Why fandom organizing is a powerful strategy for movement building

This article Why fandom organizing is a powerful strategy for movement building was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In the original “Star Wars” movie, Princess Leia receives the Death Star plans thanks to the sacrifices of fellow rebels like Cassian Andor. Unsurprisingly, when Disney+ premiered a prequel series about Andor in 2022, its showrunners focused on the triumphs and sacrifices of everyday people and leaders like the eponymous character, as they spark the early rebellion against the Empire.

Knowing “Star Wars” fans would be primed to take real life action for freedom from fascism and white supremacy, our movement group — Get Free — decided to give them an organizing home to learn and plug into movement strategy. So, we created Project Fulcrum, which we kept active after the second season of “Andor” ended in May. As a result, our community was ready to join the fray when people like Nelini Stamp at the Working Families Party began offering concrete ways to boycott and resist Disney/ABC taking Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air last month.

After just a few days, nearly 1.7 million subscribers dropped Hulu and Disney+ streaming services at a $3.5 billion price tag for Disney/ABC, which soon folded and reinstated Kimmel. From there, we called on fans to amp up the pressure on media companies Sinclair and Nexstar, which continued to block Kimmel on the many local stations they owned. This culminated in a series of “Andor”-inspired fan pickets on Sept. 26, outside their corporate headquarters, alongside members of 50501 and the Writers Guild of America. By nightfall, Sinclair and Nexstar caved.

Writer and organizer adrienne maree brown says “organizing is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” This effort prevailed in part because of months and years of a small number of activists experimenting with a new frontier of organizing: tapping into fandoms and turning popular online communities into new movement bases. In many ways, fandoms are the modern-day houses of worship for many young people. It’s where they hang out on and offline, make meaning, and debate politics, identity and issues. 

Unfortunately, before groups like ours were able to get the support needed to do this work, the right-wing received deep-pocket funding (often undeclared) to intervene in pop culture spaces with targeted attacks on diverse casting and storylines, which turned these fandoms into battlegrounds.

Our country has experienced the ramifications of their successful recruitment of new members — particularly isolated young men — to their white supremacist and fascist movements, riding grievance to power. We’ve seen this play out in our own beloved “Star Wars” community, particularly during the right-wing cancellation of another Disney+ show, “The Acolyte,” and previous attacks on people of color, women, and LGBTQ cast members like Ahmed Best, Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega from previous films. “Andor” presented lifelong fans like us an opportunity to turn the tide.

“Star Wars” is inherently political. George Lucas has always been clear about that point. As a drama about everyday people and leaders who stood up to imperial supremacy and sparked a galaxy-wide rebellion, “Andor” delivered a story that mirrored our own history and reality in a country not so far away. Showrunners like Tony Gilroy studied revolutionary history and primed audiences to resist authoritarian divide-and-conquer politics. Organizers just needed to build a culturally-relevant vehicle for large numbers of fans across races, backgrounds and genders to come together and take nonviolent action in real life. 

Welcome to the Rebellion

We kicked off the project at Star Wars Celebration — the global fandom convention hosted by Lucasfilm — and collaborated with progressive content creators on TikTok and Instagram to recruit young Black and brown nerds to sign up for Get Free’s new organizing endeavor, Project Fulcrum, a reference to the codename for rebels like Cassian Andor and Ahsoka Tano. By becoming a “Fulcrum” with Get Free, fans would get access to a Discord server of like-minded people and receive a weekly newsletter called Nemik’s Manifesto (inspired by the fallen rebel philosopher in season one of “Andor”), which provides analysis of the latest episodes, political education on how it connects to current events and history, and calls to action for how to make a difference in real life. 

We were impressed by the initial burst of new members signing up. Some days we had hundreds of people joining us on Discord and waiting for the next manifesto. For the four weeks of the show’s run, we built a team of Get Free staff members, avid “Star Wars” fans already in Get Free’s membership, and contracted fandom content creators to introduce us to prominent voices and reach larger audiences. For about 10 weeks, we met weekly to discuss what we would include in the newsletter and how we could keep leveling up the education and training of our new online choir on Discord, so they would want to stay and be active in Get Free’s campaigns for reckoning and repair. 

These efforts didn’t end with the season finale. Unlike normal news cycles, the lifecycle of fandom content and discussion can go on long after a show has ended. And that was certainly the case with “Andor.” We leveraged this by pitching “Star Wars” podcasters and influencers, along with pop culture journalists, to interview our leaders, host them on live or recorded discussions, and create joint pieces of content aimed at bringing more fans into our movement. We then gave fans the first opportunity to join in person direct actions during our Too Hot for a Fascist Future summer campaign arc, which included turning out members to banner drops at the Smithsonian to combat whitewashing and the Supreme Court to call out attacks on birthright citizenship. 

