#the only reason the alien is distinct is bc they are working in different types

[captainadwen]

finally finished project hail mary. the last few chapters got really, really good. like, can’t put it down good.

unfortunately it took 400 pages before it got that good

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

I suspect quite a few people on this site don’t realize they are struggling with the effects of chronic trauma. In particular I think more people need to learn about the symptoms of C-PTSD.

Distinct from general PTSD, Complex PTSD is caused by prolonged, recurring stress and trauma, often occurring in childhood & adolescence over an extended period of time. There are many risk factors, including: abusive/negligent caregivers, dysfunctional family life, untreated mental/chronic illness, and being the target of bullying/social alienation.

I’m not a mental health professional and I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone, I just remember a million watt light bulb going off in my head when I first learned about C-PTSD. It was a huge OH MY FUCKING WORD eureka moment for me—it explained all these problems I was confused and angry at myself for having. The symptoms that really stood out to me were:

Negative self-perception: deep-seated feelings of shame, guilt, worthlessness, helplessness, and stigma. Feeling like you are different from everyone else, like something is fundamentally ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ with you.

Emotional avoidance of topics, people, relationships, activities, places, things etc that might cause uncomfortable emotions such as shame, fear, or sadness. Can lead to self-isolation.

Learned helplessness: a pervasive sense of powerlessness, often combined with feelings of desensitization, wherein you gradually stop trying to escape or prevent your own suffering, even when opportunities exist. May manifest as self-neglect or self-sabotage. (I remember watching myself make bad choices and neglect my responsibilities, and having no idea why I was doing it, or how to stop myself. Eventually I just stopped caring, which led to more self-neglect.)

Hyper-vigilance: always feeling “on edge,” alert, unable to relax even in spaces that should feel safe. May be combined with an elevated “flight” response, or feelings of always being prepared to flee. (I used to hide important documents and possessions in a sort of emergency go bag, even when I was living alone and there was no logical reason other than it made me feel “prepared.”)

Difficulty regulating emotions: may include mood swings, persistent numbness, sadness, suicidal idealization, explosive anger (or inability to feel anger and other strong emotions), inability to control your emotions, confusion about why you react the way you do.

Sense of foreshortened future: assuming or feeling that you will die young. Recurring thoughts that "I'll be dead before the age of 30/40/18/21 etc." As a teenager I used to joke darkly that I didn't plan to live past 30—not because I planned to end my life, but because I simply couldn't imagine myself alive and happy in the long-term. I couldn't imagine a meaningful future where I wasn't suffering.

Emotional flashbacks: finding yourself suddenly re-experiencing feelings of helplessness, panic, despair, or anger etc, often without understanding what has triggered these feelings. Often these flashbacks don’t clearly relate to the memory of a single event (since C-PTSD is caused by repetitive events, which can blur together), making them harder to identify as flashbacks—especially if you’ve never heard the phrase “emotional flashback” and don’t know what to look for. For years I just filed it under “sometimes I overreact/freak out randomly for no reason, probably bc I am just a terrible human being.” (It turns out there was very much a reason, it was just hidden in the past. I have since learned to be kinder and less judgemental towards myself.)

There are other symptoms too, here are more links with good info.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, because I’ve noticed that a lot of the people I interact with online have risk factors and experiences similar to mine. These include:

growing up in a dysfunctional household

having caregivers who do not fulfill basic emotional needs (do not provide consistent positive attention, encouragement, support, acceptance, communication, a sense of safety and security)

on a very related note, experiencing neglect or abuse at the hand of caregivers or other adults. I also want to emphasize the significance of emotional abuse, since it is hard to recognize, easy to ignore, and utterly rampant in so many communities. In general, family dysfunction, abuse & neglect are quite difficult to identify when you are a child/teen and that is the only “normal” you have known.

(For example, in my family it manifested as an emotionally absent father I was vaguely frightened of, constant nagging from a hypercritical mother, and a house full of people who yelled and screamed at each other. It took me years to realize I grew up in an abusive environment, because there was no physical violence, because I participated in the fighting, and because my behavioral problems made me the family scapegoat. And I internalized that guilt: I thought I was the problem. But no—I was a child, and I deserved not to grow up in a household full of anger and fear and negativity. You deserved that too. You deserved to grow up safe and loved and treated with kindness.) 

anyway back to more risk factors:

being neurodivergent or chronically ill (especially without receiving proper treatment/support/accommodation)

being queer (especially in a conservative or undiverse community, or without the support and acceptance of family & friends)

being the target of bullying or harassment (from peers, teachers, authority figures, irl, online, etc)

being isolated or alienated from peers, from family, from your wider community.

growing up with chronic anxiety, discomfort, pain, fear, or distress caused by any of the above and more.

There are many other experiences that can cause chronic trauma, but these are some particularly common ones I see people in my own community struggling with. And I want more people to be aware of this, because we’ve been taught to ignore and second-guess the significance of our traumatic experiences. We’ve been taught to feel guilty for our own pain, because “other people aren’t struggling, so I shouldn’t either” or (contradictorily) “other people have it worse, so I shouldn’t complain.” But that’s not how it works—you are not other people, and you deserve to have it better. We all deserve better. We deserve to be happy. We deserve not to be in pain.

I used to think I couldn’t have a trauma disorder because (I argued in my head) the things that happened to me weren’t that bad. And then I spent five years in therapy learning to accept the full extent of my issues. I’ve since learned that trauma comes in many forms, and can happen quietly, invisibly, silently, chronically, and usually without the survivor being aware of the long-term repercussions of what they are surviving. That revelation comes later, after you have survived and must instead learn to live.

Finally, no single type of trauma is more real or harmful than any other. Severity is measured by the way the individual is affected, and the same situations affect different people in different ways. Because no one gets to choose how their brain reacts to trauma. No one gets to choose their hurt—otherwise there would be a hell of a lot less hurting in the world.

We can, however, choose to seek help. We can learn to recognize when something is wrong, we can learn when to reach out to professionals, and we can learn to educate ourselves on our injuries.

And gradually, we can learn to heal.

(posts like this brought to you by ko-fi supporters)

[thedreadvampy]

Hey Ruth! I noticed you've talked in the past about asexuality in quite a negative manner. As an ace-person (who has received backlash for it) I was wondering: do you still uphold these opinions?

Hey! I have in the past said I don’t really...like people popping up in my ask box asking me My Opinion On Asexuality, but I do appreciate you asking me as someone I kinda know and with your face turned on, so I’m gonna aim to answer in the macro. Though I mean it depends on what the opinions...are? I have had a lot of opinions over the time I’ve had this blog and I don’t necessarily know what all of them were or which ones have concerned you. I can give you a top-level view of how I see my views, though (however, since I have been largely holding off on answering this kind of ask for Literally A Year Now this is less an answer to your specific question and more an answer to the last year of asks)

(also if I get dogpiled in my inbox for Having Bad Asexuality Opinions which I do every time I talk about asexuality regardless of what I actually say then. my phone is broken I won’t know about it :) so I feel untouchable)

I don’t think I hold a negative opinion of asexuality as an identity (I say I don’t think bc we all have blind spots)? I have a lot of very important people in my life who are asexual, aromantic or aroace and. I mean it feels pretty condescending to say ~uwu it’s valid~ bc like. ace and aro people don’t really need my input to validate their identity. but a) it seems like a pretty accurate way to describe their experience and b) I know a lot of them have had a really huge boost from finding a name and community to fit their experience and have found that really helpful, and I’ve seen that make a huge difference in people’s lives and I’m really happy to watch my friends come to understand themselves and feel comfortable and accepted in a part of themselves they had felt really alienated or stigmatised by. In a broader sense, I think there’s huge value in decentralising romance and sex in our assumptions of What Human Happiness Means and for some people that’s not the most important thing, and for some it’s just not interesting. 

