Uh oh. There it is, friends. The can is open, and there are worms freaking everywhere.

You know how the Star Wars and Star Trek fandoms can be. You know how most fandoms can be, come to that. We just don’t seem to get the whole concept of live and let live. Do you remember the vicious console wars of the 90s, that pitted Mario and Sonic against each other? Friendships were won and lost and mothers’ weight problems were relentlessly mocked on the schoolyard, simply because somebody’s allegiance was different to yours.

Nothing’s changed at all in that regard, to listen to all of the Nintendrone, Sony Pony and such snark that goes on. Can’t we all just get along? Most forward into a glorious new utopia, where we’re all simply gamers and not judged by the systems we game on?

Well, no. No, we can’t. By the same token, can’t we appreciate both Star Trek and Star Wars equally? Again, no. Not usually.

You’d think, what with sharing a genre and all, that we wouldn’t have to get all mutually exclusive about this. That it’s totally acceptable to support both intergalactic dramas with Star in the title. Sadly, though, it’s not as simple as that.

Now, in terms of mainstream popularity, Star Wars pretty well has Scotty and his buddies beat. That’s all well and good, but you do not want to attract the wrath of Star Trek meme-makers. Just check out this hilarious Wars-trumping crop of memes.

30 The Classic Star Trek Joke

Now, as we all know, Star Wars has its own share of iconic catchphrases and such. We’ve got the "Force is strong with this one," "May the Force be with you,"  and other bits of beautiful wisdom from Yoda (do, or do not. There is no try). When it comes to legendary movie lines, we’ve got reams and reams of material to pick from right here.

Having said all of that, Star Trek only needs two words.

Captain’s Log is a line that, regardless of your familiarity with the franchise, you can immediately identify. You know that there’s a Shakespeare play/J.D from Scrubs soliloquy coming up. Sometimes, if you’re powerful and super cool enough, a meager two words are all you need.

Even Admiral Ackbar’s beloved, meme-tastic It’s a trap! can’t match that.

29 When Snarky Spock Strikes

As fans of the more recent Star Wars movies will have noticed, the franchise has been experiencing a subtle shift in sense of humor. There has always been the occasional gag thrown in, just to cleanse the palette from all of the intense space drama action, granted. Lately, though, more and more visual jokes and such have been creeping in there. The way that Marvel movies like to do things.

By comparison, then, you may think that Wars has Trek beaten in that sense. That the latter would be quite po-faced and super serious in that regard; like the elderly, moth-ball smelling great Vulcan aunt that disapproves of her wayward space great nephew’s antics.

Don’t be fooled, though, because Star Trek can get down and snarky with the best of them. Spock’s no stand-up, but when he throws the shade, he goes all the way.

28 When Non-Fans Just Don't Get It

Now, this is exactly what you have to be careful of. As we’ve already seen, people do tend to support one franchise over the other. You can, of course, totally dig both equally, and rise above the flame wars and petty arguments that tend to arise. You can do that, of course you can, but then you’re being far too reasonable and sensible for the internet.

We don’t take kindly to that sort of thing online, buddy boy.

Whatever your sci-fi franchise preferences may be, you’re totally welcome to them. Just don’t vilify those who don’t share them. As tempting as that always seems to be, come on, people. It’s 2018. Let’s stop going all high and mighty clichéd PC gamer on everybody. Enough already.

27 When Worf Brings A Welcome Touch Of Sophistication To Proceedings

Worf, portrayed by Michael Dorn, has carved himself quite a place in Star Trek legend. The franchise’s first Klingon main character, he has since gone on to appear in more episodes than any other character.

Why the popularity? Because he’s the man, that’s why. There he is, on the bridge, defying every cheesy old stereotype about the Klingons you care to throw at him.

They’re a brutal, warlike race, you say? Not around here they aren’t, friend. That is to say, not always. Worf’s an enigma, a complex, beautiful, flawed being like the rest of us. He’s the kind of dude who’ll tear your head right off and then (apparently) sit and drink tea with his pinky finger sticking out, reflecting on the harsh reality of this life of ours. Maybe he’ll write a poem or two. We just don’t know.

26 When You Leave The Ewoks To Live Long And Prosper In Peace

Now, see, there are all sorts of reasons you might prefer one franchise over the other. Maybe the most practical of things. You might prefer the storylines, say, or the writing may appeal more in one franchise over the other. It might also be the flashy action of Star Wars that draws you in, or the very opposite may be true of Star Trek. Different strokes, that’s what it’s all about.

Maybe it’ll be something deeper than that, though. The primary characters’ reactions to the creatures they encounter on their travels, for instance. The Enterprise crew are all about innocent discovery and scientific curiosity, as pictured here, while the Star Wars guys prefer…

Well, sending teeny, adorable little Ewoks into battle against the Empire.

The message of which could probably be described as mixed, at best.

25 When Star Trek Just Tells It Like It Darn Well Is

Oftentimes, with the far-reaching, contradictory and confusing storylines of space dramas, we can find ourselves getting totally darn lost. Losing track of it all, and struggling to empathize with characters. That happens. When they’re huge, spider-like beasts with eighteen eyeballs, who live on an imaginary planet in the year eight trillion and two, we lose hold of our frame of reference somehow.

