sun bear but specifically when theyre a cub and have the big ol eyes which robo does sooo often but i didnt grab a photo of cause i honestly just love that photo of him sm
requesting all your bitter thoughts on popular ships if you’re comfortable 👀
Well I'm probably already gonna get crucified by a lot of people in this fandom for pointing out what ships I find uncomfortable, so why not?
I'll talk about my beef about the fandom depiction of those four ships specifically, because they're the ones riling me up the most whenever I go into the tags.
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Dinluke
I usually don't go anywhere near Mandalorian content (mostly because I haven't watched the show and would like to one day do so at my own pace instead of being pressured into doing so), so finding this ship in tags it doesn't belong to irks me to no end.
I've seen a few bits and pieces that aren't bad, but 90% of the content I've stumbled upon is written or drawn very out of character to the point I'm not sure I'm seeing the characters that are supposedly being depicted.
Trope-heavy fics where Din is aggressive or possessive over Luke are in bad taste, and I hate that a majority of people seems to like this unhealthy and somewhat racist dynamic.
They just honestly don't have any chemistry from what I can tell and the only commonality between them is that they were trying to be there for Grogu in their own way. And then Luke shrugged his shoulders and sent the kid off on his own into an active turf war. That's it.
Bobadin
The fetishisation is strong in this one. Anyone with a twitter account can see what I mean.
It started out as a fairly respectable ship and then it descended into 'fic writing for clout' territory.
You can tell when the author or artist doesn't care much for the characters themselves or their history, and are just putting them in situations where they can be nasty for no reason other than 'this will get me views'.
I have seen some skin crawling content online that really shouldn't have ever spilled out of anyone's brain to ever see the light of day, and no I will not put myself through explaining someone else's weird S&M fetish.
Foxiyo
Gateway ship. It's like Rexsoka, but with a vague cover of legality behind it, because supposedly Riyo Chuchi is a consenting adult.
The most prevalent dynamics depicting this ship are often disrespectful towards Fox and other clones (sometimes infantilising, other times hypersexualising), plus Riyo is written in a way that makes her seem less like an adult and more like a naive child.
Major red flags on this one.
Codywan
A ship that works if written well and respectfully, which is tragically not the case for 99% of times.
Writing Obi-wan as the perfect man with a savior complex that can do no wrong, while Cody is just his basic trophy husband with no personality or skills is... Yikes...
Lets not even talk about all the fetish stuff that goes unchecked half the time. I have seen too much that honest to god rubs me the wrong way.
They say sparsity of actual good content should make it worth more, but in this case I feel like the less good Codywan stuff there is, the more badly written content crops up to fill the void...
am beg to hear your thoughts and rambles on this please
I've put some of my thoughts here, but I Have So Many lmao. Disclaimer that I've only seen part of the Clone Wars series and that while I've read a lot of star wars comics, I certainly haven't read them all, so these are mostly Just My Thoughts on my made up Mandalorian school politics that I made up mostly for the Galidraan au.
(it's also really long so here's a readmore)
So I don't think that education past age 13 is mandated on Mandalore. For the most part, education past middle school has been handled by one's clan, through apprenticeships and adults handing down knowledge and stuff like that. Perhaps there are specialized schools for like space travel and stuff. I think even elementary schools were a hard fight to institute, especially among the more traditional clans, but I like to imagine that either a) at one point the True Mandalorians and the New Mandalorians were like "education of children is very important to both of us so we should make sure all children get educations" or b) Mand'alor Tarre Vizsla was like "Education is a core tenant of both Mandalorian culture and the Jedi culture I was raised in and so I personally am making sure all kids get educated k thx."
Education inequality is fairly rampant, as big powerful clans like Kryze or Vizsla can afford to send their children anywhere in the galaxy to get education, whereas your local Vhett dirt farmer will do what they can with the clan they have, so you might have great practical knowledge on how to deliver strill whelps and you can easily calculate how much space corn seed you need per space acre but you never had calculus and you don't know a lot about how to get legislation enacted and you definitely never got the Flying Spacecraft 101 class that all the rich kids got to have at age ten.