So like. I find it difficult to really express these opinions in any meaningful way because my opinion on asexuals and aromantics is much like my opinion on trans people or idk like people of colour. like very obviously those people exist and very obviously those people don’t deserve to be marginalised or stigmatised but it would feel. weird and performative to just make a post saying like “Asexuality Is Good And Valid, I Am Pro It” bc again like. who needs my permission or cares about my opinion. it’s not a Good Thing To Do it’s just. a thing you are that shouldn’t be treated as a bad thing.

however. and I suspect that this is what you’re referring to. while I love and appreciate ace and aro people, I think building communities and active support for ace and aro people is valuable and needed and, as above, I think Asexuality Is Good And Valid I Am Pro It, I do take some issue with elements of how discussions around asexuality are framed online (pretty much only online, I really haven’t run into the kind of black-and-white thinking in in-person queer spaces) 

and I also. think there are some issues with people extrapolating their experience of their own sexuality onto the world in a way which. I’m just going to say a lot of the time when I talk about The Ace Discourse in a negative way it’s around people assuming that the world is split into a binary between ace and allo people, or assuming that only aspec people experience a nuanced or complex or fluid relationship to their sexuality while pigeonholing allosexuality into a pretty flat image of sex and romance focus. and I have always felt like this does a massive disservice not just to people who don’t identify with aspec labels, but also to the general hope that we could work against the expectation that there’s a Standard Amount To Value Sex/Romance - I think that the assumption that there are aspec people and then Everyone Else Has The Normal Type and Level of Attraction just. reinforces the idea that there’s a “Normal” type and level of attraction. which is ultimately pretty self-defeating and also just. observably untrue. 

and this division of the world into Aspec People and Allo People also has some other weird knockon effects - I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with identities like gray ace or demi or other aspec labels beyond asexual and aromantic, but I do think that the way those labels are used is often. unhelpful. and they’re defined in such personal, subjective ways that you get weirdnesses sometimes like people Diagnosing Each Other With Demisexual or people saying ‘you can’t talk about this experience you share because it’s an Aspec Experience’ and again. there isn’t a concrete material experience there because the whole experience of romantic and sexual attraction, what that feels like and how sharply divisible it is is very, very personal and subjective. and everyone has different experiences of those and will name those experiences differently.

there’s also. historically a minority of Big Ace Blogs that kind of sneer at allosexuality or who would hijack posts about other issues to derail them to asexuality. but I don’t think they were ever representative of the community as a whole and I certainly think that inasmuch as those blogs remain around they’re a legacy of the Long-Ago (and a lot of them are trolls imo)

but there is. an issue I take that does seem to be more currently live which is the question of allo privilege. I think personally that framing all allosexuals/alloromantics as privileged over all aspec people on the basis of feeling sexual/romantic attraction is provably untrue in a world where people, particularly queer people, are actively oppressed and marginalised for expressing non-normative sexuality. it isn’t that I don’t think asexuality and aromanticism isn’t marginalised and stigmatised, because it visibly is, but it seems pretty reductive to boil it down to a binary yes/no privilege when both sexualisation and desexualisation are so actively tied into other forms of marginalisation (this is what I was trying to express in the argument about Martin a while ago - sex and sexuality are so often disincentivised for fat, queer, disabled and neuroatypical people that it doesn’t...feel like a reclamation that those tend to be the characters that get fanonised as ace where slim, straight, able-bodied and neurotypical characters aren’t. like it’s more complex than a binary privilege equation; sex and romance are incentivised and stigmatised differently at the intersection of oppressions and. for example. in a world where gay conversion therapy and religious oppression of gay and SGA people is so often focused specifically on celibacy and on punishing the act of sexual attraction, I don’t think it’s a reasonable framing to say that a gay allosexual man has privilege over an aroace man on the basis of his attraction) 

so those are like. things I would consider myself to feel actively negative about in online discourse (and again. in online discourse. not in how I relate to asexuality or aromanticism or aspec identities in general but in the framing and approaches people take towards discussing it in a very specific bubble).

but also. um. the main criticism I have of the online discourse culture of asexuality is that there are things I don’t have experience of that I have mentioned, when asked, that I don’t personally understand the meaning of but I don’t need to understand them to appreciate that they’re useful/meaningful to others. things like 

the difference between QPRs, asexual romantic relationships and close friendships

how you know the difference between romantic attraction and friendship

the distinction between sexual attraction and a desire to have sex with someone for another reason

and I hope I’ve generally been clear that this is. honest lack of understanding and not condemnation. I personally have a very muddled sense of attraction and often have difficulty identifying the specifics of any of my own emotional needs so like. it’s a closed book for me at the moment, how you would identify the fine distinctions between types of want when I’m still at step 1: identify That You Want Something Of Some Sort, Eventually, Through Trial And Error. but I think I’ve always been explicit that this isn’t a value judgement it’s just a gap in my own knowledge and yet. every single time I’ve said anything other than enthusiastic “yes I understand this and I love it and it’s good and valid” (and again. I have not gone out of my way to talk about it I have mostly only mentioned it because people keep asking me to talk about it) I have got a massive rush of anger and accusations of aphobia and “just shut up if you don’t know what you’re talking about but also answer my 30 questions to prove you think Correct Things about asexuality” and. I understand that this comes from a place of really unpleasant and aggressive backlash towards the ace community so it’s a sensitivity with a lot of people but like. it doesn’t seem proportional.

also I feel like ever since I hit like 700 followers my Tumblr life has been a constant cycle of people asking me Are You An Ace Inclusionist Are You An Exclus Are You An Aphobe Justify Your Opinion On Asexuality which. eventually yeah I’ve got pretty snippy about the whole thing. but you know. fuck it I’m just gonna lay it out and if you or anyone else is uncomfortable following me based on those opinions then I’m sorry to hear that and I will be sad to see you not want to engage with me any more but I also think that’s absolutely your prerogative. however I will not be taking questions at this time (and not just bc my phone’s broken) - demands for an argument about this Are Going To Be Ignored so if you want to go then go.

so like the big question I reckon is Do You Think Asexuality Is Queer and

yes. no. maybe. I don’t understand the question what does it mean for an identity to be queer? 

there are spaces and conversations where any form of aromanticism or asexuality makes sense as a relevant identity. talking about hegemonic expectations of normative romance. building community. combatting the idea that heterosexual missionary married sex between a man and a woman is the only rewarding or valuable form of relationship or intimacy.

there are spaces where I think heterosexual aros/heteromantic cis aces don’t. have a more meaningful or direct experience of the issues than allo cishets. because while being aro or ace or aspec has a direct impact on those people on a personal and relational level, disclosure is largely a choice, and the world at large sees them as straight. they don’t have the lived experience of being visibly nonconforming that SGA people and aroace people do. they may still be queer but there’s a lot of conversations where they bring a lot of the baggage of being Straight People (because. even if you’re ace or aro you can still be straight in your romantic or sexual attraction and if your relationships are all outwardly straight then you don’t necessarily have an intimate personal understanding of being marginalised from mainstream society by dint of your sexuality). this doesn’t make you Not Queer in the same way that being a bi person who’s only ever been in m/f relationships is still queer, but in both cases a) you don’t magically have a personal experience of societal oppression through the transitive properties of Being Queer and b) it’s really obnoxious to talk as if you’re The Most Oppressed when other people are trying to have a conversation about their lived experience of societal oppression. and they’re within their rights to say ‘we’re talking about the experience of being marginalised for same gender/non-heterosexual attraction and you’re straight, could you butt out?’)

