It's Getting Hotter than Mustafar in Here: Adventures as Anakin Skywalker on Tinder

On the afternoon of July 12, 2016, I logged into Facebook and was greeted with tragedy. What came to an end was an adventure, an experience, a beautiful few months of living in the head of a famous character. Facebook had removed my Anakin Skywalker parody account.

Let's set the mood a little (Because this is the only thing I could come up with when I searched "sexy Star Wars music.")

The Idea and the Force Awaken
The account's life began back in January. I have never been on an official date, so I felt like trying to find a first date off the internet was kinda cheap and I didn't feel comfortable showing pictures of myself to strangers on the internet. Still, the dating app Tinder interested me. I know several people who use it and have a lot of fun with it, a few who have gotten dates from it, and I even have a friend who found a girlfriend there. I was curious about what it was like and wanted a way to check it out without risking my dignity and facing the blunt truth of how attractive I actually am.

I'm a pretty big Star Wars fan and over Winter break, just before I created the account, my friends and I waded through 2 1/2 grueling hours of Episode II, so that was fresh on my mind at the time. I love terrible movies, so for as awful as some of the moments in the prequels (Episodes I-III) are, I love them for their cheesiness. Every time I go to the beach, I have to recite the "I don't like sand" line (for the uninitiated, watch the video to the left), probably annoying anybody I'm with, and I have an ironic appreciation of crappy George Lucas creations such as Jar-Jar, midichlorians, and pod racing. This, combined with my desire to check out Tinder inspired me to create an account for prequels-era Anakin Skywalker, where I could refer to Mr. Lucas's wonderful creations to my heart's desire.

Because you're required to have a Facebook to use Tinder, I set up an account for Anakin. This isn't illegal unless someone can prove it did them legal harm (which it didn't), though it does violate Facebook's policies. The website's algorithms recognize fictional character names and prevent you from creating a profile for "Anakin Skywalker," so I went by "Anakin Skywålker." This was totally fine because the algorithms didn't pick up an exact match and on Tinder, the first name would still look the same. I filled in a few goofy details and added myself and a couple close friends who knew about my idea. I added a few photos to fill in the Tinder profile and thought I'd leave it at that for the time being (more on my Facebook profile later). Here's what the basic Tinder profile looked like:

*Jedi hand motion* You WILL swipe right
How Tinder works, for those of you who don't know, is it presents you with a profile like the one I created (but with a real person's first name and pictures) that you can swipe right (like) or left (dislike) on. If you and another person swipe right on each other, you match and the app sets up a chat.

I initially started using Tinder as if I were using it myself, swiping right on girls who seemed fun and interesting and left on those who didn't and kept the age range to 18-25 and the distance to 10 miles from my location. After a couple days, I reminded myself that I was on Tinder for the sake of an elaborate joke and not to find a date, so I started swiping right on everybody and relaxed the age and distance settings. You're allowed something like 50 likes per 12 hours unless you pay, so what I'd do is spend a minute or two of solid right swiping until I ran out and then let the matches flow through until I could swipe again.

Without further ado, here's some things I learned while on Tinder:

It's best to just start a conversation with a simple, "Hi, I'm Anakin. Nice to meet you" than anything else. People liked jokes, but the conversations never went on as long if I opened with them. I'd like to think this is solid dating advice whether or not you're pretending to be Anakin Skywalker.

Dating Tip: Midichlorians are not a good conversation starter

I tried to speak in only dialogue from the movie, but found out this was pretty difficult. I know the movies pretty well, but not that well, and I often had to skim the quotes page on IMDb for lines that didn't always work. I stopped pretty early on after realizing this was way too much work. I did manage a couple times though:

Sand was always a coarse and rough and irritating topic. It got everywhere.

I cannot flirt, even as a fictional character.

You meet some unsavory people

Quite a few girls had a crush on Hayden Christiansen when they were younger. If only his acting skills were as good as his looks, amiright?

Staying in character wasn't too hard, but it meant having to be creative. While Anakin Skywalker is a well-established character, there are a lot of gaps to fill in. For example, one of the first matches I got asked me about life as a padawan, so I had to come up with what I thought Jedi school would be like and what sort of thing Anakin would be learning in the time he's offscreen.

This led me to develop a character within a character, and over the course of several conversations, I began to establish Anakin's opinions on Jedi life, the different planets he visited, the other Jedi, and the prequels-era galaxy. While I was still Anakin Skywalker, I definitely developed my own voice within the framework the movies had given me.

Other running jokes I developed included:

• Anakin is a pod racing junkie with season tickets. I offered to take several matches to Tatooine to see a race
• Trying really hard to hide his relationship with Padmé but failing horribly
• Affectionately calling Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine, "Palpy"
• In the movies, Anakin is upset that the council wouldn't make him a Jedi master, so I ran with that and made him really petty and paranoid, suspecting that insignificant things like tripping over Yoda were costing him his promotion.
• Courscant's smog problem (I'm from LA, so I know a thing or two about smog)

The hardest part about staying in character was keeping things consistent. Anakin changes from a whiney little boy to a whiney young Jedi padawan to the whiney, evil Darth Vader in the course of three movies. That's a lot of different characters to cover within the character. While I was aiming for an Episode II/pre-Episode III era Anakin (whiney Jedi padawan), sometimes I would be asked about turning to the dark side or or whether or not I had kept track of Luke and Leia. Star Wars is a rich franchise because of how much it follows and develops characters like Anakin, but the large scope can be hard to work with if you're trying to nail down a character.

A lot of it had to do with the flow of the conversation as well. Sometimes I thought it'd be funnier to be younger Anakin and be naïve about Palpatine and other times, I thought it was funnier to be post-Mustafar (the big, final battle in Episode 3) Darth Vader and talk to people about the Empire's hiring process and the big plans we had for the Death Star. 

The final thing I learned on Tinder was that most people get the joke and play along, but the few exceptions are the ones who make it all worthwhile.

Using Tinder was an interesting experience. At first, I felt bad judging people based on pictures and three line descriptions, but it became pretty addictive once I dealt with the fact that that's what you do when you use Tinder. It was a good time-waster and a nice companion on the toilet seat, and I really enjoyed being in the head of Anakin and creating my own version of the character. I don't know if I'd look for a date through Tinder--it didn't seem like the best environment for that--but I would definitely use it again, because once I brushed off the initial weirdness, it was a lot of fun.

While I enjoyed Tinder, the Force was also calling me to use my powers on another social media network. To be continued...