Who Owns the Myth: Star Wars, Fandom, and the Soul of the Saga
For nearly five decades, Star Wars has been more than a film franchise. It’s a living mythology—shaped by creators, challenged by fans, and fought over in every theater lobby, convention hall, and comment thread.
Who Owns the Myth? is part memoir, part cultural study. Author and podcaster Pete Fletzer draws on a lifetime inside fandom—running one of the first Star Wars fan sites in the ’90s, writing for Star Wars Galaxy and Insider, and interviewing actors, artists, and authors on his long-running podcast Around the Galaxy.
This book isn’t about toxic fans or “ruined childhoods.” It’s about how a modern myth became a shared possession—and what happens when millions of people feel ownership over the same story.
Author: Pete Fletzer
Release date: November 11, 2025
Pages: 173
ISBN-13: 979-8297580053
If you think about that title for a minute, that’s one heck of a big topic to tackle, but that’s exactly what Pete Fletzer does in this self-published investigation into the fandom and its relationship with the saga, written by someone who was at the vanguard of the fandom thirty years ago, both as the mind behind mid-90’s website Echo Base and soon after as a writer for Star Wars Galaxy Magazine and Star Wars Insider before stepping away and returning over twenty-five years later to front the Around The Galaxy podcast. That distance and perspective has allowed Fletzer the scope to construct the book, one that both charts the growth of the saga in multiple arenas as well as the fandom that has devoured everything Lucasfilm has presented for almost half a century.
Where do you start with such a topic? At the beginning of course, and for Pete some of his earliest official interactions with fandom came at Star Wars Insider for editor Scott Chernoff, who gives his own mini assesment of the subject in his forward before we dive into one of the moments Fletzer believes saw the fandom start to question the myth that was Star Wars; 1997, the Star Wars Special Edition and the Han vs Greedo scene. From there he takes us back another 20 years, to 1977 and his own introduction to the saga, and it’s in these personal moments that his argument solidifies. Star Wars quickly became a modern myth, one that millions of people around the world studied, enjoyed and revelled in. An entire fandom grew up around it, only growing more fervent with the advent of the internet, of which Star Wars fandom was an early adopter. With links to the classical Greek myths underpinning the construction of the saga (and of course the writings of Joseph Campbell), he compares and contrasts, all while the fandom grows and ages, becoming multi-generational as fathers and mothers introduce the trilogy to daughters and sons. Then the Special Editions, and soon after the Prequel Trilogy.
Here, as we know so well, is where the first massive schism occured (yes, there were those who railed against The Empire Strikes Back in the fanzines of the early 80’s, but this was on a global scale) and he delves into the reasons why. George Lucas, the man who created it all, returned to the saga to tell the story of how everything we saw in 1977 came to be, only for the kids he had delighted twenty-two years before to kick back at The Phantom Menace, when all he had done was deliver a new trilogy for the next generation of eleven-year-olds. With Star Wars now woven into the fabric of geekdom at every turn (books, comics, video games, collectibles, conventions, fan / official sites and more) it saw debates turn to arguments, commentary turned to criticism. As Attack of the Clones arrived after a very public shrinking of the online Star Wars website community, the issues only grew, and Who Owns The Myth looks at it all, a time when Star Wars turned in on itself, the days of Star Wars vs Star Trek a thing of the past as Star Wars splintered into subsects that bickered amongst themselves.
It’s a fascinating read, one that follows the history of the saga while noting these moments in the fandom, and even though this may seem at times like an investigation into the darker corners of the fandoms negativity, it never loses sight of the wonder and the love we feel for the saga. It’s very much from Fletzers point of view – which of course it should be – and he’s an astute student of all eras, from the foundational days of the original trilogy to the excitement of the prequels and the sequels, but one thing very much shines through. How important Star Wars is, not only to him but to all of us, and why we’ll hit up daily sites, check out social media channels, buy books and comics, amass collectibles and queue up at midnight to be the first in line to see the films. Who owns the myth? We do.
For more on Who Owns The Myth, check out our interview with Pete on the latest episode of Canon Fodder.