(I very much object to the assumption coming from a lot of exclus that “cishet ace” is a term that can reasonably be applied to non-orientated aroace people though. het is not a default it really extremely doesn’t make sense to treat people who feel no attraction as Straight By Default. when I were a lad I feel like we mostly understood “asexual” to mean that identity - non-orientated aroace - and while I think it’s obvious that a lot of people do find value in using a more split-model because. well. some people are both gay/straight/bi and aro/ace, and it’s good that language reflects that. but I do think it’s left a gap in the language to simply refer to non-attracted people. this isn’t a criticism of anything in particular - there’s a constant balancing act in language between specificity and adaptability and sometimes a gain for one is a loss for the other)

some queer conversations and spaces just. aren’t built with aces in mind. and that isn’t a flaw. some spaces aren’t built with men in mind, but that doesn’t mean men can’t be queer. some conversations are about Black experiences of queerness but that doesn’t mean non-Black people can’t be queer. not all queer spaces will focus on ace needs but that doesn’t mean asexuality isn’t queer, or that queerness is opposed to aceness - sex, sexuality, romance and dating are all really important things to a lot of queer people, especially those whose sexuality and romantic relationships are often stigmatised or violently suppressed in wider society. there should be gay bars, hookup apps, gay and trans friendly sex education, making out at Pride, leather parades and topless dyke marches and porn made by and for queer people, romantic representation in media of young and old gay, bi and trans couples kissing and snuggling and getting married and saying sloppy romantic things. and there should be non-sexual queer spaces, there should be discussions around queerness that don’t suppose that a monogamous romantic relationship is what everyone’s fighting for, sex ed should be ace inclusive, etc. 

I think the whole question of inclusionism vs exclusionism is based on a weird underlying assumption that If An Identity Is Queer All Queer Spaces Should Directly Cater To That. like. aspec identities can be queer and it can be totally reasonable for there to be queer spaces that revolve around being sexual and romantic and there can be conversations it’s not appropriate or productive to centre asexuality and aspec experiences in and we can recognise that not all queer people do prioritise or have any interest in sex or romance. in the same way that there’s value in centring binary trans experiences sometimes and nonbinary experiences at other times but both of those conversations should recognise that neither binary or nonbinary gender identity is a Universal Queer Experience.

anyway that one probably isn’t one of the opinions you were asking about but I have been wanting to find a way to express it for a while so you’re getting it: the Ruth Thedreadvampy Inclusionism Take.

uh. it’s 1:30 on a work night so I have been typing too long. if there was an opinion you were specifically thinking of that I haven’t mentioned, chuck me another ask specifically pointing to what you want me to clarify my thinking on. sometimes I gotta be honest I’ve just been kind of careless in my framing (thinking of the Martin Fucks debacle where I spent ages insisting I didn’t say Martin couldn’t be aroace then read back like two days later and realised that I had said “he’s not aroace” bc I had written the post at 2am without proofreading and had meant to say “unless you think he’s aroace”) so I May Well Not Stand By Some Posts or might Stand By Them With Clarification

[laundryandtaxes]

Hi Julia, I'm gonna push back on your post re: nyc. I grew up in another city in New York State and moved to the city at 17 for work, never going to college. I've lived in three different boroughs, and never held a lease, just for context. I think the divide of "native New Yorker" vs "transplant" is in many ways created as a way of sewing division and doesn't reflect that in every strongly-rooted ethnic group, immigrant or otherwise, there is a certain amount of coming and going. For me, every generation of my fam has come here to live for a time since immigrating, despite moving to the south or Midwest. That's super common for my ethnicity and common in many other groups here.

Many if not most of my friends who grew up here have nuanced views on this, and when it gets down to it see it beyond a binary of "native vs nonnative". I think that viewing it as a binary isn't particularly useful. There are definitely alienated internal migrants and people who move to join elite communties, but most of my friends who grew up here have lived elsewhere for a time, and if there have family or ethnic community here aren't weird about it.

This model of discourse doesnt usually talk about the strongly rooted elite/borgeiouse here, and many people who migrate to NYC internally do it for social and economic reasons. Particularly pre-pandemic, the gay and ballroom scenes were massive draws, and jobs in certain industries are concentrated here. Wealthy residents are catered to, and certain type of internal migrant/wealthy expat/wealthy immigrant is definitely catered to by legislation that favors gentrification and has made the city a playground for the rich. The city has intentionally eroded public housing, but it remains that a higher percentage of residents live in public housing, rent controlled apartments well-below market value or recieve housing subsidies here than nearly any other city in the country. People will get on public housing and section 8 waiting lists and leave the city or even country. To be here and to stay here is very tenuous for many multigenerational residents. Regardless, migration and immigrantion have been part of NYC since it began having a distinct culture towards the 1820's. Culture and social creation has never been the exclusive domain of people born here, and NYC is what it is because of born-residents, immigrants, internal migrants and being a center of cultural and social community that draws people from around the world. If it was just one of these things it wouldn't be NYC.

NYC is a place that feels disconnected from the (rest of) the USA and I think that the politicization of desire to be here will have implications exacerbated by the pandemic.

Re: nyc again:

Many wealthy people leave nyc because there isn't a great bang for your buck in the same way as other parts of the country. It's honestly a shitty and expensive place for the rich lmao.

And many poor/working class people come here bc of enviable renters protections, higher wages, and special education for disabled kids. In particular people come from within the eastern seaboard, New England and south for all of these things.

Thank you for another perspective! I am not from New York myself, so my perception of the city comes largely from the accounts of friends who are from NYC, and media, but just like with anywhere you can’t get a complete picture of what a place is like based on those two things.

I will say that a lot of what you’ve said here strongly contradicts my idea of what the city is like, some of which is based on personal experience. I considered a move to NYC at some point with an ex girlfriend (which, holy shit thank goodness that didn’t work out) and I have to say that in particular the idea of NYC as a place with “enviable renters protections [and] higher wages” specifically doesn’t square with what I saw when I researched those two things. Wages in NYC for work that doesn’t require degrees didn’t look good at all, and as far as renter’s protections go, my current understanding is that rent control is awesome but that landlords regularly engage in tenant harassment to pressure rent controlled tenants out of units and the city does almost nothing about it. The second is based more on recent articles I read and news pieces I watched about NYC, but the last time I looked at wages in NYC I was extremely unimpressed given the cost of housing alone, and when I was running the numbers for myself (this was maybe 2015ish) I came away not understanding how anyone could possibly afford to live in the city unless they 1) made a ton of money, in order to afford the outstanding rents, or 2) got into a rent-controlled apartment, which it seemed it was not easy to do unless you knew someone, like I did at the time, who was basically going to tell their landlord to hand you the lease. Obviously I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that I am very surprised to hear that anyone thinks of NYC as a place with genuinely solid rent protections and good wages, because the last time I looked it really did not seem like either of those was the case. If that is the case, that’s awesome and I am very glad to hear it. The story I was told by friends was largely one of intense, almost unbearable pressure from gentrification and jobs not paying nearly enough for the cost of living and being actively displaced by people who came to the city with an absurd amount of money to spend. So if that isn’t actually the case, that’s very very good news because I kind of had what I THINK of as contemporary NYC built up in my head as this horror story of the worst things that could happen to a city.

