The solar eclipse is currently gliding high over the continental United States, dazzling people, annoying others, and leading many more to squint for a few seconds at the sky with intense dissatisfaction. (Flat-earthers, as usual, have their own thing going on.) Online, it’s been a cause for mass hysteria, leading to a lot of jokes of varying quality, and, inevitably, co-option by brands. The marshmallowy Southern snack cake MoonPie has understandably claimed this one for themselves, “moon” being right in their name and all, not to mention the fact that 2017 is coincidentally the product’s centennial anniversary. Accordingly, they have been slinging pies online at a discount for weeks in advance of today’s event, and hyping it up with stuff like this:
It is pretty clear, if there is one dessert that is having its day in the moon-blocked sun today, it is the goddamn MoonPie.
Someone at Hostess unfortunately disagreed.
Which got a swift response:
Look: brands are going to fight on Twitter. That is the state of American popular culture in 2017, that faceless capitalist monoliths will slap-fight each other for our amusement on social networks. But this was an almost bullying move from a behemoth like Hostess (96.4K followers!) against the humble folks of MoonPie (7.3K followers), and, if the ratios here tell you anything, the people have sided with David against Goliath on this one to the tune of 100,000 retweets. Hostess is trying to play nice and make up:
But fuck that. The moon is pretty small, and it belongs to MoonPie, at least today.