This article contains considerable spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If you want to go into the film pure as the driven salt on the mining planet of Crait, you should wait until later to read this. Otherwise, join us for some insight into the Last Jedi controversy that has apparently caused a rift between the Star Wars fandom and the critical community. The biggest question of all, however, is whether this divide is representative of how the fandom truly feels.

For those who spend any given movie’s opening weekend trying to immediately determine what, if any, place it has in film history, the process has become something of a numbers game that relies upon three vital metrics. The first: what did the critics think of it? Thanks to the popular aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, you don’t even need to read reviews anymore to find out. Before the film opened, The Last Jedi’s sky-high critical score (hovering around the mid-upper 90s) became a story in itself. Second: what did the fans think of it? Here, again, Rotten Tomatoes claims to have the answer, with a controversial “rotten” audience score currently sitting around 56 percent. (More on that in a second.)

The third and final metric is box-office numbers, which allow us to quickly contextualize the film’s financial standing. In this case, The Last Jedi can boast the second-biggest opening ever, just behind The Force Awakens. With a muscular $450 million in tickets worldwide and $220 million in the U.S. alone, the latest Star Wars has earned more, domestically, than Warner Bros.’ Justice League did in an entire month.

Put these three numbers—critical score, audience score, box office—together and a convenient, hot-take-able narrative begins to form. According to this interpretation, The Last Jedi is A) a hit with critics, B) reviled by Star Wars fans, and, above all, C) too big to fail. That last point is kind of a given—but the most interesting friction, here, exists between points A and B.

The divide between critics and “true fans” has been a long-running narrative surrounding the superhero films over at Warner Bros., but this is the first time Lucasfilm has really had to grapple with it. As Forbes points out, when it comes to Star Wars, this appears to be by far the biggest gap between critical and popular opinion. Or is it?

First of all, it should be noted that the audience members most likely to register their opinions on Rotten Tomatoes are a very specific, very reactionary kind of fan. In the less self-selected space of CinemaScore—where general audiences are polled as they leave the theater—The Last Jedi earned an “A.” Yes, the very same rating as the well-liked Force Awakens. Furthermore, there’s someone on Facebook who claims to have maliciously and single-handedly manipulated the Rotten Tomatoes score in order to “keep it dropping.”

Whether or not this claim is true (and there’s no way to verify it at the moment), that Facebook post reveals how easy it might be for a vocal minority to manipulate a metric such as this and create a false narrative. Yes, there is a ticked-off splinter of the Star Wars fandom angered by The Last Jedi. These MAGA–esque fanboys—the same that called Rey a “Mary Sue” or lost their marbles over the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot before it even hit theaters—have been spreading their overblown hatred all over social media. As you might imagine, those “fans”—who seem to take their cues from First Order supremacists Hux and Kylo rather than Resistance heroes Rey, Finn, and Poe—aren’t very comfortable with the film’s more progressive messages. Their hysteria-tinged reactions are best ignored.

But there’s another, more thoughtful corner of the fandom that also holds a less-than-rosy view of The Last Jedi. And though I don’t share their opinion, if you take a longer lens on this franchise, it’s easy to see how they got there. The first factor to consider is a specific way that fandom has changed since the rise of the Internet. Though the prequels certainly felt some of its scorch, this is the first Star Wars trilogy to truly contend with the full force of the Internet’s attention. As franchise filmmaking becomes more and more like serialized TV, eagle-eyed Redditors have started subjecting movies to one of the trickiest crucibles for any piece of entertainment to survive: crowdsourced fan theorizing.