Then the New Mandalorians decide that Mandalore needs public schools beyond just the elementary schools. I think this happens before Satine Kryze gets into power, but she definitely goes absolutely fuckin ham on expanding education. It's very divisive at first--some farmer Houses think it's a ploy to convince all their kids to move into cities and industry, others think it's a great opportunity to give their kids a chance to achieve something more than space corn. Some warrior clans think this is an evil New Mando plot to turn all their kids into pacifists, while others are elated at the chance to let their kids learn things that would never be affordable otherwise, and an educated warrior is a better warrior. So now they want to get involved in the public schools.
So now we have (more) school politics, and the politics of education is always a divisive thing.
The thing is, the New Mandalorians don't have total control of Mandalorian politics until Satine Kryze. There are Factions. The big factions are the New Mandalorians, the True Mandalorians, and Death Watch, but there are also smaller factions, as there are in all communities. There are traditionalist clans that never remove their helmets and won't even give their names to strangers, there are industrialists who want to expand their business beyond the Mandalore system and want their kids to learn languages and laws that they couldn't even hope to comprehend, there are strong clans who argue that the clan system has always worked perfectly fine, and there are people who have lost their clan or who have been kicked out of their clan, who now have kids and have no idea how to even begin teaching them.
Can you ban all weapons from school when your student populace has a lot of members from a faction where the use and care of weapons is a literal tenant of their religion? Should you include a class on the use and care of weapons in such a case, or leave that to their clan? Should the children be able to keep their helmets on all day? What about in the case of it being religious? What about the rest of their armor--especially armor pieces that double as weapons? How much security should each school have, especially when Death Watch is in the area and has been known to kill children? Would having armed guards posted around the school endanger them more--or send a message that your school board doesn't want, that it's actually really dangerous to send your kid to school? Should the school provide free breakfast and lunch to children? Is that their job? Will the parents consider it an attempt to brainwash their children into being sympathetic to the ruling faction?
Despite being extremely divisive, as soon as the New Mandalorians implement schooling for teenagers, everyone else also immediately decides to implement schooling for teenagers. Implementation and effectiveness varies. I think areas with primarily True Mandalorian rule or clans that are more like Din Djarin's clan would have fewer public schools overall, and most of the families would stick to the traditional clan-based education. Death Watch ruled areas probably have schools that are basically military schools. I think New Mandalorian schools would focus a lot on business and politics--trying to get children to be a new generation of leaders, because a good economy is very important in keeping people peaceful. In places with New Mandalorian control, weapons are banned outright on premises, but with True Mandalorian schools, I think the use of weapons is banned, maybe you have to keep it in your locker or something, but I don't think school is a weapons-free zone.
After the Mandalorian Civil War, Satine Kryze takes power. The True Mandalorian faction is dead, and Death Watch is in hiding. And Satine Kryze goes ham on education. Everything she does is for Mandalore's children, of course she goes ham on education.
She builds schools everywhere. She enacts legislation to make sure that there are elementary schools and secondary schools enough to service all the children of Mandalore. Real "x amount of schools for every y amount of population" stuff.
All schools provide free meals for all children--this is her single most popular law for a populace just starting to recover from a civil war. So many people lost everything; making sure that their kids have two meals a day even when there's nothing in the pantry at home is worth whatever the hell these New Mandalorians are teaching in these schools.
She brings in several teachers from across the galaxy to help them build a curriculum, though most of the education stuff is still decided by Mandalorian locals. What do Mandalorian children need to know in order to thrive on any planet they set their boots to? Mandalore will need to trade with other planets, and they will need to know about these other planets to not be exploited in their current state of weakness. Mandalore has a seat in the Senate; its children need to know about who else has a seat, and what their priorities are, and whether or not those priorities will conflict with Mandalore's priorities. Mando'ade will need to learn new languages, and they will need to learn math and engineering and history and politics and civics and there is just so much to learn and their population has been reduced so drastically. There are a lot of people who would teach if only they were still alive, but they are not, so we hired advisors.
She doesn't even consider involving the EduCorps--that's a Jedi thing, and even Obi-Wan Kenobi is barely welcome on Mandalore after having helped end the Civil War.
