On Aug. 28, Amandla Stenberg, the lead of the “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” posted an eight-and-a-half-minute video to her Instagram Stories about Lucasfilm’s abrupt decision not to pick up the show for a second season just a month after the Season 1 finale streamed on Disney+.

“It’s not a huge shock for me,” Stenberg said. Since the series was announced in 2020, she continued, “we started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.” (Stenberg was unavailable to comment for this story.)

In other words, “The Acolyte” was the latest high-profile target of “toxic fandom,” the catchall term for when fan criticism curdles from good-faith dissatisfaction into a relentlessly negative, often bigoted online campaign against either the project or its stars and creative leaders. In a franchise economy increasingly dependent upon established audience devotion to drive the bottom line, the...