Yeah I remember how I spent a long time being exposed to Star Wars (didn’t watch the movies, but generally absorbed its presence in pop culture) without ever learning what made the Empire the bad guys aside from the fact that they had bad guy aesthetics.
It was pretty much the same for me. Both my parents were big Star Wars nerds so I did see the movies and got a ton of the EU books, but even there if you don’t know what to look for it’s just like “oh they’re the bad guys, they’re doing bad guy stuff that opposes the protagonists, and some of them do cartoon villain stuff sometimes but mostly it’s just this team vs team thing where you’re rooting for the POV characters.” I don’t remember any of that slop ever really conveying how realistically awful those cartoon bad guys were, although at the same time that’s not really something that fluffy pop culture media can necessarily do on its own since it relies on knowing the broader context in which a work was made.
Like how a lot of the Empire’s casual atrocities that do make it into the OT are just like things the US was regularly doing in Vietnam, except Americans in general neither know nor think about that and wouldn’t just casually make the association.
Yeah I remember how I spent a long time being exposed to Star Wars (didn’t watch the movies, but generally absorbed its presence in pop culture) without ever learning what made the Empire the bad guys aside from the fact that they had bad guy aesthetics.
It was pretty much the same for me. Both my parents were big Star Wars nerds so I did see the movies and got a ton of the EU books, but even there if you don’t know what to look for it’s just like “oh they’re the bad guys, they’re doing bad guy stuff that opposes the protagonists, and some of them do cartoon villain stuff sometimes but mostly it’s just this team vs team thing where you’re rooting for the POV characters.” I don’t remember any of that slop ever really conveying how realistically awful those cartoon bad guys were, although at the same time that’s not really something that fluffy pop culture media can necessarily do on its own since it relies on knowing the broader context in which a work was made.
Like how a lot of the Empire’s casual atrocities that do make it into the OT are just like things the US was regularly doing in Vietnam, except Americans in general neither know nor think about that and wouldn’t just casually make the association.