I love Star Wars. No, but seriously, I fucking love the beautiful, festering, wriggling, ever-growing mass of shining delight that is the Star Wars franchise. I think that on the whole, I have never had more fun with a single franchise, and I find that I have an insatiable hunger for everything happening in every corner of its intricate universe.
I also think on the whole, that Star Wars may be the dumbest, most ridiculous fucking thing to ever exist.
The thing is when I say that, it truly comes from a place of love. Looking over everything I’ve ever experienced and will experience within Star Wars, even the coolest parts of it are full of silly shit. The thing is, it never is enough to ruin my experience. This isn’t true for everyone, and that is absolutely as valid as my opinion. You don’t have to like every inch of Star Wars, you could be turned off by certain dumb or silly things and not others, that is completely fine. I just need everyone to understand, that even the parts of Star Wars you love and respect over others have their own batch of dumb shit. I also need everyone to understand that while it is okay to dislike things, it is never okay to abuse others because they like something you don’t.
I think no less of those that shit on Star Wars, but if you shit on me for being positive about it, you suck. That’s kind of all there is to that.
I’m all about being critical though. You want to talk about filmmaking techniques, directorial styles, dialogue writing, and acting choices, oh buddy, I got some shit to say. You want to discuss the philosophical notions behind the concept of The Force, debate events and their implications within the canon and Legends, or breakdown character choices and arcs, I have even more shit to say. But you want to complain about how silly something looks, or how physics or logic dont work based on our own reality, I don’t really have time for that business. You have all right to dislike nonsense like that in the franchise, but interjecting the completely subjective and incredibly reductive argument of “but it dumb” into a conversation about lore and history adds absolutely nothing to the dialogue.
I think what makes Star Wars a weird place of contention for these types of arguments is that it has the slightly misleading appearance of being a science-fiction property. Yes, it has lasers, robots, and space travel, but it relies more on the storytelling tropes and themes of the fantasy genre. Science fiction always finds itself with a root in reality, looking at where we are as a species and society, and extrapolating what the future could bring. Fantasy tends to look at broad concepts of definitive “good” and “evil,” and what individuals and their specific personal traits can accomplish in the face of insurmountable odds.
Sci-fi is about what we can be, fantasy is about what we are.
Star Wars has more surface-level stuff like magic and wizards, kingdoms, and warring factions, but on a deeper level it tells the Hero’s Journey, it focuses on the passions of small groups working to fight against capital lettered “Bad Guys.” Fears of legacy, inadequacy, powerlessness. The universe’s rules have no basis in reality, but the human connections absolutely do. Georgie Porgie Lucas himself didn’t even know what a fucking parsec actually was, but he certainly knew the very real feeling of what it means to fear becoming your own parent. Star Wars is not a science fiction franchise as much as the shiny durasteel visage may have you believe, it is a fantasy. A genre known for throwing logical caution to the wind to focus on what is cool or important for character growth or world-building.
But as much as that, Star Wars is a silly as shit soap opera.
Georgie was adamant that Stat Wars, as much as it is mainly about the Hero’s Journey, is a children’s franchise. Which, in the vein of his contemporary Speilberg, and others like Jim Henson, simply meant it was for everyone. Nothing is too complicated to grasp and focus on themes that we understand at every age and step in our lives. But if we really take his phrasing to heart, I would go so far as to be momentarily reductive myself and refer to the franchise as “baby’s first ‘Days of Our Lives.’” There are shocking twists that were often written on the fly. Instead of long lost twins, we have clones. Instead of fake deaths, we have literal resurrections (and survival via a pure desire for vengeance). Instead of surprise family member reveals… oh yeah, that one is on the nose, but you get my point. Shit’s silly.
And that is fine. The fact that “blah, blah, blah, was dumb,” or “yadda, yadda, yadda, was illogical” should not be such bones of contention within a fandom for a series about space wizards with laser swords, featuring creatures called “monkey-lizards,” and villains with names like “Sidious” and “Savage.” Seriously, real life is full of enough negative shit, we don’t need our cartoonish escapism to be put under the same scalpel we put Oscar-winning art. Yeah, the original Star Wars was a phenomenon at the time, but the blockbuster film concept had only existed for two fucking years at that point. It still was as goofy at times as it was amazing. Georgie made some amazing advancements in tech, then and with even the most reviled of his films. But he was never using that tech to make Citizen Cane, even at his best. But he didn’t have to, to create a franchise that will probably survive in the way the myths of the ancient Greeks did.
We can hold any piece of Star Wars up against any other piece of Star Wars, and that is a logical place to base criticism. Within that, arguments of inconsistency in universe rules, our ideas of character development, or repercussions of events, have their place. But arguments that one part of Star Wars is or isn’t more silly or dumb than another, are themselves silly as hell. Not that you have to like all of the dumb or silly stuff, I’m not asking that. But we should respect all those that do like it because whether folks want to admit it or not, silliness is a fundamental piece of the Star Wars puzzle. Adding reductive subjective opinions to a discussion about in-universe logic is never necessary. And passion doesn’t always have to be serious.