Star Wars: Not just a geek thing

“Is it actually good?”

“That’s a stupid question.”

“So should I watch Star Wars first or Star Trek?”

“That’s your decision. To choose to watch Star Trek after watching Star Wars. I won’t force you.”

“But isn’t Star Wars a part of Star Trek?”

It never gets easier. Although, I felt I had grown out of the vitriolic debates, the infinity loop arguments, the ‘did-Han-Shoot-First’s, the ‘did-Boba-Die-In-The-Sarlacc-Pit’s. It does not end.

Star Wars has been around for far too long and has too many obsessed fans. It wasn’t required of me to be the torch-bearer in its defence. Just breathe. It is not your job to convert the ignorant. Yes, your friend did have the audacity to say Star Wars is a part of Star Trek. Sacrilegious though it is, not the least considering that if anything its Star Trek that should be a part of Star Wars. But... just breathe.

My love for Star Wars was instantaneous. But, aside from a handful of friends in school who would get excited about each week when our school newspaper would come around only because we would roll them up and pretend they were lightsabers, there was no one around to share the obsession. I should specify that a bunch of guys recreating the scene where Darth Vader slices of Luke Skywalker’s hand using rolled up newspapers, after first getting into a heated argument of who gets to be Vader, is not the best way to get girls. Yes, it’s the dream to have a girl who can quote Star Wars, but with time you learn to just settle for a girl.

I was at a friend’s place one day. She had told me that she liked Star Wars and I had treated it with the same flippant sort of attitude that I previously applied to most people who said they ‘liked’ Star Wars. I began investigating her room.

She had all the films on Blu-ray.


Not impressive; show me a weathered VHS and then we’ll talk.

I asked her if she wanted to watch one.

She said she usually watched either all the sequels or all the prequels together. It was interesting to know so, but it was still too soon to tell if this was legit.

I put on episode five ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.  She said,

“Pause it. I need to wear my Stormtrooper helmet”.

I was in love.

It’s May 4 – Galactic Star Wars day.

“May the fourth be with you.”

That never gets old. Aside from wearing a Death Star t-shirt, I wanted to do something special this year. I thought I would be one of the many who write about the love they have for arguably the greatest movie of all time. It could have been an analysis of what Star Wars means to us as a people and as a struggling country trying to make it with the backdrop of an insidious alliance using an omnipotent force to spread discord and destruction within a corrupt system. But I feel that this is where the Star Wars fanatics go wrong. Recreating and trying to quantify in humanistic terms a series that should not be tainted by the harsh realities of the world we live in.

The Star Wars movies mean something different to everyone who watches them, cementing their timelessness. There exists a global cult, who meets and recognises the reasons why they feel so strongly about films that, for most of them, were made before they were born. It’s about ringing your friend’s doorbell and saying,

“Open the blast doors!”

It’s about walking through a supermarket and pretending to use ‘the Force’ to open the sliding doors.

The indescribable joy of meeting someone who is similarly obsessed, and being transported to when you first put one of the movies on, maybe as a child inserting the VHS the wrong way in, and not getting yelled at by your older brother because, hey, his baby brother is about to watch Star Wars.

At the end of it, sometimes, all you need to make things better is to put an episode on, and get lost in space, sitting next to a girl wearing an over-sized Stormtrooper helmet.