One thing that helps me deal with people who insist on hating on Satine for kicking out the traditionalists...
... Is that while people keep insisting that Satine exiled 'those poor warriors' they forget that One, the people she kicked out weren't the poor or anything, they were basically the rich guys.
We know the following:
There are clans that are warrior focused clans like the Vizsla's, meaning that Satine didn't exile warriors (aka the whole population) in general but a specific group of clans
Said clans we know were in power and had literally Nobility and Royal Tiles (Duchess, Princess, Countess...) + pieces of land (See, Krownest)!
Said clans were also the minority of traditionalists who wanted to keep the power in the warrior clans
... So basically she kicked the rich guys, even specifically only the minority of rich guys who refused to change their ways if you want to go with that interpretations
And so, every time someone tries to insist Satine was horrible for exiling warriors all I can think of is dude bros getting angry that the Elon Musk equivalent in Mandalorian culture was kicked out.
If Satine and Din switched places, but like Just Their Appearances changed, Din has Satine's backstory + personality and vice versa And Everything Stayed The Same in their stories (except maybe a few lines in the clone wars because Heaven's Forbid have a homoromantic relationship in the 2000's/s, though obviously the romance would be more obvious than Codywan's)
People would love New Mandalorians and Satine Din
And Duke Of Mandalore X High Jedi General of The Republic would be Way More Popular
So apparently the latest anti Satine bullshit is that she's not a mandalorian (and therefore is a colonizer) because she wasn't born on mandalore, but instead was born on Kalevala...
A world in the mandalore system, inhabited by mandalorians...
Ok first, y'all do realize that if being born on mandalore is the threshold for counting as a "real mandalorian" then that excludes a TON of characters from being mandalorian right? Like under this definition popular characters like Jango, Boba, and Din are not mandalorians
Second, this is some serious colonizer bullshit (that people use to call Satine a colonizer! Oh the irony)
"You're not a citizen/member of a culture if you were born outside the homeland" was a thing colonialists used to deny status and rights to people
What in the actual show makes you think she didn't already compromise?
Why did the traditional Mandalorians NOT need to learn how to compromise?
What was wrong about Satine, in the actual text of the show, that makes compromise necessary?
I need you to give me an answer that does not echo "meet me in the middle, says the unjust man" for the trads who Just Want To Keep Their Guns. Satine canonically doesn't ban armor (people wear it), doesn't ban the language (she speaks at least two dialects, Korkie takes notes in it, and it's on all the signage), doesn't ban the food (no evidence for or against, because that's an insane thing to ban so why would anyone even touch on it), doesn't ban the culture except for saying "don't do war."
So, based on the text of the show...
Why did Satine "need to learn how to compromise," and what makes you think she didn't already do so?
We are only told the following: Satine was elected by the New Mandos aka the CONFIRMED majority of the people of Mandalore; Satine Possibly exiled a the warriors out of Mandalore (possibly, because Almec had every reason to lie in that moment and because I think that @/smalltheurlsweretaken theory that it was more of a treaty for the warriors to not start shit in return of having the least damaged location in the sector); She knows Mando'a and how to fight and so the kids in the Academy; She steps down the moment people don't want her in charge.
So like. WHERE'S the enforcing?????
You can't argue it was exiling the warriors, because we do know that they were a Minority and that there still remained warriors in Mandalore thanks to the confirmation that the Protectors were the Royal Guard but with more traditional armour. Plus we see that the kids Do know how to fight, and if they were trying to ban being warriors then the kids, specifically the nephew of the Duchess and his friends, wouldn't know how to fight
You can't argue it's banning the language, because we see it all over Mandalore (even in the Academy) (post by @/ahsoka-in-a-hood)And we have Satine be the only canonical character to speak it in the show.
You can't argue that it's via erasing over history, when we see all over the place Murals, some of which are possibly older than Satine herself.
so like. Where's the enforcing??????
Where is Satine, who left the post of ruling Mandalore the second people didn't want her there, enforcing her pacifism on the Mandalorians?
So I was scrolling through Star Wars YouTube - an error, I know - and I came across a critic about Satine that I wanted to address:
They were criticism her not having a standing army + not reforming the warriors into a police force.
And I just wanted to point the following: We do know for a fact that the New Mandalorians had a Police Force, called Mandalorian Guard, from which you also had the Mandalorian Protectors - members of which were Fenn Rau - and the Secret Services - the Mandalorian Guard which, if you go with the Legends that the Mandostans so much love, they were formed by various clans and the structure was specifically made to avoid clans separating themselves from other clans (thus preventing clans not getting along and starting a problem of clans not working together).
As for the army... aren't you fans always saying that all the Mandalorians are an army in on itself? Ready to fight at the call? New Mandalorians won the Great Clan Wars, you could point out that the New Mandos lost against Maul and the Crime Syndicates - which I remind you were needed by Death Watch because Satine had the majority of the Mandalorian people backing her up - but like. We do the see the Mandalorian Guard fighting the syndicates. Who had blasters. And the majority of the Mandalorian people we can assume didn't, let alone armour on themselves really - especially if, ya know, the majority of the people weren't part of the warrior elite.
And that also the warriors are considered a minority, an elite minority but a minority in 4 million people (in comparison, Naboo has 4.5 billion people) still
And also felt comfortable enough to protest against Satine in a open space - which could be for various reasons, from the guard actually holding the syndicates back to the syndicates actually only attacking the priority points that Maul ordered an attack on and no where else but like. no one knew that outside of the syndicate (though, if we go with 'good strategist mandos' thing maybe they figured that out so they weren't worried) and we know the Mandos are crazy but i'm pretty sure that the number we saw probably wasn't the entire population (I'm horrible with crowd numbers but I'm guessing from 500 to 2000 max) so like.
