Star Wars: The Awakening of Skywalker it's been a few weeks, but as for the rest of the internet, the trilogy-ender is old news. Instead, everyone seems to be talking about Lego Star Wars right now, a family-friendly video game series set in the George Lucas universe.
If you've been on TikTok or Instagram recently, you've probably noticed that these social networking sites were photographed with smiling plastic watermelons. Depending on where you look, it's actually a smirk of happy faces surrounded by blue circles. It's a habit that has caused a lot of confusion, as long as there's no new game out – the last Lego Star Wars title, Power Awakens, It came out in 2016. The next game, which includes the Skywalker saga in nine movies, has not been released until 2020.
"Why the fuck is allones (profile picture) a Le Starwars character," one Twitter user asks right.
"Ok can anyone explain why everyone at TikTok has Lego Star Wars characters as they have a pickup ???" another wrote. "I'm lost."
As a New York Times reporter, Taylor Lorenz noted on Twitter a few days ago, the whole thing started out as a user-created trend on TikTok, with people coming together to create a "raid" against a group known as The Hype House. Hype House is a LA-based residence where a group of TikTok content creators came together in an effort to make collaboration easier. Together, Hype House has millions of fans – and with the honor comes a certain setback. In this case, everything is fun. The real users of the Lego Star Wars avatar have been trying to build an army against the Hype House in an attempt to overthrow the fledgling "empire" – think Clone Wars, but on social media.
That's probably where things are it started, but right now, it's becoming a bandwagon where people change their avatar because it's cool to do so. Some even take the blue circles that define these avatar images and place them in actual photos, just to be accompanied by a sea of iconic Lego Star Wars profiles.
My 10-year-old brother has made it his goal to get everyone in our family to change our pictures showing the side of Le Star Wars hahah pic.twitter.com/Jcrz4xf1D0
– DAVID DoBRIK (@DavidDobrik) January 5, 2020
And, to be fair, Lego Star Wars games are great. Aside from giving hardcore Star Wars fans the center of the main movie, the games also do an excellent job of exploring their favorite characters. For example, you can get baby Anakin to solve a puzzle for you, or be able to roll like a good droid.
“Lego Star Wars has always been fun to play everything with everyone, especially because all the characters look different and have great skills – in contrast, say, Lego Harry Potter, which is a bunch of British kids rolling sticks in stuffs, ”says Star Wars columnist and Polygon reporter Ryan Gilliam.
When you think about it, a whole generation of kids on social media have grown up in these games, not movies. The first Lego Star Wars game, the first to participate, came out in 2005, compared to 2015 The Army Awakens. Nostalgia is playing out here, as social media users have begun to abandon efforts to "defeat" the TikTok team and instead are now closer to their beloved Lego Star Wars characters.