Internet Culture

‘Rouge One’ is trending because ‘Star Wars’ fans can’t spell

The typo still makes a movie we’d want to see.

Photo of Michelle Jaworski

Michelle Jaworski

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The excitement for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in hyperdrive following the release of its initial trailer, but our first big real reveal since the cast photo last August has also led to some amusing typos.

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Although we’re only starting to wind down from The Force Awakens, many fans are already on board with Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso, the return of Mon Mothma, and appearances from Diego Luna, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, and Ben Mendelsohn in a jam-packed teaser bursting with goodies for Star Wars fans to dissect for months to come.

Go ahead, watch it again. We’ll wait.

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Trouble is, when some fans went to tweet about the movie, they typed in “Rouge One” instead of Rogue One. The Rogue–Rouge mixup is understandable, considering it’s just the transposition of two letters, but it’s unclear how many instances were simply excitement-based typos or whether most people believe that’s how “rogue” is spelled.

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Writers foresaw the problem, probably because they’d already made the mistake themselves while writing Rogue One articles.

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Because Star Wars takes over the Internet whenever there’s a new trailer, enough people were tweeting about Rouge One that it ended up trending below #RogueOne. The movie is getting so much hype that even spellcheck can’t even stop the typo from climbing to the top of people’s feeds.

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https://twitter.com/my_name_is_jim/status/718050322854387712

As more people started to notice “Rouge One” trending, instead of correcting grammar or making fun of the people who got the title wrong, they started getting creative and ran with a “Rouge One” movie.

The word “rouge” can mean a couple of things. Most often, it refers to a red powder or cream used as makeup, though it can also refer to a type of point awarded in Canadian football. It’s the former definition that many fans jumped on as they imagined just what Rouge One would be like (but the latter wasn’t completely ignored, either).

Least of all, Star Wars definitely has the name of its next makeup line right there.

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The spelling snafu also offered a connection to Moulin Rouge, which happens to star Ewan McGregor, the prequel trilogy’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s totally what he was doing while in self-exile on Tatooine, right?

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We have eight months to perfect our puns, because this will probably happen every time Rogue One makes headlines from now until December.

 
The Daily Dot