7 Page Essay Incoming. If that much text is TL;DR for you, please ignore this and move along.
I’m going to come out and say it, I love Star Wars. It’s one of my top favorite films, and it’s one of the few things in life I look forward to and keeps me going. Yet before even giving me a chance to explain my reasoning for it, Holla Forums users will be as fast as lightning to tell me to go back to Reddit, or to dismiss Star Wars as “Reddit” in itself. At first, this merely seemed along the lines of the edgy contrarianism found within Holla Forums, much along the lines of the insufferable Alien prequels being “kino”. It seemed like nothing more than a mindless meme, so I paid them no mind and figured it would just die down eventually. But it didn’t, and only gained traction across many other boards on Holla Forums. It got so expansive that an infographic arose to explain why the films are dismissed as “Reddit”. The infographic starts with this opening statement:
“When Star Wars discussion pops up on Holla Forums, many will rightly criticize the show for being “Reddit”, an observation that is often outright denied or criticized for being too vague. While “Reddit” is used disparagingly for a reason, the term could use some clarification. Put succinctly, “Reddit” is used as an adjective to describe a program with certain characteristics designed to appeal to the same audience that heavily uses Reddit. These characteristics are contrived enough that they are easy to spot, and are as follows:”
So I read each and every one of the points on the infographic, and needless to say, none of them made sense to me. These are nothing more than baseless accusations that observe Star Wars in a surface-level manner with even more ignorance than the gullible normies swarming into the film’s fanbase, which pose a significant grievance to the fanbase’s veteran members, myself included. Star Wars has a unique integrity to it that I don’t think deserves to be ignored by the “Reddit” dismissal. Therefore, I’m going to debunk each and every one of the points that substantiate the claim that “Star Wars is Reddit”, exposing them for the fraudulent accusations they truly are.
“Glut of surface pop culture references: A Reddit user’s cultural references are restricted to Hollywood science fiction films and other “nerdy” fictional worlds. While these works can display thoughtfulness on their own, Star Wars will often soullessly deploy their aesthetics and jargon (ray-guns, wormholes, etc) without any sense of wonder. The film is effectively signaling a creativity it does not possess while simultaneously comforting the viewers with familiarity. In lieu of actual memorable moments, Star Wars will occasionally also resort to specific references to established intellectual properties (“The Hidden Fortress”).”
To start, the assumption that Star Wars’s science fiction references are not only heavily relied upon for the majority of its substance, but also that they stem from predominantly popular and well-known products like Wizard of Oz or Shakespeare, seems to imply that Holla Forums users are making such an assumption from first glance of a few episodes, or worse yet, jumping right into episode 3 without having seen the rest of the show. While there are admittedly references to more popular science fiction works in the show, i.e. Flash Gordon, Star Trek, Dune, Buck Rogers and Metropolis, the amount of far more obscure science fiction works Star Wars alludes to is in far greater abundance. These include, but are not limited to, Foundation's Edge, New Gods, Metropolis, the films and cinematic style of Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, Sergio Leone, John Ford, The Dam Busters, Battleship Potemkin, Buck Rogers, and quite a few Joseph Campbell references, including The Hero's Journey. And most of the previously mentioned references are from episode four alone, and were only the more prominent references to be listed compared to many, many others.
Fact of the matter is, Star Wars knows its sci-fi, and is profusely dense in its expanse of sci-fi. And it uses this to its advantage, utilizing a lot of B-movie and cult classic material to subvert either traditional societal mores, or even the source material itself. When it utilizes more popular science fiction references, it’s for the sole purpose of parody, which can be either direct or indirect, depending on the plot of the episode. A New Hope is a perfectly functional and very creative parody of The Hidden Fortress, going a step further than most Dungeons and Dragons type parody plots by exploring how such traveling technology could be fully capitalized on. Star Wars’s pop culture references are, in all actuality, quite rarely surface-level compared to the plethora of more obscure references that only hardcore science fiction enthusiasts will recognize upon first glance. Reddit’s attention span cannot possibly allow for such extensive trivia expertise.
