Really. I don't. Maybe I've finally grown up. Or maybe I'm just too bitter and need to get out to stop the pain. But while I'll still cherish the memories, I'm truly done caring about whatever happens to this franchise.

So let's waste your time and mine whining about it, shall we ?

The purpose of this blog is to get back into the habit of writing stuff down. Indulging in some nerdy nitpicking seems like a fun way to do that. Naturally, most of the topics ideas I'm getting are things I've been mulling over for a while already. And apparently quite a few of those still revolve around Star Wars. Some of those takes are not things I commonly see whenever my web roaming brings me back to this old galaxy. Maybe that makes them interesting, or maybe I'm just that annoying guy that always needs to have an opinion different from everyone else's.

I don't know if I'll get around to those rants or not, but if I do, one of the annoying things about this series is that it can mean so many different things to different people that it's impossible to say anything meaningful about it without first stating what the franchise even is to you, as this will affect any point you try to make.

So let's do that. This way I'll have something to link to if I ever decide to touch the subject again.

A long time ago...

I first saw Star Wars¹ on VHS at about 7 or 8 years old. I remember liking it quite a bit, but for some reason the bug didn't quite bite. I thought "yeah, okay, that was pretty cool" and moved on with whatever else I was infatuated with at the time.

Then a few years later my mom took me and my cousin to see it again as the special editions² hit the theaters (According to their release date, I was ten by then). And this time lightning struck. We had to go see The Empire Strikes Back on the very next day, and then had to wait two whole weeks before we could finally see the saga's conclusion. I had seen the light. From then on, Star Wars was my religion.

Being an obsessive kid, I dove head first into it. I read all the books I could get my hands on, even going so far as trying to read one I found in English.³ I wrote awful stories about my own version of Corran Horn. I didn't play video games, I played Star Wars video games. At some point I got into role playing games via, you guessed it, that old D6 edition. I wanted to know everything about this galaxy far, far away and quickly connected with a couple of guys my age that seemed to love that stuff as much as I did. I still consider those guys my best friends 30 years later.

So when it comes to the OT, I may suffer from some slight nostalgia bias.

That being said, after mulling over those for quite a while now, I like to think my appreciation for it is not all rose-tinted glasses.

The older I get, the more convinced I am of the importance of storytelling. The tales we share define us, both as individuals and as a culture. And what made that original trilogy tick wasn't so much its groundbreaking visuals or its weird mashup of pulp influences (although those definitely helped). It was that it got its plot fundamentally right.

Lucas' first draft was a tangled mess of ideas that no one could make sense of, but after rewriting it several times, he ended up with a clumsy⁴ and simplistic script that dutifully checked all the marks from Josepth Campbell's Hero's Journey. While structurally sound, it was pretty blunt, which turned out to be its main strength.

The archetypal characters and lucas's general lack of direction allowed the enthusiastic cast to nail their parts, while its retread of classic tropes made it easy for audiences to grasp as they got introduced to this brand new setting while being bombarded with all the spectacle.

The sequels took this diamond in the rough and polished it. Lucas wisely (and perhaps reluctantly) delegated writing and directing to people who knew what they were doing, and it paid off. The Empire Strikes Back added much needed depth to the story while staying laser-focused on its themes, and Return of the Jedi managed to bring it to a satisfying conclusion, despite being the weakest of the three⁵.

As a kid, I certainly didn't give much actual thought to those movies and kept to the escpapist fantasy. But looking back, it's obvious that the coming-of-age story deeply resonated with me. Star Wars is far from the only one of those, but it's the one that grabbed me and as such, it's part of whoever I became.

I Don't Want to Grow Up

Two years after I became a believer, The Phantom Menace came out. Needless to say, I was all over it. It was freaking Star Wars, so how could it not be the best thing ever ?

But by the time we got to Revenge of the Sith, I was pushing eighteen and in my final year of high school. Having developped some basic critical skills in the meantime, I was definitely not impressed with that new trilogy.

