Solo4114
Master Member
The Batman analogy always falls apart for me, as its movies were an interpretation of a long-lasting and evolving comic book character. James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, they can be seen on screen in strong or weak outings and ride out the storms; the audience never feels as though they're watching the definitive version of the character and they feel more free to embrace or reject it from their personal catalogue. Conversely, properties like Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Ghostbusters are defined by their films, and it's hard to scrub the stink of a bad outing from the franchise as a whole. My skin still crawls when I think of the prequels or Crystal Skull.
Yeah, many of us might take our movies too seriously by some standards, but that comes with the territory on the RPF.
But even for folks like me, for whom Star Wars is a part of my identity, I was still able to eventually reach a point where I just...stopped caring about the stuff I didn't like, and focused instead on the stuff I did like. And I found new stuff to like, too.
Really, though, the period of 1999-2012 or so was a pretty awful time to be a Star Wars fan, if you didn't like the PT. I hated it, personally. And because of Lucas' auteur sensibilities, his basic attitude was "They're MY stories, and you can suck it if you don't like the stories I wanna tell the way I wanna tell 'em." Even after my ire at the PT died down, I was still consistently incensed at his steadfast refusal to clean up the original version of the OT and release that on home media, preferring instead to issue shoddily handled transfers of his latest tinkerings.
At this time, the rest of the franchise was really floundering. The videogame side of the franchise was averaging maybe 1-2 mediocre-to-good games for every 4-5 stinkers, and some of the stinkers were truly rank (e.g. Star Wars: Galaxies). The games were mostly focused on the PT era too. The books were garbage and had been for a while.
Put simply...it felt like Star Wars had just left me behind and I was no longer able to enjoy ANY of it. Including the OT (because I couldn't find a good copy of it anywhere other than crappy laserdisc rips).
That changed for me over time. Disney bought the franchise, I gave the Clone Wars cartoon a chance and it ended up actually having a halo effect for the prequels themselves (which I still view as deeply flawed, but am less bothered by), Rebels came out, better games started popping up, and in general, I just...stopped being so damn angry about a movie franchise, however much I loved it.
Coincidentally, around this time, the rest of my life also improved dramatically, and in hindsight, I would say that a big part of what allowed me to become AS angry as I was about Star Wars was that I just wasn't as happy about life in general outside of it. Not like I was depressed or unhappy, but around the same time that I let go of my anger at the direction the franchise had taken, I found myself appreciating a lot of other stuff outside of it.