love your neighbor" is, itself, a political statement, an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood has a seemingly low-key moment in which Mr. Rogers has his bare feet in a small pool alongside his friend Officer Clemmons -- who is black. This action, at the time, was making a huge statement.

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And it goes back further. On Twitter, user "Dagoth Valentine" presented Wendig with a challenge: "Explain to me how the Three Little Pigs is political without pulling something out of your [expletive]." Wendig responded with ease, noting political themes and motivations of multiple versions of the classic fairy tale.

Here, I think, is the issue: If you don't want politics in your pop culture, how is it that you define "politics?" While movies, shows, etc. will occasionally beat their audience over the head with a message directed at current political figures (we see you, The First Purge), in most cases the message isn't specifically about politicians or policies -- but that doesn't mean it isn't political.

Wendig's Aftermath books have received criticism from certain Star Wars fans because of its "gay agenda," because they feature characters that don't identify as straight. But is acknowledging the fact that gay people exist really a "political" statement? Sinjir doesn't stand up at a podium in Empire's End and say, "Here is my speech on why gay marriage should be legal in the United States," he's just a dude that's attracted to dudes. That detail helps establish who he is, how he acts and what his motivations are, but it isn't the entirety of his existence. The "message," such as it is, is that the universe is vast and it has all kinds of people in it, and people who are different than you can still be good.

You are free to hate that message. Even if you have been a Star Wars fan for decades, the new movies and books don't have to be for you (which is a whole separate column). The thing you can't do, however, is ask that Star Wars be free from those messages entirely. After all, explicitly writing a universe in which there are no gay characters would be exactly as political a narrative choice as writing a universe in which they do exist.

The thing is, you are far less likely to notice the politics of the entertainment you consume when those politics align with your own. Some of the people complaining fail to realize that they are explicitly pro-politics in their media -- when the politics reflect their own worldview. How many pro-America songs dominated radio waves after 9/11? Those songs were political, even if they were espousing politics that most Americans were able to agree with at the time. And how many conservative Christian groups were asking Tim Tebow to just stick to football when he was giving thanks to God after every touchdown?

I want to be clear on one point, though: I do not think that everybody asking for their favorite pieces of entertainment to be politics-free does so with malicious intent. I believe there are those who genuinely want to "turn off their brain" and enjoy a piece of fantasy without being forced to think about "real world issues." Many will say outright that they want pure escapism -- something to enjoy that doesn't remind them of the heated debates they're seeing elsewhere in their lives.

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To those people I say: I'm sorry.  But what you're asking for is impossible. 

Are you writing a children's book about a society of circular creatures? Well, why aren't they triangles? Are you referring to the circles as "he?" If so, why not "she?" Do the circles want to escape into a world of spheres? Well, what does that say about our own three-dimensional existence?  Every choice, no matter how tiny, matters. It's all political, whether or not there is a politician in sight.

Sure, you can find media that already aligns with your own views and thus doesn't make you uncomfortable. Yes, you can seek out entertainment that plays things "safe," and that's not inherently bad -- though you may find it boring (conflict, after all, drives stories). But when/if you're asking for Star Wars to stay out of politics, then you're asking for something that has never and will never exist.