Santa Lives
I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia. Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about. Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else. I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation. My mother on the other hand… that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them. My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world. The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love. For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.
Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again. Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club. Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th. I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting. Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie. I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming. In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them. For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.
The “A” Team
I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years… shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be. I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens. The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is… it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with. Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team. These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching. While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about. While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.
There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies. The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product. Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies… it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did. So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises. There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again. Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical… was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades. Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars. To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.
Grumplings
The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns. In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids… you get a Grumpling pet. Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow. I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings. Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount. I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount. So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.