In between our initial online and offline mobilizations — and the most recent boycott campaign — we engaged with the peaks and valleys of fan engagement by deepening our Discord community, giving new members opportunities to join in-person podcasts of Get Free or online teams like the new volunteer-led Discord moderator crew. We also offered trainings and watch parties of non-”Andor” “Star Wars” content like (the highly popular and political) animated series “The Clone Wars.”

Project Fulcrum proved that fandom organizing is one of organizing’s most underappreciated yet powerful strategies. Because we already did months of groundwork beforehand, we were able to activate our base and recruit more when we hit a new moment of opportunity like the boycott. At Get Free, we now include fandom organizing and seizing pop culture opportunities as a key pillar of our movement-wide campaign plans and are exploring further opportunities to reach Gen Z and Millennials, particularly those involved in other online communities like Dungeons and Dragons table-top roll playing games, the Beyhive (Beyonce fans) and more. 

“Andor” fan organizing worked because we had leaders — including volunteers, paid staff and consultants — who were authentically part of the “Star Wars” community. We could then be effective messengers to fans and create opportune strategies for seizing moments for organizing. We could translate nuanced political analysis and campaign calls to action into language that mirrored what fans were used to seeing on “Andor” or in their Discord threads. Having at least one of the drivers of a given campaign be well-informed of the fandom you’re engaging in is critical for success. 

Because of our deep familiarity with the lore, we were then able to shape the discourse. There are parts of “Andor” that could lean towards fatalism or all-or-nothing thinking. Our interventions steered fans toward constructive nonviolent action. We helped people talk about how to learn from losses in both the series and in real social movements. We also added to the series discourse on how the show addresses repair and reckoning with truth, while connecting the dots between the Empire’s strategy and the white supremacist faction’s agenda in real life (see our discussion of genocide on Ghorman here).

Lessons for the sequels

It’s fine to joke about the popular meme that highlights how activists often waste too much time attacking each other, but we also have to overcome the deeply held cynicism that prevents people from getting involved in our movements. We must inspire them to action. 

Posting “Star Wars” content also helped our nonfandom communications perform better. We’ve seen a massive increase in average views on Instagram, for example, compared to the 90 days before the Project Fulcrum launch. We increased both our new fan followers and non-”Star Wars” audiences engaging in our bread and butter campaign content (like this one) on how the Trump administration is trying to take away children’s freedom to learn the truth of our history. As mentioned earlier, influencing the conversations people are already having in their fandom can drastically help our ability to break through the noise and build the narrative power movements need to win in the political realm. 

Highly online fandoms tend towards being “indoors people.” “Andor” and “Star Wars” fans like hanging out online, so we were able to escalate their engagement on digital actions. However, converting people to field action and connecting them to our more “outdoors people” proved difficult, with some exceptions like the Disney/ABC boycotts. We attracted people from all over the country and world, which is a great strength — but it can also make in-person events a challenge if people live in far flung parts of the U.S. One of the ways we grew the leadership of members who arrived via Project Fulcrum was by deputizing them as Discord moderators. This has been a powerful, meaningful growth opportunity for members who prefer online activism. It takes some patience and lots of creativity to figure out where you can move communities on the internet.

Just like any other base-building and campaign strategy, fandom organizing takes time, resources and capacity. Raising funds to compensate subject matter experts and trusted voices within the fandom was key to understanding the landscape quickly, and going wider and faster in our reach. Our compressed timeline from ideation to launch meant it took away some bandwidth for other ongoing projects. It benefits everyone to plan further out and see which upcoming shows, films and pop culture opportunities a team can staff and take on efficiently. 

The persistence of authoritarian divide-and-conquer politics requires us to adapt winning strategies from our ancestors, interrupt where our opponents are extracting their own sources of power, and apply our organizing talents where tons of people exist for much of their days and nights. That means taking fandom organizing seriously and figuring out how it fits into your organization’s plans and the wider movement’s goals of actually realizing a country where freedom and equality are for all. We saw an opportunity in the final season of “Andor” and now many more people across races, backgrounds and genders have joined our ranks for truth and reparations — and have already dealt major blows to the MAGA regime’s agenda. The boycott wins show us that we did, we can and we will prevail. 

As Nemik’s Manifesto read,  “Remember this: Try.”

This article Why fandom organizing is a powerful strategy for movement building was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/10/why-fandom-organizing-is-a-powerful-strategy-for-movement-building/