-Preamble-
(Or, if you’re reading this years from now, and this is one out of a myriad of articles, you can probably skip this part.)

Hello. If you are one of the first people reading this, and, for whatever reason, find what I have to say informative, thought-provoking, or agreeable, I want to be upfront with you and tell you, first of all, I appreciate the sentiment, but also, I'm not entirely sure what I would like this Substack to be. I'm not sure there is anything in particular I want this Substack to be. I'm not even sure that I'll write a follow-up to this piece - the only reason I put Part I in the title was due to the fact that the topic at hand is but one snarling head of a vicious hydra. This beast, however, has so many slavering, gnashing mouths that I doubt anyone could rightly address or catalogue all of them, though, since they fascinate, perplex, and intrigue me, so I'd like to write my thoughts on a few before moving on to address some other nightmarish, chimerical monster spawned from the fetid bowels of Clown World, if only to get my own thoughts straight (I find both writing and talking to myself helps, though only one of those can be done outside the privacy of my home or car). If anyone else happens to find value in them, all the better.

But, ultimately, I am nothing if not capricious. Fickle might be a more appropriate word, given that capricious so often has a malicious connotation to it. To be even more simple, I wouldn't say I'm easily distracted, but my mind does tend to follow a rabbit down a hole, only to find another, newer rabbit while spelunking, and then promptly follow that one down a different arm of the tunnel, so on and so forth until I bypass Wonderland entirely and bumble headfirst into Hell. You'll most likely notice that I have a penchant for tangents that often veer in odd ways, and some times meander from the path I meant to embark on (though, usually this begins as way to build context, which I find it critical in building the foundations of my thought, even to myself), so you'll see “I digress” quite often in my writing. This is all to say, it may be some time before a proper follow-up to this topic comes. It may never be written. There may be topics I write on once that could well warrant a dozen articles, yet one or two is all I could ever articulate before some new dominates my thoughts.

What I'm saying, simply put, is this - don't get attached. Though, if you do… well, I'd be flattered all the same.

That being said, that's enough chasing this rabbit. Let's address the hydra lurking in the corner.

-The Many Battered Wives of Fandom-

-Part I: This is not about Star Wars-

The following series of articles is not about Star Wars. I want to make this explicitly clear. This is not about Star Wars.

I’ll also say this now - I do not like Star Wars. In fact, I’ve come to outright loathe it, so much so that when I even see someone with a shirt or some other piece of merchandise with that green, bug-eyed little turd from The Mandalorian, my respect for that person's opinion instantly decreases (assuming I had any at all to begin with). Is that a bit harsh? Absolutely. Yet, at the same time, Baby Yoda - or, as I prefer to call it, Glup Shitto (if you know, you know) - feels to me like a scam, and an obvious one at that; a cute little… thing meant to lure you in and distract you so you'll sit down, watch a strictly mediocre show, and let Disney pillage your wallet while you do. Baby Yoda is but one in a long line of increasingly oblique yet thankfully ineffective scams to sucker the public into consuming more Star Wars content. And anyone who falls for a scam has my sympathy… but I'm not going to put much stock into what they tell me to do, whether it be invest in a stock or waste my time on some garbage movie. Baby Yoda, being the most successful of these scams to date, is utterly emblematic of why I’ve come to despise the franchise so much.

I’ll be honest with you - I’m a product of the 90’s. I was a young and very impressionable child when the remastered cuts of the original Star Wars Trilogy came to VHS. One of my earliest memories was my father bringing home an action figure of Luke Skywalker in the orange Rebel flight suit as a gift; why, I can’t say, because I distinctly remember that I had not yet seen any of movies at that point. I also distinctly remember thinking that it was an action figure of a hockey player rather than a sword-wielding, interstellar pilot, for reasons that are completely lost to me now. Once I did watch the movies, however, I was hooked. Honestly, showing me those at such an impressionable age is debatably the worst decision my parents ever made while raising me, as I suspect it was the flashpoint that set me down the path towards where I’d go - though, that is a story for another time. Suffice to say, I was an absolute fiend for Star Wars. I could quote the movies, forwards and backwards. I watched them so many times that I wore the tape for The Empire Strikes Back out, and my mother had to buy me a new one. I’m not sure how they weren’t concerned when I told them that, when I got bored in the car of playing with my collection of Star Wars toys, I’d shut my eyes and replay the movies in my mind’s eye. I slept underneath Star Wars branded sheets wearing Star Wars branded shirts reading Star Wars branded books. I’m fairly certain I shit my Star Wars branded underwear when my dad told me he’d read that there was a new one coming out, back when The Phantom Menace was announced.

