#mando things

[lowlights]

You and Mando are traveling through space with time to kill. It's bunkbed chat time.

*

"Mando?"

"Yeah?"

"What do you dream about?" you ask idly from your bunk that sits above his.

Silence.

"Mando, you awake?" you call out.

"Yeah," he sighs out through the filter of his helmet.

You liked to ask questions of Mando before the two of you fell asleep, and the quiet stretches of space always gave your mind time to wander. You quickly realized that you enjoyed asking the kind Mandalorian any question that passed through your head, endlessly entertained by his feigned annoyance.

"So?" you continue, "What do you dream about?"

"No one asking me things." The little chuckle he lets out at his own joke doesn't escape you. He likes the little back and forth the two of you have.

You think about your next question, letting the comfortable silence stretch out between the two of you.

"Mando?"

Sigh. "Yes?"

"Do you cut your own hair?" you ask with a smile. You've often imagined what he looks like under that stoic helmet. "Like, do you have a ponytail under there? A shaved head? Are you bald?"

"Where do you get these questions? What goes on in your head?" he asks with a bemused tone.

"Oh, so you're bald."

"Am not," he says defensively, although he immediately softens his voice. "And yes, I do cut my own hair. I don't like it too long, but I don't always get a chance to trim it. Before you ask...yes, it's a little long right now."

You bite your lip and think about what his too-long hair might look like. "Do you have any questions for me?"

He ponders for a moment. "No. But...I don't mind if you ask more questions. Helps the time pass."

"What was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?" you inquire, desperate to learn more about a clumsy, teenaged Mando.

"Alright, question time is over."

You grin, totally unaware of Mando's matching smile under his helmet. You'll get it out of him eventually, and he knows it. He would answer anything you asked of him.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

I don't know if it's a purposeful choice to carry it over from Legends or not and tbh I don't really care, but between the little kids running past in Mando helmets and the talk of foundlings and now The Mandalorian accidentally becoming a tired Dad when he absolutely did not mean to, I'm glad to see the Mandalorian attitude towards kids seems to have carried over into the series so far.

Also loving that instead of the "suave but emotionless bad ass who appeals to fanboys" I was worried we would get, so far the Mandalorian /has/ a bad-ass mood, but it's also balanced with him, like, hitting his head or constantly getting knocked on his ass, feeling tired, and being soft towards kids & polite towards acquaintances. Espc. the permanent exasperation.

SAME. AT ALL THIS.

I’ve deeply appreciated how he’s clearly VERY good at his job, but it also shows that like... he has bad days (nearly gets mauled by those two beasts of burden I forget the name of), he can get overwhelmed (guard protecting the baby, jawas), he can’t 1v1 everything (large animal I forget the name of), and he has his limits (exhaustion, impatience, not enough knowledge [bad jawaese])

He’s surprisingly well-rounded so far. I wouldn’t call him a particularly deep character right now, but he’s a LOT better drawn than I expected so far.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

Mandalorians are 100% of my investment in Star Wars, so I am hyped about this against my will bc that armor looks so good and Taika is involved, and Favreau actually does seem to be personally invested in Mandalorians.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

Frankly, I don’t trust anyone who characterizes the Mandalorians (here, referring to Legends Mandalorians) as lacking a proper society or societal structures like schools, formal education, local economies, marketplaces, trade routes, guilds, etc.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

@the Solo Visual Guide: Thank you for having Mandalorians mint their own coins. Because I’m so tired of people writing Mandalorians as not having centralized or organized anything. Also, thank you for bringing back the mythosaur and canonically attaching it again to Mandalorians.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

My favorite word in the Mando’a dictionary is echoylir: to search, to mourn, to grieve. One looks for something because one mourns its loss, one grieves because someone is missing.

This is a double meaning that is passed down to its noun form echoy: search, the act of mourning. The act of mourning is a search. Even further, the adjective form echoy’la—searching, mourning—has a third meaning: lost. The one who is mourning or searching is themselves lost. One only searches for the path if they are lost, i.e. they do not know where it is. One who is searching does so because they cannot continue on without what they seek; perhaps a bit much if it’s one’s speeder keys, but a sound principle. More poignantly, one who is mourning does so because they feel lost without the person for whom they grieve.

I just always find it so beautiful and stunning that both concepts have the same word here.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

(Use this one instead please)

I made this for you because reasons.

I am a di’kut who keeps forgetting to publish this but, ahhhhhhh! Amazing, thank you @natswash 

[captainofthetidesbreath]

I’m working on this post about deer iconography in Mandalorian culture (which I totally made up, but that’s for later), and I was thinking about what would differentiate my (made up) deer from the shatual native to Mandalore, which generally give the impression of being Mandalorian deer. I looked up what we know about shatual and checked all their mentions in the novels they appear in:

Much bigger than strill—seems to be at least as tall as an average human

Game animal, often hunted for meat and sport.

Divided into bucks and does.

One of their vocalizations is referred to as a bark.

Well, that isn’t very specific—there aren’t even antlers or horns. So, I went to check what other animals it could be, starting with animals that are divided into buck and doe that aren’t deer, and this is the list I ended up with:

antelope (yea, not a deer)

chinchilla

gerbil

hamster

hare

kangaroo

wallaby

koala

mouse / rat (sidebar, in-universe, borrats are divided into buck and doe)

rabbit

squirrel

weasel

There isn’t any evidence I’ve found so far that states that a shatual is not any of these animals, scaled up to be as tall as the average human if necessary, and a lot of these animals have a vocalization that’s referred to as a “bark”. But what am I really suggesting here?

Shatual are human-sized jackalopes.