It’s all about being grounded in reality, friends.

That’s key to this particular Star Trek meme. It’s completely relatable. However far forwards in time you are, wherever you are in whichever galaxy, snarky jokes about hospital food can and will always remain. I can dig that. I really can.  The plots of these things can go from zero to batpoop crazy in a heartbeat, after all.

24 When Picard Is Unimpressed By Your 'Disney' Talk

Now, I’ll admit, I’m a little conflicted here. I’m not quite certain where I stand.

I see two different possibilities, both of which are obscured somewhat by Captain Jean Luc Picard’s inscrutable, charismatic face. are we inwardly envious that Disney hopped onto the Star Wars bandwagon and allied themselves with the franchise, or are we contemptuously dismissing the whole idea as beneath us? I just do not know.

Either way, it’s probably immaterial. What really matters here is that this is freaking hilarious. That’s the major takeaway from this meme. Picard, as we know, isn’t one to get all excitable and animated. By the same token, though, he’s no super stoic Spock, either. Which is something to be grateful for, because it means we’re sometimes treated to facial expressions like the one in the bottom right panel there.

23 When You Can Pull Off Amazing Puntastic Jokes Like This...

Ah, yes. Now, this, I can get on board with.

Often, here on the web, the unnecessarily picky correction squad will ruin your whole day. You know the sort. The people who’ll instantly drop a post correcting your grammar or other typos. The people who’ll see the slightest error in a quotation or fact that you state, and land on it like a sumo wrestler jumping from a fifth storey window onto a grape.

These are the persnickety people who knew exactly what you meant, but will mess with you anyway. Generally, I’m against that sort of thing, but sometimes, beautiful things are born from simple typos.

This, I’m sure we can all agree, is one of those times. Now, that’s a spin-off I’d like to see.

22 ...And Also Like This

I’ll admit, with that last one, I thought I’d seen it all. I thought that a world where Tony Stark takes a wrong turn and ends up on the Enterprise was… well, darn far enough. As far as questionable spin-offs go, this little doozy had Joey (remember how vomit-inducingly terrible that was, coming in the wake of Friends?) written all over it.

Right when I was about done with everything, Dwayne ‘The Spock’ Johnson rode into town. At this point, we’re all familiar with the memes. The way that anything that rhymes with ‘Rock’ is fair game. It’s a cheap but brilliant shot, usually, but in this case, I think they’re really on to something.

Why not make this a thing? After all, Good old Dwayne’s been in just about everything else lately.

21 When A Star Wars Fan Tries To Get You Down

Here it is again, rearing its ugly, judgmental space-head.

In a way, I guess it’s natural. After all, here on the internet these days, everything’s all about popularity. About attention. About likes, shares, retweets, comments and adoring heart emojis on your Instagram selfies.

Life is a popularity contest online.

When you ally yourself with something, then, it becomes part of your self-image. If anybody questions your taste, in anything from pizza toppings to movies or TV shows, you’ve got to fight back. You’ve got to leap, jaguar-like, on any opinion that differs from your own, however reasonable or harmless it may seem.

Are showers better than baths? Are they really? Not in my freaking world, they aren’t. Stop that entirely reasonable water usage talk.

20 When It All Gets A Little Ridiculous

This is what the anonymity of the internet does to some of us, sadly. It can bring out the worst in people. When you’re safe there, hiding cosy behind your username, you think you’ve got carte blanche to get all up in everyone’s business. To be the best d-bag you can be. Some transcend this kind of pettiness, and others grasp the opportunity with both hands and go right at it.

In the case of two ‘rival’ sci-fi franchises, you tend to be able to dig a little deeper than usual. There are all kinds of scientific issues, and questions of realism, that you can dig up to compete over. This, right here, tends to be a popular one.

This is the sort of thing some of us lose sleep over.

19 When Jedis Have Nothing On The Star Trek Crew

Now, of course, this one’s endlessly debatable. As we’ve seen in the more recent Star Wars movies (which you may not have seen yet, so I’m not going to be too explicit here), the Jedis have some darn fancy tricks up their sleeves. Even back in the days of the original trilogy, Darth Vader and other high-ranking members of the Dark Side could pull some serious stuff. Force Lightning? That little thumb-and-finger choking motion Vader could do? This was darn cool stuff, there’s no denying.

Even the good guys had some pretty cool powers.

The life of a Jedi trainee, on the other hand, isn’t the most exciting. Granted, levitating rocks and such is quite neat, by us mere mortals’ standards, but over in Star Trek, they know what’s up.

Nice reality you have there. It’d be a shame if somebody… warped it.

18 When YOUR Franchise's Hapless Henchmen Are Much More Useless Than The Stormtroopers

As Star Trek fans will know, the series often utilizes an unfortunate range of stock characters, informally known as Redshirts. These background extras are recognized by two primary traits: their red Starfleet uniforms, and the fact that their life expectancy usually extends about as far as the commercial break.

