As a Star Wars fan, I’ve long been familiar with the strange, combustible ecosystem of its fandom. This is after all that notoriously wretched hive of scum and villainy where grown men in cosplay rail against the “woke mind virus” they believe Disney smuggled into their decidedly unpolitical galaxy. But in the past few months, something remarkable has been happening. The conversation has veered off its usual course — past the endless gripes about Rey’s lineage, past the tired Darth Jar Jar conspiracies and the incessant Filoni-worshipping — and landed somewhere far more charged. Suddenly, posts joking about subredditors ready to be “tied to a missile and fired at Tel Aviv” started flooding my feed, and astonishingly, people weren’t flinching.

It’s telling. For perhaps the first time, Star Wars seemed to be driven by something more urgent and tangible than nostalgia and merchandising. The idea of political awakening has rarely felt so freshly, almost violently, excavated from the franchise’s marrow. And it’s all because of Andor.

In the month since Andor concluded its second season, the Star Wars spin-off has morphed into a radicalising force for disaffected liberals, post-left thinkers, and a whole generation of Reddit-warped digital revolutionaries. Tony Gilroy’s cerebral slow-burn about fascism, imperialism, and the machinery of resistance has slipped the bounds of allegory and re-entered orbit as a cultural touchstone. The series feels so precisely timed that it makes a galaxy far, far away feel disturbingly proximate. In this moment of global exhaustion on political, ethical and ecological fronts, it was perhaps inevitable that Andor would become one of the most politically charged pieces of popular culture in years. But the series, it appears, has gone beyond, galvanising viewers who had until recently remained comfortably aloof from the language and logic of revolutionary struggle.

Andor is the bitter pill in the sugarcoated saga of the franchise’s space operatics. Of the many spin-offs Lucasfilm has produced in its Disney era, the series has emerged as a taut political thriller for a more mature audience. If George Lucas conceived Star Wars as an allegory for the Vietnam War and American imperialism, then Tony Gilroy strips it down to the bone to reveal the machinery beneath.

Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor is the titular reluctant hero conscripted by circumstance. His transformation from a disillusioned hustler to an ideologically hardened rebel charts a slow, tragic arithmetic of resistance. Gilroy’s writing eschews the romanticism of lightsabers and chosen ones. Instead, it focuses on bureaucratic cruelty, resource extraction, media manipulation, and state-sanctioned terror, all rendered in disconcerting detail. The cartoonish villainy of the Empire from the Originals has now turned into an uncomfortably close reflection of the very real systems that valorise control over justice.

In its sophomore season, much of the plot centres on the planet Ghorman, which the Empire has developed a particular interest in. With a visual language that evokes the Paris Commune, Tiananmen Square and the Gaza Strip, the season portrays imperial agents concocting the myth of the insurgent to justify genocidal force.

The idea that a Disney series could tilt the political compass of its audience toward a kind of digital Maoism might sound absurd. And yet, scroll through Reddit, Instagram Reels, or Twitter posts from the last two months and a distinct shift in tone is undeniable. The r/Andor subreddit now fuels threads dense with mini-Marxist reading groups, complete with debates on resource imperialism, postcolonial analysis, the ethics of insurrection, and heated reflections on real-world repression.

As the genocide in Gaza rages and Los Angeles simmers with anti-immigration crackdowns, this freshly radicalised troup of internet rebels turn to the series for clarity. That it took a Star Wars show to radicalise a chronically online generation feels ridiculous, but as Emerson reminds us, fiction has a way of smuggling in truths.

Andor’s dour framings of colonial occupation and the fragmented, often contradictory decisions required to resist it, seem to have spoken directly to a global audience watching democracy buckle under its contradictions. Viewers across the world have taken to the internet to project onto Andor their own experiences. But two particular moments in the global discourse have refracted this phenomenon into something unmistakably real.

As the Israeli bombardment and successive blockade of essential services in Gaza has escalated into what international observers, UN rapporteurs, and many across civil society openly describe as a genocide, scenes from Andor resurfaced across social platforms. Clips from the show’s depiction of state-sanctioned terror and ethnic cleansing during the infamous Ghorman Massacre, as well as Senator Mon Mothma’s powerful speech calling a genocide for what it is, have been juxtaposed with footage from the Palestinian people under siege. For many viewers, the parallels have been far too precise to be coincidental.

