The Galaxy That Never Got Me

The sad truth is I always wanted to like Star Wars. Genuinely. I love epic rebellion stories—in films, games, novels, series—and what’s more epic than Luke Skywalker, the weird princess, and that small green man with the speech impediment? The bones are great. The bones are perfect. And yet.

The first teaser for The Force Awakens dropped in late November 2014, and while fans across the internet lost their minds entirely—some of them producing an enthusiasm that was almost physical in its intensity—I watched the clip and felt nothing move. A hooded figure running through desert. A new lightsaber design that appeared to have two small glowing testicles welded to the hilt. The Millennium Falcon doing a barrel roll. The John Williams swell. And inside me: silence.

I’d tried. I watched the original trilogy as a kid, sat through the prequels, gave the whole mythology a fair hearing. Jar Jar Binks was too dull to hate properly, which says more about those films than anything else I could offer. Darth Vader was genuinely menacing in 1977—an achievement—but by the time I was old enough to contextualize it, he’d been merchandised for so long that the menace had been completely laundered out of him. You can’t be afraid of a character whose face is on a child’s lunchbox in a hundred countries.

Star Wars has a specific entry window. You have to catch it at the right age, with the right empty Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of you, before cultural saturation makes fresh encounter impossible. I missed that window, and J. J. Abrams—technically polished, emotionally cautious—was never going to open another one.

The Force Awakens came out in December 2015. I saw it eventually. It was fine. Daisy Ridley was good. I’ve forgotten most of the rest. When does Game of Thrones come back again?