When I say I loved Star Wars as a child, I don’t mean that I was simply fond of it - it was an insatiable lust for the franchise and the world within it that bordered on mania.

But this is not about Star Wars. It isn’t about how I fell out of love with it, either, though that will most likely need to be addressed at a later point.

Star Wars is, ultimately, not at the heart of what I wish to discuss and theorize about, but it is, I believe, one of the most exemplary specimen of the greater phenomenon. This phenomenon is not one I have named, and, honestly, I believe (and fear) that it’s most likely just one violent, raging storm within a larger system that’s bearing down on us. Perhaps I’m writing this as a way of naming each of these individual storms before trying to even wrap my head around the entirety of the system. To return to the metaphor of the Hydra from above - one I’m beginning to suspect I’ll be using more than I originally intended - I think it’s helpful to study the individual heads, one by one, perhaps even cluster by cluster, before addressing the beast as a whole, so that we may better understand the various components of it and, hopefully, one day be free of it.

Now, when it comes to this Hydra, I am fairly certain that it has been lurking around the periphery of our culture for much, much longer than most who are now acutely aware of it’s presence think it has been. For decades, it was lurking in the shadows, waiting until it acquired enough heads to leap upon the unsuspecting public and collectively maul us.

One of this Hydra’s heads is the Star Wars franchise - if you were beginning to wonder when Star Wars was going to be relevant to this hydra metaphor. It is the first of the many heads that people noticed. I can’t say that it was the first of the heads that I was aware of, but, once I did recognize it for what it is, it became apparent that this head was much more ferocious and pernicious than most of the others, and, over time, that head has only grown larger, its teeth more numerous, and its disposition more unpleasant and violent, while its coloration grows brighter and more obvious as the years pass, exposing it to more and more once unwary bystanders.

Now, you’ve probably noticed that the Star Wars franchise isn’t exactly what it used to be. Though it feels as if an entire lifetime has elapsed since, at present, it’s been over a full decade since Disney acquired LucasFilm as a studio from George Lucas, and the IP is nearly unrecognizable in its current, miserable state. I’m fairly certain everyone but the most deluded acolytes of the Cult of Disney and brain-dead redditors (though, perhaps I’m being redundant) is aware of this fact. The degree of mismanagement not just of the Star Wars franchise, but the entirety of LucasFilm has been so extreme it almost beggars belief. In any world with even an iota of sanity, Kathleen Kennedy - the current head of the studio, for those unaware - would have been frogmarched out of her office and blackballed from the entertainment industry entirely, if not sent to court to stand for some sort of intentional and malicious sabotage of company assets. But I suspect if you’re reading this, you most likely know this already.

Now, let's hit rewind on the VHS machine and, for a moment, roll the tape back to 2012 - a simpler time, for sure, though I'm not certain we appreciated that fully when we were there. Barack Obama wins his bid for re-election over Mitt Romney, to the surprise of no one who was paying attention. The Arab Spring is in full bloom, and to many, it appears that the infamously unstable Middle Eastern states may finally be turning the corner towards liberal democracy. LMFAO's seminal classic, Party Rock Anthem, dominates the airwaves. Many people riff on the supposed apocalypse predicted by the Mayans, but are only half-joking when they say they said, “Gee, sure would be nice if that asteroid would come along and wipe us out already.”

If only we knew how good we had it.

But, pertinent to the topic at hand, it was also when I like to imagine Bob Iger handed George Lucas a comically oversized novelty check for four billion something dollars to convert LucasFilm from a satrapy to a province - a cost that, while I'm sure they recouped a time or two over, has not paid the dividends originally expected. Now, at this time, I was nearing the end of my teenage years, and though I still held a certain fondness for the Star Wars franchise, I had long since shifted my manic obsessions elsewhere. I met the news with what I'd say was optimistic apathy - it wasn't the holy revelation that it seemed to be to a large swathe of Reddit's population, but I knew I would still see the movie, and was interested to see where it would go. I didn't think much about it afterwards.

