My sister is finally getting around to finishing watching Lost, which has made me think about Lost, due to my warning her not to expect answers and just watch it as a show about people getting constantly hosed by absurd rules they themselves even give up on questioning by season 6.

But there are a lot of Lost fans who want to know How this? or Who that? But the thing is, from all but Day One, a lot of questions are simply "The Island did it." Because on that show, the Island can do all kinds of freaky stuff, and seems to do it pretty arbitrarily. A plane lands and some people on the plane go back in time, and others, who came with them, for specific purposes that would seem to suggest they should get a time travel ticket too, don't. A parapalegic gets up and walks around five minutes after setting butt on the island, and another one's cancer goes away and another guy recovers from brain-melting sonic fences and harpoons and like, everything but missing-eye-syndrome. But then other people randomly come down with spine cancer or appendicitis or infections from old bullet wounds that cause them to channel their girlfriend's ghost. The writers clearly established that there were no rules, and the island was a douchebag that did things for its own reasons, including tricking two brothers into guarding it by letting anyone who wanted wander all over the island doing whatever they wanted and refusing to guard it by killing all intruders. And when all was said and done, and they wrapped up their story about the people who had an interesting three years encounter with the island, the fans are still demanding a grand unified theory of how and why mystical island stuff happened.

So it's pretty clear right? Genre fans are not satisfied with hand-waving things away, they demand a plausible explanation, a pseudo-scientific cause for all inexplicable pheonmena in any work that is not sword-and-sorcery fantasy. So all these stupid creators need to do is come up with an explanation, and the fans will be happy, right?

So a long time ago, a bearded hippy guy made a stupid movie that our fathers liked because it was a bunch of idiots driving cars around listening to the same music our fathers like. So people decided to let him make more movies, and he made a movie with one of the car drivers only now he drove a crooked spaceship next to a space yeti and made friends with a couple of teenagers who bitterly resented his skepticism about magic because he never saw anyone do anything that could clearly be construed as magic for three whole movies (and could, in fact, kill as many jet-pack-flying, armored mercenaries named Fett as one of the best space wizards around. Only he was BLIND when doing so, and lacked any space magic). So you could hardly blame him for taking this magic business with a grain of salt. And when the bearded hippy, now a wealthy Hollywood fat cat & film pioneer, who unlike most of his contemporaries, did not rise to fame adapting successful novels, and even helped a marginally retarded friend make the two best movies of his career (Greedo maybe should not have shot first, but at least no one tried to make him brandish a walkie-talkie at Han Solo). You'd think this guy of all people had maybe earned a little trust, right? And given that the universally favorite character of his films did not really believe in his film's magic, there would be a good reason to provide an explanation for the phenomena the fans got to see for themselves while that character was frozen or blind or keeping the magic character from freezing to death or getting shot in the back by his father, right?

So the bearded film pioneer and not-ripping-off-HG-Wells-Peter-Benchley-Mario-Puzo-or-Josef-Conrad creative genius invented something called midichlorians and many of the exact same people who would later demand ANSWERS from a couple of pedophile-looking showrunners, sprained their outrage muscles with their disgusted reaction!

I think I want Shia Lebouef, Michael Bay and Anton Yelchin to team up and rape my childhood some more (in a non-Sanduskyish way, of course), just because I think my fan community has it coming at this point (speaking of which, how are none of these people involved in the Red Dawn remake? ). Because my childhood was already traumatized with Marian Ravenwood hiding from turbaned pursuers in a giant basket or jar in a North African marketplace even though I could not hear any of the Yakety-Sax music that scene deserved. My childhood featured Megatron not noticing a kid in an arm-powered wheelchair trundling up alongside his leg and slipping a floppy disc into the drive conveniently located on Megatron's ankle to win the day for the Autobots. My childhood saw Snake Eyes wearing blond wig ATOP HIS NINJA MASK and a bright-colored Miami Vice-esque jacket with shoulder pads to pose as a rock star. My childhood had Orko & Snarf & Cringer and Sarah Conner's roommate making me afraid to wear headphones lest I suffer the same traumatic seizures she appeared to be experiencing before Arnold put her out of her misery. My childhood had two Wolverines pissing away their post high school summer at a resort in the Catskills learning lessons about not getting put in corners.

Our childhoods raped themselves, and we revile those who produce the things we love, regardless of whether they leave us to assume some BS sci-fi/magic explanation, or make one up and turn the word "midiclorian" into an internet epithet on a par with "like Hitler". Hell, we honor and respect one such Creator for his refusal to reveal things to his fans, to the point where we NAME A WEBSITE after his repeated habit of demanding money in exchange for answers (that is basically what RJ was doing, after all).

On the other hand, they're getting paid for all this, so I suppose it works out.