Being A Star Wars Fan Is Exhausting. There’s A Sense Of Entitlement To Being Heard In The Fanbase At

Being a Star Wars fan is exhausting. There’s a sense of entitlement to being heard in the fanbase at large that results in attacks on every single element of every piece of SW media as if the actual war is here on earth. If you love it more than you hate on it, you’re expected to be able to defend and justify what you love. And then you’re mocked anyway. You can’t just love something without random passerby informing you why that thing sucks. You can’t just be a fan- you have to prove you’ve always been a fan, that you hate the right things at the right times, that you fit into the carefully outlined rules of hating the majority of what Star Wars has to offer in the name of being someone’s definition of a proper fan.

As a Star Wars fan you have to hear about why your favorite characters are overrated, or why someone hopes they die, or why they didn’t deserve the attention they got from the story. You have to be bullied and stand your ground, again and again, just to preserve any of the happiness this universe makes you feel. You have to watch those bullies turn on the creators of the movies and shows and characters you love, and the actors that bring them to life, and you have to worry about what such a response means for the continuation of a story that means so much to you. “But that story shouldn’t matter to anyone,” they say. “It wasn’t the story I wanted.”

Listen. No one has the right to tell you what you can enjoy. If you love something, don’t let anyone make you afraid of loving it wholeheartedly. Ignore them. If something meant a lot to you, even if it seems like it meant a lot to just you, it has all the value it needs to have. If something moved you, or helped you through, or gave you a means of coping with how much life sucks out of you, it did what a story is meant to do. And that’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says about it.

And yes, I’m writing this as a reminder for myself just as much as anyone else.