The Doom Of Geekdom

I was a STAR WARS kid growing up. 

I had the toys, I loved the movies, and I imagined that universe and its people all of the time. I wondered what Episodes 1, 2, and 3 might be (since we started, it turned out, with part 4) and wondered where it’d all lead. 

I don’t know that I thought the movies were perfect but they were exactly what I needed. 

Even today I adore that property and those worlds. 

I won’t tell you that I love every film blindly, that there are not errors in logic, or storytelling, or theme, but I will tell you that I love them just the same. 

Movies to TV shows. 

I love it all. 

If you told little kid me that one day there’d be STAR WARS movies, and television shows, and cartoons, and all this merch I’d freak out. 

Yeah, I get it, it’s commercialism, and all that. 

Whatever. 

It’s fandom. 

Fans are consumers and most of us realize we’re being pandered to and don’t care because we just wanna support our fandom and fly our geek flags high. 

Whatever. 

The problem though is when that fandom becomes toxic. 

I have talked about this before, and about how toxic this particular fandom is but now I want to focus on a different toxicity. 

This isn’t about how a (hopefully small) number of fans don’t want diversity in the franchise but that many of them don’t even seem to want the franchise anymore. 

They cry about the diversity. 

They carp about the storytelling. 

They are mad that there are legacy characters in the shows and then mad that their FAVORITE legacy character isn’t in anything yet. 

The fandom has become so toxic that it’s poisoning the very well all of this comes from.
For the love of Pete, Lucas sold the franchise to get free of it. 

You don’t do that if you feel that it’s a healthy organism with healthy roots. 

No, you do it if it’s become a burden and its fanbase an anchor tied to the past. 

I totally appreciate the desire for not overdoing STAR WARS and for putting out the best content. 

I absolutely agree. 

I also think that there’s so much possibility to tell interesting and rich stories that fans need to just accept that they may not like everything that comes out under that banner. 

Sometimes you have to let go enough to let the property breathe. 

This sense of ownership and entitlement is ridiculous and childish. 

We don’t OWN this stuff. 

We’re FANS. 

Right?

Right?

When will we stop acting like children as we fun govern everyone else because WE feel like our memories are more important than other people’s. 

We feel like we are the centers of the fandom and we aren’t. 

STAR WARS is so big now. 

It lights people’s imaginations up and connects in ways we don’t always see. 

Our persistent frustration though that it isn’t catering to us though is damaging the brand and not letting it grow. 

Sure, yeah, it’s owned by Disney. 

It’s a property. 

Sorry, that’s how this stuff goes. 

Horror is still seen as sorta punk rock because franchises still feel a little wild but very, very few of them are not controlled by a big production company and the ones that aren’t tend to be bad, bad, bad (or cling to gore and sex like a blankie).

I do hate that there are all these suits that decide the fate of this franchise. I hate that they are calculating everything to please all the fans because they need all the money. I wish that the auteurs would be allowed to tell stories in this world without pandering to fans. Sure, not all of them would be box office hits but they may be amazing. 

We don’t need every show and movie to be a blockbuster with a huge budget. 

Comic book movies are going through the same thing, where they need to be scaled back and to focus on the characters again and not the cataclysmic circumstances of everything. 

STAR WARS is about the people in that world, and the strange mix of magic and science fiction. 

That’s what the focus should be on. 

It’s modern mythology. 

Not everyone will love every movie or show. 

Not everyone will love every character. 

So what. 

The franchise needs boldness. 

Even with his missteps in the second trilogy Lucas was true to his vision and his story. 

That’s what we need, but with the support to let these people tell their stories. 

Scale back the budgets. 

Tell STORIES. 

Stoke imaginations. 

Fans will be left behind, but that’s life. 

They will always have the original trilogy, which they hate anyway because it’s not the PURE trilogy before Lucas went back to ‘fix’ things that he couldn’t address when they first came out. 

Fans will never be fully happy. 

That’s the joy and pain of fandom. 

I realize that the studio doesn’t care about anything but profits and that’s the heartbreaker of all this because a day will come when this franchise is mothballed again, and it will be our fault because we can’t just be happy about anything. 

The studio is so hyper-focused on the profits and what fans are saying that they are killing interesting projects and firing interesting filmmakers because they want to tell stories that weren’t exactly in the narrow scope of what fans seem to want. 

That doesn’t mean accepting things we think are bad, but allowing that maybe they also weren’t for us in the first place. 

Not everything is. 

And that’s OK. 

I guess…

…c…