About me
Yet, this project is essentially about Star Wars, so this is the story of how I experienced Star Wars in my life. So to speak, a fan history. Like everyone else I started as baby and non-Star Wars fan. This is the state of every Star Wars fan ever, even those who had parents who stuffed their little kids into R2D2 costumes when they're little or whatever and gave their offspring plastic weapons to play with, because being dressed in fanmerch doesn't make you a fan. Really.
The first time I encountered Star Wars, was when I was six years old and I was not yet a Star Wars fan. It was on a skiing holiday in Switzerland and I was taking my first steps at learning the ways of skiing while at the same time living in the same house with too boys of seven and eigth who were more than mildly excited about Star Wars, because that was in the year of 2005 when "Revenge of the Sith" had come out. One of them was very proud to posess a mask of Darth Vader. Seriously, I didn't like that thing. It smelled awfully of cheap plastic and looked weird and creepy. But even though I didn't see the boys often at day, when we were all skiing and I was in the beginners course for the teensie weensie peedy lasses, I did hang together with the boys when we were in our house (we were on a group holiday. Four families that knew each other more or less, together on holiday) and so two boys crazy about Star Wars wanted to make me roleplay with them in their version of Star Wars.
I should be Luke Skywalker and kill Darth Vader and after killing him, take both of the lightsabers, the red and green and also put on the mask. Because that's was Luke did in Return Of The Jedi, didn't he? For some reason the story the boys played with me, is similar to another script of Return Of The Jedi that George Lucas could have used to lengthen the Star Wars Trilogy to a Tetralogy, in which Luke actually does take his fathers mask and become the next Dark Lord of the Galaxy. Whatever the case, it only worked to the point when the boys wanted to put the Darth Vader mask on. The tried to force me and it ended in lots of giggling, until we were too loud and anyway it was too late, so we had to go to bed, but we never finished the game and I don't know what happened to Luke after he took Darth Vaders mask after all.
Then I didn't have much to do with Star Wars, except of course that thanks to Lucasarts that surrounds everything and penetrates and binds us together, all of the boys around my age were wild about Star Wars and build lightsabers out of lego and other brick sorts just to destroy these because they fought so wildly that they usually broke fast (The expensive plastic thingies that make light and sound and everything are of no use. After all, they're to expensive to fight with and too cheap to be of any other use than that of a fancy torchlight). One year later, which is a long time for little children, my little brother and me got a PlayStation for Christmas and additionally, the Chinese copycat versions of quite a bunch of games (we lived in Hangzhou that time). My father brought our German copyright wellprotecting PlayStation to somebody who would enable it to run the copycat versions of any game. And seeing how Lucasarts has yet flourished and bloomed ever since, I won't feel sorry for that.
One of them was Lego Star Wars and that is in my experience the game that made many of my generation Star Wars fans in the first place. Lego Star Wars really is the cutest and funniest alternative version of Star Wars that ever existed. But I was a seven year old girl, unexperienced at video games and my brother was three, so we didn't even have much of our cheap bought Lego Star Wars. We did play with one of my classmates once, who wanted to explain us, how it worked, but it only led to him playing through a complete level of the game without us understanding what he had actually done. So, seven year old me felt that I had better things to do, I mean, like watching a German "Alice in Wonderland" cartoon series via internet, playing games on barbie.com and stuff like that. Much better, right? The next years we did play that game from time to time, but we never came too far in it and dropped it afterwards again.
A few months later, there were spring holidays, so my mother took my brother and me on a bus tour with her friends and there children. We visited some places around China, rode around in a bus all day and the sons of my mother's friends watched Attack Of The Clones on the small screen the bus actually had. I didn't concentrate on it, but later I especially remembered Padmé being attacked by scorpions, the Jedi slicing them apart, the chase through Coruscant and the erotic flying fruit scene. Mind you, I was seven, so my heart was seriously touched by that. And yes, I grew up the last ten years, don't worry. Anyway, even though secretly I was a bit impressed I told the boys that Star Wars was stupid, because I was a girl and Star Wars is for boys, isn't it? And we were playing that wargame between girls and boys throughout the holidays, we really did. The only other girl and me against a bunch of boys, like somehow kids do as soon as they're in first class because heaven knows who told them to. And Attack Of The Clones isn't the most impressing Star Wars movie either.
The next thing is, that we moved to Germany and I definitely even more became a girl that hates Star Wars out of principle, because I found it really stupid, when boys played with lightsaber toys and excluded girls from their world. I actually loved the boys world in many aspects, but I was a crazy little girl that no little boys dared to let close. I read a lot of books that time and Star Wars didn't really exist much in my world. Then I came to fifth grade. And mind you, I hadn't seen any movies of the Original Trilogy ever before. I really hadn't experienced the REAL Star Wars ever before. The only thing of Star Wars I ever experienced was all the meta stuff I was thrown at from a very early stadium of my life and that all seemed so ridiculous to me, that I couldn't stand it.
There is kind of a movie cycle on that channel, and they repeat all of the Star Wars movies twice a year, all six of them in a row. I had seen parts of Revenge of the Sith a few weeks before, with a friend that couldn't connect to Star Wars at all, while I at least knew a couple of things. In the late autumn of the year I went to fifth grade, we finally watched The Empire Strikes Back on TV at home. And I was so amazed and sucked up by that strange Science Fiction and yet not Science Fiction, Fantasy and yet not Fantasy story. I loved other worlds, I loved magic and I loved fantasy heroes, so I really turned excited from that movie. Suddenly, lightsabers didn't feel that ridiculous anymore. And I was puzzled how I should behave in front of those boys that loved Star Wars and I had laughed at. I already knew a lot of the story before, nobody is protected from that, until Star Wars isn't popular anymore, and trust me, that's in a future far, far from ours and a long way to go. I had heard the phrase "I am your father" countless times before, seen drawing of Princess Leias hairdo, lightsabers and Jedi, but still, seeing this movie that is different than the idea all the merchandise somehow gives you, it a totally different thing. I felt with Luke and of course the Force was a thing that caught me, because all kinds of magical powers I wished to have, when I was younger, duh. It totally appealed to me.
From that time, when I first saw Empire Strikes Back, together with my brother and my father, who fell asleep halfway through the movie, everything went very quick. I started playing Lego Star Wars with my little brother and nothing could stop us anymore, also, we were now both able to understand, how play the darn game. We saw the other movies, though in a quite disaccurate order. Next, I saw Revenge of the Sith (again, only parts of it), then Empire again, then Phantom Menace, then Return of the Jedi, A New Hope and I think I still have never seen Attack Of The Clones completely from beginning to end, only parts of it, until I could piece the whole movie together. That school year, my brother and me played through all of the levels of Lego Star Wars there were. Also, we live close to Legoland Germany, so we frequently went to a place that distributed the fandom drug, by celebrating Star Wars days, building Star Wars lego miniature landscapes and generally doing everything so we might buy Lego Sets, which we did, but only a few small ones.
In seventh grade I went to Fasching (that's a kind of German carnival celebrated in January and February and doesn't have to do anything with fascism if you're wondering. We wear costumes and party and it's like Halloween, but without trick-or-treating in the streets) in a Princess Leia costume and at least from that on I really was a Star Wars fan.