Fast forward to 2015. The mood around the country is significantly darker. George Zimmerman is acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, exacerbating existing strains on deteriorating race relations in America. A young white man guns down elderly African-Americans at bible study in a Charleston church, while Islamic extremists gun down French cartoonists in Paris, and the media is flooded with images of massive human caravans trundling through the European countryside as the foul fruits of the destabilization wrought by the Arab Spring came into full bloom. Crazier still, that guy from the Apprentice, of all people, is running for president - but we're certain he's just doing it for attention. There's no way he's possibly going to win the election in the following year. Worst of all, a living amalgam of the worst qualities of bland, upper middle-class white women, synthesized in a lab by the twisted psychopaths in the music industry, called Megan Trainor is unleashed upon an unaware populace and begins a campaign of auditory terrorism against anyone with functional ears that continues to this very day.

Again - we didn't know how good we had it.

But, pertinent to the topic at hand, the first film of what history will remember as “Disney Star Wars” - “The Force Awakens” - is released to critical and popular acclaim. For months prior, marketing for the movie rages across every form of media in existence, making the film impossible to ignore. If Bob Iger could have found a way to advertise via smoke signals, I know I would have been seeing hazy smoke clouds vaguely resembling storm trooper helmets hanging above the dusky horizon in the weeks leading up to the film's release. Hell, I recall going to the store and picking up a bag of tangerines to find the soulless R2-D2 knock-off little soccer ball robot on the label, along with the line that read something like, “Be sure to check out Star Wars: The Force Awakens, only in theaters on December 18th!” It was that very moment a familiar prickling against the back of my neck began as I became aware of the pernicious gaze of something monstrous resting upon me. I didn't know it at the time - I figured it was a trick of the imagination, rolled my eyes, put the tangerines in my cart, and went to buy my customary six pack of Rolling Rock.

I'm fairly certain most of the American population alive at the time can recall seeing footage on the nightly news of literal legions of what years later will be widely known as “Bug Men” and “Soy Boys” in Star Wars cosplay, camping in front of theaters days, if not weeks in advance of the movie's release. I can see it now, this very moment, in vivid detail - lines and lines of awkward, podgy, mostly bearded men of all ages, clothed in ill-fitting t-shirts that either hang loose from their reedy, spindly frames, or are stretched taut over globular, distended guts, their eyes wide with an unsettling, almost demented excitement, jaws agape and filling the air with lunatic howls and childish wails from beneath cheap, plastic Darth Vader masks and wildly swing about replica lightsabers and toy guns clenched in clammy hands. Honestly, for as vivid as I remember the hype, it's almost difficult to believe it ever really happened, what with the diminished state the IP is in now. Of course, individuals like the aforementioned crowds still exist - and in large numbers, as well - but their population has sharply declined like some sort of endangered gazelle, and their gatherings are now confined to various convention circuits. Nowadays, the general public is free to admit that acting like a child who'd just downed a handful of Vyvanse over a movie in public rather than conventions was, frankly, ridiculous. But, at the time, Star Wars as a franchise was so revered, entrenched so deeply in our culture, we all pretty much just shrugged and said, Well, yeah, it's a bit silly, but it IS Star Wars.

Grossing over two billion dollars, rising to the lofty position of the third highest grossing of all time upon release, the movie’s release was treated less like that of a conventional film and more like a cultural watershed moment, if not some sort of religious experience. Looking back, I don't think that's a totally incorrect way to label it, actually. In many ways, it did, indeed, signal a great sea change in both niche nerd culture and the broader pop culture - even if many of us didn't know it at the time.

I saw the movie opening week with some friends. I didn't hate it. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. Unpopular opinion, but I thought that Adam Driver as Kylo Ren was actually kind of cool, as he appealed to my inner edgy thirteen year old. But, no sooner was I walking out of the movie theater did I feel it again - that prickling sensation at the back of my neck. This time, it was not so easy to shrug off. My friends and I went to Whataburger afterwards, and, as we discussed the movie, that awful prickling sensation only grew stronger, and a cold, icy sense of fear began to condense in the pit of my stomach, despite the warm double cheeseburger I’d just dropped into it.

