# Star Wars: The Last Jedi Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the December 2017 sequel directed by Rian Johnson, split fandom so hard that the online fight around it became a defining case study in review-bombing, coordinated harassment, and director-versus-troll internet warfare. Between a bot-boosted Rotten Tomatoes crash, a men's rights fanedit that stripped out women, and racist abuse that drove actor Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram, the discourse spawned some of the most-quoted meme moments in 2010s film Twitter. ## Origin The film's road to release started on October 30, 2012, when The Walt Disney Company announced it had acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion and planned a new Star Wars trilogy targeting a 2015 launch[10]. Deadline reported on June 20, 2014 that Looper writer-director Rian Johnson was signing on to write and direct the next two Star Wars episodes after J.J. Abrams' Episode VII[11]. The official Star Wars site revealed the title as Star Wars: The Last Jedi on January 23, 2017[12], and the film opened on December 14, 2017, pulling $473 million worldwide in its first two days[3]. The backlash catalyst hit almost immediately. On December 14, 2017, Change.org user Henry Walsh started a petition to 'Have Disney strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the official canon,' which pulled more than 20,000 signatures within days[13]. Meme-shaped mockery of the backlash emerged a month later: on January 14, 2018, an anonymous user posted 'The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit (aka The Chauvinist Cut)' to The Pirate Bay, and by January 15 Twitter user @BBW_BFF's screenshot of a Pedestrian write-up drew thousands of retweets[4]. That same day Johnson retweeted the post with extra laughter, kicking the meme cycle into gear[14]. - **Platform:** Rotten Tomatoes / Twitter (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2017 ## Overview The Last Jedi debates lived at the messy overlap of film criticism, coordinated review-bombing, and outright abuse. Critics logged a 93% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 86 on Metacritic[3], while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes dropped to roughly 55%, the lowest for any Star Wars film at the time[1]. Vox described the split as unusual: blockbusters normally rate higher with audiences than with critics, not the reverse[1]. Polygon reported that at least one Facebook group, 'Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys,' claimed responsibility for using bot accounts to drive the audience score down[2]. The surrounding meme content split into a few recognizable strands. First, mockery of the 'De-Feminized Fanedit,' a 46-minute cut posted anonymously to The Pirate Bay in January 2018 that removed nearly every female character[4]. Second, a run of Rian Johnson clapback tweets, most famously a January 19, 2018 thread where he pulled a canonical reference book off his shelf to defend Luke's force-projection stunt against fans calling it inconsistent[5]. Third, a June 2018 campaign called 'Remake The Last Jedi' that claimed 'producers' would front $20 million to redo the film[6]. Fourth, the wave of support posts around Kelly Marie Tran after months of racist trolling pushed her to wipe her Instagram in June 2018[7]. Most of the meme surface was tweets about the discourse itself rather than image-macro templates: shoulder-brush gifs, laughing-emoji dogpiles, and 'manbaby' sarcasm aimed at the loudest complainers[8]. Rian Johnson and cast members Mark Hamill and John Boyega actively fed the mockery cycle by retweeting jokes at the trolls' expense[9]. ## How It Spread The December 2017 audience-score collapse got most of the initial press. Vox, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Slate and Business Insider all covered the split between critics and audiences within a week of release, with several outlets arguing the 'backlash' narrative was inflated by review-bombing rather than reflecting a real fan revolt[2][3][15]. On December 17, 2017, the 'Down With Disney's Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys' Facebook page posted an admission that its admin had used bot accounts to log fake negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes[3]. The meme energy actually crested in January 2018 around the De-Feminized Fanedit. After @BBW_BFF's laughter tweet, Rian Johnson quote-retweeted it with more laughter, Mark Hamill replied with crying-laugh emojis, and John Boyega joined the chain with the same reaction, each post pulling tens of thousands of likes and retweets[14]. The Washington Post, Polygon, Uproxx and The A.V. Club all wrote it up as a story about a men's rights fanedit becoming a self-own[16]. Days later, on January 19, 2018, Johnson posted the 'Doppelganger' bookshelf thread pulling Daniel Wallace's canonical Jedi reference to defend Luke's projection scene, and Twitter cut a Moments page around the response[5]. Fans piled on with reaction gifs like Twitter user @paul_mcq's shoulder-brush post[17]. By summer 2018 the story shifted from the movie to its cast. A June 4, 2018 tweet from the 'Star Wars