I also am not intimately familiar with the culture of NYC, but I have to say that I don’t think I agree with the idea that ‘ "native New Yorker" vs "transplant" is in many ways created as a way of sewing division’ because I don’t think that concept is unique at all to NYC- I certainly have a lot of a specific kind of pride in having been born and raised in Chicago, I and most other Chicagoans consider it genuinely offensive and rude when people who grew up in suburbs nearby tell people they are from Chicago, I and most other Chicagoans see ourselves, I would say, as a particular breed of people who share a particular kind of roots in this place, and I don’t think that pride is harmful or bad in any way. I would never tell someone that moving here is an evil thing to do- I consider roughly 10 years of residency to grant you the right to refer to yourself as a Chicagoan and not just a Chicago resident lol- or say that transplants to Chicago are categorically bad people. Half of that is just stupid cultural stuff, really, and shouldn’t be taken very seriously. But I don’t think the concept itself is bad. I have a fundamentally different relationship to Chicago than someone who grew up anywhere else and moved here, no matter how long they moved here, and I don’t think it is harmful at all to be open about and proud of that. I would never make the claim that transplants haven’t made massive contributions to the city, and I would assume most native New Yorkers wouldn’t make that claim about transplants to NYC.

Thank you for sharing your personal understanding of the situation there, and I am very surprised to hear that the proportion of residents in NYC who live in public or rent controlled housing is quite high, and glad to hear it. As needlessly aggressive as Chicagoans (myself included) can be when “New York” is even uttered aloud, I obviously have a lot of real respect for the city and I am glad to hear that it hasn’t just been mostly ruined in the way I had imagined it. This is a good lesson in taking any media you see about a place whose name will get clicks/engagement just by virtue of the aura of the place (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc) with several grains of salt. If I was only familiar with Chicago through media I’d think it was some super dangerous place when it definitely isn’t categorically. 

[goyangii]

How much radfems do you personally know in Korea? What do people tell you when they know you're a radfem?

ok so like just first off i live in america? idk why ppl assume that asians don't...exist in other places like. yes my family is from korea, yes i am korean. but that doesn't make me Korean Authority 101 and fwiw i wouldn't want to live in korea for a multitude of reasons so i can't answer your question the way you probably want,, 

also ive gotten DMs from ppl with weird questions like this as if even if i lived in korea i'm somehow like, this mouthpiece for the culture or as if koreans are some alien species like? i already have to deal with ppl assuming i don't speak english, that i'm not from here, when i go outside fdssgdgds like idk how to impress upon you that it's super highkey annoying to get the online equivalent of ppl saying 'oh! ann yung horse say yo' to me at work, on my blog,,, pls if this is how u guys interact with poc online, don't do this offline. also koreans aren’t like what you see in kpop, kdramas, etc. i have encountered a weird and surprising amt of ppl operating on this assumption and i just. screams. koreans aren’t a monolith, korean culture is heavily patriarchal and this has an impact on the way misogyny is inflicted upon kr women but it’s the minutiae that’s distinct and unique, kr women face (generally) remarkably similar issues to jp women, sea women, white women, hispanic women, etc. such as male violence, restriction of reproductive rights, religiously motivated misogyny (fsr ppl don’t seem to know a lot of koreans, esp korean americans, are at least passively religious? i think they get this assumption bc a lot of cn aren’t, and ime a lot of jp aren’t), sexual assault/harassment, pay gaps, familial issues like second shift, etc. this isn’t to say koreans don’t have unique cultural issues — beauty culture is a big one ime — but rather that there are a lot more similarities than differences when it comes to misogyny across the world. addressing this intersectionally doesn’t mean othering woc or their cultures, imho, but rather recognizing the differences that do exist. idk if this makes sense..          

all that said i put my exp under the cut, i hope it helps! 

my exp is that most younger koreans, esp korean americans, i know are libfems if they are feminists (which isn't really common at all ime, at most it's younger women who buy into libfem beliefs but wouldn't go as far as calling themselves feminist. the ones who do are very much edgy art student socjus types and i've only met them on my college campus lol). i have never ever met any older korean feminist here, and older koreans (men and women) tend to be pretty regressive/conservative in general. i can't count how many times i've been told off, directly or indirectly, by older koreans for how i talk, dress, groom myself, not having a bf/husband, and so on. younger koreans aren't much better, even the 'woke' ones, just the verbage changes.

interacting w/ korean relatives living in or visiting SK, radical feminism is the feminism of choice there but it is not by any means a "normal". feminism, even libfem, is not looked upon highly and being openly feminist is not normal or 'cool' outside of western facing circles and even then you'll probably get backlash from other koreans (usually men) for it. when i talk with my korean friends, fob or koream, about women's issues a lot of the time they might agree on certain things or join in on the ‘men suck!!1!!1′ venting, but once the topic veers towards feminism they're usually pretty withdrawn on it. i think it's interesting that doesn't seem to really change.

the only woman i know who is even vaguely feminist or accepting of me being feminist, let alone a radfem, is my mom surprisingly. maybe bc she's from busan lol. but she's very much unusual for a korean woman and while not feminist let alone radfem, refuses to date or marry men ever again (so ig she's an unintentional separatist queen? ..i'm joking gsdgds) and agrees with me on a lot, but not all, feminist topics like abortion and reproductive rights, women's rights in the workplace, domestic violence (which she/we were victims of, so ofc), etc. even lgb rights she's warmed up to quite a bit since i was a teen. but she is literally the only one, even my halmoni and aunties — who had abusive relationships with men! — think/thought feminism was unnecessary or even useless, despite being strong women in their own right.

what is interesting imo is that trans issues are a little complicated in sk. there are notable trans celebrities, but i’ve only known them to be hsts mtfs. when i came out as a tif, the logical conclusion was i was a super butch who was so gay i wanted to be a man to be ‘normal’ (i mean...not wrong in a way?) and this is the general perception a lot of koreans have of trans ppl. and while most are probably going to be polite about it, i don’t know any koreans, even younger ones, who are super pro trans rights or anything. i’ve met only one korean trans person who was a transbian mtf, but dozens of white trans ppl. that said i do find it interesting koreans seem to at least turn a blind eye to hsts mtfs but there’s still a lot of bristling about homosexuality. again this isn’t that dissimilar to how it is with other cultures, i guess, but it is interesting. 

last disclaimer that this is my exp and maybe other koreans have different experiences? feminist movements seem to be particularly strong in unis/college campuses and ive never been to a korean college/uni. maybe there is a stronger radfem presence there? but the only big radfem groups i know of operate mostly online (like WOMAD), much like in the west. imo radfem is just too radical to really make it mainstream, regardless of the culture. 

this ended up super long sorry 😩

[izzyovercoffee]

The thing is, I never read Legends, so I always saw the warrior mandalorians as imperialist. Both of the houses we see (Kryze and Viszla) are headed by white, blonde families and Clan Wren are the descendants of a people who were conquered, converted to Mandalorian ideals, and placed in a subordinate position under Viszla. Bo Katan, a traditionalist, rejects Maul as unfit to rule because he's an alien. And this was all decided before the reboot with Legends so....I'm confused.

Confusion is totally understandable! 

