I'm a Padres fan now. Baseball is awesome.
At some point I'll write more at length about how at this late age I became a baseball fan out of nowhere, but this particular piece of writing is about fandom.
As a lifelong Star Wars fan, I can comfortably say it was MUCH easier being a fan when the whole thing was static. I used to get a <i>The Star Wars Insider</i> as a kid, and I remember the articles mostly being about...well, rehashing the original trilogy, over and over again. And then, of course, the prequels were announced, and the whole narrative organism was flung into its evolutionary course that we're at today.
And it seems to me that the more Star Wars there is, the more complexity there is about whether you like it or not; you might like one set of things, but not another set of things in the same universe, and that universe is asking you to accept all of it or none of it. At least that's how it feels to me these days. Of course these are all just fake stories, so in order to preserve my peace, I've just dialed down the importance of Star Wars in my life. I watch it when I feel like it, declare a general opinion about it, and move on.
I'm not interested in fan discourse anymore.
Now that I'm a baseball fan, I'm starting to see the same things as I move into those fan spaces on the internet. Vitriolic fans of other teams who make posts about the Padres not advancing in the Wild Card, celebrating their failure. Padres fans who curse the players up and down for their "slumps" or their "lack of care."
To me it, the problem is pretty clear. In both cases, people think they could do a better job - whether it's writing a Star Wars movie or managing a baseball team.
I'm not much better, I suppose. Silhouette Zero was partly me having the audacity to do Star Wars "my way." But I've never made a movie or written a script. I have no real idea of how difficult it is to do such a thing. And as a lifelong professional non-athlete, I certainly have no idea how to manage a baseball team.
At this point in my life, being a fan means the superficial joy of rooting for my team or watching a cool laser battle. Being a fan no longer means having to be an expert.
I think I'm happier that way.