An Empire to Think With: Fictional Scaffolding and Collective Political Reasoning
Abstract This article examines how audiences use serialized science fiction as a shared framework for reasoning about contemporary politics. We focus on the Star Wars series Andor (2022–2025), which depicts empire as a bureaucratic process rather than an archetypal battle, supplying transferable institutional mechanisms to reason with instead of a simple moral binary. Analyzing 728,624 comments from the show’s primary Reddit community (2022–2026), we conceptualize this interpretive practice as fictional scaffolding, defined as the deployment of a narrative’s relational structure – its configuration of actors, dynamics, and institutions – to make sense of parallel real-world events. Text analysis reveals that discussion within the forum grew more than tenfold and peaked after the series concluded. Crucially, this reasoning is structured rather than purely projective, as distinct narrative elements afford specific, stable concrete referents. We argue that complex serialized fiction can serve as an allegorical public sphere, demonstrating how popular culture can anchor and structure collective political cognition at a productive remove from entrenched partisan reflexes.