thedeadparrot

I, like most people who love Star Wars, fell in love with Star Wars when I was still a kid. I don't know if many people can articulate the thing that made them latch onto it, but I can. What I loved about Star Wars was the way it broke down a barrier in my mind that I didn't even know existed in the first place.

It was a retelling of the stories that I'd always heard about with knights with metal swords and plate armor and in stone castles, but now it was in space. Now it had spaceships and laser swords and the Force. The beauty of Star Wars isn't just that it breaks down the barriers between fantasy and science fiction, but that it does it so effortlessly, that it evokes a complete galaxy that is so much bigger than what we see on screen.

It wasn't until later until I fully understood the other genres that were mixed into Star Wars, the Western gunslinger, the evil space Nazis, the semi-bastardized Eastern Philosophy. Star Wars is the height of remix culture, back when remix culture tried to hide its references just a little bit.

( more rambling, with some mild Force Awakens spoilers )

Still, things like The Clone Wars give me hope that The Force Awakens doesn't even matter in the long run. The MCU is willing to be all sorts of different things at the same time. Let's hope the Star Wars universe gets to be that as well.

I rewatched Star Wars this weekend with my friend, all of the original trilogy, because we are giant nerds, and Star Wars is so, so perfect in so many ways. It captures something, I think, a big, wonderful world to play in, the stories of wizards and princesses and heroes translated into a retrofuturistic space opera that still manages to be its own thing.

It's hard to tell whether or not it does manage to execute its emotional beats, because my feelings about them are so clouded by the fact that I get the urge to sob every time I hear John Williams' Force theme playing and squeal with delight every time I hear the Imperial March.

Due to the resurgence in Star Wars feelings, I went looking for fic, naturally. It's interesting, the mix of the old and the new. Back when I was reading Star Wars fic, there was a lot of Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon fic, which kind of squicked me out because of the teacher/student thing. It doesn't bother me as much now, fandom having desensitized me to pretty much everything. Obi-Wan/Anakin seems to have had a surge of new stuff, and so has a lot of gen. It's definitely a fandom predisposed to ripping action yarns, which has been pretty cool to see and a very different change of pace from what I've been reading lately.

And then there's a going back. Finding things that I remembered.

I hope to one day be that good, that memorable of a writer. Maybe it's not a matter of skill. Maybe it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time for a particular person. Capturing the right kind of mood. Capturing the right kind of image. But I'd like to be someone who can do that, who can write something that will lead another person to track it down across the internet years and years later to an ancient Angelfire site with a terrible tiling background image.

That would be cool.