But with the arrival of the Internet, fan fiction could no longer be ignored. After an initial period of hesitation, Lucasfilm adopted an embrace-and-encircle strategy.

The author starts the story; the audience completes it. The author creates the characters and the situation they find themselves in; the audience responds and makes it their own.

But people now don’t want subtext, they want subtitles”—clear explanations of what’s going on. And that’s what the characters provide on Twitter.

Lucas may have created Star Wars, but even he had to admit to Roffman that the fans own it now. He meant this figuratively, of course. In a literal sense, ownership is something else entirely. But it’s all bound up with a much larger issue, which is control. Who controls a story—its creator or its fans?

If the story is meaningful enough, a superficial encounter won’t leave them satisfied. They’ll want to go deeper. They’ll want to imagine themselves in it, retell it, make it their own.

The bigger lesson is, don’t attack the audience for trying to connect with a story you hold the rights to.

A small shop based in midtown Manhattan, Deep Focus works with clients like Samsung, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts to develop online promotional campaigns that seek to involve fans with the product.

Cameron, Landau maintained, had a better idea of how movies and games could work together. By creating the movie and the game in tandem, he hoped to have a game that would explore elements of the story the movie could not. He also wanted a home for some of those extra creatures he was coming up with.

“Now you get to live in that world from 10:00 to 11:00 on Sunday night,” Ross said. “But I see the potential for telling that story in a different dimension—for bringing more of that world to an audience that has expanded because the world has expanded.”