It had many flaws, but its biggest one was by far the writing (which, again, had always been Lucas' weak point). This went far beyond the cringy love scenes and terrible lines about sand. A lot of people complained about the acting, but that was a symptom of how awfully dull the characters were to begin with.

Years later, I'll begrudgingly admit that delving into the politics behind the fall of the Republic and depicting the ineptitude of the late Jedi order were interesting ideas, which I dismissed back then out of a misguided notion of what Star Wars should be about. But ideas are worth nothing if executed poorly, and sadly the story was so badly told that there's no way I can care enough to reconsider them.

Some people like to point out that supposedely everyone loved the first episode when it got released and hating on it only became trendy later on, completely disregarding the fact that the hype around these movies was huge. Yes, people tend to get caught up in the excitement when things are new, and it takes some time to revise one's initial judgment. Dismissing opinions you don't agree with as blindly following the herd can work both ways.⁶

But those people do have a point: Hating on the prequels did get pretty trendy.

George Lucas ruined my childhood

RedLetterMedia's epic sized reviews of the (by then) new trilogy started a new kind of web entertainment, which mostly consisted in trashing some notorious piece of media while playing up the outrage for comedy. This formula got pretty popular, to the point of getting quite tiresome more than a decade later.⁷

The conversation quickly focused almost exclusively on Lucas himself, and soon devolved into memes about him turning to the dark side and willfully setting out to sully everyone's childhood memories. Clearly the man was a fraud who didn't understand his previous creations. It was a textbook fall from grace. People felt betrayed, and this being the internet, the whole world had to know about it.

Looking back, it's embarassing how far some of us took it, and how petty and entitled the whole thing could get.⁸ But back then I was fully on board. Luckily, there was some valid criticism among all the nitpicking and Lucas bashing, and this whole period got me to think a lot about storytelling and the creative process. I learned to move on from listing plot-holes and focus more on bigger picture elements like tone, theme or characterization.

I slowly started to understand how foolish putting individuals up on pedestals is. Lucas' story was a perfect exemple on just how harmful the myth of genius can get. He'd never been the god-like visionary some had made him out to be. He wasn't an evil hack only concerned about business either. He was just a regular guy with some good ideas and a drive to make cool stuff, and the real tragedy of the prequels was that no one dared to help turn these ideas into something coherent.⁹

As bad as I still think those movies were, they helped me to understand why I had to kill my idols. A recurring meme back then joked about how Lucas had turned into Darth Vader. Sadly I didn't see any follow-up about how maybe it was time for us nerds to confront and atone with our collective father.

At some point in the early 2010's I was done grieving, and forgave George for his sins. I would still glance at whatever was going on in the EU, but was content knowing that the main saga was basically done. Surely we could now all move on and hopefully learn a thing or two from past mistakes. Everything was going to be allright...

Here we go again

I've got a bad feeling about this...

Disney buying the licence felt like someone about to resurect the corpse of an old friend. I didn't want more Star Wars, and only wished for it to rest in peace. But sadly billion dollars media companies don't seem to care about what I want, and the rest of the world seemed pretty excited. And hey, Lucas was out, so surely this couldn't be as bad as the prequels, right ?

"I'm just happy we'll get to see some new Star Wars" was a pretty common phrase to hear. My answer to this was that I'd rather get more Firefly.

There's nothing wrong with wanting more of something you love, and I'm not against the idea of telling new stories in a pre-existing setting. But the tale should come before the brand. Keeping a series going just for the sake of producing ever more content was already a long tradition, and we all knew from experience that digging up old and beloved franchises to do so was fraught with peril.

Star Wars being such a cultural touchstone with an already divided fandom, Disney had a tough job on their hands. It wasn't hard to predict it couldn't please everyone, and we already knew how mad the internet could get over those things. Some kind of backlash was inevitable, no matter how good or bad the new movies would turn out.

As much as I pretended not to care, I was still emotionally attached to this universe and I dreaded reliving the prequels bullshit all over again.

A dull awakening

As much as I didn't want to like it, I still tried to approach The Force Awakens with a fair and open mind.

As an exercise in mimicking the orginals, it was pretty good. But as far as substance, there wasn't a lot to chew on. Playing it safe with the first movie was understandable, but did it really need to repeat so much of A New Hope ?

