#I love Andor I'm so thrilled it's coming back

[starwalker03]

The Closeness of a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I've found over the years that, with the autism running around in my brain, my interests cycle around the same few fandoms every year. although it's probably too logical to designate it a period of time, but for the most part it seems to occur over the course of a year (which is already an irregular measurement anyway as it changes every four times).

I go through the wide expanse of the DCU, I think of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Boys, I scroll aimlessly through tumblr's tags related to All For The Game, I rewatch Merlin for the nth time, and perhaps She-ra while I'm at it, and if I feel particularly sentimental Doctor Who revisits. There's always some irregularity with which ones get to be a side show I recall briefly and go to bed thinking of once more (suffering from brain worms) and which ones consume me in reckless abandon like the actual show rides. But without fail, every time, there is always Star Wars.

There is always Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi and a sea of stars and a brilliant John Williams soundtrack and movie after movie and show after show, and no mater how much new content arrives I will always love most Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. There is always A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

My mother read the title screens to my brother and I as children, with that same voice every time, you know the one, the one that all parents read stories to their kids in (whether they did so for you or you've merely seen it in movies). And every time I waited on baited breath to here the first note of the soundtrack and to see the same movies I'd watched a hundred times before. I assembled LEGO sets and played pretend at being a Jedi and completed every level in LEGO Star Wars with my brother on our Nintendo Wii and had lightsaber fights and dressed up for school discos in a big hooded cloak. I grew up with it every year, I could probably recite almost every line in the original trilogy. I'm not of the generation that watched it start, that was my mother, who went to see it in cinemas with no idea what she'd behold (and leave the theater with a new obsession and a crush on Harrison Ford). I am of the generation that was born with six movies and watched The Clone Wars, born of one throw away line in A New Hope, on TV. Seeing the same episodes over and over in completely the wrong order. I saw the sequel trilogy as it came out in theatres. I did not see this franchise start but have watched it grow with me nevertheless.

This franchise is my home, it has my heart, it has my endless love. This franchise may well be what set me off on my journey of wanting to tell every story possible. The quintessential tale of the hero's journey, but this time IN SPACE. What better creation could there be for a child.

Now I see new shows come out one after the other, and the out pour of words everyone has to say on them hits me before even the first line of dialogue. I have yet to watch Andor, or the Ahsoka series, or finish the latest season of The Mandolorian. these stories, if placed before my childish self, would leave me frothing at the mouth for weeks on end. I would peel my eyelids back and absorb every bit of light from my TV as the stories unfolded, i would learn every line and every character name and every ship name and every droid name and I would run through the soccer field and imagine I was slipping on the floors of an imperial destroyer desperately trying to reach a fight before it ended in blood.

I can't do it now.

There is politics in every stance and hatred in every line of public words on shows from a franchise I love. people question why it must be the way it is before they even see it. news headlines about who will play who and what every plotline will entail and exactly how dark every characters skin tone is and whether they kiss the right people.

I don't care, what happened to the lightsabers? what happened to the thrill of an imagined fight scene of thousands of flying vehicles in space? Where is the adventure? where is the belief in defeating an evil for the good of the galaxy? It was all so simple then, and as someone who tells stories now I know and understand it can't stay that way.

Star Wars was begun in 1977. And now, our world is different and the same. It was post both world wars, in the midst of the cold war, and just two years after the Vietnam war. In this time it was political enough a statement to make a movie with the entire foundation of 'we are good people and we want to be happy, so we will fight a war for it'. The conversation of symbolism and context can be had till the sun goes down because the context is our world, with all its messy complications. Star Wars has grown since then. It was always about fighting fascism, but now it must do more than fire a gun and kill an evil monarch and have a party that represents everything going back to goodness. Now it must show what really happens after, because we are in the after.

Star Wars is now its own world, and yet still a mirror of our own- this is what storytelling does. And yet, every second it persists, changes, evolves, stays the same, someone must make the articles and the call outs.

Why is Star Wars what it is now? Why must it be like us?

because in 1977 a farm boy destroyed a weapon, and six years later he defeated a tyrannical empire, and he did it all in a story that was fundamentally about love, compassion, peace, calm. About talking before you act and finding a way to work with others, about putting your weapon down because you refuse to let yourself use it, even when your anger rises.

Why must Star Wars have our problems? Why must it tell these stories?

because this is what story telling is about. hold my hand, sit with me on the living room floor, crane your head back at a TV screen and read A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away, and for just a while, for just a few hours, feel.

It's beautiful isn't it? And that's why it must be like us. To remind you of that fact.