The Force Awakens was dished up by mystery-box-loving J.J. Abrams—co-creator of Lost, the most famous example of a story failing to stick the landing for its theory-hungry audience. The Abrams installment of this Skywalker trilogy whipped up a few tantalizing questions for its fans to chase: who are Rey’s parents? What’s the story with Snoke? But the answers delivered by The Last Jedi, disappointingly for some, were “nobody” and “nothing much.” There’s no shock-inducing “Luke, I am your father” twist—a reveal that never would have made it to the screen unspoiled in this era of online leaks. Last Jedi director Rian Johnson didn’t seem too interested in mystery boxes or enormous “gotcha” reveals, though his film does seem to truck in another famously popular element of serialized TV fandom: shipping. So at least some of the angry Last Jedi viewers are fans upset that all of their theorizing was for naught.

Disappointed theorizers aren’t the only sort of good-faith fans resistant to The Last Jedi’s charms. The humor in the film has also proven quite divisive. Some see the comedy—best represented by Domhnall Gleeson’s punching bag Hux—as consistent with the franchise’s legacy of wisecracks.

But for those who don’t like it, each joke lands with a clang. This is a criticism that Johnson himself saw coming; he told Vanity Fair that he was especially worried about how the Hux-based humor would play at the film’s L.A. premiere:

I knew [the movie] was going to get darker in some spots just because of what we had to do. It was really important to me to, at the very outset, make a bold statement of, we’re going to have fun here also. Relax, you can laugh with it also, this isn’t just going to be a dirge . . . That was the one thing I was most nervous about . . . You can never know until you put it in front of a big crowd of strangers is if the jokes play or not. So I was very relieved when we got the laughs. Oh, that very first scene. That was really the one that was just, I was holding my girlfriend’s hand very tightly when that came up. Then I relaxed when the audience got it and started rolling with it. It’s so important to me because that sets the tone and the expectation that, oh, O.K., there are going to be laughs in this movie.

But beyond the jokes and deflated theories, the biggest sticking point among The Last Jedi’s more critically engaged detractors appears to involve the treatment of the franchise’s original hero: Luke Skywalker. Here, audiences may be taking their cues from Mark Hamill himself. Unlike Harrison Ford—who, for a time, put the Star Wars fandom in his rearview—and Carrie Fisher, who, for a variety of reasons, couldn’t consistently engage with the community, Hamill has always shown up for Star Wars fans. Even in the franchise’s fallow era—the 16-year-gap between The Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace—Hamill was a consistent presence at conventions, stoking the fire of the fandom. It’s impossible to overstate his influence.

So when Hamill told Vanity Fair back in May how disappointed he was, initially, with Rian Johnson’s take on Luke, he gave his fans permission to be disappointed too. Hamill told David Kamp: “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’”

The actor has since walked back those remarks, telling Variety in June that he “got in trouble” for how “inartfully phrased” that statement was. “What I was, was surprised at how he saw Luke. And it took me a while to get around to his way of thinking. But once I was there, it was a thrilling experience. I hope it will be for the audience, too.” But even the week before The Last Jedi’s premiere, Hamill was still throwing doubt on Johnson’s characterization of Luke. “‘It’s time for the Jedi to end?‘ Are you kidding me?” Hamill said, rehashing one of his lines with Mashable. “I’m just saying, what could have happened between the last time we saw him and now for him to be that way? Even if it was the worst thing in the world, I said to [Johnson], ‘Jedis don’t give up.‘”

Hamill primed the pump for fans to dislike Johnson’s Luke—and, taken a certain way, The Last Jedi could certainly be viewed as a condemnation of the Skywalker legacy. In what many critics consider Johnson’s boldest and most compelling move, The Last Jedi calls into question the binary morality of George Lucas’s dark side/light side saga. Going beyond the muddied waters of The Empire Strikes Back (which demands audiences consider what would happen if the most evil villain in the world were actually your father and potentially salvageable), The Last Jedi rips up the overworked Chosen One narrative and the notion that the Force should belong to only a certain elite sect. I see this as Rian Johnson building on and advancing the notions originally laid out by Lucas, while others see him as a Kylo Ren hell-bent on obliterating the building blocks of the franchise. “Let the past die,” Ren says in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to.” But is that really what Johnson is doing?

