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Kelly Marie Tran Has Deleted Her Instagram Following Months Of Harassment

BuzzFeed has reached out to Tran's reps for comment.

Last week, people noticed that Star Wars actor Kelly Marie Tran had deleted her Instagram account.

Some people believed this was because of the harassment she received for her role as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi.

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Screenshots of the now-deleted abuse have been shared across the internet over the past few months to show what Tran was receiving on her Instagram.

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And when the news broke that the comments might have led to her deleting the account, fans rushed to support her.

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This isn't the first time a Star Wars star has exited social media due to fan abuse. Last year, Daisy Ridley deleted her accounts, saying she found the platforms bad for her mental health.

Ridley had come to international attention thanks to the franchise, but her key role in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi brought accusations that the new films were propaganda from a "social justice warrior," and that Ridley's character Rey was a Mary Sue — an overly perfect character inserted into the story by creators to serve an unrealistic purpose.

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Ridley has shot down these claims as sexist, but they continued to be applied to her during the following film, The Last Jedi.

Tran's character, Rose Tico, a maintenance worker for the Resistance, was introduced in The Last Jedi and was quickly singled out by Star Wars fans in a similar way.

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As the press tour began prior to the release of the film, Tran's social media drew a lot of (positive) attention.

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However, following its release — which had a more mixed reception than the previous two films — a lot of vitriol was directed at Tran's character.

Critics of the film blamed "SJW" characters like Tran for ruining the film. Racist edits were made to Tran's Wookieepedia page, and she and the film were attacked by troll websites.

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Liena Gül, a 22-year-old who runs a Kelly Marie Tran fan account on Twitter, told BuzzFeed News that the account regularly received abusive messages from people taking issue with the actor's role in the Star Wars universe.

"Kelly was trying to stay as positive as possible," Gül told BuzzFeed News. "But the internet being as it always is bullied her to the point of making her [stay] away."

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Some people shared photos and videos of leftover Tico toys at stores.

And some people have attributed the recent release of Solo: A Stars Wars Story for the renewed campaign of harassment.

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Similarly to The Last Jedi, Solo has also been accused of forcing diversity — in Solo, one character is retroactively announced as pansexual. Some people have gone as far as to call the film "Soylo," a play on a popular far-right term "soy boy" used to describe men that lack typical masculine qualities.

Many people have compared the treatment of Ridley, Tran, and other targets to that of the young actors who played Anakin Skywalker in the maligned Star Wars prequels.

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The news about Tran, and the following tweets about Star Wars' aggressive fanbase prompted The Last Jedi's director Rian Johnson to tweet about problems within the fandom. However, he also stated that those supporting Tran and diverse elements of the films are the 'vast majority."

BuzzFeed News has reached out to Tran's reps for comment.

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