Younglings

About

Younglings refers to jokes made about Anakin Skywalker's murder of young Jedi in training while executing Order 66 in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith that spread with the rise of Prequel Memes.

Origin

In 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker murders a room of young Jedi, aka Younglings, at the order of Chancellor Palpatine (shown below).

As the film grew into a target of derision and ironic fandom, jokes about the scene began appearing online. An image that paired the scene with the Stahp meme was posted to Know Your Meme^[1] on September 28th, 2012 (shown below, left). On February 10th, 2013, IGN user LeCambrioleur^[2] posted an image macro referencing the scene on the site's forums (shown below, right).

Spread

The spread of jokes about the scene coincided with the rise of Prequel Memes in late 2015. Of these, two formats were most prominent: either the scene was referenced in an existing meme template (example shown below, left), or the scene itself was turned into an exploitable (example shown below, right).

The scene has continued to be referenced in jokes throughout mostly Reddit in recent years. For example, Facebook meme page Youngling-core uploaded a This Is Where the Fun Begins joke on December 7th, 2016, gaining over 590 likes and reactions (shown below, left). Redditor shouldibeawake4this^[4] posted a Cat In The Hat variation to /r/dankmemes on February 13th, 2017, gaining over 1,300 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References