For the record, because this got so long, it has to go under a cut. I apologize for the length, and if my tone is off it’s not intentional. I’m, essentially, info-dumping, because there’s a lot of extraneous information that applies to the arcs I’m gonna try to address under the cut. I’m also reading your ask as if you didn’t see Satine’s New Mandalorians as imperialist, bc that seems to be what you’re implying in the ask? If I’m off, I apologize in advance.

Also even though I say “you” in this reply, I don’t mean you specifically, I’m meaning to address a general “you,” not you you.

The short answer is that even if you are not familiar with Legends material, reading only one of the two houses as imperialist kind of misses all of the subtext conveyed purely by the information presented in the arcs themselves, and oversimplifies imperialism. It is easy to miss, though, and imperialism itself is a complex subject that isn’t discussed as well as it should be.

But, ultimately, even if we were to ignore Legends and only look at canon material, we still have what boils down to this:

The New Mandalorians, an all white faction of mandalorians:

exiled people of a differing cultural philosophy

has a society not achievable through means that don’t involve steps towards ethnic cleansing 

declared pre-established nonwhite mandalorians as not mandalorian, thereby stripping any claim to that cultural identity, in the same vein as calling them the equivalent of savage

were part of a regime change backed by an outside stronger, larger military force invested in that regime change

All of these things, together, paint House Kryze and the New Mandalorians as Imperialist. Regardless of Legends material, regardless of how anyone feels about Death Watch.

And even though the writing does not really carry the kind of awareness that definitely points to a lesson on imperialism, if we entertain that as the conclusion to all of the arcs … it would have been more effective to make Sundari diverse in comparison to Death Watch, and have that diversity leverage Death Watch’s war crimes directly, rather than make Sundari the accidental genocidal Imperialist power by poor design decision.

Furthermore, as much as I would rather not bring it up as it’s always used as a straw man argument against the existence of racism, the fact is that Imperialism is not the sole purview of white people. Chinese Imperialism exists. Japanese Imperialism exists. Both are as effective analogues for Imperialism, and both are closer to actual Mandalorian history than the space!Nazi aesthetic the writers went with—not just for obvious reasons, but because the space!Nazi aesthetic implicates an altogether different type of imperialism. 

And it’s a type that completely distracts from and undermines the ultimate goals of their storytelling in those arcs. 

Moving on to that last point, though … that scene where Bo-Katan rejected Maul, can be read differently—as in, she did not reject him because he was an alien so much as she rejected Maul because he wasn’t mandalorian. Or it could be both of those things, but it’s an important distinction to make—it’s important to not forget all of the things Bo-Katan, specifically, was fighting for.

Bo-Katan fought to save the culture Satine was trying to eradicate — and in terms of cultural genocide, if Maul was to take up his position as leader of mandalorians, that is just trading one type of cultural genocide for another.

It is, under no circumstance, the same as framing it as a simple rejection of Maul because he’s an alien. Him being an alien literally does not matter in that moment, tradition or not, because Maul had no stake in it—because it’s not his culture on the precipice of extinction. To treat that scene like it was … well, was to miss the point.

The very long longer answer goes under the cut.

To warn you about what’s under the cut, as it’s, again, very, very long. I’m basically going into a detailed explanation about: 

Legends & why/how Legends applies to the Mandalore arcs

a longer diatribe on imperialism: —To Legends or Not to Legends —Why does Legends help the New Mandalorians?

how & why the New Mandalorians are Imperialist: —A Diatribe on Imperialism

and their platform is transparent and hypocritical w/o the additional context of Legends to soften the edges: —Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorian’s Transparently Hypocritical Political Platform, and more on Jango Fett

a longer explanation on Bo-Katan and Maul: —Xenophobia versus Continued Cultural Genocide

the actual events that are contextually relevant to the Mandalore arcs: —Legends: The Aftermath of the Mandalorian Wars—Legends: The Mandalorian Excision

what I mean by the Fetts were established as mandalorian before the Mandalore arcs aired: —Why the decanonization of the Fetts matters, in the context of the story and canon —An aside: Separating “Boba Fett” from “Mandalorian” after 30+ years

As I’ve said, it’s a lot. Mostly meant to be used as a reference, I guess. I apologize if I repeat myself too much. I wrote this in chunks and threw it together, so if it’s messy or even more confusing, that’s 100% on me.

[[ EDIT:: it has since come to my attention that George Lucas was the mind behind the retcon, stated once in a special featurette for TCW DVD set for Season 2. Him being known and expected to be (hopefuly for obvious reasons) incredibly racist makes it all a little less surprising, but no less fucked up. That the writers still stick with it now, after he’s out, is disappointing, and I maintain that that tweet by Hidalgo was unnecessary. Nothing else about the argument changes except on who to blame and criticize more than the others. ]]

To Legends or Not to Legends

The Imperialism implied in the show was based off of a larger context of conquer and destroy that exists in Legends, and at the time of airing took for granted that the viewer would have at least some knowledge of that mandalorian history, but would still work overall if the viewer did not know those details.

So, even if you are not familiar with Legends the show at the time took for granted at least superficial understanding of the KOTOR series and The Mandalorian Wars that occurred 4000 years prior to the events of the show. The Mandalore Arcs make multiple references to a history of galactic-scale war and conquest, but nothing was ever established even close to threatening outside of the events leading to KOTOR i & ii. The writers, themselves, also indicated familiarity and desire to canonize the KOTOR events (writing Revan, for example, into the show and having them voiced until, ultimately, Revan was cut from that episode. It doesn’t make KOTOR canon, but what it does do is build a case and point to the inspirations of where the writers were coming from). 

The Expanded Universe was still referenced even if it was obliquely—and under that knowledge, Expanded Universe / Legends material therefore matters when it comes to talking about the context of the Mandalore arcs.

I mean, obviously it wasn’t required knowledge, as anyone can watch the episodes and follow for the most part, and at this point because most of those things are now relegated to a time period that, most likely, will not be addressed or brought up in canon material from this point forward, it’s hard to gauge if it will ever “matter.”

But, regardless, the intent to reference the old republic can still be seen in there, and the Mandalore arcs make more sense, overall, politically and otherwise, when the Mandalorian Wars were / are taken into account as compared to how the arcs stand without that background.

At the time, while Legends wasn’t rebooted yet, only the highest levels of canon really “mattered,” and those were movies and TV. They both did and did not matter, because the showrunners ultimately had the final say of what they wanted to present. They could draw from the expanded universe material, even extrapolate on what was set up as a foundation—or they could do as they ultimately did and annihilate what was previously established.

To reiterate, the movies, and the shows, had the power to erase pre-established expanded universe canon, as it was canon at the time, just a “lower level” of canon. It wasn’t a clear cut line like it is today, where Legends is Legends and doesn’t “exist” in the star wars universe. Expanded Universe was canon-enough right up until the movies and the shows decided otherwise. Expanded Universe was canon right up until the show decided to outright erase some parts and rewrite it.

And that’s ultimately what happened to the mandalorians.

A Diatribe on Imperialism

So, to come back to the topic of Imperialism, Imperialism absolutely was the topic of discussion. But, again, because of the design decisions, even though they framed the New Mandalorians as the radical faction that came as a direct counterpoint to Death Watch and Mandalore’s history of war and conquest, the visual notes and hints they ultimately settled on implied a wholly different background that really … can’t conceivably be what they intended from the beginning.

Both Houses were Imperialists, and both of them carry a violent history.

