I have a confession to make.

I liked Star Wars Episodes 1-3.

Not in an ironic way. And I didn’t just tolerate them, or sort of like them. I just plain liked them. At no point while watching them did I feel like I had wasted money on my ticket, or that George Lucas was destroying my childhood. Are they the greatest films of all time? No, but neither are Star Wars episodes 4-6. Are they better than episodes 4-6? Personally, I don’t think they are, but if someone thought they were, I wouldn’t crucify them.

I guess this is a rant in two parts. Part one has to do with nerd rage.

Let me preface this by saying that I consider myself a nerd! I am pretty sure I have the credentials to back it up. I’ve been playing video games literally for as long as I can remember. I have both played in and GMed several different tabletop games — in fact, one of my longest-running games to date (that I’ve played, not GMed) was a Star Wars tabletop game. I watch Doctor Who, listen to Anamanaguchi, read Dinosaur Comics, and I was (to put it very simply) heavily involved in the drama club at my high school. So I am pretty sure that I qualify as a nerd.

One thing, however, that separates me from some (not all!) nerds is that I don’t really do the nerd rage thing. See, nerds in general, more than any other social group I have ever encountered, have the capacity to hate really insignificant things with an astounding amount of vitriol. They don’t just hate a given TV show, video game, film, or whatever — they hate it with the passion of a thousand exploding suns. Justin Bieber? Worst no-talent hack of a “musician” to ever live, period. Big Bang Theory? Clearly the dude who created that pathetic excuse for a sitcom should be forever erased from the surface of Earth by a gigantic nuclear explosion. Final Fantasy XIII (which I actually liked a lot, as opposed to my other examples)? A complete and utter disgrace to the Final Fantasy name from which the world will never truly recover; the entire staff of Square-Enix should burn every copy and then commit seppuku.

This wouldn’t be so bad (though it would remain a little disconcerting) if there wasn’t a tremendous amount of peer pressure involved. You have to hate exactly what this sort of nerd hates, or every opinion you’ve ever had about anything is instantly and utterly invalid. If someone really likes raging hard about a particular topic, they will never back down, endlessly over-analyzing the faults of the subject of their rage until you give up from sheer exhaustion.

But nothing, and I mean nothing, is a more frequent and more hated nerd rage subject than the Star Wars prequels. If someone who’d never seen them listened to a nerd rage about them for awhile (and they can go on for quite awhile indeed), that person might get the impression that George Lucas had done literally nothing right with them — that every single frame has at least a dozen errors contained within. A friend of mine once actually criticized the speed at which Samuel L. Jackson walks in a scene in the third film. I can absolutely understand why (lots of) people didn’t like the prequels, but when you reach that level of scrutiny, I feel as though you’ve lost any semblance of objectivity and fairness.

You know what was cool? Pod-racing. Pod-racing was really, really cool. I love that whole scene. I like the goofy, two-headed announcer; I like the unique cast of alien pilots; and the fact that Anakin’s freedom is riding on his success makes the whole thing quite intense. Y’know what else was cool? That dual-bladed lightsaber. I can remember sitting in the theater and having my mind completely and utterly blown as first one, and then another crimson beam hissed to life, and then Maul really started going at it, deftly repelling the assault of not one but two Jedi! And the music, I mean, man! I try not to use the word too much, but if anything ever deserved to be called epic, it was absolutely Duel of the Fates.

I definitely remember being similarly thrilled by the Battle of Geonosis. To see all those Jedi in action! And not just them, but the calm, cool, collected clone troopers taking down wave after wave of enemy droids, flying around in those rockin’ gunships. And then we get to see Yoda fight, and he’s awesome at it! And then in the third film, we get to see him fight again, and all of that alongside the awesome lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin.

I know, I know: all I’m really pointing out here are the neat action sequences, but 4-6 were so much more than that — a well-crafted plot, likeable characters, et cetera, right? But think for a moment about what you appreciated about 4-6 when you very first saw them, when you were little. If you’re anything like me, what you appreciated was that Darth Vader is a scary badass, lightsabers are really cool, and the assault on the Death Star was awesome and intense. And to be perfectly frank, I’m not even sure that the plot of 4-6 is that well-crafted; I think a lot of that is overhype generated by a combination of childhood nostalgia and a desire to distance the original films from the prequels.

Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that, irrespective of your opinions about Star Wars 1-3, there are good things about those movies. And regardless of your opinions of 4-6, they aren’t the greatest films of all time.

Please, stop the nerd rage. It isn’t healthy.