To be clear, Andor is not about Gaza. It is neither a parable nor a direct allegory, at least not officially. But the manner in which Gilroy and his team of writers evoke the psychological texture of the paranoia, the fragmentation of solidarity, and the calculus of sacrifice of life under occupation, has created a cultural conduit through which people are making sense of horrors unfolding in real time. Posts reading “Ghorman is Palestine” began circulating. One Reddit user wrote, “Never have I felt more on the side of the Palestinian cause than after watching this. I understand resistance in a way that I never had before”.

Meanwhile, as Southern California has become an unexpected epicenter of anti-immigration protests, Trump has unleashed the National Guard on protestors, branding them “insurrectionists”. In just three days, federal agents raided shops and day-labour centers in broad daylight, kitted out like Call of Duty villains with drones, tear gas, unmarked vans; all to hunt undocumented workers guilty only of crossing borders drawn over their ancestors’ land.

Videos from LA circulated showing police evicting migrant families from public shelters, blocking access to water distribution points, and cordoning off aid stations under the pretext of “order.” Soon, stills of protestors being tear-gassed collided online with excerpts from Nemik’s The Trail of Political Consciousness. The final bequest of the doomed young Trotskyist is this revolutionary manifesto. “Freedom is a pure idea,” he writes. “It occurs spontaneously and without instruction.” His words now permeate every neo-communist twitter page or Instagram account like digital samizdat.

Across the internet, Star Wars fans began overlaying scenes of Andor with footage of National Guard crackdowns and ICE raids. Even symbols of the (Star Wars) Rebellion began sprouting up in solidarity, captioned, “Los Angeles, you have friends everywhere.”

Today, as tens of thousands filled the streets in the United States as a part of the “No Kings” uprising against Trump’s jingoist military parade in the capital, the iconography of rebellion was everywhere, with banners scrawled with “I have friends everywhere” making their way across the country. 

Elsewhere, Californian State Secretary Alex Padilla’s forcible removal and Governor Gavin Newsom’s Palpatine-laced rebukes of Trump have fused into the Andor-fuelled consciousness of the chronically online. Clips of Padilla being dragged from a press conference in full view of cameras are being circulated alongside the uncanny echo of Ghorman Senator Dasi Oran’s silencing in the series.

Meanwhile, Newsom’s Palpatine parodies of Trump’s Truth Social rants have weaponised the symbolism of Star Wars against its own American iteration of the Empire.

Outside the show, Andor has spurred a strange and telling shift in perception. Many of those who began watching the series for its impeccable production value and claims of “peak Star Wars”, have found themselves grappling with the banality of evil and the mechanisms of imperial propaganda that might be hitting a little too close to home for comfort. If there is something almost surreal about this convergence of pop fiction and real-world atrocity, it may lie in the friction between what Andor shows and what it withholds.

What has made Andor’s political afterlife different from that of earlier cultural moments is its sincerity. None of this feels ironic or decorative. The Maoist memeification is tongue-in-cheek, but the desire behind it is very real. The jokes about “joining Hamas” after watching Andor feel inane, but aren’t entirely facetious. At the very least, Andor has made political violence or armed resistance thinkable again. People are not simply pretending to be rebels. They are looking for models of survival, action, and integrity in an apathetic world that is collapsing around them.

In this way, Andor didn’t ignite the moment so much as give it a grammar. It gave the disillusioned a way to articulate something beyond despair. A franchise born of mythic messiahs has turned messiah-skeptic, embracing a new insurgent modernism that’s finally ready to ask the only question that counts: What must be done? And the answer feels increasingly inexorable. One way out.

Of course, one shouldn’t overstate the case. Watching Andor does not a cadre make. It is still a piece of fiction, nestled within a media empire whose primary function is to generate profit. But Andor proves that even in the most commodified corners of culture, something meaningful, germane and subversive can take root.