I also want to reiterate: Imperialism is not the sole purview of white people. Other races, other Empires, have also expanded their respective territories, have also conquered huge territories, have forced assimilation of local peoples into their respective Empires. The Mongolians. The Chinese. The Khmer Empire. The Vikings. The Romans. The Japanese. And so on, and so forth.

Presenting imperialism = white is a very narrow, limited view of imperialism, and inaccurate (Chinese Imperialism is a real thing, Japanese Imperialism is a real thing. These things really happen today, and affect real people, and so and so forth). 

Not only white Europeans colonized huge chunks of the world, but generally white Europeans did so to such a degree that world is still fucking wrecked by it even to today. (But that doesn’t make the survivors of other imperialist conquests any less significant. It doesn’t make ethnic cleansing and intra-racial imperialism and genocide any less heinous, but I digress.)

Beyond that, though, while Imperialism and its effects absolutely is an important discussion to be had, by oversimplifying imperialist = white, and “warrior white” = imperialist, we fail to recognize the other types of imperialism in effect today (and in the star wars universe) that absolutely should be acknowledged and discussed.

Contrary to popular belief, there are other visual analogues that exist outside of centering white supremacy, even when that centering is meant to be in criticism of it.

Further, Imperialism isn’t only perpetuated through physical violence—and, in fact, in today’s world it’s more effectively perpetuated through other means, through policy. Satine Kryze’s reign is, yet again, another example of how a superficially nonviolent society can still wield imperialism through policy and not be demonized because, technically, they’re not violent like those other guys, aka Death Watch.

It’s easy to defend something terrible when the only other comparison is a group of extremists already demonized by history that are marginally more obviously terrible.

But, again, if the racism inherent in the episodes is missed, then it’s very easy to miss all of the unfortunate implications tied in with it. It’s also then easy to miss how the whitewashing comes in. And, ultimately, it’s easy to miss how that decision distracts from and completely undermines the point of those arcs. 

Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorian’s Transparently Hypocritical Political Platform, and more on Jango Fett

When the writers chose space!Germany, space!Nazis, they implicated Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians in a specific type of imperialism, and a specific type of genocide. And even though I cannot make any claims as to fully know what they intended to indicate, from what can be determined watching the arcs, the intention was not to paint Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians as having that history of genocide. She was supposed to be a symbol against those war crimes, not a symbol whose power stems from it.

To reiterate, it was not one they wanted to implicate her and their faction in—it was one they wanted to implicate only Death Watch in, alone. But because of all the things I’ve pointed out in previous posts and above, there’s no other way to interpret the visual presentation of Sundari as anything but carrying an implied violently racist society. Because you cannot achieve a population that looks like that without eugenics, without genocide.

And if you still don’t see it now, after myself and other people have explained how and why Sundari is the perfect example of what that looks like … well.

Coming back to the white = imperialism analogue, that’s where, I think, the “well, of course they’re all white / blond / blue-eyed!” analogue falls short. Because the actual comparison of space!Germans? Space!Nazis? It just doesn’t work. It does not fit. The quick and easy analogue of Imperialism that the writers chose to go with, does not match what the apparent goals of either the longer Legends-inclusive bloody history nor the Mandalore arcs were trying to convey.

And as I’ve said before: we, the viewers, were supposed to sympathize with Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians, but for anyone even remotely familiar with the concept of eugenics, anyone who knows what the extreme conclusion of a racist society looks like, looks at the New Mandalorians and Sundari and sees them as the defacto success story of space!Nazis.

To say “it’s not that deep” is to, ultimately, pick and choose when and where one cares about visual details in a visual medium—when and where one cares about how information and story is illustrated through setting—and that’s really not an effective way to learn how to improve storytelling in a visual medium, nor learn why these interpretations arise and how to avoid (or fix!) them in the future.

On top of that, it ultimately takes away from the story. It takes away from the arc. It undermines anything Satine and the New Mandalorians could have stood for, because instead of being a Pacifist society out of a willingness to change and be better than what their history says they are, they’re a Pacifist society that had a successful implementation of a eugenics and cultural genocide program and that’s how they maintain their stability. And that’s monstrous.

It made Satine into a monster, by sheer accident and oversight.

When they made that design decision, they unfortunately implicated all of the white New Mandalorians as complicit in a specific type of genocide, one that can only be associated with space!Nazis, because that was the visual shortcut they decided on using. 

We were supposed to see the monsters only in Death Watch, not in the New Mandalorians, and not in Satine. The intent was to implicate Death Watch as all massively violent criminals and murderers, not make them victims to stand on ground equally bad. Not to inadvertently make them sympathetic.

It was just not reflective of the context they were pulling from at the time, nor was it effective for the story they wanted to convey. In no way did it make Satine Kryze sympathetic, because how could it?

Their writing choice had the exact opposite effect of their intended goal.

Why the decanonization of the Fetts matters, in the context of the story and canon

Moving on from that, I, generally, would couch against oversimplifying Satine’s (and the New Mandalorian’s) position: what they were doing, in no uncertain terms, was taking a culture that was, before the Mandalore Arcs, established as a nonwhite culture and declaring them savages that needed to be colonized for their own good. Almost literally exactly how the Fetts were decanonized within the show.

That is a type of Imperialism. That, in itself, is a type of colonization that has already happened in our history in the real world, worldwide, to countless native societies and people. 

Whether Filoni and Hidalgo George Lucas and the other writers liked it or not, the Fetts were still mandalorian as of the movies’ airings, and his retcon delivered through the show didn’t come until years later. So that retcon, that declaration, cannot be separated from what was established as canon beforehand and at the time of that episode’s airing—no matter how much the writers seemed to want to erase or ignore 30+ years of the larger franchise establishing otherwise in expanded materials without conflict. 

And because it cannot be separated, that directly implicates Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians as just as Imperialist as Death Watch, except they’re less “terrorist.” But terrorism, in general, is determined by governmental and institutional power, and because the New Mandalorians wield all the power in mandalorian space, any act of obscene violence they may or may not wield on their marginalized populations will never be called terrorism—because, again, terrorism is the sole purview of people who don’t wield institutional power.

So, to reiterate, as I’ve said before, and as someone rightfully pointed out in the notes of the previous posts, by having the Fetts identified as mandalorians in canon material prior to the Mandalore arcs of the show, it was implicated that mandalorians as a cultural identity were nonwhite. 

To then introduce the New Mandalorians as all-white out of nowhere, and have them thereby declare:

the Fetts as not mandalorians, and

fighting as veneration was unconscionable

basically made the New Mandalorians echo real-world violent colonialism in the terms of the White Voice Of Reason coming to Tame The Savages and make them “reasonable and cultured.” 

So on the one hand, you have white Death Watch who is obviously Imperialist, yes, but then by doing the above the writers accidentally made it impossible to separate the New Mandalorians from a different but still clear Imperialism. I say accidentally because, generally, the writing of the early arcs didn’t seem to be all that self aware in those implications for Satine.

I mean, also consider that the Death Watch of the show also had:

a white woman in a position of power who wasn’t white supremacist pale / blond / blue-eyed, and

later established that they had nonwhite people among their ranks in respected positions

In comparison to New Mandalorians? Imperialism is still present, but the ethnic cleansing and the eugenics is not.

