It's Not FOR You Anymore.

On the state of the Star Wars franchise.

I was born the same year that Return of the Jedi released in theaters. Growing up, I watched the original trilogy with my parents and spent afternoons building TIE fighters out of Legos. I became a voracious reader in my teenage years by consuming all of the Tim Zahn and Aaron Alston and Mike Stackpole and (for better or worse!) Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novels. When I went off to college, I was captivated by the New Jedi Order series and kept in touch with my friends back home by excitedly discussing each twist and turn. In a literal sense, I grew up with the fictional Solo kids, introduced in Tim Zahn's magnificent Thrawn trilogy in the early 1990s. I became an adult and joined the Marines around the same time the fictional Solo kids were written into adulthood and were thrown into their own conflict. While deployed, I was thrilled when a care package from my parents would include the latest Star Wars novel.

It is entirely coincidental that my third deployment saw my insatiable appetite for reading burned out of me (thanks to the grind of constant work in Afghanistan) around the same time that the sale of LucasFilm Ltd. was announced.

There was a lot wrong with the Star Wars universe; continuity errors abounded after decades of never-rebooted creative works from movies to comics to video games and novels. So even though it pained me when the folks who had bought the franchise announced that thirty-some-odd years of universe-building were being swept away, the justification that was given--that a more coherent continuity plan was being put together--was believable.

But it was insincere. The universe has languished, empty of almost all of the years of rich fictional investment. And the creatives, with colossal salaries, clearly had no vision for an over-arching narrative. Even the tone, themes, and story beats from sequel movie to sequel movie are obviously incoherent. What took the original expanded universe decades to run into (continuity errors and plot holes), the sequels accomplished in a couple of years.

It hasn't been a complete waste; there have been some decent to genuinely good stand-outs in Disney's run, but the entire endeavor has felt deflated, soulless, predictable on balance. The Phantom Menace earned its fair share of criticism for being so tonally and narratively different from the original trilogy of films, but it was strange because George Lucas had a strange story that he wanted to tell. Its weaknesses as a movie were reflective of the consistent limitations in its creator's storytelling quirks. But the current crop of Star Wars content just...content. It feels like it exists to keep people just engaged enough not to leave until the Next Big Thing comes out. Or it reeks of design-by-committee. Or it's transparently a vessel through which contemporary themes can be dressed up in the skin of Star Wars to smuggle them into the cultural zeitgeist. Yes, there is the occasional gem (predictably, Tim Zahn's post-Disney novels were great, Andor was surprisingly good, Rogue One overcame development hell to be far and away the best post-Lucas film release, and the Squadrons video game was a brilliant throwback to the days of X-Wing and TIE fighter on the PC), but on balance, the franchise has taken on the feeling of a focus-grouped corporate product. In its own way, the fact that there is a Disneyland theme park set in their own reinterpretation of Star Wars is perfect self-parody.

And the sad realization that I've come to over the past few years is that Star Wars, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense, just isn't for me anymore. It's not being made by people who want to build in the sandbox that George Lucas' imagination built. Its creatives aren't fascinated by its universe or its history. The people working on it, with precious few exceptions, didn't grow up with the Solo kids or debate pointless minutiae about Star Destroyers or somesuch other nerdy B.S. on message boards into the wee hours. And the content being made reflects as such. It's made for some other demographic. I'm not here to disparage that, even though I may find it dismaying. This is just no longer a franchise that is being steered by a person with a particular vision and a host of authors, writers, and other creatives that passionately want to contribute to that vision. I enjoyed that vision, that universe, those characters. And very few of the people being handsomely paid to make Star Wars content even remember a time when those things were being made. What they're churning out is aimed at a different audience. It's not for me anymore. And the sad part is that it isn't that I outgrew a beloved childhood interest, it's that the people that bought it didn't particularly care to keep people like me around.

I haven't watched The Acolyte. I saw the initial trailer and it sparked no interest for me. I don't know any of the characters. The setting is vacant and disconnected from the rest of the franchise. And the interviews with the cast and creatives have been depressing in their vacuity and transparent lack of connection to the subject matter. But, by God, are the algorithms invested in me watching the show... Every YouTube video I watch is preceded by an advertisement for it. Every tenth article in my Facebook feed seems to be a cookie-cutter passive-aggressive defense of the show. I can't go a day without bumping into a half a dozen insulting screeds about the "toxic fandom" or naked accusations of misogyny, sexism, or other bigotry being hurled at people who have opted not to watch or who have expressed criticism of the program. It's rote, banal, numbing.

A sorry state of affairs for someone who so loved the galaxy far, far away.