Lastly, there is a third scenario. The one that seems to have become reality a few weeks ago. We’ve thrown out no new content. We’ve seen how having some new content can be problematic. The only option remaining is all new content. New films. New books. New everything. Yet even this seems to be something that Star Wars fans are more than ready to complain about. We complained about the prequels when it seemed that George Lucas had begun to “sell out” his own franchise. We moaned about poorly written and executed characters. We opined about how if only there had been someone involved to temper George’s vision how the result might have been something more akin to the Original Trilogy. Then we got what we asked for. George sells his company to another who has both a track record of endless, mind-numbing sequels of the very films that put it on the map (I’m looking at you Aladdin: King of Thieves, and Cinderella II: Dreams Come True) as well as a record of making some incredibly entertaining and ground-breaking stuff (Marvel’s The Avengers being the most recent example that comes to mind). Yet, once this happens, we complain that Star Wars will be lost without George at the helm. Thousands, if not millions of fans complained that Disney might not involve the same man that they were decrying only a day before. We are anxious about how an endless stream of new movies might take away the wonder, and lead to Star Wars XIV: Jar Jar Binks Reanimated to Marry the Great-Grandchild of Han and Leia without realizing just how close we already are to that point in the EU books that we cherish so much.
These fears might be completely unfounded. In the coming weeks and months, as more information comes to light (we already have a screenwriter and rumors about directors floating about), we are going to face the decision collectively, and individually, about whether or not to accept that this is actually happening. We will either be forced to stand on our principles, or just enjoy the ride no matter what might come. However, the bottom line here, Star Wars fans, is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. We shudder at the idea of no new content. We cringe at some of the potential implications of an endless outpouring of some new content stretched out over years and years. We cry and curse when the floodgates are opened to an entire realm of possibilities.
What is left for us? What more could we want? What might actually make us happy? I cannot claim to have definitive answers to any of these questions. But what this situation has revealed to me is that Star Wars fans are looking less and less like the loyal, quirky fans who can name worlds of which their friends have never heard, and know all the back-stories of random people standing at the bar in the Mos Eisley Cantina, but are becoming a group more and more filled with angst and self-loathing. And while I’ve spent more years in my brief life than I care to admit in angst and self-loathing, it’s time that we as Star Wars fans find the strength within ourselves to reckon with these questions and these eventualities. It’s time for us to realize that despite what Star Wars has meant to us, there is a line at which a franchise of fiction must remain a franchise of fiction. We are enabling these changes in ways that we cannot see and do not know, all the while punishing ourselves in the process. I’m calling on you to stand up, Star Wars fans, and let’s evaluate exactly who we are, who we want to be, and what we want from Star Wars, and from life. Only then can we either accept ourselves for who we are, or change the things within us that bother us. A friend of mine seems to always urge us to “keep it real” and it’s long past time for us to take that advice.