The impression that Clan Wren’s ancestors were subjugated by Mandalorian Expansion may not be wrong, or it may be. But consider why you want to make that assumption, if it’s necessary, and if it’s coming from a place of “well, of course they’re not naturally mandalorian, because they’re not white!” And if that perspective is being used to form a complex history and relationship with their cultural identity, or if you’re only doing it for superficial flavor that adds nothing to the story nor context. Because if it’s the latter, it’s not a decision that is made in vacuum, but rather one that can contribute to racism / racist narratives.

It’s racist in much the same sense as saying that someone cannot be British if they’re Asian. That someone cannot be American if they’re Asian. These assumptions that are being made, they’re not factual statements built from nothing but racist assumptions that don’t hold up under their own weight or logic.

Which isn’t to say that Death Watch isn’t terrible—they absolutely are.

The implied Imperialism of Death Watch is very real, yes. The problem is that I haven’t seen anything to implicate DW as subjugating the Wrens or other humans, if we’re looking at the show and canon only. 

I say that because … we only have the word of the New Mandalorians, who are speaking from a position I’ve hopefully explained in great detail as hypocritical at best, as well as the word of the Jedi Order / Republic, who both have a vested political interest in making damn sure the New Mandalorians keep their seats of power and would not want to undermine that stability (because the New Mandalorians are Republic-friendly and Death Watch is quite clearly Republic-unfriendly. Not to mention that both the Jedi Order and the Republic had a direct hand in the war to keep the New Mandalorians in power years before, when Satine rose to the duchy. And yes, this was stated in the arcs themselves, is canon and thereby not relegated to Legends information). 

None of the people pointing fingers at Death Watch are speaking from an unbiased position—and if the writers really wanted to make those accusations clearer and from an actually sympathetic POV, they would have made Sundari not all white, and gave minor airtime to a nonwhite mandalorian leveraging those crimes against Death Watch. 

But, they didn’t go down that route, so instead we have a conflict that is murky and convoluted with no right side. And as much as I detest Death Watch, the accusations towards them are not coming from a source that doesn’t benefit from villainizing everyone who contradicts them across the board.

And that’s a problem when the story arcs, themselves, expect us to just see Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians as the “obvious” correct side without any kind of deep or critical thinking.

In Legends, Death Watch has always been anti-alien, but again, because of that lazy design decision … the writers relegated the anti-alien sentiment to all of Mandalorian space as a whole, as opposed to just Death Watch. 

Like I said, it’s distracting from the points and sides they were trying to make.

We also have another canon man native to Concord Dawn to compare Jango’s status to, because the excuses that we’ve been given so far has been “he’s not a mandalorian but he’s native to Concord Dawn” as if that should be an easy distinction to make … yet we have someone else who is also native to Concord Dawn, who was never part of Death Watch, and yet he’s still considered mandalorian.

That man is Fenn Rau. 

Canon material shows us:

Fenn Rau is a mandalorian, despite being from Concord Dawn, while

Jango Fett is “not,” when he’s also a Concord Dawn native

Concord Dawn sits firmly in Mandalorian Space, and Fenn Rau was a True Mandalorian, as was Jango Fett—also known as the Journeyman Protectors. They were a different faction who ultimately sided with the New Mandalorians against Death Watch—but unlike the New Mandalorians, they always dropped everything to fight whenever DW so much as blipped once on a radar. 

We also have the now-canon information that Fenn Rau was on Kamino and trained the clones, and from what Legends tells us … Jango Fett was the one who recruited a good number of mandalorians to help train the clones. At the very least, they must have known and interacted with each other, having been of the same factions and in the same space multiple times.

Again, the things Fenn Rau and Jango Fett have in common:

natives of Concord Dawn

part of the Journeyman Protectors third faction

and the things they don’t have in common:

Fenn Rau is white

Jango Fett is not white

So. 

There is no real logic involved in these writing decisions, outside of explicitly implicating the New Mandalorians as an Imperialist force complicit in racial & ethnic cleansing. That would be the most logical leap to explain why Fenn Rau is a mandalorian, but Jango Fett is not. 

Literally none of it makes sense story-wise in canon otherwise—because that’s, literally, the shortest logical leap that can be supported by the information provided by canon without bending ass over head and making weak excuses.

And, well, even so … If you only look at it from what you see on the shows and movies, it still doesn’t make much sense. Canon as it stands alone frames Satine Kryze and the New Mandalorians as a faction that stands on a position built on transparent irredeemable violent hypocrisy. 

Xenophobia versus Continued Cultural Genocide

And once more I come back to that scene where Bo-Katan rejected Maul. 

To reiterate, I argue that him being an alien does not matter. She may have said it, it may have been implied, but identifying him as an alien in that specific scene once Pre Vizsla was killed does not automatically mean xenophobia—especially when that scene was meant to be a defining point between continued cultural genocide and survival. Whether mandalorians would be willing to crucify itself on its traditionalism and be totally extinguished by accepting Maul, or by standing true to survival and rejecting an outsider from assuming a culture with which he has no stake in.

Rejecting Imperialist cannibalism, yet again.

Allowing Maul to lead the Mandalorians after executing Pre Vizsla would have been trading one violent subjugation for another—trading Satine Kryze’s cultural genocide in the forced conversion to Pacifism for the subjugation under the violent rule of a person who wasn’t mandalorian and had zero stake in what they, as a people, had to lose (once again, their cultural identity).

And that context matters. It matters. She didn’t make that decision from a position in which she was given much choice, regardless that allegiances split on that decision. Bo-Katan was fighting for traditionalism, yes, but that traditionalism is built on a foundation of mandalorians surviving mandalorian cultural genocide at all costs — first from the New Mandalorians and the Republic, 700 years prior, then the New Mandalorians and Satine a few decades prior to the show, and finally, if you take Legends context of The Mandalorian Wars, a survival of cultural genocide as brought into play by Sith manipulations.

Pre Vizsla died because his rigid traditionalism was the sword on which he was willing to impale himself on before he was willing to change. And that kind of rigid inability to adapt would have meant the death of mandalorian culture. 

So … don’t oversimplify that scene. Context matters. Everything that leads up to that moment in the show matters. 

Legends: The Aftermath of the Mandalorian Wars

What ended The Mandalorian Wars?

The Jedi Order was, essentially, split into two: The Jedi who would fight, and the Jedi who Refused to fight. The Jedi who left to fight followed in the steps of Revan and Alek, and the Exile.

What ended the war was this:

At the Battle of Malachor, the Jedi Revan executed Mandalore the Ultimate, and 

stole the ceremonial mask needed for any Mandalorian to declare themselves Mandalore and lead the people

At the same time, The Jedi Exile, a High General, made the decision to activate the Mass Shadow Generator, which wiped out the entirety of the Mandalorian Army, and

nearly killed off all of the mandalorian people in the known galaxy in that same action

The entirety of the Mandalorian Army was, simultaneously, the entirety of the Mandalorian People. And because the majority of Mandalorians, at that time in history, served both in a civilian and a military capacity, when the Jedi Exile initiated the super weapon, she nearly wiped out the entire population of Mandalorians from the known galaxy. 

From that point forward? Mandalorians, as a people, were forced to change their philosophy in order to survive. Mandalorians, as a people became a people focused on survival instead of conquest. Fighting was, is, central to their culture, but the fight stopped being about conquering and became about survival.

But later, when they eventually recovered their numbers, different factions within the Mandalorians would pop up.

There were:

Extremists, who wanted to return to their conquering ways, irregardless of the fact that conquering directly lead to their annihilation. These people would venerate Mandalore the Ultimate for all the wrong reasons.

