Your bag is empty.
This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
Fresh off a midterm shellacking, Republicans will devote themselves to post-mortems and soul-searching, trying to understand what happened. If they are honest with themselves, they should acknowledge one crucial, bizarre mistake that largely flew under the radar: A week before Election Day, for no discernible reason, the online right devoted itself to posting Harry Potter and Star Wars fan fiction.
Leading up to Tuesday, conservative X accounts were obsessed with Malfoid, a gender-swapped Draco Malfoy, and dramatic edits of Anakin Skywalker. This reached some of the highest levels of the Trump administration, with the Department of Education posting AI art of both Malfoid and Anakin. “There’s magic in learning,” the caption reads. Palmer Luckey, founder of weapons contractor Anduril Industries and a leading tech voice on the right, posted a photo of him and his wife, Nicole Edelmann, dressed up as Harry and Malfoid for Halloween. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, posted an AI-generated image of Anakin Skywalker with his wife and children, captioned “This is what they stole from you.”
For those of you not well-versed in Harry Potter fan fiction, Malfoid is one name for a common stock character. (The name is a portmanteau of Malfoy and “foid,” incel-derived internet slang for “woman.”) She is a female version of Draco Malfoy who falls in love with Harry. Great gobs of fan art depict Malfoid as a blond schoolgirl while retaining Draco’s cruel manner. The effect is something like an imaginary femdom girlfriend for thousands of adult men, who identify themselves as “sensitive young men” who are “yearning” for Malfoid. To those adult men, looking at anime girls on the computer constitutes a similar experience to wistfully thinking about your crush on a moonlit night.
While the Anakin Skywalker meme does not involve genderswapping, fans have reimagined the future Darth Vader as a righteously angry and violent Zoomer who turns to the far right in reaction to the Jedi’s establishment liberalism. In long essays about Anakin, they reinterpret him as the “archetypical chud” who “wanted to make a difference, only to discover that the entire political order he had devoted his life to defending was deeply corrupt.” In the films, Anakin’s wife, Padme, begs him to stop after he turns to the dark side. The memes ask what would have happened if she had put family over ideology and stayed with him, even as he became Darth Vader. In other words, what if the evil guy was actually right all along?
If you are skeptical that headcanon tweets and fan art constitute political speech, just take it from the posters themselves. One said Malfoid is “culturally important for the right” because she reflects “traditional western storytelling.” Another called Malfoid the “resurrection of the Chivalric Mytho-Poetic Romance,” whatever that means exactly. The influential tech poster Beff Jezos incorrectly predicted that “the Anakin edits might turn the tides of the midterms.”
This is only the latest example of a close dialogue between online oddballs and the cabinet agencies of the federal government. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified numerous coded white supremacist references in the Department of Homeland Security’s posts, including ICE recruitment ads. By posting Malfoid and Anakin, the Department of Education waded into its own baffling culture war with its own inscrutable symbology. As MAGA careened into a historically bad midterm election, those in power seemingly abandoned realpolitik to spend more time playing with their dolls.
But what can these memes tell us about the regular men who fell in love with them? Malfoid and Zoomer Anakin are works of fan fiction, which has long been one of the most powerful cultural forces on the Internet, though not typically for adult conservatives. Fan fiction writers ask, What do our favorite stories fail to represent about our own lives? In Malfoid and Anakin, we see two attempts to answer those questions by disaffected, right-leaning men. In both cases, the answer is a quaintly simple love story. Harry gets the girl. Anakin keeps his wife. Happy ever after.
In both rewrites, we see the ultimate unattainable fantasy of the alt-right poster: A woman who agrees with me. The most important change to the Anakin meme is not just to make him correct, but to make him still have a family. By challenging Anakin’s dark turn, Padme chose fuzzy-wuzzy ideology over her husband. Musk, who has 14 children with four women, posted the meme of Anakin with the happy ending he was denied, surrounded by his wife and loving children. The message is, Why do our woke wives keep leaving us and taking the kids just because of politics?
Star Wars was already a family tragedy. The entire story is one of a son wrestling with the sins of his father. Perhaps for the Anakin fan-fic posters, this ruins their favorite childhood movie. Seeing a man lose his family after devoting himself to extreme politics might not be fun anymore. Better to just rewrite the story so that she stays.
