How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy STAR WARS Again
A guide to getting your Force groove back
I’m a little bit older than Star Wars, but not so much older than I can remember a time without the galaxy far, far away. The universe that George Lucas birthed in 1977 has been a steady fixture in my life, even as my relationship with it changed over the years. I’ve gone from loving it to hating it, and now I have two podcasts about it. I even have a Star Wars tattoo these days.
Right now my attitudes about Star Wars feel about right; maybe they’ll change over time, but the way I think about the universe allows for it to change, and for my relationship with it to change. How did I stop worrying and learn to enjoy Star Wars? Let me tell you.
The first step is to realize it’s okay to not like Star Wars, or to not care about it anymore. You may have had a relationship with it in the past but you don’t need to cling to it. Yeah, it’s a big deal, and yeah because you once loved it you feel compelled to maybe keep up, but you should just let it go. Hold on to your old memories of the thing and let the rest of it go. It’s okay that Star Wars is not for you. Free yourself of the burden of having to worry about the next movie or the new TV show. Give yourself this blessing.
Now, how to enjoy Star Wars, in a handy list format:
Embrace Glup Shitto.
The Star Wars universe is vast, and every character in it has a story. For some people this is an irritant - “I don’t care about the backstory of the walrus guy at the cantina!” - but it’s actually part of what makes Star Wars really special. It’s an entire universe there to be explored, and you have the option to explore as much of it as you want. The weird side characters who get fleshed out in cartoons or books or comics or video games or whatever give everything texture, and it’s fun to see them weave in and out of stories. Some people feel like you are required to follow every thread and learn about every character if they show up in a movie or a show, but you don’t. You can, but I have never seen a Star Wars thing where you needed to be versed in deep lore to understand what’s going on. This week’s episode of The Mandalorian is a pretty good example - if you watched The Clone Wars cartoon all the stuff Bo-Katan says about Mandalore is referencing things you already know, but if you’ve never even heard of the cartoon she talks about it in such a way that you can follow along. In fact she mentions her father dying with honor, and I honestly wasn’t sure if that was something we had seen on The Clone Wars or not (turns out we had not), but it didn’t matter. The context was there.
But Glup Shitto is fun. It’s rare that a Glup Shitto is a major element of the story, but is usually just a little cameo or easter egg designed to delight the dorkiest among us. It’s fun seeing these stories all bump into one another, and it’s fun to imagine that these characters have lives beyond what we see on screen. It gives such depth, and honestly it’s kind of realistic. Every person you pass by on the street has a story, is in their own drama, has had their own adventures. For me it’s fun to follow the threads of these fictional characters as they fill out the edges of this vast universe.
Remember it’s for kids.
Because we have grown up with Star Wars it’s understandable that we want it to grow up with us. And in some cases it has - Andor is an incredible adult show, and it achieves that adultness not with nudity and swearing but with complex characters and grounded stories. But in the end Star Wars is for kids, even as it sometimes gets brutal or crazy. I think George Lucas understood that kids can handle quite a bit - after all, he had Anakin Skywalker massacre a room full of children (offscreen but you know what happened) - but that they also wanted cute creatures and juvenile jokes every now and again. For Star Wars it’s all about balance, and not every work in the universe gets that balance right. But to be put off by silliness or goofiness in a Star Wars movie is to lose sight of who these things are largely intended for. Conversely, when you allow yourself to enjoy this aspect so many problems within Star Wars kind of evaporate. Life’s too short to get worked up about Jar Jar stepping in poodoo.
Accept it’s going to be bad sometimes.
It would be nice if Star Wars maintained the batting average of the original trilogy, but that’s simply not realistic. Some of the movies, shows, etc will not be very good. It’s not quite Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) but perhaps we can create Sturgeon’s Principle of Star Wars, which is “Sometimes it’s going to be crap.” This isn’t some great revelation, but I think Star Wars’ going from extreme scarcity - decades between trilogies - to relative saturation has happened so fast some of us haven’t had time to adjust. Like, The Book of Boba Fett sucked, and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean Star Wars sucks or Star Wars is dead, it means that this one show sucked. The next show, it turned out, was Andor, which decidedly did not suck.
Holding this idea - that some of this stuff is simply not going to be very good - takes a lot of the pressure off. In the 2020s not every Star Wars thing needs to measure up to what Lucas did in 1977. For one thing, that’s one of the great movies of all time, it’s insane to expect that level of quality in everything. Allowing a Star Wars thing to be bad and letting it go is a key way to relate to the universe in this era.
Realize it’s a big tent.
Sometimes Star Wars will be crap, and that’s just the law of averages working as there are more and more Star Wars things being created. It’s easy to look at that and think it’s bad - they’re oversaturating! The quality would be higher if they did less! - but I think it’s actually a great development.
