If your understanding of Star Wars fandom comes entirely from social media, you’d assume the whole galaxy looks like the remnants of Alderaan. Every week brings a new declaration that the franchise is finished. Then you spend a weekend at Forest Moon Festival in Humboldt County and realize that the impact Star Wars has on our national identity isn’t going away anytime soon, even if its impact is shifting.
The festival itself is low-key. The Arcata Farmers Market had some Star Wars music and a handful of costumed attendees, but mostly it was still a farmers market. In Eureka, the Redwood Coast Museum of Cinema served as Forest Moon Festival headquarters, housing a Return of the Jedi exhibit alongside displays dedicated to the region’s surprisingly rich film history.Â
Later beneath the redwoods, Kevin Thompson, Kyle Newman, Matt Michnovetz, and Mike Hansen spoke to attendees in a setting that felt more campfire gathering than convention panel. Dedicated fans sat in front of the makeshift stage to hear from the speakers, while kids ran about blowing bubbles and hitting cardboard cutouts of Darth Vader with inflatable sabers. Thompson was especially engaging, recounting how a young man found himself recruited to work on Return of the Jedi, swapping stories about life on set and nights spent drinking with the crew. There was none of the self-importance that often creeps into franchise retrospectives. Just a man remembering a strange and wonderful chapter of his life.
Hansen, meanwhile, offered perhaps the healthiest perspective on modern fandom, arguing that every era of Star Wars is part of the franchise’s history and that fans are free to embrace whatever pieces of that history speak to them. In an age where debates over canon resemble theological disputes, it was a needed note.
Part of the festival’s charm is that it feels completely untouched by the modern convention industry. There are no premium experiences, no exclusive lounges, no endless upselling. Compared to something like D23, Forest Moon Festival is amateur hour in the best possible sense of the phrase. It is organized by fans, attended by fans, and powered largely by enthusiasm rather than corporate synergy. The result is something that feels increasingly rare: a gathering built around affection instead of consumption.
What I kept noticing, though, wasn’t the adults. Of course, older fans were there (Return of the Jedi came out in 1983). The shocking thing would be if they weren’t. What stood out were the kids: Kids with lightsabers. Kids in Jedi robes. Kids running around the woods pretending they were on Endor without a trace of irony. Nobody had explained to them that Star Wars was supposedly in trouble.
The next morning, walking through the redwoods used in Return of the Jedi, it occurred to me that maybe we’ve become too obsessed with measuring cultural relevance like it’s a stock price. Star Wars isn’t the center of popular culture anymore. Neither is rock music. Neither are Westerns. With the near destruction of the concept of monoculture that the internet brought, neither is almost anything. But there’s a difference between no longer dominating the culture and no longer mattering. Forest Moon Festival felt like evidence of that. The franchise may not own the conversation the way it once did, but there are still kids picking up sticks and pretending they’re lightsabers in the forests of Endor. That’s a hard thing to call dead.
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