Something that always bothers me about Star Wars and the Mass Effect games is how everywhere the main characters go, they conveniently run into one or two people they’ve already met. I refer to this as “Star Wars Syndrome.” In a galaxy that is supposed to be immensely vast, containing trillions of individuals, the chances that you could “accidentally” run into people you know on every single planet are astronomically impossible.
I get that it happens just to make the plot more interesting (“Hey look! We know that guy!”), but it makes the galaxy feel much, much smaller than it’s really supposed to be. The writers are catering to the audience’s familiarity at the expense of destroying the believability of the galaxy they worked so hard to create.
A few years ago, I watched all six Star Wars movies with my wife, who had never seen them in their entirety. We watched them in chronological order, starting with Episode I: The Phantom Menace. When we got toEpisode IV: A New Hope, all of the characters were meeting each other when my wife looks at me with a perplexed expression and says, “Wait, don’t they all already know each other?”
Perfect example of “Star Wars Syndrome.”
I get that it happens just to make the plot more interesting (“Hey look! We know that guy!”), but it makes the galaxy feel much, much smaller than it’s really supposed to be. The writers are catering to the audience’s familiarity at the expense of destroying the believability of the galaxy they worked so hard to create.
A few years ago, I watched all six Star Wars movies with my wife, who had never seen them in their entirety. We watched them in chronological order, starting with Episode I: The Phantom Menace. When we got toEpisode IV: A New Hope, all of the characters were meeting each other when my wife looks at me with a perplexed expression and says, “Wait, don’t they all already know each other?”
Perfect example of “Star Wars Syndrome.”