HAPPY STAR WARS DAY EVERYONE. BECAUSE OH MY GOD STAR WARS.

psssttt.... star wars :D :D :D

Yup, a day created because some nerd figured out that “May the Fourth” sounds a bit like “May the force” and the end. Literally, that’s it. No special significance other than a homophonic quirk.

It’s a divisive day, and I’m struggling to come to terms with how I feel about it. But instead of just keeping my thoughts on the matter to myself like a normal person, I’m serving up another of my patented HOT FRESH TAKE thought pieces. Yes, it’s a Bank Holiday Monday guys!

Instead of doing a boring history about when the phenomenon started and how it’s grown that I can’t be bothered to do anyway, I’m gonna fall back on fun graphs and statistics. And I’m gonna look at how people continue the joke past 4/5. So here we go!

I got the stats for 2013 about usage of the joke structure ‘may the X be with you’ (because I actually did all this research last year). Here’s how the graph looks:

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I had to exclude the fourth from this because obviously it’s huge. Let’s look at the interesting dates:

  • After the 4th, most people do a joke of this form on the 1st. “May the first be with you” is clearly the funny joke of choice for unoriginal people on Twitter then. That makes sense, it’s the first opportunity to make it and relies on people remember the meme from previous years and going “oh right haha.” The whole ‘deliberately get the date wrong’ is also supposed to be funny. But it’s not really.
  • Second most popular is the 5th. This is the day directly following the 4th so also makes sense. Recycling a joke from yesterday is a classic Twitter joke (I cba to look into how many people are doing Royal Baby stuff still today, but I bet it’s at least a few).
  • The 7th is oddly popular for reasons I can’t quite understand. Whilst the 6th is pretty much dead. No idea about that one.
  • After this, the most popular ones are the 14th and 24th. Obviously here the joke is that they also have the “fourth” bit in them and lol irony.

But anyway, that’s all lame.

I haven’t looked into how many people are doing this post-May. But I bet there’s at least one genius out there who tweeted “December the 25th be with you” instead of, y’know, being with their family and stuff.

Why the hate? After all, I love a horrible pun as next as the much guy. Well, I think it ties into my whole faux-celebration of geek culture that’s all the rage right now. Star Wars is still seen as kinda a nerdy thing and being ‘into it’ is seen as cool in that geek chic kinda way. (See my blogs passim on Big Bang Theory, etc.). Maybe I’m wrong about this entirely, but it’s the vibe I get.

But I’m massively stuck up and pretentious anyway so I can talk.

Also, it leads to horrible corporate attempts at being down with the kids. For example, this year’s worst exit entry has to be this, from Charmin:

Actually, everything Charmin post is super annoying and crass. But this rubs me up especially the wrong way. But at least it only got 31RT/25FAV. So some poor graphic artist has to put in about an hour’s work for some lovely low engagement numbers. Hooray for working in social media.

Well anyway, I thought I’d have more to say than that. But I don’t. Happy Star Wars Day I guess.

HOT TAKE ENDS HERE.