Largely, this is due to an amazing phenomenon known as plot armour. This comes about because you want to convey that the main characters are in peril, but you can’t actually write them a horrific end yet because they’re too important to the plot. This is an issue across all manner of TV shows, movies and books, of course, but Star Trek has an elegant solution: wipe out the Redshirts.

It’s a thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it.

17 ...Or Maybe The Stormtroopers Are Worse After All

So, yes. The Redshirts have a mortality rate unmatched since the super grim days of the Black Plague. Meanwhile, the Star Wars franchise has its own crew of hapless henchmen: the Stormtroopers.

As we also know, these guys have an unfortunate reputation. They’re supposed to be the Empire’s military arm, striking fear into the hearts of victims wherever they go. Instead, wherever they go, their victims tend to say things like, oh, it’s fine, it’s just those guys. They couldn’t hit a huge darn AT-AT’s butt with those blasters.

It’s just not the message you want to give off.

Again, though, a lot of this is due to our old friend plot armour. If they had any semblance of aiming ability, the whole franchise would’ve abruptly ended during Luke and Han’s rescue of Leia in A New Hope.

16 When Star Trek And Star Wars Are Definitely Not The Same Thing

Uh oh. It was just inevitable that this one was going to crop up sooner or later. I have to say, though, I hadn’t quite mentally prepared myself for it.

You see, this is a real bugaboo of mine.

This is ignorance in its purest form.

It’s nobody’s fault, granted, but it’s still the sort of thing that really gets to fans. Like a hardened PlayStation gamer whose mama thinks that PS4 and Xbox One are the same thing.

There are similarities for the casual observer, of course. If you’ve never gamed in your life, how are you to tell one chunky console from another? How are you to tell one spacestastic franchise from another, either?

I’m not judging anybody, you understand. All I’m saying is, where’s freaking Scotty to beam me up?

15 When Luke Skywalker Takes The News Super Hard

First up, we’ve got to cut the poor soul some slack here. After all, Luke Skywalker had it pretty darn hard. That unfortunate business with his aunt and uncle, being rapidly drawn into a huge intergalactic conflict that was way beyond him, trying to square with his Jedi destiny, all those family issues... it’s not been an easy run for the poor guy.

As such, Star Trek fans, you could’ve been a little more considerate here. You know, introduced the idea gradually, subtly, so as to spare his feeling a little. Sadly, nope, it was not to be.

As though poor old Luke wasn’t having enough of an existential crisis at this point, Darth lent in and hit him with a second bombshell. Apparently. Harsh times indeed.

14 When It's All That Darn Jar Jar Binks' Fault

So, as we’ve covered pretty extensively already, people do tend to feel some kind of way about their fandoms. It’s always a little odd to me that somebody else’s opinion can be seen as a threat to your own in this regard, but there it is. Here on the web, if you say that you don’t like Harry Potter, for instance, Potterheads will respond like you’ve just personally roundhouse kicked their grandmas in the face.

There are certain things that even the most ardent of Star Wars fans will have to concede, though.

Mainly, the fact that Jar Jar Binks is a garbage monster.

To this day, there has never been a single documented case of anybody liking this character.

At first glance, I didn’t believe this guy could be as annoying as he looked. Then he opened his mouth.

13 When Star Trek Has The Edge In Predicting The Future

If you’re a fan of the sci-fi writers of the eighties and nineties, you’ll have noticed that… well, they were a little off the mark. To hear a lot of popular novelists and short story writers tell it, we should be living in a very different world right now.

Fancy flying bubble-cars a la The Jetsons, hoverboards, teleportation and much more should be a thing right now. What do we have instead? Precious darn little, that’s what. McDonald’s don’t even deliver yet.

Surprisingly, though, Star Trek’s predictions have been completely on point over the years. The key, by the looks of it, was not being too outlandish about it all. It’s a little thing I like to call The Simpsons Effect, when your predictions are a little too accurate.

12 When J.J. Abrams Takes Over Both Franchises

You know what, J.J.? I admire your ambition, I really do. This is the sort of go-getter attitude we could all use a little more of. The kind of spirit you need to be able to say, nuts to it. One epic space drama franchise just doesn’t cut it for me. I want to get in on Star Wars as well.

Well, no. Of course, it wasn’t. It’s all about that money.

The Star Trek and Mission Impossible III director signed up for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, making all kinds of fans feel some kind of way in the process. Was this act, in some small way, an attempt by J..J. (the second J stands for Just Lens Flare Out The Wazzoo) to unite the two bickering fanbases?

11 When You Don't Let A Little Thing Like Continuity Hold You Back

So, as I say, J.J. Abrams is a veteran of both rival franchises. He’s dipped his toes into the murky waters of Star Trek and Star Wars, and as any director will, he’s had his own indelible influence on the franchise in the process.

Legendary penchants for lens flare aside, what has this meant for these two iconic series as a whole? That really depends on who you ask. After all, this is an inevitable effect of directors, writers and such moving around.

In the earlier days of Superman, say, the guy’s powers were constantly being altered, increased and exaggerated upon. There was a time when he could only leap tall buildings in a single bound, until suddenly only full-on flight would do. When it comes to Star Trek and Star Wars’ expanding universes, offshoots and side stories, it’s tough to say what’s important and what isn’t.