gffa:

I’ve watched a lot of Star Wars documentaries because it’s really interesting to see the behind the scenes process, to get the thoughts of the cast and creators, and just to see how the magic happens.

But there’s one moment that always stands out in my memory the most:  A video of George Lucas working on The Phantom Menace.  He’s at his desk, he has a yellow notepad in front of him, pencil in hand, and he’s scribbling on it and making notes about what he wants the story to be.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about that even more than usual.  That every time someone tries to scream at me about my Star Wars opinions, I think of that shot, of some dude sitting down to write his story in chickenscratch on a yellow notepad.

That’s what we’re arguing about.  Yes, Star Wars is a huge franchise and billion dollar movies are being made, there’s a certain level of reach and influence.  But it’s never going to be the kind of reach or influence real life events have, and so what we’re all doing is screaming at each other, snidely commenting about the “stans” of this character or that character, resenting each other for being angry about this story element or not being angry about that story element, and sometimes even harassing each other, over that.

Over some dude sitting at his desk and scribbling story notes onto a notepad.  A made-up story that doesn’t actually matter that much.

Every time I think about that, about that image and how fandom is just furious that someone disagrees with them (which is different from how we treat real people, because I do get furious over people treating other fans like shit for liking/disliking something they don’t, for writing an opinion about a made up story that they disagree with, for harassing actors with horrible slurs and threats of violence), every time I think about that image, I circle back to being baffled at all of us for caring so much about a made up story when the actual real world is actually on fire all around us.

Stories are important, they become deeply personal to us, they are often useful tools to help us illustrate things or gain a sliver of understanding about the world around us.  There’s a lot to be explored about how they can be inspirational when someone desperately needs it, certainly I’ve come to tears over how much it means to me when this story element or that story element has come at just the right time.

But they are still just stories.  They are still some person sitting down to write some words about an idea they had for a fictional world.  No single character in a fictional story has ever had real feelings or suffered real pain.  A made up story will never matter as much as caring about actual people with actual feelings and actual pain.