Facts' account noted that Kelly Marie Tran had wiped her Instagram posts after months of racist and sexist harassment[7]. HuffPost had already reported in December 2017 that trolls edited Rose Tico's Wookieepedia entry to rename her 'Ching Chong Wing Tong' and inserted references to Adolf Hitler[7]. Twitter user @suzannesamin's 'drown out the manbabies' tweet became one of the most-shared support posts of the week[8]. On June 14, 2018, a group calling itself 'Remake The Last Jedi' launched a website and Twitter campaign claiming producers would fund a $20 million reshoot, which CNET and Indiewire covered as another troll-adjacent stunt[6]. Johnson replied publicly with a single tweet consisting of the word 'please' repeated[6]. On July 25, 2018, Johnson deleted around 20,000 of his own tweets in the wake of Disney firing James Gunn over resurfaced old tweets, telling The Mary Sue there was no directive from the studio and calling it a 'why not' move[1]. Tran finally responded in an August 21, 2018 New York Times editorial that referred to herself by her birth name, Loan, and described growing up as a Vietnamese woman in the U.S.[18]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Star Wars: The Last Jedi? It is the ninth Skywalker-saga film, directed by Rian Johnson and released December 14, 2017, that became a lightning rod for online fandom fights, review-bombing, and coordinated harassment[1]. ### Where did Star Wars: The Last Jedi come from? The film was greenlit after Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in October 2012, with Rian Johnson attached to write and direct in 2014[10][11]. ### What does Star Wars: The Last Jedi mean as a meme? Online, the title refers less to the film itself than to the surrounding 2017-2018 discourse: review-bombing, the sexist fanedit, and Rian Johnson's Twitter clapbacks[2][14]. ### How do you use Star Wars: The Last Jedi in meme form? Most uses are references, not templates: quoting Johnson's 'please' tweet, screenshots of his bookshelf thread, or the shoulder-brush and 'manbabies' support tweets[5][8]. ### Is Star Wars: The Last Jedi still popular online? The film and its discourse are still cited whenever review-bombing or fandom harassment stories break, though the peak of meme activity was January to August 2018[2][7]. ### Why was the Rotten Tomatoes audience score so low? Critics gave the film a 93% fresh rating, but the audience score fell to about 55% and at least one Facebook group admitted to using bot accounts to review-bomb it[1][3]. ### What was the De-Feminized Fanedit? It was a 46-minute cut posted anonymously to The Pirate Bay on January 14, 2018 that removed most of the female characters, and it was widely mocked including by Rian Johnson himself[4][16]. ### What happened to Kelly Marie Tran? After months of racist and sexist harassment tied to her role as Rose Tico, Tran cleared her Instagram posts in June 2018 and later wrote a New York Times editorial describing the abuse[7][18]. ### What was the 'Remake The Last Jedi' campaign? It was a June 2018 Twitter and website campaign claiming a group of producers would fund a $20 million reshoot, which Rian Johnson mocked with a tweet consisting of the word 'please' repeated[6]. ### Why did Rian Johnson delete 20,000 of his tweets? In July 2018, after Disney fired James Gunn over resurfaced old tweets, Johnson mass-deleted his archive, telling The Mary Sue there was no studio directive and calling it a 'why not?' move[1]. ## References 1. [https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/18/16791844/star-wars-last-jedi-backlash-controversy]() 2. [https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/18/16792184/star-wars-the-last-jedi-rotten-tomatoes-review-bomb]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/star-wars-the-last-jedi]() 4. [https://archive.is/q5mbF]() 5. [https://twitter.com/rianjohnson/status/954399660206186496]() 6. [https://www.cnet.com/news/star-wars-fans-start-campaign-to-remake-the-last-jedi/]() 7. [https://twitter.com/SWTweets/status/1003833275738013697]() 8. [https://x.com/i/status/1004009347662405632]() 9. [https://twitter.com/rianjohnson/status/953107873487208448]() 10. [https://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/disney-acquires-lucasfilm-for-4-05-billion-plans-more-star-war/]() 11. [https://deadline.com/2014/06/star-wars-rian-johnson-director-next-two-movies-793805/]() 12. [https://www.starwars.com/news/the-official-title-for-star-wars-episode-viii-revealed]() 13. [https://www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-have-disney-strike-star-wars-episode-viii-from-the-official-canon]() 14. [https://twitter.com/BBW_BFF/status/953106797878960128]() 15. [https://slate.com/arts/2017/12/the-last-jedi-backlash-is-misleading.html]() 16. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/01/17/a-mens-rights-activist-edited-the-last-jedi-to-remove-the-women-its-bad/]() 17. [https://x.com/i/status/954399660206186496]() 18. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/movies/kelly-marie-tran.html]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/star-wars-the-last-jedi Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library