The Queue: I will do what I must

One of the many little things I loved about the Obi-Wan Kenobi series was how it basically highlights how the fall of the Jedi was the Jedi’s fault — how their failure to embrace the Force in all its aspects, the Dark and the Light, Hate and Anger and Love and the wild tumult of the heart, how their turning away from the will of the Living Force was their undoing.

Plus, y’know, Lightsaber fights. I am firmly convinced that there are people who love Star Wars for all the space outlawry, the smugglers and scoundrels trading blaster fire and running Imperial blockades, and I wish them all the joy in the universe at their Red Dead Redemption in space version of the franchise. There’s nothing wrong with liking that aspect.

But for me, if it doesn’t have Lightsaber fights, I tune out. I can get space cowboys from so many different franchises and so many different media, but relatively few movies actually try and give you anything like the Jedi — a kind of Lensmen as Samurai that despite being similar to a whole host of other fictional organizations, are somewhat sparse on the ground compared to space westerns and wagon trains to the stars.

So anyway, yeah, I’m one of those people who only likes Star Wars when the space wizards show up and throw down with big rave lightsticks.

Am I the only one who kind of likes how much Imperius hates us mortals? I mean, sure, he’s a jerk, but I get why he’s mad — if not for the existence of Sanctuary and the mortals therein, he and his could have kept on eternally fighting the Demons to an endless stalemate which is clearly all he wanted.

Imperius is that guy who doesn’t care who wins as much as he cares that he gets to play and I kind of begrudgingly feel bad for him that I ruined his fun by being better at the game than he is.

Everyone has their strengths. Druids are the swiss army knife of tanks — they can’t do absolutely everything, but they can do a lot of things, and some of those things aren’t really very tanky at all. Warriors are basically the ol’ reliables, who are pretty good at just about anything you might ask a tank to do but who really can’t go very outside the lines. Monks and Pallies are very different from one another, but both kind of have that feeling of coming at tanking as an extension of their other abilities, with the potential to utterly wreck certain encounters if used right.

Demon Hunters have ADHD. Trust me, I recognize my own personality when it shows up in class form.

And DK’s are all about tanking as a negative. I don’t mean that they’re bad at it, or that they’ve got a  bad mindset, but rather that DK tanking is about negating what the boss or mobs do. You do lots of damage? I heal myself through it. You do a big AoE? I put up a green bubble. The old joke is that DK’s don’t need healing, but to my eyes it’s more that they will try as hard as they possibly can to not need healing right now. And I won’t like, I kind of love them for it.

It feels strangely personal when someone disses something we enjoy, doesn’t it? Like in my whole Star Wars thing above I sincerely worried that it sounded like I was saying that people who don’t like the laser sword space wizard aspect of Star Wars are wrong, and they’re not — their joy in elaborate space heists, escaping the Empire and so on is not at all doing it wrong.

I don’t know why it feels that way. For years, I liked the prequels and everybody who went on and on about how bad they were, it felt like a personal attack, which of course it wasn’t — I didn’t make those movies, and someone having a different opinion of a piece of art than I did shouldn’t affect me much at all. Intellectually I even believe this. Intellectually.

Emotionally I’m still trying to figure out why Scott Pilgrim wasn’t an utter blockbuster hit of a movie.

This.

Look, I just really like it, okay?

1 — Stayed the same. The enjoyment I get out of rampantly speculating about it has counterbalanced the annoyance at how people lack nuance when it comes to things like that chart and assume it’s meant to be taken as infallible doctrine instead of an in universe guess by folks who may or may not know what they’re talking about.

2 — I don’t know, sorry.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Gonna go snuggle up with my cat and watch some more Star Wars. Yes, I’m still sick. I’m starting to worry this is the new normal, quite frankly.