Are you a Star Wars fan? I'm beginning to question if I am... - Page 3 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Are you a Star Wars fan? I'm beginning to question if I am...

   
An opinion of mine that I am sharing for this particular case, but that I honestly have for all fandoms ever: a true Star Wars fan would never use the expression "true Star Wars fan". Or, as Tom Reimann famously put it, "the correct answer to 'If you're such a big fan, then in what issue of Aquaman did we learn the name of Aquaman's father?' is 'F**k you -- Arthur, Prince of the Sea, belongs to everyone'".

So yeah, just something I felt like sharing. I personally watched the original trilogy because my dad was a massive fan of it and had the original VHS (THE ORIGINAL VHS, I SAY) stashed somewhere in our old house. I liked it, so I decided to also watch the prequel trilogy, and I also liked it. I didn't watch Ep VII, nor do I plan to, for a simple reason: I have lost interest. Not because I think that the new movie sucks, or that the overall direction of the product is bad or whatever the hell: I have lost interest, simply because I think it is a natural reaction, after six episodes of the same thing, to just want to go out and do something else. It's kind of the reason why I never finished the Harry Potter series.

I'm always fascinated to hear from such wildly divergent viewpoints, especially from my own.

In the last few posts, I've heard someone call JJ Abrams - surely the most successful geek in modern history; the Theo Epstine of sci-fi, if you will - a destroyer of franchises, which seems like an interestingly hyperbolic statement, considering Star Trek and Star Wars were largely dormant, given-up-for-dead franchises before he took their collective reins.

I've also now heard a justification for not finishing a story you enjoy. That's an even wilder one for me. To not enjoy the first half of the Harry Potter and Star Wars narratives before giving up on them is one thing; that makes sense to me. But to enjoy them and then decide to give up on them before seeing how the narrative ends is inexplicable, at least for me. But hey...that's the beauty of a site like MW. It allows all of us to interact with folks who have differing, sometimes inexplicable, opinions that so wildly differ from our own that it seems as if said people are posting from different planets.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Raistlinmc View Post
I'm always fascinated to hear from such wildly divergent viewpoints, especially from my own.

In the last few posts, I've heard someone call JJ Abrams - surely the most successful geek in modern history; the Theo Epstine of sci-fi, if you will - a destroyer of franchises, which seems like an interestingly hyperbolic statement, considering Star Trek and Star Wars were largely dormant, given-up-for-dead franchises before he took their collective reins.

I've also now heard a justification for not finishing a story you enjoy. That's an even wilder one for me. To not enjoy the first half of the Harry Potter and Star Wars narratives before giving up on them is one thing; that makes sense to me. But to enjoy them and then decide to give up on them before seeing how the narrative ends is inexplicable, at least for me. But hey...that's the beauty of a site like MW. It allows all of us to interact with folks who have differing, sometimes inexplicable, opinions that so wildly differ from our own that it seems as if said people are posting from different planets.
Allow me to rephrase that: in Harry Potter's case, I didn't finish it because there were some characters that I didn't like, and some plot points that I didn't enjoy, so yeah, putting up with them for the sake of enjoying a good fantasy was something I was willing to do for 3 or 4 books, but SEVEN? My patience has its limits.

In Star War's case, I DID see how the narrative ends. Ep 6 gave the series a satisfying conclusion as far as I am concerned, and the prequel trilogy did a good job in showing us how Anakin turned to the Dark Side... So yeah, 3 episodes to show us how he became a villain, and 3 episodes to show us what he did as a villain and how he redeemed himself, capped off by his cathartic death: as far as I am concerned, the very long and very interesting character arc of this guy is now over, we know everything we needed to know about him, and the whole narrative built around him has been succesfully resolved.

Episode VII is essentially a reboot. It doesn't add anything to first six episodes: instead, it kickstarts a fresh new narrative in the same universe. In simpler terms, it is not "we are exploring unresolved plot points of the concluded narrative", it is "we are giving you more Star Wars". And I am just not interested in that, I've had my fix of Star Wars already, I'm full. It's literally all there is to it.

Fair enough. With Star Wars, I see where you're coming from, and I can even (almost, sorta-kinda) agree.

But with Harry Potter, I will - until my dying day - think you're terribly wrong, simply because what you think you know about the characters by the end of book 4 isn't nearly what you will learn about them by the end of book 7. Pretending otherwise is ignorant and arrogant to the nth degree. But, again, to each his/her own

Quote:
Originally Posted by Raistlinmc View Post
Fair enough. With Star Wars, I see where you're coming from, and I can even (almost, sorta-kinda) agree.

But with Harry Potter, I will - until my dying day - think you're terribly wrong, simply because what you think you know about the characters by the end of book 4 isn't nearly what you will learn about them by the end of book 7. Pretending otherwise is ignorant and arrogant to the nth degree. But, again, to each his/her own
Now I feel like I kicked a hornet's nest for carelessly bringing up Harry Potter <.<

Look, I won't deny that the idea behind HP was good, and that JKR can be a pretty damn brilliant writer when she wants to. It's just that, throughout the series, I was constantly annoyed by the obnoxious presence of a number of things I did not like: I gave this lady 4 chances, for a total of over 100 euros, to persuade me to put up with such things and keep reading, and she just didn't. So I chose to stop reading. Not reading is the first inalienable right of the reader in Daniel Pennac's famous manifesto, after all.

If you feel otherwise hey, it's your choice. I certainly won't call you ignorant or arrogant for it: if anything, I might point out how including a "I respect everyone's opinion" kind of statement, in the same line in which you included not one but two insults to someone who expressed an opinion different from your own, is kind of hypocritical... But probably not even that. We wouldn't want to turn a perfectly ok topic in a flame fest, right?

EDIT: this being said, I do concede that, given the kind of argument I made in regards to Star Wars, Harry Potter wasn't the most pertinent example I could have made. A better one might have been Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull : I liked the first three movies, I was satisfied with them, so I am not interested in a reboot. Not because I necessarily think that a reboot would be inherently WORSE than the original thing, but simply because I am the kind of guy who believes that the fond memories of the past belong in the past: gimme something new now.

Well, I certainly wasn't trying to insult you, I promise you that. I wasn't saying you personally are arrogant or ignorant; I just said that assuming you know enough about complicated characters by the middle of the story in an extended narrative to make an ultimate judgment on them is both arrogant and ignorant. I stand by that. It was never my intention to be insulting.

People grow. They change, their tastes change. When franchises start spanning decades, then you are more likely to grow into or grow out of you favor for any particular series. If you find that you are no longer inspired or excited by Star Wars or any other property, it's likely that you are a different person than you were twenty or thirty years ago. That's okay. I used to love Lego. I was a Lego maniac up until my teens. Now my kids have all my old Lego and I'm glad that it brings them a bit of joy even though they aren't as enthused about it as I was at their ages. But now I don't really care about it. now I do wood working, which is an evolution of what drew me to Lego to begin with. And that's okay.

We don't owe any loyalty to Star Wars or any other property. Once we are done with it we move on without remorse. And that's as it should be.

I like some of the nuances that the prequels created. Like in Empire Strikes Back. Okay when I first saw it, it was the love child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy that threw me for a loop. But after the prequels, I note that on Dagobah, R2-D2 would definitely know who Yoda is. Despite knowing EXACTLY who Yoda is does not stop R2 from being a complete jerk to the Jedi Master, even zapping him with electricity over a flashlight.

R2 has also done a lot to help his friends over the course of six movies. Preventing C-3PO from having his memory erased at the end of Episode III is not one of them. R2 is a dick.

That's what 1977 will do to a droid.




 

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