Why Do We Have Fandom Holidays?

It's been a minute since "May the 4th Be With You" was considered a nerdy insider joke. The phrase and associated day has been celebrated within Star Wars fandom since the original trilogy, but somewhere during the geek overhaul of culture in the mid-aughts, May the 4th became as popular as...well at least as Google.

While I was walking around the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival yesterday, there was a fair amount of homage paid to the series. One festival-exclusive tote bag (which I sadly did not have the foresight to take a photo of) had the typical title and place of the festival right alongside a Star Wars logo and date reminder. The AFI in Silver Spring is bringing the original trilogy back to screens for a week. Which is fortunate timing because the 20th anniversary re-release of Revenge of the Sith is wrapping up.

But there is also Towel Day, for Hitchhiker's Guide fans, 23 November for Doctor Who, Tolkien Week for the greedy LoTR nerds, Sherlock Day for Doyle memorialists. Why does a fandom need a holiday though?

For a while, I've been wanting to write about tumblr holidays. How the holidays are celebrated ties in deeply with tumblr's resurrection of a thousands-year-old Yelp complaint and the sudden surge in jokes about the Cask of Amontillado (a relatively obscure Edgar Allen Poe poem) but also remains frustratingly separate in terms of why they have appeared.

Some of the holidays are because stabbing Caesar just feels like the right and fun thing to do. It also has a somewhat unexpected wealth of material around it - what with the whole Shakespeare play about it and political prescience for these, our modern times. From my viewpoint, it all started with Mean Girls ("why don't we all just stab Caesar???") but even with the continued popularity of the film I don't know that most people would point to that as the source of tumblr's absolute obsession with March 15th.

So March 15th is a holiday because everyone has a morbid sense of humor about history and we like resurrecting old shit for hypermodern layered memery - also see: Great Molasses Flood lesser celebrations on Jan 15th - but other holidays like, say, April 1st or November 5th, are because of collective experiences we've ...endured on the site. And do both of them happen to stem from Supernatural for some goddamn forsaken reason? Why, yes. Because the show I dedicated five priceless years of my youth to has somehow become the genesis of all modern online culture (another article on this later, maybe).

April 1st was the Mishapocalypse (covered in published chapter but also here), which left the day of pranks open season for tumblr to then introduce booping in 2024, which caused everyone still left on the site to become absolutely rabid. Some of us have little paw badges on our tumblr profiles because we love to boop and be booped in return. It's not that April Fool's is about pranking, it's about a site-wide event happening which requires participating and piling on and is annoying as hell to everyone not interested in it. It's also become a form of tumblr trying to outdo itself - for me at least, there's an excited about what the next iteration of April 1st will me.

November 5th is also tied to a specific day but has much more far-reaching and lasting consequences to the method of communication on the site. You see, on November 5th, 2020, America had an election. And we were deep into the middle of lockdown and a global pandemic. I'm guessing the majority of people on earth were aware of those things. But it was also the penultimate episode of Supernatural after a whopping 15 year run. And the writers decided to cap off their story by taking the much debated slash ship and bedrock of Supernatural fandom, human Dean Winchester and angel Castiel in the most excruciating (hilarious) way possible. Castiel tells Dean, "I love you," Dean says nothing in reutrn, and then Castiel immediately gets swallowed up by black goop and goes to super-bad angel hell.

This image was immediately seen everywhere on the site as fans freaked out. But, also, you know, an election was happening. So someone decided, why not meme it. People started finding out about Georgia flipping and Putin supposedly resigning (memorialized as the #destielputinelection tag) on the same night through Dean's expressionless face.

And now...any time something of note happens, the first way a tumblr user finds out is highly likely to be through this news delivery service. Of course, on November 5th there are anniversary celebrations, but the holiday itself is somewhat seen throughout the rest of the year. The meme only continues to exist because it was birthed on that specific night.

Twitter and Reddit, also full of nerds, don't seem to create their own holidays the way tumblrites to. Of course, there's plenty of May the 4th celebration and there are other very old markers of shared culture (france is bacon) but tumblr seem to be continually inventing new ones, since we're all obsessed with iterations and 'yes, and'ing the poster before us. The weird holidays we celebrate cement our community, which is what they do for the wider culture as well - consider the Super Bowl - but tumblr is much less visible and much more focused on what it chooses to promote as its 'brand'.

Fandom holidays bring together communities who have historically felt targeted by the mainstream. Those holidays started much earlier than the current era of nothing-but-niche entertainment and helped connect fans who had no other outlets. (Also see: cons. Gally feels like a holiday weekend to me.) Now, instead of the urge to mark your presence as a nerd through wearing at towel in public, it's through how you get your daily news.

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