mandosaysfuckgender

[mandosaysfuckgender]

...an ongoing complaint that I have regarding stories that center around the Mandalorians as a culture is the frequency with which stories have somebody say that a Mandalorian would never abuse a child, would never be cruel to a child, would never do this or that to a child, often in response to something like a jedi putting their teenage student in a dangerous situation, or the Elders trying to kill their own kids on Melida/Daan, or Anakin being allowed to podrace.

They say these things despite the fact that we know that, in canon, there are plenty of examples where children were hurt, were abused, were forcibly assimilated in the case of somebody like Kal, were encouraged into dangerous battles as young as eight... and ultimately this is a very frustrating thing to read, when we only really see a handful of characters truly treasuring children. Among them? The Children of the Watch in The Mandalorian (and our main character DID sell a baby to the bad guys before his religious leader convinced him to fix it), and some of the New Mandalorians, like Satine.

Ultimately, it comes across as a very uncritical parroting of ideals that, while they are espoused by a specific group of mandalorians, and that the culture at large may claim to hold... in reality, they're rarely if ever actually exhibited by the characters that we are most likely to hear or see saying it.

While I think there is room for a character to think or say and even believe that no Mandalorian would ever do this or that, I think that it would need to be done in a very specific way where the story then, in the wake of telling of this ideal, shows the ways in which it is inconsistent, or lays on a foundation of unfamiliar standards for 'hurt," or fallible, or idealistic, or simply a lie.

It is just not approached or explored in a way that is critical, or realistic, or anything! Because even in the real world, plenty of cultures, basically every culture, that claims to value children above all, is liable to hurt those children in some way, by somebody. No culture is a monolith, and a strong, insistent claim to value children is often used as a way to cover up such abuses.

Because while "nobody would actually do that. Not one of us," sounds nice, "one of us" does.

The catholic church claims to value children and their innocence too, don't you know? That's why they're so anti-abortion. So they definitely mustn't have ever hurt a child, right?

Right?

(The only ways you can believe that nobody of your culture would hurt a child is if you either block out everything that suggests otherwise, or you are a child, and a very successfully sheltered one at that.)

[mandosaysfuckgender]

it is interesting that for all the talk of “fixing” padme and making her “more than a weeping wife”, the idea of padme choosing to die while pregnant remains this huge taboo. post after post about freeing her from sexist writing, and ppl still can’t imagine a padme separate from her children. her ultimate purpose remains motherhood. padme refusing motherhood/being unhappy in motherhood is taken as a total impossibility. it has to be sith life force draining, it has to be the force choke, it has to be bad space gynecologists (??). it can’t be that a mom lost the will to live despite her babies. that doesn’t happen!!

[mandosaysfuckgender]

[mandosaysfuckgender]

[mandosaysfuckgender]

this is a confession to the star wars fandom because I have to get this off my chest. last summer just for fun I taught myself to read aurebesh and. you fanartists have Got to Continue putting the most Hilarious stuff into the background of your art because it is literally my favorite thing

here’s a couple of excellent things I’ve read since I started keeping a list just last month:

- “I hate drawing lightsabers”

- “Idk what to put here”

- “stupid fucking sign”

- “eat paste, it’s good”

- an entire news article on a phone screen which I actually found really impressive

- a few funny misspellings but the best one so far was ahsoka somehow becoming “asock”

- wanted poster of obi wan that read “wanted for fashion crimes”. the caption translated it as “wanted for high treason”. like blatantly lying to my face. love it.

- door on a ship was labeled “cake storage”

- “shopping list: frogs, hair gel, lightsaber polish”

and my personal favorite:

- “if you’re reading this you’re a fucking nerd”

[mandosaysfuckgender]

Vader: [opening a desk drawer in Obi-Wan’s old room] Let’s see what this old fool kept in here…[picking up a piece of paper]  Obi-Wan: [in a letter] 

Dear Anakin, 

If you’re reading this, then you must be rifling through my belongings, which means you are either extremely bored (in which case I suggest going and tidying up your quarters, which I don’t need to see to know are a disaster,) or I’ve been missing for an extended amount of time and the Order needs the room to store extra chairs, or I’ve died, possibly while trying to rid the galaxy of General Grievous. If I am in fact dead, I hope this letter finds you well in spite of it, and that you have not gone off the deep end or murdered anyone in an attempt to avenge me. (…unless it’s Grievous, I suppose.)

You will find attached to this letter the receipts for several items in my room, such as the electric tea kettle. I hope you can at least return them for store credit. 

I’ve set up a college savings plan with the Galactic Bank of Coruscant, because I noticed that Senator Amidala is obviously pregnant, and since I am not nearly as dense as you apparently think I am, I presume the child is yours. The account information is in my safe, which I would give you the combination to except that I know you have been breaking into it since you were 14. 

If you do intend to eventually leave the Order, as I suspect you might, please make sure that you give the Council two weeks’ notice. It’s only polite, and you never know when you may need to use them as a reference. Even though I know you clash with them, they do care about you.

Finally, please make sure Duchess Satine’s nephew gets the inheritance I’ve left him (the information is also in my safe, and no, I’m not going to tell you any more details about this. I realize how much this is going to torment you, and I’d be lying if I said that’s not bringing a smile to my face.) 

Your blanket is in the hamper. Wash it on the gentle cycle. The password for the wi-fi, in case you’ve forgotten, is BuyYourOwnDataPlanAnakin.

