Lego Star Wars Icons

About

Lego Star Wars Icons refer to in-game icons of playable characters from the Lego Star Wars video game series. The icons, both original and recreated, gained notable spread as profile pictures on Discord, Twitter and Instagram starting in 2017, while in early January 2020 TikTok users set the Lego Star Wars profile pictures en masse, partly to protest against the Hype House collective.

Origin

On March 29th, 2005, Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, a Lego-themed video game adaptation of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, was released.^[1] In the game, players could unlock a total of 56 playable characters (59 in the Game Boy Advance version). In this and the following installments of the series, each playable character had a round icon which could be seen as a part of the in-game interface, in the character select screen and during the loading screens. The border of the icon could be blue, green or brown depending on whether the character was selected by player one, player two or was unselected (examples shown below).

While the Lego Star Wars icons have been used as profile pictures prior, the earliest evidence of them being used as a trend can be traced to a tweet by Twitter^[2] user @Lord_Bung who on January 8th, 2018, reported an influx of Lego Star Wars profile pictures on the platform. On the same day, Twitter^[3] user @IoxAlt reposted a photoshopped image of Barack Obama in the blue circle of a Lego Star Wars icon.

Spread

On January 19th, 2018, Instagram^[4] user starwars.wookiee posted a collection of 132 Lego Star Wars icons, writing "Join the LEGO Star Wars Movement 😂. Change ur pfp." On the following day, Redditor^[5] Emperor-Palpamemes made a post about starwars.wookie's posts to the /r/StarWars subreddit, where it received over 270 upvotes in six months.

In the following years, Lego Star Wars profile pictures gained prominence on Twitter, Instagram, Discord and other online platforms and services. For example, on November 12th, 2018, Twitter user @tictacsnack tweeted about making 11 members of a Discord server to change their profile pictures to Lego Star Wars icons (tweet shown below).

Additionally, Star Wars icons have seen active use in ironic memes, while Yoda's icon has been an important part of the Lego Yoda meme and related formats.

TikTok Spread

Prior to December 19th, 2019, Star Wars profile started gaining traction on TikTok. On December 19th, 2019, legostarwars_army Instagram was created for the purposes of collecting Lego Star Wars icons.^[5]

The trend gained a defined presence on the platform in early January 2020. For example on January 2nd, 2020, user @dripp.skylark posted a video calling for his subscribers to change their profile pictures to Lego Star Wars icons (shown below, left). On the same day, @dripp.skylark posted a video captioned "Keep em comin boys, we will defeat the Hype House Empire once and for all" (shown below, right). The video received over 44,800 likes.

On January 3rd, 2020, Change.org user Paul Foisy created a petition calling for raiding The Hype House comments on January 4th, 2020.^[6]

On January 3rd, The New York Times journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted^[7][8] about the trend, with Polygon,^[9] The Washington Post^[10] and other online outlets covering the news in the following days.

As of January 10th, 2020, #lsw hashtag on the platform had over 958 million views, with #legostarwars hashtag accumulating over 384 million views.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References