The marketting made a lot of noise about how much respect was being paid to the OT, but that respect largely showed at the surface level. Most of it boiled down to cheap appeals to nostalgia (I hated the Millenium Falcon reveal¹⁰) and some (admitedly stunning) shots exalting the old iconography. The new cast felt like kids playing make believe in the Star Wars universe, which was cute and endearing, but failed to make up for the uninspired script.

The few themes and ideas it introduced remained under-developped and I didn't care for the story hooks it left for its successors (I never understood why everyone seems to think star wars has to involve mysterious lineages, but that's a topic for another time). I guess it did its job of getting a plot started, but between the characters' lack of growth beyond their basic concepts and the movie's refusal to give some kind of context to what was going on, I was struggling to see much of interest in there.

Are your expectations subverted enough ?

I'll give this to The Last Jedi: it surprised me.

I genuinely laughed at Ryan Johnson's methodical dismantling of every single plot point Abrams had left him. It felt like a middle finger to how bland and uninteresting these ideas were, which I almost wanted to applaud.

I'm just not sure demolishing the ongoing plot so thoroughly right in the middle of a three acts story was such a good idea. Dropping a few threads and taking some things in a new and unexpected direction would have been fine, but by the end, I was struggling to see how anyone could possibly follow up on this mess. I saw some people hoping the next episode could fix this, but there was nothing left to fix.

Assigning each film to a different director wasn't a bad idea, but one would expect those three to agree on some kind of general outline before getting to work. I still can't understand how such an oversight from Disney was even possible.

Johnson also set out to deconstruct the rusty tropes Star Wars has been saddled with for ages, which is a perfectly valid goal¹¹, and something I would agree was badly needed. The trouble is that he didn't get much further than pointing these tropes out, and didn't bother to dig much into them. A more subtle approach and a better script could have made it work, but as it was, the whole thing felt petty and not nearly as clever as it thought it was.

While having radically opposed intentions, both TFA and TLJ ultimately suffered from the same fundamental problem: they had nothing to actually say. As bad as I still think Lucas failed with this prequel trilogy, I could now see that he was at least trying to bring something new to the table.

Calling it quits

By that point I had truly lost all interest. I didn't watch Episode 9, and while I did feel some vindication at how badly it was received, I didn't care enough to gloat.

Disney's handling of the franchise boiled down to an awfull lot of noise about nothing. The sinking state of online discussion and the ongoing culture wars only made it more frustrating to try and reason about. Plans for more theatrical releases seem to be abandoned for now, and the future seems focused on TV shows, which thankfully don't get as much media coverage. I'm told some of them are decent, which I have no reason to doubt. Smaller productions aren't expected to generate as much profit as summer blockbusters, so there's more room for them to try new things.¹² I just can't be bothered to pay attention anymore.

Epilogue

Stories matter. Whether it's the bible or your childhood's comic books, we all have a few stories that shaped us into who we are.

That's why it hurts to see them die. The nerd outrage can get pretty childish, but there's a reason we get so emotional in the first place. Treating these stories like mere content to be consumed and wondering why anyone would care so much about silly space wizards is missing the point. Lashing out and abusing blasphemers is just as misguided. Nothing of value will grow from that battlefield.

We should remain critical of what gets produced, and it's okay to nerd out and bicker about it. Let's just stop turning this stuff into holy wars. Stories matter, but that doesn't make them sacred. Ditch the dogma, and focus on looking for some bit of meaning. If you can't find any, just walk away. Rant about it if that makes you feel better, but don't forget to move on, and please don't feed the troll factory. This way lies only madness.

And maybe start writing your own stories.

I guess this is what Star Wars taught me. I know this sounds corny, but it took me 20+ years to begin to get it. Maybe someday I'll learn to get to the point. Anyone knows of a good story about that ?

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If you're not sick of Star Wars yet and are hungry for more, sfdebris has a fascinating three parts series on Lucas' evolution and the making of both his trilogies, up to the sale to Disney. Good stuff.