Isolationists, who wanted to focus only on the growth and continued survival of the mandalorian people, who wanted to continue Mandalore the Preserver’s work — and never regress to the old, conquering ways, because that’s ultimately what killed them.

From these two factions, eventually, over the millennia that followed, would continuously fight each other: because Extremists wanted to return to the toxic ‘old ways’, and Isolationists saw conquer as an invitation to the Republic (and the Jedi) to finish their path of genocide.

And the thing was: they weren’t wrong.

And this is important as historical context to know, when taking in the Mandalore Arcs of the Clone Wars, because in those arcs, it’s clear that The Republic and The Jedi Order have not only had a vested interest in Mandalorian politics—Kenobi clearly references a time when he was directly involved with keeping Satine Kryze in power.

Historical context.

Because of the sheer scale of catastrophe the Mandalorians successfully caused to the galaxy during the Mandalorian Wars, The Republic and The Jedi Order would forever remember those events and continue to act accordingly to prevent them from ever happening again, no matter the cost.

THAT is why both The Jedi Order and The Republic have such a serious and vested interest in Mandalorians remaining demilitarized and passive.

And THAT is why, ~700 years prior to the events of The Clone Wars, roughly 3300 years after the conclusion of the Mandalorian Wars, The Jedi and The Republic carpet bombed the fuck out of Mandalore without provocation. It was thenceforth referred to as the Mandalorian Excision

Legends: The Mandalorian Excision

When the arcs were written, imperialism was both a direct reference not to a recent campaign, but to a literal galaxy-wide imperialism ~4000 years before the events of the Clone Wars, as well as the one ~700 years before.

The Mandalorian Excision came after the end of the Thousand Years War in which the Jedi waged a millennia-long campaign against the Sith and wrecked the galaxy, again. The Republic, weakened by the war against the Sith, could not survive another galactic wide conflict.

But, after the rise of Tarre Vizsla ~1000 years before the events of TCW, the warring Houses of Mandalore banded together to join a united Mandalore. The constant fighting and war left Mandalorian Space very, very weak, but of the factions that arose out of that peace, half wanted to regain their power and conquer the galaxy, while the other half cautioned for pacifism and peace.

Unfortunately for all of the Mandalorians, the Republic got wind of the ancestors of Death Watch — and even though Mandalorians were undecided as how to proceed, and didn’t have any power whatsoever to follow through on those desires because they were still extremely weakened from both the galactic-wide conflict and their own inter-clan and inter-house fighting, The Jedi Order led the “preemptive strike” and glassed Mandalore.

Preemptive strike is interesting language choice, because what that ultimately means, and what actually happened, is that Mandalore did nothing to provoke that attack because they were nowhere near to threatening to anyone in power, and the Jedi and the Republic still decided to base delta zero Mandalore anyway, just to be safe. 

Because we can’t be having any repeats of The Mandalorian Wars, even though that was ~3000 years before.

And after they carpet bombed Mandalore, the Republic and the Jedi Order then invaded the planet, and installed a new government as ruled by the New Mandalorians, under the agreement that they would never move against the Republic.

The New Mandalorians then began the exile-or-die campaign, with the “help” of the Republic. Anyone who was unwilling to denounce “the old ways” would be killed or exiled.

Why does Legends help the New Mandalorians?

Because without the above context, without the very extreme, very dramatic, very real threat of genocide by the Republic to the Mandalorians, there is no motivational pressure for the New Mandalorians to act like they do — to force pacifism to such an extreme.

But when you’re in a position of be pacifist or the galaxy will crush you again, and this time they might wipe out everyone, then there’s a literal galaxy’s worth of motivation to force cultural genocide to kill the literal thing that has made you and your people a target for elimination if you so much as breathe the wrong way.

And that context, above, was the context in which the episodes were written. Because, like it was said, the Legends reboot didn’t happen yet — so all of the expanded materials attached to the Mandalore arcs lay out a very real, very clear wider view of why the New Mandalorians violently enforced radical Pacifism.

This isn’t to say that the implied ethnic & racial cleansing is forgivable, and this isn’t to say that cultural genocide is forgivable, because these things are literally unforgivable, heinous, and monstrous — but given the situation, given their position in the galaxy, given everything that was at stake … can you blame them?

I mean, obviously, duh. Yes. You can blame them. You should blame them.

But … it gives that extremism more sense, on all sides of the conflict.

An aside: Separating “Boba Fett” from “Mandalorian” after 30+ years

Yes, I’m back on this. I promise this is the last section. I just wanted to clarify whitewashing and what I meant when I said 30+ years of the franchise.

At the time of the show’s airing, by making the decision to make the second-highest level of visible canon mandalorians white (as TV came just under Film at that time in terms of validity) and in that same arc retcon the Films’ non-white Fetts from that same category, that was an act of white-washing. That is essentially the most obvious and easily pointed out example of whitewashing. 

It was literally an act of rejecting and delegitimizing nonwhite representation on-screen when that nonwhite representation had many years of worldbuilding and detail behind him/them. Boba Fett, himself, was named as a mandalorian bounty hunter as far back as the late 70s (I apparently have official trading cards from the 80s that say this, too). Since Jango Fett’s debut in Episode II: Attack of the Clones in 2002 he was written as mandalorian.

That’s 30+ years of the name Boba Fett associated with Mandalorian.

And, decades later, when it’s revealed that Boba, and Jango, are not white, it’s mysteriously retconned in a TV show that neither of them are mandalorian? After more than 30 years of the franchise establishing the exact opposite?

TCW canon erased “mandalorian” from the Fetts, redefined mandalorians as white with the introduction of the two Houses and Sundari, and then obliterated expanded universe all in the very same arc by taking what was the capital planet of Mandalore space and glassed it, then gave it Sundari as its central city. The capital planet that was, before the show, ethnically and racially diverse with different climate zones and flora and fauna.

The mess that was the mandalorian fandom trying to make sense of it all was … even now, years later, the community is still reeling from it.

The most grievous, obvious, in-your-face racism and whitewashing done in a long time in the franchise. There’s no way to argue that it isn’t.

Unintentional? Sure. Accidental? Probably. But still, it is what it is.

The thing, though, that gets me the most? Is the out-of-context tweet to confirm it, one that was entirely unnecessary and unneeded.

Why unnecessary? Because mandalorians, as I’ve said time and time again, have a history in Legends-to-Canon of fighting over identity politics, of literally starting wars over the “right” way to be mandalorian. 

To have White Mandalorians look at a Brown Mandalorian and say “THIS MAN, this man who was born in mandalorian space and taken in and raised by a mandalorian clan to become a mandalorian warrior and then elected mandalorian leader of the True Mandalorians, he is NOT A MANDALORIAN!” … is par for the course in the world of mandalorian politics in the larger context of mandalorian history. Mandalorians.

They do this shit, all the time. 

It could have been left alone, to be taken as one will—and it should have been. But instead of doing that, Pablo Hidalgo, in a tweet, “confirmed” that Jango was never mandalorian at all, thereby eradicating any of the complexity that can be inferred on the in-context declaration in the show, and supporting what is, ultimately, an act of racist writing that was as I’ve already said, unneeded and unnecessary.

After 30+ years of Boba Fett established as mandalorian, and 6+ years of Jango Fett as mandalorian, suddenly … he was not white enough to be mandalorian in a show that had higher canon validity than 30+ years of expanded material.

And if you read that section above comparing Fenn Rau and Jango Fett … well. If you can’t see why it’s messed up … I don’t know how else to better explain it.