Star Wars, we’ve already established, is vast. It’s not only vast in terms of size, in terms of characters and even in terms of time periods (as of now Star Wars stories can take place anywhere within a span of 150 or so years), but it’s vast in terms of possibilities. When there is less Star Wars you need to make sure your Star Wars fits a mold, that it satisfies as many people as possible. But if there’s more Star Wars you have the ability to tell a whole swath of different kinds of stories. They don’t all have to fit the template, and I think that in recent years we’ve seen the beginnings of this. The Mandalorian and Andor are both Star Wars, but they’re incredibly different in terms of tone, storytelling and perspective. Both are legitimate Star Wars but neither needs to feel exactly like the other. There’s space in this universe for diversity.
George Lucas tried to tell us this in his trilogy, especially in the Prequels. He has Obi-Wan Kenobi go off in Attack of the Clones to have a PI escapade. There’s political intrigue and adventure, horror and love stories in Star Wars, and the universe is big enough to tell tales in all of these genres and more. And this means not every Star Wars thing has to be for you - the big tent can contain multitudes, and you’re allowed to ignore the stuff that doesn’t appeal to you. This is freeing - to realize that Star Wars now contains all kinds of approaches and tones and styles, and that you need not subject yourself to every single one of them.
Know that it will never make sense.
Canon! The cause of, and solution for, all of fandom’s miseries. Star Wars has a weird approach to canon because stories in this universe are not told chronologically; movies or TV shows can be set at any point in the timeline, revealing previously unknown events. To call these prequels is actually reductive at this point; The Bad Batch takes place after Revenge of the Sith, but does that make it a prequel to Star Wars? Not quite, or at least it doesn’t seem to be the case. While the time jumping aspect of Star Wars storytelling makes canon connections uniquely satisfying, it also means that everything won’t always line up. You just gotta let it go.
You also have to let go of the idea that any of the space or tech stuff is going to make any sense. The main physical law in Star Wars is the Rule of Cool - does it look or sound cool? Then it’s in. This is how it’s been ever since Han Solo boasted about the Millenium Falcon doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, a statement that makes no sense because a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. (Of course Star Wars has gone and explained this away, and such is the strange joy of this universe- even as we tell you not to worry about it there becomes a storytelling possibility in explaining it)
The Rule of Cool is baked into the very DNA of Star Wars; it’s part of the scifi serials and comics that influenced George Lucas. Many of these stories took the vaguest understandings of scientific concepts and wove them into exciting narratives, but I can guarantee you that you’re not going to learn a lot of physics reading old Flash Gordon strips.
Now, we do get caught up as the Star Wars universe grows and we see ship capabilities in one film not quite match up with capabilities in another, but you have to ask yourself - does the ship having different capabilities this time make this scene better, or tenser, or more fun? Consistency is good - you don’t want to create a universe that is entirely without rules, where literally anything can happen from moment to moment - but you can’t be hemmed in by it. This is a corollary of the canon thing; it’s fun when used right, but sometimes it needs to be ignored altogether.
Allow it to change.
This is a universe that is almost 50 years old. At this point hundreds of creators have had their fingers in the pie; while this is George Lucas’ kitchen there are quite a few chefs. With this kind of longevity and diversity of creative talent demanding that Star Wars be exactly what it was in the 70s is a fool’s wish. Hell, it was a fool’s wish in 1980, when many fans were scandalized by how different The Empire Strikes Back was from Star Wars. There was a Star Wars fanzine that shut down after Empire because the creators simply felt that the movie they had fallen in love with had been ruined by this dark, strange film.
It’s going to change. It’s going to grow. Let it. Don’t demand that Star Wars stay what it was when you were ten; let it be something new to today’s ten year olds. Enjoy the change; know that the originals are always there (sort of - the Special Editions are beyond the scope of this piece, and you should know that there are ways to get beautiful 4K transfers of the original, unfucked with movies) and see where the changes take it, and you.
And if you don’t like where it goes? Refer back to the advice before the list: realize it’s okay to not like Star Wars. If the whole thing moves away from you, that’s okay. It moved away from me for years, but eventually it moved back (or maybe I moved. The truth is that Star Wars and I are both always changing, so who knows who met who halfway). My one regret from the time when Star Wars moved away from me was the bitterness I had about it, as if I was owed the Star Wars I wanted. As if I didn’t already have the Star Wars I wanted! Other people got the Star Wars they wanted, and today you’ll meet actual grown adults who prefer the Prequels to the OT because that’s what they grew up on.
For the past few years Star Wars has given me a lot of joy, and it’s because of these things. Because I realized these things. If something was bad, I let it be bad. If something wasn’t for me, I understood that. I didn’t need to get worked up (maybe I got a little worked up about Rise of Skywalker, but I think that’s just bad bad, not simply Star Wars bad). My Star Wars tattoo has meaning to me, and even if every new Star Wars thing for the rest of my life sucks, I’ll be okay with the tattoo.
Listen, I like a lot of things about Star Wars; there are aesthetic aspects of this universe that are burned into my brain forever. I think that Lucas’ brilliance in giving Star Wars a spiritual dimension has allowed it to be something more than a toy-generating factory. I think Star Wars actually is special, and that it remains special even post-Lucas. But I also hold it lightly, and I am willing to let go when the time comes. I don’t need Star Wars to be what it was when I was ten, I just need it to be what it is today.
A note: yes, I've written a piece with essentially the same title... nine years ago!