With at least one new film every year, you’d think it would be easy being a Star Wars fan in 2018, but it isn’t.

That’s not because JJ Abrams killed off Han Solo in Episode VII, or The Last Jedi snuffed out Luke Skywalker. It isn’t because we never got to see Luke, Han and Leia fighting side-by-side, which would have been cool. It isn’t porgs, or that superfluous giraffe-horse bit in Episode VIII. And it most certainly isn’t due to the introduction of a character called Rose. None of these things make being a Star Wars fan remotely difficult. They’re just some things some film-makers put into a family film. No, there’s only one thing that makes Star Wars fandom a drag in 2018, and that is other Star Wars fans. Or, more specifically, that small yet splenetic subsection of so-called “fans” who take to the internet like the Wicked Witch from the West’s flying monkeys to troll the actors, directors and producers with bizarre, pathetic, racist, sexist and homophobic whingebaggery about the “injustices” that have been inflicted upon them. Truly, it’s embarrassing to share a passion with these people.

It’s a poisonous tributary of fanboyism that appears again and again. Earlier this week, Kelly Marie Tran, the Vietnamese-American actor who plays Rose (and the first WoC in a lead role in the saga) deleted all her Instagram posts. While Tran hasn’t specifically stated that online trolling is the reason she left social media, since the release of The Last Jedi in December she’s been on the receiving end of a torrent of online abuse. Some comments voiced dissatisfaction with the character of Rose itself, or deemed it necessary to attack Tran personally about her performance. Others were more concerned about her gender and her race. For an idea of what she’s been dealing with, one individual even went so far as to amend Rose’s entry on the Wookiepedia Star Wars wiki to read, “Ching Chong Wing Tong is a dumbass fucking character Disney made and is a stupid, retarded, and autistic love interest for Finn. She better die in the coma because she is a dumbass bitch.” If constant invective like this is the reason for Tran leaving social media – if she thought it best to sever the unbroken line of communication between her and the type of person who thinks sending this to a stranger is the right thing to do – then you can hardly blame her.

Sadly, seeing enthusiastic young actors being worn down by the corrosive surge of “fan” venom is nothing new. Daisy Ridley also left Instagram in 2016. John Boyega was forced to become a spokesperson for Bame actors everywhere and address racial abuse before Episode VII even came out, after the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII was circulated in response to the film’s “anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide”, and the argument that “Jewish activist JJ Abrams is an anti-white nut”. A broiling nucleus of “fans” was also up in arms about the revelation that Lando Calrissian in Solo is pansexual, despite not having to suffer a single shot of him so much as playing footsie with another man. One “men’s activist” put together a “de-feminised” “Chauvinist Cut” of The Last Jedi with the female characters either excised or their important actions gifted to male counterparts. The edit’s description refers to Rose as “Asian chick” and “China girl”, and claims Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma is easily killed by Finn, because “women are naturally weaker than men”. It’s worrying, baffling stuff. You’d think it was a joke if the person in question hadn’t gone to the considerable effort of making the thing.

Those are of course extreme islands of toxic fandom within the passionate, overwhelmingly positive world of Star Wars appreciation and debate. A campaign to gazump The Last Jedi’s score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes by down-voting it seems tame by comparison, almost benign. Some people didn’t like the film, which is fine, and voicing this opinion is exactly what Rotten Tomatoes is for. It isn’t until you remember that similar down-vote protest campaigns were waged against Marvel’s Black Panther and the all-female Ghostbusters reboot (alongside a horrific barrage of racist abuse suffered by Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones) that an ugly pattern of concerted attacks on diversity and representation begins to coalesce.

From Comic Book Guy to Tim from Spaced screaming at that small boy about The Phantom Menace, fantasy and sci-fi have always gone hand-in-hand with a kind of boundless enthusiasm that doesn’t apply to other genres. And this is what makes being a sci-fi fan brilliant. If you want to sign a harmless petition to have The Last Jedi removed from Star Wars canon, then that is entirely your choice. But what’s happening to Kelly Marie Tran is different, and it’s important not to casually conflate good, honest, red-cheeked arguments about Star Wars and geek culture as a whole with these isolated yet incandescent pockets of racism, homophobia or sexism. It’s the same gulf that exists between a football fan and a hooligan. Sci-fi is the vehicle for their bigotry, not the cause.

Anyone who followed GamerGate is probably already drawing parallels between the misogyny of that sorry affair and these hissy fits in reaction to harmless pieces of family entertainment. The most vocal offenders in Tran’s case, as always, are an infinitesimal minority of the millions around the world who enjoy the films, or at least don’t feel the need to harass those they perceive as being to blame if they don’t. These males – and it is males – feel they have ownership over a piece of entertainment: that geekdom is their safe space, theirs alone, and the newfound mass popularity of the genre is bringing a lot of casuals into their hitherto predominantly straight, white, male dojo. Diversity isn’t what some of them want. Which is bizarre, considering the benefits of diversity are what quite a lot of sci-fi is actually about. But it’s not what these people believe they paid for, and therefore see themselves of having part-ownership of. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

The internet provides the tiny, troublesome few a platform to have their wobbly lipped wails heard, not only by the widest possible audience, but by the film-makers themselves. Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi’s writer-director, took to Twitter to label Tran’s attackers “manbabies”. You get the feeling that there were probably a few other words he would have preferred to use.

Of course, the best thing we could all do is ignore these trolls, and leave them pounding their fists into their R2-D2 pillows in impotent fury, while the rest of us real fans get on with the important business of lobbying Lucasfilm to release the original “Han shot first” cut of Episode IV in 4K. But that’s easy to say without an Instagram feed full of hatred, bigotry and personal threats. “A few unhealthy people can cast a big shadow on the wall,” Johnson went on to say. “But over the past 4 years I’ve met lots of real fellow SW fans. We like & dislike stuff but we do it with humor, love & respect. We’re the VAST majority, we’re having fun & doing just fine.”

He’s right, but every time the sludge at the bottom of the Star Wars fan bucket makes the news, it gets harder and harder to remember that.