Last week, I wrote that the new Madoka movie “captured my imagination.” What did I mean by that? Well, let’s go back to a time when I was young and Star Wars was still good. I was in the library when I found some sort of encyclopedia of Star Wars props and vehicles. I couldn’t tell you anything substantive about the book–the wingspan of a Snowspeeder or the cargo capacity of an Imperial-class Star Destroyer or anything like that–but what’s stuck with me has been, interestingly, the foreword of the book. There, the author talked about seeing Star Wars for the first time in 1977, about the sense of wonderment he took home from the theater, about his fantasies of shooting up TIE fighters in his car on the drive home. It’s clear from the reverence he gives to the material that, even years later at the date of publication, that sense of wonderment has never really left the author.

Clearly, Madoka won’t make the same cultural impact as Star Wars, and clearly I don’t fantasize about Witches and labyrinths lurking around every corner. But I think there are two commonalities between Madoka and Star Wars that every creative person can learn from. First, both series use meticulous world-building and compelling visual spectacle to not only draw in the viewer, but permanently color the viewer’s idea of what fantasy ought to look like. Star Wars was not the first science fiction story to use laser beams and androids and space dogfights, but it firmly entrenched these elements in the genre. Similarly, Madoka is not the first series to juxtapose a sterile modern setting with vivid, intensively subjective terror-worlds (cf. Persona), but it does so with such craft that it’s hard not to imagine the gleaming heights and tortuous shadows of the setting being reflected in future works. In other words, although I will never know what it was like to watch Star Wars in 1977 when it was bold and new, I suspect it’s a feeling akin to the way I felt watching Madoka.

Secondly, both Star Wars and Madoka are uncommonly receptive to fan engagement. Inviting fan involvement is an important counterweight to the traditional top-down model of cultural output: authors hand down works into the marketplace, for the fans to passively consume. This top-down model is reinforced by various social factors; copyright law looks unfavorably on many transformative uses of others’ work (see, e.g. Castle Rock, Air Pirates), while the proliferation of digital distribution (legitimate and otherwise) makes mass consumption easier than ever. Yet, the Internet also provides unprecedented opportunities for fans to engage with cultural goods on their own terms, to create their own meanings and spinoffs–for one creative work, in other words, to beget further creative works. To embrace fan input, then, is not only smart business, but an endorsement of what my old teacher, Prof. Terry Fisher, called semiotic democracy.

Anyway, now that that’s all over with, here’s the worst pun I’ve made in some time.