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It's Lonely Out There for a Star Wars Dissenter

For anyone not part of the Star Wars fan club, today can’t be over soon enough.
Image: Disney

I have been dreading this day for a long, long time.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened last night to just about universal critical acclaim, and I'm happy that seemingly everyone I know is fully aboard the hype train. I, however, completely don't care.

Put yourselves in my shoes. Growing up, Star Wars was a non-entity in my life. According to my father, Darth Vader scared me as a youngster, putting me off the series for much of my formative years. Heading into my teens, I had already moved onto other far geekier realms of pop culture, most notably professional wrestling, which is a cross I continue to bear to this very day.

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I did get around to seeing the one with Jar Jar, but I'm not sure that counts for much.

In other words, to me, Star Wars might as well not exist.

But not today.

Today, you can't read a tweet, check Facebook, or visit a website without running into beaming coverage of The Force Awakens. (Well, unless you use one of these apps, a story I volunteered to write this morning because you can't spoil what you don't care about.) It's as if the entire internet has decided, "You know what? Let's make Nicholas feel more alien and more other than he's ever felt in his life." It's kind of a downer, feeling like you don't belong on the planet today! The suffocating, breathless coverage of, I don't know, some robots in space (?), completely confuses me. And I'm sure these are many of the same people who will no doubt remind me that wrestling isn't real, as if I didn't already know that. It's a work, technically—but now maybe let's discuss "the Force" or whose lightsaber looks the coolest? That's a good use of our time.

Worse was the constant drip-drip-drip of footage in the weeks and months leading up today, each split second of footage analyzed over and over again by some of my favorite websites. Isn't this a bit much?

So while I'm blown away that a movie franchise designed for children has managed to capture the attention of every adult behind a keyboard, please do keep in mind that, no, not everyone worships at the altar of Star Wars, and that at least some of us find the whole thing a little weird and off-putting.