Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The December 2017 audience-score collapse got most of the initial press. Vox, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Slate and Business Insider all covered the split between critics and audiences within a week of release, with several outlets arguing the 'backlash' narrative was inflated by review-bombing rather than reflecting a real fan revolt2315. On December 17, 2017, the 'Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys' Facebook page posted an admission that its admin had used bot accounts to log fake negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes3.

The meme energy actually crested in January 2018 around the De-Feminized Fanedit. After @BBW_BFF's laughter tweet, Rian Johnson quote-retweeted it with more laughter, Mark Hamill replied with crying-laugh emojis, and John Boyega joined the chain with the same reaction, each post pulling tens of thousands of likes and retweets14. The Washington Post, Polygon, Uproxx and The A.V. Club all wrote it up as a story about a men's rights fanedit becoming a self-own16. Days later, on January 19, 2018, Johnson posted the 'Doppelganger' bookshelf thread pulling Daniel Wallace's canonical Jedi reference to defend Luke's projection scene, and Twitter cut a Moments page around the response5. Fans piled on with reaction gifs like Twitter user @paul_mcq's shoulder-brush post17.

By summer 2018 the story shifted from the movie to its cast. A June 4, 2018 tweet from the 'Star Wars Facts' account noted that Kelly Marie Tran had wiped her Instagram posts after months of racist and sexist harassment7. HuffPost had already reported in December 2017 that trolls edited Rose Tico's Wookieepedia entry to rename her 'Ching Chong Wing Tong' and inserted references to Adolf Hitler7. Twitter user @suzannesamin's 'drown out the manbabies' tweet became one of the most-shared support posts of the week8. On June 14, 2018, a group calling itself 'Remake The Last Jedi' launched a website and Twitter campaign claiming producers would fund a $20 million reshoot, which CNET and Indiewire covered as another troll-adjacent stunt6. Johnson replied publicly with a single tweet consisting of the word 'please' repeated6. On July 25, 2018, Johnson deleted around 20,000 of his own tweets in the wake of Disney firing James Gunn over resurfaced old tweets, telling The Mary Sue there was no directive from the studio and calling it a 'why not' move1. Tran finally responded in an August 21, 2018 New York Times editorial that referred to herself by her birth name, Loan, and described growing up as a Vietnamese woman in the U.S.18.