I’ve never seen Star Wars.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a planet called Ewokland, home to (you guessed it) the Ewoks. They were a fierce and proud people, but also incredibly cute. This cuteness caused many foes to underestimate them, and meet their gruesome fate in the tangled forests of Ewokland, where no one can hear you scream. But little did they know, on some other planet, a dastardly villain was hatching a plan to conquer Ewokland, ostensibly for its rich oil reserves, but mainly just for kicks. In fact, no one really know why he wanted to invade Ewokland, as the economics just didn’t make sense, not to mention it was just plain barbaric and violated interplanetary law. But everyone was scared of this bad dude, whose name was Darth Vader, because he was a bit unhinged and had his finger on the Death Star’s nuclear button. Also, he was somebody’s father or something, so it was quite important to appease him, although no one really knew why. Everyone kept saying to “take him seriously but not literally”, until he literally blew up a planet and they all belatedly realised he was quite serious indeed.

Oh, I’ve just been informed the Ewok’s home world was called Endor. So, anyway, Darth Vader was hatching his plan and amassing vast forces of storm troopers and whatever the evil equivalent of X-wing pilots are called. First he reached out to the president of the Ewoks and offered to broker a trade deal, taking the Ewok’s oil reserves off their hands in exchange for “protection”, but the Ewoks, suspecting foul play, rebuffed him. This made Darth Vader very angry. He did not like it when things didn’t go his way. The Ewoks, in turn, taunted him with memes that made him look very stupid, and if there was one thing Darth Vader hated it was looking stupid. Like all dastardly supervillains, he was very thin-skinned. So Darth Vader began gathering his forces in earnest, in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The economy was so tanked on the Death Star thanks to Darth Vader’s terrible monetary policies, that most of its inhabitants had no choice but to enlist in the storm trooper army in order to feed their families.

Meanwhile, some good guys, led by a plucky young upstart called Luke Skywalker, got wind of this evil plot. Mainly because it was all over the front pages of the galaxy’s newspapers. Nobody really needed military intelligence anymore, because the evil guy always just came out and said exactly what he was thinking.

The good guys were none too happy about Darth Vader’s plot, partly because they knew that once Darth Vader had Endor under his control, they would be in the firing line next. So they gathered a meeting of the leaders of all the space faring nations to discuss a response. Han Solo was all gung-ho about sending troops to invade the Death Star and capture Darth Vader, until Princess Leia pointed out that Darth Vader would nuke them all faster than you could say “Jabba the Hut”. Chewy said something very wise and important that no one took any notice of because it just sounded like garbled nonsense.

In the end, the team hashed out a package of very reasonable-sounding economic sanctions that they put to Darth Vader with the view to dissuading him from his evil course of action. That’s when Darth Vader threatened to cut off all their communications. Oh yeah, it turned out that all the good guys’ nations were entirely dependent on the Death Star’s communications network, with no one thinking to question this technological dominance until it was far too late. Without a comms network, the good guys would just be floating impotently in the darkness of space for all eternity. That seemed like a pretty bad outcome to the good guys, so after a bit more hand-wringing they all decided that they would politely ignore the threats coming from the Death Star, and instead sent their supreme leader (not sure of their name) on a state visit there.

The state visit went as well as can be hoped. The supreme leader bit back their disdain and attempted to use their “soft power” to wield influence. No one had to seriously get their lightsabers out. In the end, Darth Vader got distracted by some shiny humanoid robots presented to him by the supreme leader and decided not to launch a full-scale invasion of Endor for now. He sent a small exploratory band of storm troopers down to the planet, and these were swiftly and brutally dispatched by the ferocious Ewok army. Nobody minded much. The good guys all breathed a sigh of relief. The destruction of the universe could wait until another day.

Happy Star Wars Day, everyone!