Good Whill Hunting

In a recent interview, George Lucas revealed some of his plans for the third Star Wars trilogy, had he been the one to make it. He didn't make it, of course, having sold the franchise to Disney. And after hearing his plans, people are thinking that’s a good thing.

He revealed that the third trilogy would have gone into the microscopic world, looking more in depth at the midi-chlorians that no one liked from The Phantom Menace. He would have introduced another bunch of microbes, the Whills, who really control The Force and the universe.

At this point, I have to say that I’m not entirely sure that Lucas is being honest with us. Part of me believes that either:

1. He’s so tired of people criticizing the prequel trilogy that he’s trolling us by taking what people didn’t like about them and then expanding on that. If we discover that one of the Whills is a whiny teenager having an unconvincing romance with an older Whill royal, then you’ll know I’m right.
2. Like any decent Star Wars fan, he’s alarmed by the bigoted criticism the new trilogy is getting, so he’s running interference by putting out truly bad ideas for how it might have gone. Racist “fans” will be quicker to accept non-white-male stars when they realize that they could have gotten microbe stars.

But assuming that Lucas’ ideas were genuine, this stands as the most extreme example of a principle I heard once about why sci-fi/fantasy franchises often disappoint over time: that the creators probably have different ideas of what the story is about than the fans do. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said that, but I think it was someone on a Battlestar Galactica after-show. That was another show that deviated from expectations as it went along. It became a convoluted origin story for the human race, rather than the parable of post-9/11 America that attracted many fans.

The midi-chlorians were a good example of this. It struck a false note with fans because:

1. The concept of The Force had seemed like a statement of mind over matter. The idea that great power could come from patience and understanding was an inspiring meek-shall-inherit-the-galaxy idea. The 98-pound weakling could watch the movies to escape from a world where he gets beat up by the school bully. But by introducing the midi-chlorians, it made it seem like just another genetic lottery. Now the 98-pound weakling realizes that in the movies’ universe, he’d just end up getting force-choked by the school bully.
2. Although Star Wars has always played fast and loose with science, at least it avoided using technobable as an cop-out story device, unlike a certain other Sci-Fi franchise.

Supposedly Lucas had the midi-chlorians in mind right from the start, so he perhaps didn't realize that the fans were building up a different mental image of the story's world than he had.

Ironically, another example of this is the aforementioned bigot fan contingent. A variety of incidents have exposed the fact that there are a lot of alt-right crossover in the sci-fi community. That’s a surprise to many, since Star Wars and Star Trek have, in their own way, made morality into a key ingredient. How that could possibly be compatible with tormenting a person for being of a different race is a mystery to most of us. And yet, these folks evidently have a great deal of passion for a franchise, despite not sharing some of its key values.

I guess you could make the argument that we all pick and choose what we want from a media property. After all, a lot of people are fans of Star Wars without being a fan of, you know, wars. We can absorb the story’s themes while glossing over the message that comes from the movies’ action, perhaps because action and violence are so ubiquitous in our media. There’s a similar concept in video games called Ludonarrative Dissonance, which is when the gameplay and the story have different messages, such as a violent game that tries to have a pro-peace moral. And I guess this can be a solution to my long-standing question of why far-right politicians often listen to music with a liberal message. Lefty lyrics often come with aggressive delivery, so you might well absorb one while ignoring the other.

That’s not to say that everyone has a right to get what they want out of our favourite media. We simply can’t all expect to get something out of it when we each see such different things in it. And if your experience is very different from either the creator or the rest of the audience, then you’ll be disappointed.