Towel Day - Tumblr Posts
Happy Geek Day//Towel Day.
For this day I drew Marvin, the paranoid android accompanied by one of my geeky OCs, Serenity Fancy, with her cat, those three are thinking about the best answer for everything: 42.
"So Long, and thanks for all the fish!" 🐬
I think it's interesting how the two big holidays we celebrate today have completely exchanged places over their lifetimes.
When it started, Towel Day was very much a memorial. The date - May 25th - has no textual significance whatsoever. Rather, like the feast day of a Saint, it is the anniversary of Douglas Adams' death. The observance with the towels and all is/was a Fandom reference, but the purpose of the holiday was to honor the memory of a Great Man - and how more appropriately than with a bit of silliness? And in the, what is it, 20? more? years since his death, the memorial aspect has been eroded away, until it is now basically a celebration of the work more than the man, fun unalloyed by grief, a way to fly your geek colors. And perhaps that's what he would want in the end.
The Glorious 25th of May is exactly the opposite. It is - or was - purely a Fandom thing. It's a holiday in text, and we celebrate it alongside the characters because, well, Night Watch is a frickin amazing book and deserves to be celebrated. And there's admittedly always been a melancholic aspect, deriving from the text itself, but the date and the celebration were ultimately fictional. What I used to say is that I celebrated both, but I celebrated Towel Day harder because it commemorated something real.
And then Terry Pratchett died.
And this silly fandom thing we were already doing proved a ready made memorial to honor the memory of a Great Man. The fan art now us bursting with lilac covered fedoras. It now celebrates the man in addition to (perhaps even more than) the work.
I always wondered if Pratchett chose May 25th in honor of Adams. And I wonder what this day will look like in another 20 years, when the grief of this death has faded as well.
GNU Terry Pratchett. GNU Douglas Adams.
Happy Memorial Day.
Happy Glorious 25th of May! 💜🌸