Be well, my Padawan, and I shall see you again someday – hopefully many years from now – when you, too, rejoin the Force. Don’t forget to change the payment settings for Netflix now that I’m dead or you’ll fall behind on your programs. 

Yours,  Obi-Wan Kenobi  PS: Don’t let Vos speak at my funeral. 

[mandosaysfuckgender]

My brain is embroiled in “Obi-Wan gets hit by a Plot Device that changes his body from standard expression of XY to standard expression of XX, garners a variety of reactions that mostly boils down to nobody wanting to acknowledge more than they have to, except for the medics and whoever is in charge of putting armor on the reticent bastard”

[mandosaysfuckgender]

there's a secret good sequel series that lives only in brain where finn and rey are force-sensitive foils to each other and they still spend movie #2 entirely apart but it's because they're exploring parallel and at time opposite relationships with the force and their place in the universe

and in my secret good version. okay hear me out. the han-leia kid is a hot lady. okay. are we following. and she DOES abandon luke's new jedi, not by falling and murdering people, but by stealing the millennium falcon and running off to escape responsibility and swaggers around with incredible han solo "loser pretending to be cool" energy. and then. she accidentally picks up two force sensitive teens on jakku and she's like. are you KIDDING me

[mandosaysfuckgender]

When I was a kid I had the expanded universe star wars book in which Boba Fett is being digested by the Sarlacc and interacting with the personalities of various minds the creature had absorbed, like it was a psychic collective, a HAUNTED space monster. It was one creature but it was driven mad with the combined traumatic memories of everything it had ever eaten so when fett kills it at the end of the story it's framed more like he's putting a tormented spirit to rest, though it's implied a part of that entity might be buried in his own psyche for the rest of his life.

Disney's version: it's a big dumb animal he escapes from the day after he got eaten

[mandosaysfuckgender]

i think about where george lucas had planned to take star wars more than i should, but particularly because i am fascinated by the original idea of vader going to luke himself and asking for help atoning, which was cut and condensed into ROTJ for time constraints. and i want to write it. i really do. but the unfortunate thing is that i was of the generation of kids who watched avatar: the last airbender growing up, and all i can think about is vader testing his fucking opening lines like zuko does. the concept of HEY, LORD VADER HERE is irresistably funny

[mandosaysfuckgender]

I'm not really a HanLuke shipper but I can imagine them hooking up early in their friendship & then Han later after various revelations having a personal crisis over whether or not it's weird to have sex with both halves of a set of twins

[mandosaysfuckgender]

one of the weird things i noticed watching the phantom menace yesterday is that when he first meets and fights darth maul, qui-gon and obi-wan both use it/its pronouns for maul. not sure what was going on there

[mandosaysfuckgender]

padme's handmaidens are such an underrated concept. i mean, yeah you can call it women supporting women and leave it at that but like. its so much more intense than that. they basically created the persona of queen amidala together. they assigned her specific mannerisms and tone of voice and breathing patterns and all of them studied that well enough to play the role perfectly. they put all of the derangedness teenage girls put into discovering their own identity into perfecting mimicry instead & they did all that knowing that their role will always be to die in padme's place if it comes to that. idk what insane levels of devotion does it take to be like 14 and you've become so intimately familiar with your friend that you can quite literally become her. there's friendship & traumabonding and then theres "my entire life is dedicated to dying for this woman" and then there's that but with added identity fuckery and thats what the handmaidens have going on with the bonus point of being 14

[mandosaysfuckgender]

I think the Jedi council should have at least considered sending obi-wan over to Dooku to be like “yes hello I am here for sith training” just to see what would happen

[mandosaysfuckgender]

so there's this devastating period of dramatic irony during revenge of the sith where obi-wan genuinely believes that anakin died on coruscant during order 66, like he assumes anakin died a hero at the temple, going down with the order itself, because it doesn't occur to him that it may be any other way. his grief is overwhelming, he's shaking and lost and needs yoda to reorient himself back into being a jedi at all. he does pull himself together, but then matthew woodring stover decides to punch the audience in the gut anyway:

just look at obi-wan instinctively thinking of himself in the first person plural because anakin is so much a part of who he is and how he approaches the world, so deeply embedded in his language patterns too. like how many times must he have been accidentally slapped by memories like this, even after discovering what anakin became? his habitual jokes and quips are tied to the man he used to banter with so often. his mind is full of mines armed with grief haha

[mandosaysfuckgender]

DO YOU KNOW THIS CHARACTER?

[mandosaysfuckgender]

blackkat's newest ficlet on ao3 has the Jedi Council drunk and a mention of "stop doing paperwork, if we secede from the Republic again Bail's gonna laugh at us"

and

just

What a beautiful idea. The Jedi accidentally secede from the Republic because drunk paperwork, but since the Chancellor's banned negotiating with the Separatists, they can't rejoin.

Yoda: Hm. Stay on Coruscant, we cannot, then. Politically awkward, it is.

Someone: What are we going to do about the GAR? We can't just leave them to people who don't see them as sentient--

Yoda: Assigned to the Jedi, the GAR is. Purportedly paid for by the Jedi, they are--

Mace: *muttermutter* And how anybody's that stupid to think we could afford even one with their ten years room and board and training--

Yoda: SINCE ON THE PAPERWORK, OUR NAME IS, retain the clones, the Order must.

Mace: Ow.

Somebody: How is the investigation going on that, anyway?

Everybody else: *wordless noises expressing just how poorly it's going*

Yoda: Bureaucracy, a plague upon this galaxy, is.