Idk man, we have evidence that there existed police and people meant to protect, we know that teenagers knew how to fight while at the same time that the majority of the people weren't part of the Mandalorian warrior elite and that they were already at an disadvantage in numbers + were surprised after a relative safe 20 years of peace and recovery thus didn't have stuff ready + were apparently comfortable enough to protest and we can assume it wasn't the entire population in there so like.
Maybe the DW acted when they did because the New Mandos were about to turn the tables or something? but that's just my opinion
Satine's life is not a quiet one, but there are some constants.
They are, by and large, not good ones.
This fic does NOT include Mando'a, unless the word is has untranslatable connotations, because I felt it would detract from the flow. Satine thinks and speaks primarily in Mando'a unless she is working with a non-Mandalorian individual, so just apply Translation Convention as makes sense.
------------
Satine comes into this world pale, silent, and covered in someone else’s blood.
The first isn’t unexpected. The last is commonplace. The middle is… less so.
Satine almost kills her mother.
It’s a near miss, but a miss all the same.
--
Satine is still young when her father puts away his armor and starts to argue for pacifism. She listens, though she doesn’t understand, yet.
She’s five when Uncle Jaster dies, and she sees her father cry. She sees Jango cry, too. Mama doesn’t cry, but she makes drinks like shig and warm food that’s supposed to help. Satine tries to help, too, by hugging her dad and Jango, and trying to share her stuffed animals with Jango.
He’s closer to her age, so maybe stuffed animals help him, too? It doesn’t seem like it, to her, but Jango pulls her up into his own lap to cuddle for a bit, so maybe she did help.
Satine asks why Uncle Jaster is gone, and her mother explains that someone they knew wanted power, and they tried to use violence to get it, and they killed Jaster for it. It didn’t work. They didn’t get what they wanted, but Uncle Jaster is dead anyway.
For the first time, Satine understands what violence is, and why her parents hate it.
She doesn’t understand why Jango doesn’t hate it too.
--
Satine is seven the first time her self-defense classes are necessary. She’s not very good yet, but that’s mostly because she’s still small and wriggly. When someone sets off a bomb in Sundari, and tries to scoop her up and fly away, she writhes and bites and then it’s too high to fall without hurting herself. They fly and fly and then they try to land, and Satine gets a tiny hand into the gap between their helmet and neck guard, and then the drop her, because her tiny hands have tiny nails, and those tiny nails are sharp.
She runs away through the hangar, slips between crates and wheels and too-small crevices until her family’s guard catches up and arrests the people who tried to take her.
The blood stays on her hand until she washes it off.
She can’t see it anymore. It still feels like it’s there, under her little nails.
Honestly the more I think about it, the more I find myself enjoying the idea of Jango being pro-Satine. He's not active about it or anything, but he sees her in the news sometimes and goes "Oh, huh, she's addressing the water table issue. Neat."
Just. There's no real canon on how Jango feels about politics after Galidraan, other than 'the Jedi should suffer.' Maybe he looks back on his experiences and goes "well, I got a lot of people killed for no reason. That sure was a wash."
Maybe he decided Mando politics aren't his circus anymore. Not his problem. She can deal with fixing the ecological disaster their generation inherited. Then she actually does and he’s very “oh. Huh. Would you look at that.”
He doesn’t care that much, but if asked, he vaguely approves of the general shape of what she’s doing.
I just really love the idea that everyone in-universe ASSUMES Jango would hate Satine, but he's neutral-to-positive on her ecological programs and infrastructural developments. His main negativity is about her taste in men. She dated a Jedi. Absolutely tragic.
I think it would be really funny if someone tried to get Jango's negative opinion on Satine for propaganda reasons and he, either legitimately or because he hates Death Watch more, says "I think she's doing good work" and then checks out. That one sentence nearly ends two wars and almost starts a third.
I have no idea how Satine would feel if Jango said something about this publicly. Conflicted, maybe. I want him to show up at her window in the dead of night with advice on how to upgrade her security system since it's not good enough to keep him out. She throws shoes at him.
I'm married to this idea now. Oh my god I need to use this in a fic. Jango's vaguely pro-Satine and it confuses everyone he meets. I need this. I need this comedy in my life. Guys there is literally nothing stopping me from declaring my new headcanon to be that Jango finds Satine to be the most palatable of current Mandalorian politicians.
He's not agreeing with her on everything, but she's managed to keep the main city from blowing up for over fifteen years, which is pretty damn successful without a darksaber to solidify her claim. He's not going to hug her in public of sing her praises, but he'll give her an awkward thumbs up if they run into each other somehow, and he'll say something nice about her environmental policy if someone asks him about his feelings on her. He wants to see if she can throw a punch, but he's not, like, mad about the fact that she doesn't want to? He's not stanning, but he thinks she's doing better than pretty much anyone else at the table at this point.
She fascinates him and he kind of wants to see her succeed because, fuck it, maybe Mandalore and Kalevala deserve the same kinds of farms and forests as Concord Dawn.
(Really the biggest block I'm facing here is whether Jango can manage enough self-awareness to say "maybe I was kind of fucked up by my childhood and I appreciate her trying to make sure that cycle of violence isn't perpetuated.")
(Unfortunately, going by Kamino, Jango is not that self-aware. Alas.)
(Also this is about what I think would be funny, not what I think would be realistic. If you want to argue that Jango would hate Satine for fanon reasons, please take it elsewhere. I'm here for 'huh, she's neat' and that's where I'm staying.)
