SPEAKING EASY - Star Wars Is Not God
(By Melody Werner)
By now, we all know all too well what Star Wars is. An international phenomenon that is so omnipresent in our popular culture that it has become as inescapable as quicksand. I've voiced my distaste for the franchise many times before, and I have a lot of reasons for that. Today, however, with everyone talking about The Mandalorian, I figured I would focus on one of the foremost reasons why I don't care for Star Wars: that being its terrible, terrible fan base and said fan base's cult-like worship of the series.
I recall when I was still a kid in elementary school, when I had heard of Star Wars through my mother and had seen snippets of the prequels, being looked at funny by my classmates whenever I would say that I was not obsessed with the films or the toys or the shows. Now, I don't hold a grudge with Star Wars fans over that--virtually all kids are little shits and they treat each other like dirt as a matter of course. I was no different; I'm not going to pretend I was or am a saint. What I do take umbrage with and would like to examine, when it comes to this particular fan base, is how common this exact sort of rabid evangelism is, even among older enthusiasts. Maybe pose some potential reasons for why Star Wars fandom is so uniquely stuck up and toxic.
The media we consume affects us on a personal level. This is not a controversial statement one can really argue with--I'm not going to say that you're going to shoot up a school because you played DooM in middle school. That's goofy. But what media can do is color who we become. Our personalities, our tastes, the ways we think. That's why entertainment is so susceptible to propaganda--it can touch us on an emotional level. No kid wears pajamas sporting the pattern of the American flag (and if they do, I sincerely feel for them), but millions of them adore pajamas with Darth Vader or Yoda on them. Part of that is good marketing and iconic character designs, sure--but the other major part is that people absorb the things they enjoy into their identities. "I'm a 90's kid" is not a reference to how the policies of Bill Clinton affected their adolescence, it's someone virtue signalling about how much they watched Gargoyles growing up and them saying "Other people who liked Gargoyles growing up, weren't we so lucky to be around for that?!"
Look. I'm not going to lecture anyone about enjoying Star Wars--much of my contempt for the series goes to the films, which I think are supremely full of themselves. And, you know, I think that's a huge part of why people become so zealous for this franchise--it builds itself up as being this monumental achievement, this grandiose, visionary epic that you should Care about with a capital C because of how singular and legendary it is. When I personally do not see the hype. The series is extremely vapid, characterless, and relies more on interesting visuals and self-important lore than telling an interesting story. It also cribs shamelessly from the playbook of the far more ambitious French comic, Valerian & Laureline (which you may know of because it was turned into a ripoff of Star Wars a few years ago--yes, that's right--that was a ripoff ripping off a ripoff of its own source material. Now that's more of a condemnation of the state of mainstream entertainment than anything I could write up myself). It was so bad that the artist of V&L, Jean-Claude Mézières, openly mocked the similarities with this artwork (which translates as Leia saying "Fancy meeting you here!" and Laureline replying "Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!"). And since its release, many pieces of media inspired by it have done space opera much better--namely Saga, which blows anything Star Wars has ever done out of the water with genuinely interesting characters with complex motivations.
I think this desire for more humanistic characters is why The Last Jedi appealed to me where the rest of the series has had me consistently apathetic. I gravitate toward characters who are flawed and going through some shit, but not necessarily grounded. And what I also like is how that movie tries to rehabilitate SW by digging the franchise's head out of its own ass. All that lore shit might be cool, but you don't need to fucking worship it or bark down anyone who tries telling a new story in this universe without attaching it to extraneous nonsense, it says as the typically frenzied fanbase barks at its creator with such witty insults as "Ruin Johnson" and "Social Justice Wars."
But who am I to judge? I'm a heathen who doesn't like Star Wars--AH CAPS LOCK KILL YOURSELF YOU FUCKING--
By now, we all know all too well what Star Wars is. An international phenomenon that is so omnipresent in our popular culture that it has become as inescapable as quicksand. I've voiced my distaste for the franchise many times before, and I have a lot of reasons for that. Today, however, with everyone talking about The Mandalorian, I figured I would focus on one of the foremost reasons why I don't care for Star Wars: that being its terrible, terrible fan base and said fan base's cult-like worship of the series.
I recall when I was still a kid in elementary school, when I had heard of Star Wars through my mother and had seen snippets of the prequels, being looked at funny by my classmates whenever I would say that I was not obsessed with the films or the toys or the shows. Now, I don't hold a grudge with Star Wars fans over that--virtually all kids are little shits and they treat each other like dirt as a matter of course. I was no different; I'm not going to pretend I was or am a saint. What I do take umbrage with and would like to examine, when it comes to this particular fan base, is how common this exact sort of rabid evangelism is, even among older enthusiasts. Maybe pose some potential reasons for why Star Wars fandom is so uniquely stuck up and toxic.
The media we consume affects us on a personal level. This is not a controversial statement one can really argue with--I'm not going to say that you're going to shoot up a school because you played DooM in middle school. That's goofy. But what media can do is color who we become. Our personalities, our tastes, the ways we think. That's why entertainment is so susceptible to propaganda--it can touch us on an emotional level. No kid wears pajamas sporting the pattern of the American flag (and if they do, I sincerely feel for them), but millions of them adore pajamas with Darth Vader or Yoda on them. Part of that is good marketing and iconic character designs, sure--but the other major part is that people absorb the things they enjoy into their identities. "I'm a 90's kid" is not a reference to how the policies of Bill Clinton affected their adolescence, it's someone virtue signalling about how much they watched Gargoyles growing up and them saying "Other people who liked Gargoyles growing up, weren't we so lucky to be around for that?!"
Look. I'm not going to lecture anyone about enjoying Star Wars--much of my contempt for the series goes to the films, which I think are supremely full of themselves. And, you know, I think that's a huge part of why people become so zealous for this franchise--it builds itself up as being this monumental achievement, this grandiose, visionary epic that you should Care about with a capital C because of how singular and legendary it is. When I personally do not see the hype. The series is extremely vapid, characterless, and relies more on interesting visuals and self-important lore than telling an interesting story. It also cribs shamelessly from the playbook of the far more ambitious French comic, Valerian & Laureline (which you may know of because it was turned into a ripoff of Star Wars a few years ago--yes, that's right--that was a ripoff ripping off a ripoff of its own source material. Now that's more of a condemnation of the state of mainstream entertainment than anything I could write up myself). It was so bad that the artist of V&L, Jean-Claude Mézières, openly mocked the similarities with this artwork (which translates as Leia saying "Fancy meeting you here!" and Laureline replying "Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!"). And since its release, many pieces of media inspired by it have done space opera much better--namely Saga, which blows anything Star Wars has ever done out of the water with genuinely interesting characters with complex motivations.
I think this desire for more humanistic characters is why The Last Jedi appealed to me where the rest of the series has had me consistently apathetic. I gravitate toward characters who are flawed and going through some shit, but not necessarily grounded. And what I also like is how that movie tries to rehabilitate SW by digging the franchise's head out of its own ass. All that lore shit might be cool, but you don't need to fucking worship it or bark down anyone who tries telling a new story in this universe without attaching it to extraneous nonsense, it says as the typically frenzied fanbase barks at its creator with such witty insults as "Ruin Johnson" and "Social Justice Wars."
But who am I to judge? I'm a heathen who doesn't like Star Wars--AH CAPS LOCK KILL YOURSELF YOU FUCKING--
Comments
Post a Comment