The Sacred Texts

Editor's Note: This entry contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi; read at your own caution.

About

The Sacred Texts is a memorable line uttered by the character Luke Skywalker in the 2017 science fiction space opera film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Online, people have used the moment as an image macro, pairing the subtitled frame of Skywalker saying the line with captions sarcastically describing an old and worthless piece of writing being destroyed.

Origin

On December 14th, 2017, the film Star Wars: The Last Jedi was released.^[1] In the film, the character appears before Luke Skywalker in a time of crisis and burns the ancient Jedi texts to teach Luke that they are useless.

That day, an anonymous 4chan user posted a screenshot of the moment from the film in the /tv/ board. They captioned the post (shown below) "YOU LITTLE GREEN ASSHOLE." The thread received more than 340 replies before deletion.^[2]

Spread

About two weeks later on December 30th, Redditor ^[3] Randy_Randerson101 posted the image in the /r/SequelMemes subreddit. This variation included the subtitle "The sacred texts" and the caption "when your 3-terabyte hard drive full of reylo porn accidentally gets wiped." The post (shown below) received more than 700 points (91% upvoted) in less than one week.

On January 1st, Imgur ^[4] user Hobbes314 shared a variation with the caption "When you find your mom throwing out decade old Lego SW instruction books." Within four days, the post (shown below, left) received more than 2,300 views.

Two days later, Redditor very_clean posted a version in the /r/dankmemes subreddit. This variation included the caption "When the school janitor cleans the kill list you wrote in shit on the bathroom stall." The post (shown below, center) received more than 790 points (94% upvoted) in less than 24 hours.

That day, the Facebook meme account OfficialBardockObama posted a variation with the caption "When your mom gets rid of thousands of pages you wrote on the Shrek lore." The post (shown below, right) received more than 4,600 reactions, 600 comments and 900 shares in less than 24 hours.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References