My account is older than most of the people who come to this forum.

That is all.

 

@Sarge

 

Man I meant to put "age" in the title. My account is older than the age of most users who come here.

 

cool story bobadan.

 

Harrumph. Is this your lawn or my lawn? Get off it anyway. Harrumph again.

 

@JoinTheSchwarz do you have the comic book handy?

 

And two out of your three posts on this old account are in this thread.

 

one time, i saw a bear.

 

What a glorious return this is.

 

(why don't we have beer emojis?)

 

These oldbies keep popping up and shocking the regulars!

 

I'm only 31 and my account is from 2002 when I was 15. I actually made a few accounts around that time on other Lucasfilm-related sites. It's not necessarily just 'older' people here who have accounts older than some members!

And I was treated very much like a teenage fangirl (a Han/Leia 'shipper! someone who didn't love the EU or the prequels! blasphemy!) who was invading the boys' club. I definitely have added sympathy for the new fans who struggle to prove they're more than Johnny-come-latelys.

And now I'm an oldie who gets to point at her join date.

I think I got so used to being part of dated, middle-aged male-dominated fandoms where I was the lone young female intruder (Star Wars, Elvis, Doctor Who... at least the Buffy/Angel fandom had females) that I got pretty shocked when I felt like a dinosaur in places like Tumblr (how many hadn't seen the Star Wars OT or Indiana Jones pre-TFA was amazing) and some of the truly young fandom cultures of today. My entertainment tastes made me feel like grandma. When I talked to people who had seemingly never seen anything from before they born (which wasn't long ago), it was surprising. I don't think the teens/20-somethings right now watched nearly as much archive television and films as people my age and older did (we of the VHS generation where the family library wasn't just new releases). Not to mention, I was already aware amongst my school peers that my knowledge of music showed the age of my parents. Pop-culture references went whoosh over the heads.

 

You should visit the SW thread in the JCC. I think you'll feel at home.

 

Back in the early 2000s, the fandom was different. If you ignored the EU because you felt it went against where you believed the story was headed (Han/Leia fans notoriously hated Courtship) and it had become bogged down in everything but a simple dramatic story about a family, you weren't a real fan. And the fandom really was super Prequel-centric while the Prequels were still being made. In 2002, that was the case.

The fandom is different now because of the Sequels. The EU has become Legends and is no more. The new trilogy is no longer the same one. The Sequel Trilogy is definitely more attached to the Original Trilogy than the Prequel Trilogy, which also changes the characters being focused on and how things are discussed.

Back then, you could hardly move in the fandom without hearing that the entire saga was really just all about Anakin, even though the Original Trilogy clearly wasn't. Vader wasn't but Tarkin's 2-dimensional lackey in the original film (that's the sort of thing that got lost in that rewrite). There was a lot of revisionism going on. One of the biggest negatives for me with that rewrite was it was really popular to proclaim Han Solo a completely irrelevant character who didn't matter because he didn't have the Force (or sperm donor at best in the EU) and even Leia was treated badly because she wasn't part of the Luke/Anakin plot and wasn't the important "Skywalker" because she didn't use the name (even though she was one). With the Sequel Trilogy, the then-popular rewrite of the Original Trilogy to fit that Prequel narrative lens just evaporated. Flash forward to now and Han/Leia are the parents of the prodigal son, not Luke, and Vader is nothing but a melted helmet whose legacy leaves a lasting shadow, but the story has continued and even switched that focus now onto other familial connections.

The fandom has plenty of the same members, but the focus of the fandom and how many old characters are viewed in terms of their importance have changed again. And the loss of the EU has refocused the fandom back to basics.