On 3rd July, when I got home from work to find my Wife and Daughter were out I settled down in the arm-chair and opened Twitter. I was planning on doing some retweeting of blog posts. That didn’t happen.
All I saw on my timeline were Star Wars fans and podcasters fighting. One podcaster who I looked up to seemed to be revelling in his one-liner put downs when people were voicing their opinions which were different to his.
For the record I don’t agree with the opinions of those he was putting down with the one-liners but what I did disagree with was the way the ‘good’ fans, like this podcaster and a few others were treating others. Essentially the bullies (who are opposed to non-white male leads in Star Wars films) were being bullied.
That night I recorded an episode of the Life Debt Podcast which you can listen to here. I vented my frustration and posted it straight away. It had the best day one listens out of any of the episodes. A pair of co-workers who listen both told me it was their favourite episode so far. It was the honesty, the fact that I didn’t hold back and they got it.
That night I tweeted, I don’t normally get involved with the Star Wars Twitter fights, but I just had to vent some more, this is the tweet.
Yes, I muted people I am a fan of, who I have supported on social media and who have supported the blog in the past but every tweet I was seeing was just bullying disguised as fighting the good fight.
The day after the podcast was released I spoke to a friend of mine who is also my sounding board for stuff to do with the blog and told him that I wanted a holiday. A holiday from Star Wars, no blog writing, no podcasting, no watching the films or TV shows, no listening to the soundtracks or podcasts and most of all, avoid Star Wars talk on social media. The only Star Wars thing I would do is promote the blog. I made sure I had two weeks of blog posts scheduled and I sat back and stepped away for a while.
And it felt good. The anger, the hate, the vitriol all gone.
I did my blogging duties and promoted the new posts but I didn’t linger on Twitter it any of the Facebook groups. Occasionally I would catch glimpses of news.
One such instance was that one of the main instigators of the sexist/racist/vile remarks had left Twitter (not sure if they signed up again with a new handle) and had put out some statement to another vomit-inducing podcast.
So again, the bullies had been bullies off of Twitter. This was after some of their sponsors had revoked their sponsorships of the podcast and they had turned a large amount of the Star Wars fandom against them with the mid they were flinging. The essentially wrote their own eulogy in the fandom.
In my absence I can only assume that there was another round of fighting but I avoided it.
In the last podcast episode I did I said that I had considered giving up the blog and podcast and just going back to watching the films and TV series, listening to podcasts and that I had decided against that. But I’ll be honest it wasn’t until the end of that first week off that I came to the decision that the My Star Wars Life Debt blog and podcast would continue.
There will be some changes to scheduling but those will be detailed later this week.
I have come back with all guns blazing, this week is all about what’s happened in the past two weeks but next week we will be starting with our new schedule.
I would also like to thank everyone who visited the blog and listened to the back catalogue of podcasts in the past two weeks despite there being less promotion than normal.
Thank you for visiting My Star Wars Life Debt.
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My Star Wars Life Debt 