Star Trek vs. Star Wars: Have You Ever Been Fanatical?
Have you been a fan? Perhaps the craziest and even the most irrational ones? Have you ever defended the person you adore to become aggressive?
Spice Up Your Life
Psychologically, it makes sense. It is natural for humans to form emotional attachment to a person, an object and even a story. More often than not, our conceptions and actions are concomitanat with visual impacts (Schacter et al., 2011, p.80).
Also, finding like-minded people gives us sense of belonging and forge a community. Peoplple snowball the connections from a minimal object into interweaven networks (Rainie and Wellman, 2012, p.19). Isn’t just so wonderful when you find someone, or many of them, just as “quirky” as you are? You feel so assured and comfortable when you do not need to hide real opinions to merge, and confident to talk about “Live long and prosper” (Schacter et al., 2011, p.540-542).
Too Much
Economically, it is beneficial. Capitalism implements your illusions and profit from them. It turns out there is a model of navigating popularity to maximize the margins. Males with invertedly triangular physique and symmetrically facial features are more likely to be favoured (Schacter et al., 2011, p.540-542).
Social media has indeed enhanced the connection between followers and public figures, purposefully or accidentally. Celebrities create the impression and receive feedback from the audience, and manage the persona. Marketing on social media, thus, is prioritised in those celebrities’ agenda, which is so specified that each different platform is assigned to sperate films with delicately altered content, to better target the audiences. For example, Instagram may be image-dominated, perfect for promotional use such as newly released albums and films; YouTube is more inclined to personal stories, where mundane life details are shared in a way of “vlog”. One of the best marketing cases would be BTS, a Korean boy band has seized the perfect opportunity.
Wannabe
However, aesthetic values are fluid from person to person, and can even cause dispute. Interestingly, the bigger the similarity between two communities, the bigger the disagreement. Star Trek and Star Wars possess worldview and character settings when amateurs like me can barely tell the differences. But praising Star Wars is regarded as an offense by Trekkies.
In a holistic picture, aesthetics has not only individual variances but chronological ones. Body shapes indicative of more resources are popular. To be specific, in the time of food shortage, obese ones are popular such as “Dad-bods”; in peaceful times, muscular guys are preferred, suggesting the time and money invested. In current context, properly fit bodies are still popular, but what is added is the “immature image”. Men who are much younger, clear-shaven and relatively slimmer, and sometimes vulnerable are stealing our ladies’ attention. Perhaps because of the rise of feminism, men do not need look exaggeratedly strong as a protector, and could be in need of protection.
By the way, I am a die-hard Harry Potter fan have never seen any episodes of Star Trek or Star Wars. I still feel lucky and grateful when I entered the cinema for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
References:
Schacter, D.L., Gilbert, D.T. and Wegner, D.M. 2011. Psychology 2nd ed. New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
Rainie, H. and Wellman, B. 2012. Networked: the new social operating system. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
