Yesterday was May 4th. Star Wars day to many. While I consider myself certainly a fan of the franchise, I honestly find May 4th a bit annoying. The date doesn’t actually have anything to do with Star Wars or George Lucas — it’s not the latters’ birthday or the release date of any film in the series.
No, it’s a quite informal fan day based on the fact that “May the Fourth” sounds like “May the Force” as in “May the Force be with you,” a well known phrase in the Star Wars universe. Sure, the pun is certainly a cute one but I feel it incredibly forced to the point of sometimes being annoying. The ferver fans have during the day quickly subsides, as do all the Star Wars advertisements and references online. Things get back to normal pretty quickly, so any annoyance I feel on the day is quite minor. I would say it probably does help that I’m a fan of the series, so it gives me more of a tolerance to what all I see day in, day out, but the “May the Fourth be with you” posts do get old fast.
Why am I talking about all this? Because this is also the day every year I’m reminded of a particular post made by someone else several years ago which has stuck with me, not because of what was said in it, nor how it was said, but the reaction to… or I should say, lack of a reaction to it.
Let me set the stage: As anyone who follows this site or my activities online knows, I’m quite the opinionated person. I’m also incredibly picky about what I tend to like, and am one of those people who hyperfocuses on his hobbies which are quite often atypical or eclectic. Basically, I know what I like, what I don’t like, and I hate being told what to like.
As you can imagine, the nature of advertising and, even more so, social media, be it the oh so holy algorithm or just people’s constant talking about X or Y given subject en masse as if it must be loved by all, when I have already considered interest in the subject and have passed on it… this all gets mighty old and for the million voices speaking out in praise of something I will, when the mood suits me, share my more critical thoughts as to why I don’t like something.
Call it balancing things out. I’m one person, in the grand scheme my opinions don’t matter, but I share them for those who may care. I make sure to explain why I feel the way I do — a critical aspect, as in the long run it’s generally not what you feel but why you feel the way you do that matters; “is the logic valid” is the question which must be answered.
Now, this has historically been an issue for some people. I’ll fully acknowledge I don’t know when to shut my mouth and just let something be. Let’s get that out of the way. However, I do feel that anyone who is, by virtue of using basic tools like social media which the nature of life these days makes almost necessary, unable to escape certain social trends that they simply don’t care about has a right to vent about these frustrations.
It isn’t that I am saying you can’t like or dislike what you wish — you fully can — but don’t expect me to arbitrarily share the same viewpoint, especially on any basis that something just happens to be popular which is, by far, the most idiotic reason to like something. I like what I like, don’t what I don’t, and don’t want to be proselytized to about cultural phenomena.
Still, such is seen as a crime — a crime of simply not liking the same things others do. This is a particular trait of many in various “scenes” I had been a part of over the years — groups that once were quite about individuality now follow the “go with the flow or else” mentality which ruins so many things and of course any objection to such is taken as a personal attack… usually, anyway.
Compare all of that to this post, made on May 4th 2017, where a person who, as mentioned before I no longer associate with in any capacity, decided to make their little stance against May 4th with the ever collegiate level statement:
Staying off Facebook today because I hate Star Wars!
Yes, that’s at least a complete statement. I’ll give points for that but it’s a statement with no value. All it says is “It’s May 4th, a day a lot of people will talk about this one media franchise I don’t like, but very quickly will go back to only talking about it in passing (till a new movie or show comes out, of course) and thus I must express my outright hatred of it, rather than just tolerate it for about 24 hours and go on about my day.”
Now, I left this uncensored because, fuck it — I don’t associate with this person, haven’t in years, and this post was a public post that anyone could see anyway. She isn’t the point of this anyway, but the attitude presented here — it’s actual outright negativity and hate, something I’m often criticized as sharing constantly in my social media feed (read “always negative, hate everything,” etc.)
Compare the above screenshot and caption with my introduction to this post where I say that I don’t care much for May the 4th as a Star Wars day for some reasons I express, but otherwise let the day be what it is, even if I do find it a little annoying.
Yet I’m the “negative” one. Where’s the commonality in this all, though? The answer is how I knew this person. She, like so many other people I made the mistake of trying to be friends with in the past decade, was and I presume still is involved in the anime convention scene. She runs, or ran, some con in Arkansas and herself cosplayed as Skrillex at one event I was at, which I thought was cool in itself — sure beats the Disney princesses running around anime cons that always happens for some damn reason.
The point is she was in the same scene and by virtue of how that works out she knew many of the same people I did from that grouping. As I said, she ran events and from what I can recall was generally respected in the scene — a person of status in it, if you will, for whatever reason. Not exactly someone you would expect to be so open in disliking an incredibly popular franchise, but here we are.
Anyway, getting back on track, this was a one day thing that the typical “I hate this” Facebook post just had to be made about. It couldn’t be let go. No one attacked this woman for her phrasing, or saying what she did when she did, and I know firsthand that Star Wars fans can be just as crazy about the universe as any other kind of fan. The difference is up until very recently there wasn’t always constantly something Star Wars happening. With so many other cultural phenomena that I just don’t have interest in, they come around and stick around for nearly a decade or more, always at the tip of society’s tongue. Look at the absolute glut of Marvel superhero crap over the past 15 years. I don’t care about any of it. I have zero interest in it, yet I cannot avoid hearing about it, being advertised about it, or being asked if I have seen the new show or watched the new movie.
There’s an automatic presumption that because most other people take interest in something that I do, and when I say I don’t, the reaction is taken as negativity. No, it’s just me sharing that I don’t care. My “negativity” comes from the fact people won’t fucking realize that not everyone likes the same thing and they just can’t care enough about others to take even the slightest interest in what they like.
The types of people who I speak of often times don’t seem to notice that I learn what they enjoy, make references to it, and otherwise make an effort to be a friend; to get to know others and, even if I don’t care about what they like, care that they like it.
My treatment by others, however, doesn’t match — not only do they seem to pay no attention to things I do like (since they aren’t anything they are interested in) and thus ignore when I’m otherwise “positive” about my interests, but the second I express a lack of care for any flavor-of-the-week pop culture phenomena they obsess over suddenly I’m the negative one.
This person, however, can share outright hate with no reasoning or qualifiers on not just Star Wars but Doctor Who, another incredibly popular franchise in the convention scene, and no one is giving her shit for being “negative.” It’s funny how that works isn’t it?
It’s almost as if the only way things matter to these types of people is explicitly if they have interest in the subject — if they don’t care about it then anything “negative” about it doesn’t matter… but if it’s something they like? Nope, you can’t kill the sacred cow! It’s okay for them to not like something you may like, but not okay for you to not like something they do.
Totally makes sense.
As hinted at in this entry, I associate with virtually no one from this scene anymore. At a point I finally realized they themselves were, ironically, the reason I was so “negative” and I said fuck it, and fuck you to them and their self-absorbed ways.
Consider this post therapy. The beginning of me addressing what I feel is the biggest mistake of my recent life (read, the past 10 years or so) — the mistake of wasting way too much of my own energy on people who only care about others as far as they can use them. A mistake of thinking that the geeky types of people I had known through the years still dominated these subcultures. A mistake of thinking that full grown adults who are married, have kids, etc, would actually behave like they aren’t the center of the universe.
I was damn wrong.
More on that, though, in the future.