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krpalmerI might have started to panic a little bit earlier this week when, all of a sudden, the Anakin Skywalker Home Page Forums were oppressed by sponsored links and whack-a-mole popup ads and whole reams of old posts locked up. I was convinced that the message board provider had made a brand-new decision to be more aggressive in recouping its bandwidth fees, and that relocating to a different server and different technology would be too time-consuming to handle... and then everything went back to the way things had been. I suppose ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
a_p_ must have paid a renewal fee (and that this had happened before), and I have to thank her for that.
All of it did set me thinking, though. I consider myself very lucky to have at last happened upon the Home Page Forums when I did; not only was it just in time to start feeling enthusiastic about the upcoming DVD release of the original trilogy and the announcement of Episode III's name, but at the time the last MSTing board I posted to every so often was drying to a husk animated only by "spammers" in advance of being shut down altogether, its own old posts just plain gone beyond revisiting... and yet, perhaps I've wondered if the particular draw of the board's community for me, that it spent no great effort inventing and obsessing over "disappointments", could have also worked with something like the "Droid Home Page Forums" ("devoted to the unsung observers of the Star Wars saga!") Or, perhaps, a message board community obsessed with technical details yet willing to say things along the lines of "they may not be using the best possible tactics here, but here's my idea why" would have left me cheerfully obsessed with the fiddly minutiae of the saga's "beautiful machines" to the exclusion of the characters. (Or maybe that's getting a little too utopian.)
This may, I suppose, just be another way of worrying that I could be accused at any moment of holding the convert's arrogance that "I (and a few others) hold the Secret Knowledge of how to actually enjoy the Star Wars movies!" ...and yet I've wondered if being able to empathise with Anakin Skywalker as a character gives someone the openness to be able to empathise with all the other characters around him. Of course, that leaves me with different thoughts. When I would run into "character hate," I would think to myself that fictional characters weren't real, that it was somehow your own weakness to give them that much power over you... but maybe, from a certain perspective, feeling sorry for fictional characters is just as peculiar a use of your time as disliking them.
a_p_ must have paid a renewal fee (and that this had happened before), and I have to thank her for that.All of it did set me thinking, though. I consider myself very lucky to have at last happened upon the Home Page Forums when I did; not only was it just in time to start feeling enthusiastic about the upcoming DVD release of the original trilogy and the announcement of Episode III's name, but at the time the last MSTing board I posted to every so often was drying to a husk animated only by "spammers" in advance of being shut down altogether, its own old posts just plain gone beyond revisiting... and yet, perhaps I've wondered if the particular draw of the board's community for me, that it spent no great effort inventing and obsessing over "disappointments", could have also worked with something like the "Droid Home Page Forums" ("devoted to the unsung observers of the Star Wars saga!") Or, perhaps, a message board community obsessed with technical details yet willing to say things along the lines of "they may not be using the best possible tactics here, but here's my idea why" would have left me cheerfully obsessed with the fiddly minutiae of the saga's "beautiful machines" to the exclusion of the characters. (Or maybe that's getting a little too utopian.)
This may, I suppose, just be another way of worrying that I could be accused at any moment of holding the convert's arrogance that "I (and a few others) hold the Secret Knowledge of how to actually enjoy the Star Wars movies!" ...and yet I've wondered if being able to empathise with Anakin Skywalker as a character gives someone the openness to be able to empathise with all the other characters around him. Of course, that leaves me with different thoughts. When I would run into "character hate," I would think to myself that fictional characters weren't real, that it was somehow your own weakness to give them that much power over you... but maybe, from a certain perspective, feeling sorry for fictional characters is just as peculiar a use of your time as disliking them.