There certainly are some extreme franchise rebooting elements to The Last Jedi. For one thing, thanks to the on-screen death of Luke Skywalker and the real-world death of Carrie Fisher, Episode IX will be the first Star Wars film without a single character named “Skywalker” in it. (We can count Ben Solo, if you want, but you catch my drift.) It’s a bold new direction for the so-called Skywalker saga, and one that Lucasfilm, at least, seems pleased with. Before The Last Jedi even premiered, the studio gave Johnson the reins to an entirely separate, Skywalker-free future trilogy to explore just how far this galaxy can go.

But the notion that The Last Jedi did Luke Skywalker dirty in order to advance Rey’s plot ignores the fact that Hamill gets the biggest heroic moments in the film. In a nuanced and often brilliant analysis of the highs and lows of The Last Jedi, freelance writer Jay Allen tweeted: “Luke - the hero, the POV character - is a bitter old man consumed by self-hatred, and he is never redeemed. Victory is accepting his failure.” Acceptance of failure—something Lucasfilm is quite familiar with—is an overtly stated theme of The Last Jedi, but is Luke never redeemed? In Hamill’s best live-action performance yet, Luke rallies when he needs to and pulls off the most powerful Force-using move we’ve ever seen in this franchise—a galaxy-spanning feat of astral projection. Luke had to hit rock bottom, green milk and all, in order to soar to new heights. This story was always going to end with Luke reduced, Yoda-like, to a pile of clothes. But far from advocating the end of the Jedi, Johnson’s film firmly underlines how they will carry on—even without Luke.

A lack of nostalgia might be another reason some Star Wars fans didn’t latch onto The Last Jedi the way they did with The Force Awakens (which has since been dinged for too much nostalgia) and Rogue One. Gareth Edwards’s film—which was originally conceived to be completely stand-alone—added more allusions to the Force, beefed up Darth Vader’s role, and, unadvisedly, used C.G.I. to resurrect a youthful Leia, all in an attempt to dial into the nostalgia addiction that drives pop-culture phenomena like Stranger Things. (Vader also reportedly features in Solo: A Star Wars Story.) But The Last Jedi is almost entirely Vader-free—and, in fact, Johnson had particular fun with Rogue One–esque over-reliance on nostalgia in a scene in which Luke chides R2-D2 for pulling the “cheap move” of broadcasting a hologram of A New Hope’s Leia. The Yoda scene, too, nimbly side-steps the nostalgia swamp by having the little green puppet advocate for moving on from the past. “We are,” he says, “what they grow beyond.” He might as well have been an older Star Wars fan talking about the new.

Everyone is entitled to their own thoughtful opinion of The Last Jedi. But no matter what the hot takes try to tell you, Episode VIII’s legacy will not be decided or quantified this weekend. For one, the rosy glow of The Last Jedi’s unexpected narrative departures may fade a bit for critics. Opinions may change, too, with some distance from Johnson himself. It’s impossible, in this moment, to quantify how the director’s famously convivial relationship with film bloggers influenced The Last Jedi’s effusive critical reception. (His Instagram feed is not filled with stars, but with photos he took of the journalists who interviewed him during the Last Jedi press tour. This has always been Johnson’s way.)

It‘s likely, too, that some of the more extreme negative reactions will soften and improve as time goes on. (I’ve liked the movie more each time I've watched it and I’ve heard the same from other fans.) There’s no social-media record to preserve in amber the 1980 reaction from Star Wars fans to the darker Empire Strikes Back, though I have heard, anecdotally, from some who saw it in the theater, that even Empire had to grow on them. The film has since become universally regarded as the pinnacle of the Star Wars franchise—but was famously trounced by some prominent critics at the time.

We are, these days, a culture of extremes. I suspect that, over time, the opinions of “Best. Star. Wars. Ever.” and “simply insulting” will meet somewhere in the middle—but that’s not the kind of opinion hot takes were built for.