We Deserve Better Stories

I voraciously consume sci-fi, space operas, and fantasy. Historical fiction to a lesser degree.^[1] Iconic within these genres, Star Wars is a part of the cultural cannon. My mother was seventeen when A New Hope landed in theaters, and while she didn’t carry the interest into her adult life, child-marketing hit me hard with Pizza Hut’s 1999 The Phantom Menace campaign, and Lego’s first Star Wars sets released that same year. I’m not enough of a fan to visibly share my interest,^[2] but I’m enough of one to consume media and watch the shows they put out.

Others have spoken to Star Wars’ cultural anchors through the later twentieth century, and I don’t need to rehash. It’s an allegory of empire, opposition, colonialism, and faith. It famously aligns itself with the attitudes of the decade — the prequel trilogy’s most visible antagonists were an independence movement and an incompetent Senate.^[3] Today’s offerings are multifold, varying from pulling at adult fans’ nostalgia, creating new fans, and appealing to the non-fan’s desire for relevance.

I just watched Season 2 Episode 8: Who Are You?, and I’m tired. The fictional language created for these soon-colonized people is a mix of Quebecois and German — just enough to evoke a contradicting melange of “foreign,” “Robespierre,” and “blue collar” in the viewer. Their “the galaxy is watching” chant obliquely invites “The whole world is watching.” And while leaning into the poor-horse-beaten-to-death narrative that is the empire and resistance, thank you for making obvious who are the good guys. Surely, had police when cracking down on pro-Gaza protestors in Summer 2024 worn stormtrooper gear, it would’ve helped the general public understand who the Good Guys were. The story’s insistence that the Bad Guy hides their face behind a mask, or is an overt fascist, or worships someone visibly hellbent on genocide, prevents the less-imaginative among us from realizing that their neighborhood cop is as more likely than others to be a wife-beating armed fascist.

To head off the detractors, this isn’t a silly, gatekeeping “hurr only the true fans are anti-cop.” My point’s that when fiction makes it overwhelmingly and unrealistically clear who are their Good Guys, and then mixes it with relatability and popularity, it muddies viewer’s decision-making, media literacy, and may even prevent productive use of frustration. This juxtaposition of the relatable and the unbelievable is so far not only unproductive, but distracting.

There’s more to criticize, but that’s the crux of it. These stories and their convenient narratives lead to intellectual laziness. I want to enjoy dumb media, but the more it both leans into the modern and relevant while pandering to narratives of revolution, I worry that it unproductively scratches an itch and therefore prevents us from doing something about it — that we’re satisfied by arguing with someone in our head.^[4]