Secondary education is still not mandatory, but more people than ever are taking advantage of it. In a generation's time, nearly everyone will be sending their kids to school for at least a bit--maybe just a few months when there's no harvesting to do, so they can learn basic engineering and shop skills, or sending the kids to school for as many hours as they can go when Mom is between jobs and the pantry's getting a little thin--and regardless of Satine's popularity with the interplanetary stuff, regardless of what's happening with the Senate, the one thing most people like about Satine is the schools.
firstly, I loved your clone essay and I can't wait for your deathwatch one if it's still in the works
I had a question about the Jedi philosophy/teachings if you're cool to answer—the Chosen One prophecy said that Anakin would bring balance to the Force. I've only seen the movies once so I can't remember how much stake the Jedi put in that (IIRC it was just Qui-Gon's interpretation?) but I took that to mean that the Force had to be unbalanced, assuming in favor of the Light Side. I guess my question is since the Jedi are good, how could their destruction be anything balancing? Obviously the point couldn't have been that they should be more tolerant of the Dark Side, and I don't know how they could be if it corrupts but does that just mean the prophecy was BS? I don't know if I'm interpreting it wrong or missing something?
all /gen sorry if this seems like a really stupid question lol
First. Thank you so much!!! The essay is still in the work! It's just a matter of having time (a.k.a. having a full weekend when I'm not working and am willing to stay inside and spend all day doing research and write an essay).
Second. It is certainly not a stupid question! I nevertheless appreciate the tone indicator! I know it's hard to convey tone through text over the internet.
So, from what I understand, the light side is the balance. The dark side must be kept under firm control or this balance is lost.
When the clone wars break out, we remember Yoda saying, "Victory? Victory, you say? Master Obi-Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun the Clone War has."
The dark side, long kept under control by the Jedi, had broken free, in a sense. They were no longer able to pin point it or regain control of its influence and power. And this had been building over the years.
Essentially, the force was already unbalanced.
The council and the Order's Leadership had been blinded by their hubris and as @whymylifehome, has previously said, the Jedi lost their battle against the dark side at Geonosis. In that moment, they commit themselves to war, not peace; destruction, not life, and their own imbalances and flaws come to the forefront.
"As Jedi, we were trained to be keepers of the peace, not soldiers. But all I've been since I was a Padawan is a soldier."
-Ahsoka Tano
But they also commit themselves to other wrongs. Like the use of a slave army and the use of child soldiers and eventually acts we'd consider immoral (like burning Geonosians alive).
We see this narrative during the Mortis arc too. The Brother represents how the dark side has broken free in the universe. The Father represents keeping this force under control. But he is growing older and weaker and can no longer contain his son, representing the Jedi's ineffectiveness at keeping the dark side under control. In his attempt to break free of control, the Son kills the embodiment of the Light Side, the Daughter/Sister.
And according to George Lucas, balance is when light prevails and people control their darkness. Although, he has given many conflicting statements on this since the OT aired. For example:
"The overriding philosophy in Episode I—and in all the Star Wars movies, for that matter—is the balance between good and evil."
-George Lucas, quoted in L. Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Making of Episode I, 1999
But it seems, more recently, that he has been defining balance in the force as the removal of the toxicity, hatred, and fear of the dark side. And it seems that this is something that must be constantly maintained and upkeep by the Jedi.
So their destruction brought imbalance.
So it, obviously, becomes hard for them to maintain the balance when they've mostly been rounded up and killed at the start of the new Sith Empire run by Darth Sidious. And it's something that continues to be hard to do when the responsibility of rebuilding the Jedi and helping to maintain that balance falls on one person. I've argued that Luke Skywalker was "set up" to fail. He's attempting to bring back the Jedi Order a generation after the near-total annihilation of all Jedi and the complete collapse of the Order.
He took on the total responsibility for creating a force of Force users to keep the dark side maintained and contained.
He helped his father bring balance by defeating the Emperor and thus usher in a new era, but he was going to fail. He did not have the same robustness as the Order did and that meant he did not have the same influence and power to keep an eye on and actually wrangle the dark side and it's influences.
So much so, that he gives into fear. Fear of failure and fear of destruction and fear of the dark side rearing it's ugly head again and tipping the balance he'd been working so hard to maintain, practically alone (or so it seems).