I knew what I’d just seen. So many didn’t. They were excited. They were elated, even. I could understand why - I’m sure for Star Wars fans more hardcore than I was, it was all too easy to get swept up in the braying crowd of redditors as they began their bacchanalian reverie, screaming full throated worship and exclamations of joy to the heavens in celebration of the Reddit Messiah returned.

Star Wars was back! X-Wings! Lightsabers! Storm troopers! After so many years, it was back, and it was so good, too! This wasn’t that messy, CGI, poorly written slop of Lucas’ prequels - this was Star Wars back in full force, just like it used to be!

It wasn’t just a return to form for the franchise - to these people, it akin to the long-awaited return of an old friend. The prodigal son had come home at last, bringing with him space ships, lasers, and faceless, helmeted goons with him galore, showering the adoring masses with epic space battles and swashbuckling laser sword fights, all with a kind, benevolent smile.

Yet, blinded by their rapturous joy, enraptured by the swirling madman’s parade of fellow adherents, their was a contingent of Star Wars fans that missed the gleam of malice in the prodigal son’s eye.

At the time, they didn't know. At the time, despite my suspicions, I didn't know. I doubt even the shareholders at Disney knew that they we were all witnessing the highest crest of the Star Wars wave. That was it; that was as good as it was ever going to get.

At the time, they didn't know it, but that night - December 18th, 2015 - was the first time many, many devoted and loyal fans of Star Wars met the Hydra.

If you’re reading this at present, you know how the story goes from here; I’d reckon we were all alive and there to witness it, if not directly, then out of our peripheral vision, like driving by a twisted hunk of burning metal and plastic that had been a car on the highway, or watching an ambulance speed by your window. I doubt I’ll be spoiling much for anyone when I say that it wouldn’t be long before the Star Wars fandom, one of the oldest and most well-established in the world of geeks and nerds, would be suddenly and violently be torn in two. Die-hard Star Wars fanatics that had shelves lined with Star Wars paraphernalia and collectibles, who wore shirts that said shit like, Come to the Dark Side: We Have Cookies, and maybe a Rebel insignia tattooed inked somewhere on their body - these people were suddenly excoriating the very same company they’d been praising before. Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy’s names were on the lips of every Star Wars fan, and they were being spat like four letter words. Within two years, many of the same fans that had been so enamored with The Force Awakens would be recording hours upon hours upon hours of rants, tangents, and screeds filled with all manner of bile and vitriol towards The Last Jedi.

Frankly, I don’t really care to revisit the release and the sickening media blitz that accompanied it like I did The Force Awakens. For one, when The Last Jedi released in 2017, I was not in a good place in my life; much of it is a dull, unpleasant blur, and what I can recall I don’t particularly like, so my recollections may not be as sharp as they were for 2015. I’ll just say that if I thought putting R2-D2 Lite on the label of a bag of tangerines was ridiculous, I could only stare with vacant eyes when I picked up one of those plastic wrapped potatoes you bake in the oven, only to see Darth Vader’s dark visage glowering back at me from the stick and wonder if I had died at some point and gone to Hell without realizing it.

For another, enough has been said about The Last Jedi. More than could or rightly should ever be read by one person. There’s nothing I could say about it that hasn’t been articulated better by at least a dozen different people. The movie itself is not what’s important here. Remember - this series isn’t about Star Wars.

What I want to touch on next time is not The Last Jedi, but rather, the people that were hurt by it. Being a canny predator, the Hydra had lured them in with false smiles and honeyed words, beckoning them through the door back to the good old days of their favorite franchise. It gave them shiny new toys to keep them distracted, sat with them and spun wild fan theories about the true identity of Generic CGI Villain #3 and Rey’s paternal lineage, read them fan-fiction to send them off to sleep beneath their plush Star Wars blankets, staged mock lightsaber duels and drank and made merry with them until, once they were comfortable and settled in, once their guard was down, once they trusted the Hydra - that’s when it bit them.

And it didn’t just bite the people who, to this day, still speak about Rian Johnson as if he committed some ghoulish war crime against their nation. Those are just the ones who yelped in pain.

We’ll talk about them first.