the individual intentions of the writers feels kind of secondary when talking about how reactionary the mandalorian has become, but if you wanted to be extremely generous about what’s going on, I think that the very simple and boring answer is that there is no financial incentive to care about what happens in the show anymore. Disney lost over a billion dollars on Disney+ last year, despite the wild success of the mandalorian and other D+ shows. I’m assuming the primary way they make money is off of mando and baby yoda merchandise - this would explain why the showrunners reunited both of them before the first episode of the third season even aired. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the mandalorian now exists primarily to sell the mandalorian merchandise. it has become an advertisement for itself.
and this would explain a lot! It explains why virtually all of the narrative threads from the previous two seasons have either been dropped or quickly resolved. It explains the exponential increase in nauseating Star Wars references like “Han shot first” “it’s a trap” yoda doing backflips etc. It explains why Din has become something of a zombie, going through the motions without any particular motivation beyond whatever deranged escapade he and Bo-Katan get up to on a given week. There’s no point to caring because the only real pressure is getting eyes on the screen and selling more baby yoda stickers. This is why we went from an Ahsoka cameo in season 2 (an obvious ploy to launch another show but still somewhat reasonable for the story) to having Lizzo and Jack Black in season 3 (literally no narrative reason at all). Those celebrities are really popular and their inclusion in the show produces media headlines that combine their names with the mandalorian, optimising search engine results and presenting the opportunity to sell merchandise to Jack Black and Lizzo fans, even if they aren’t Star Wars fans.
but the shape of this not-caring takes on a particular political form in the show - its lack of care for politics doesn’t equally produce progressive and reactionary political conflict, it’s only reactionary. And one of the reasons for this is because I think a lot of pre-existing Star Wars canon, which this show is leaning more and more heavily on, is so politically fraught that using it without thinking about it produces reactionary narratives. I think this is a large reason why 3x03 was so deeply disturbing politically, because it was all set-up for the arrival of the First Order in the Sequel Trilogy. The show doesn’t seem to take any specific perspective on this aside from telling the audience that its all very ominous, but it’s only ominous because the First Order are established as the villains of the Sequels, not because the rise of fascism in a fictional world is a specific horror that Favreau wants to explore, and the reasons for its rise are extremely lazy, boiling down to “the government is too wrapped up in bureaucratic processes to care and too forgiving of the empire to notice.”
and two I think that in general, positioning your story in opposition to politics - not a specific set of political beliefs, just “politics” as a whole - also produces de facto reactionary narratives. the show is not espousing any positive beliefs about what an ideal world may look like, nor is it precise in its criticisms about what it believes to be the flaws that currently exist in the present day world. It’s just against bureaucracy in general, democracy in general, technology in general. and the show abdicates responsibility for taking a position on why it thinks any of these things are bad. Din dismissively scoffs “politics” in 3x06, perhaps the laziest possible admission that the show is not interested in exploring anything it considers political, and aims to position the characters as being outside of politics. but that itself is a reactionary position, to assume that presenting a “direct democracy” as an overly-decadent, hyper-tolerant society who is too scared to give cops guns but will arm citizens if their cultural “feelings” allow them to carry firearms as “not political.” Again to be way too overly generous, perhaps Favreau is attempting to wave in the general direction of current society and say wow doesn’t this suck! too much democracy produced trump, too much technology produced ipad babies, too much bureaucracy produced complicated tax forms. That’s still stupid and wrong but it’s at least not an openly fascist position. but when you don’t confront those things as political and just say “they suck” in a way that you believe to be outside of politics, the perspective you take is that of a reactionary. a refusal to confront what you consider political is itself a political position, one where you intentionally shrink your imagination of politics to, like, government employees who work at the government building, and everything outside of it is just “natural” society - or, in this case, deeply unnatural, perverted by politics. the only apparent solution for the political conflicts in the show is to scale back “the politics” that are preventing natural society from flourishing. That’s fucking reactionary! and like sorry to pull this card but the whole “I’m above politics” schtick has a pretty extensive history of appearing in fascist slogans, from Mussolini to fucking Alex Jones, a rallying cry that these people eternally get behind - “We’re above the Left-Right divide.” positioning yourself as above politics is itself a political act, one that has a lot of baggage that, by virtue of positioning yourself as being too good for politics, you will not engage with.
so like I don’t know if Favreau is “really” a reactionary. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter because his current cultural output is deeply reactionary. but I don’t think any of this is done with intentional malice. I think when you turn art into a purely financial instrument you produce art that is fascist by default, because its only goal is to concentrate financial and political power for the ruling class by appealing to “common man” interests like. fucking Star Wars!!!!!!
amandla
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