My original design for a stylized Mandalorian buy'ce (helmet).
This buy'ce is painted green for duty, orange for shereshoy (lust for life), and with red Millaflowers for honoring a Nabooian parent. It is more decorative and stylized than we really see from canon sources but you can't tell me that there wasn't ONE oddball Mando who had the soul of an artist and zero cares to give.
Regardless of my Mando's actual name, I imagine that their friends would have called them Sarad (flower).
Iiiiiiii think that Hod Ha’ran continued to hang out with Shereshoy up until kaysh died in battle. And Shereshoy did eventually learn that the giant iridescent saltwater crocodile who can talk and do magic is ALSO named Hod Ha’ran and being a Registered Thembo, Shereshoy just thinks it’s so fuckin cool that kaysh met the REAL Hod Ha’ran (time displaced force presence of a completely unrelated Cave Dwelling Wizard) AND ALSO made a separate friend ALSO named Hod (actually Hod Ha’ran)
Also that sabertooth tookas were a real threat on taung-era Coruscant
Summary: Your second day in the covert reveals both new and familiar faces; hospitality and hostility.
Chapter 3 of the Shereshoy series | Masterlist | Ch. 2 | Ch. 4
Warnings: lots of Mando’a, mild language, soft Din, awkward Din, protective Din [he’s got a wide range, okay?], original Mandalorian characters… maybe a little bit of angst? It’s mostly worldbuilding, so I think that’s about it.
AN: A word from the author – “I’m in grad school, I take forever to write things.Soon I will start grad school again, which means I’ll write this instead of my dissertation. I’m quite fond of the Mando Legends Lore, if you haven’t noticed. I literally got Kad Ha’rangir & Arasuum tattooed on me.”
This is the third part of a sister fic for my one-shot (Courting) a friend of mine wrote based on this request, and I’m so happy she’s letting me share it with you guys! She is also sharing it on AO3, so be sure to send her your love and kudos there as well! We hope you enjoy 💛
Translations, in order of appearance:
Aliit ori’shya tal'din: Family is more than blood
Rejorhaa'i kaysh murcyur gar shupur’ika?: Are you gonna tell her to kiss your ouchies?
Cuyi ulyc, vod.: Be careful, sister.
Aliit: family
Ad(e): child/children
Kar’ta beskar: the central "diamond" of Mandalorian armor; lit. heart armor
Mirjahaal: peace of mind, "healing", general term for emotional well-being especially after a trauma or bereavement
Beroya: bounty hunter
Kurshi: tree
Sen’tra: jackpack
Buir(e): Parent/Parents
Akaanati'kar'oya: The War of Life and Death (Mandalorian myth), creation story
Verd'goten: a special trial for one to become warrior; lit. birth of warrior
So'haale: births
Urman'gedete: prayers
Eparave: feasts
Cyarir evaar'la: Courting
Alii'aliit: meeting of the clans, the closest thing mandalorians have to government or parliament; lit. "clan of clans"
Tsad: group (of people), alliance
Bes'ede: Mythosaur
Kandush : inevitable doom
Time moves differently underground.
With Odona, the hours passed quickly. As a team, you could disassemble and reconstruct nearly any ship in their small fleet, save for a few parts— which no one had yet found and delivered. The days were faster when the guardsman opted to join you in his free time, his first visit and subsequent dialogue with Odona still memorable.
To what do I owe the displeasure; Oh Mighty Protector of the Covert and Savior of Foundlings?
The pleasure of my company is for your friend, ‘Dona.
Why? Going to terrorize her again, Ik’? Ven’rejorhaa'i kaysh murcyur gar shupur’ika?
Cuyi ulyc, vod.
You had sensed there was a joke hidden within their jibes, one you were unable to decipher in their foreign tongue, but neither took the time to explain. Whilst Ikarus lacked use for the labor that required fine motor control, his presence disrupted the monotony of the many tedious and repetitive tasks you and Odona spent much of your time doing— their frequent banter kept you entertained throughout the day.
The time you had spent in the medbay was shorter— the most common injuries coming from the older adolescents early on in their training, whose resilience and constitution had yet to strengthen— as well as wrist and ankle sprains from poor fighting forms, the occasional laceration from knife safety training; and at worst, injuries from the teens and young adults earned from a vigorous sparring session.
But with Din, the mornings and evenings together never felt long enough. The hours were reminiscent of your time with him and the Child in the Crest, the warmth of your aliit protected by familiar cold walls; the stone of the cavern both analogous yet antithetic to the durasteel of your former home.
One forged of hands, and the other of time— one of the fires of a furnace, the other the fires of a planet’s mantle. Your time together before was that of contrivance, engineered— with agendas to follow and assignments to complete— your interactions affable yet somewhat artificial, a present barrier precluding your companionship from evolving into something more… More natural, more innate, more intimate. Here, your time together had been more candid, endearing— Din no longer shied away from any probing questions or physical closeness, which allowed that previous barrier to melt and slowly flow away like that of bedrock to magma, reshaping and remolding your times of leisure together to hours of unified repose.
The hours turned to days, the days turned to weeks, and the weeks turn to this moment, where seemingly no time passes at all— blanketed in the familiar darkness of your room. The unlit and chilled space, at first an unacquainted oddity, now a comfortable companion to spend the sleeping and waking hours in. The ritual remains the same— awaken with the Child, have the morning trade-off with Din, make the caf, and begin the tasks for the day— like clock work, a well-oiled droid.
This morning is almost no different, and yet, you hesitate to leave your bed, your conversation with Din the previous morning still fresh in your mind—
Din had sat aside the table, his body resting against the wall— unarmored, arms crossed, head tilted to the side, the same position as every morning. Once you handed him the Child and sat, caf in hand, he finally spoke.
“I’d like you to join me tomorrow,” he stated.
The lack of pleasantries from him was unsurprising, though a teasing ‘Good morning to you, Din’ was a tempting response. Instead, you greeted him with a grin and an unobjectionable reply—
“Alright, what are we doing?”
He hummed, pleased with your immediate acceptance.
“The adults alternate supervising the ade. Tomorrow, it’ll be our turn.”
You gestured toward the Child in his arms, in a playful retort. “Don’t we supervise this ad every day?”
The Child cooed in his arms, his ears perked tentatively at his mention. Din sighed, with a smile in voice.
“We do. It’s tradition for all of the adults to care for the ade… All have wisdom to share.”
Skeptical, you thought: ‘What would I possibly teach them?’
You observed the Child resting so comfortably on Din’s chest— his tiny hand gripped tightly into Din’s clothes, right where his armor’s kar’ta beskar normally sat. It was a stark contrast compared to the Child’s behavior upon your first meeting. With any loud noises and sudden movements, he would shrink inwards in his cradle— as if he could make himself any smaller. Medical scanners made him grimace, unfamiliar places and people made his ears droop— seeing others upset made him wary. And yet, he was endlessly curious. Despite his initial unease with the two new adults in his life, the Child was quick to trust you both— and with his trust, his personality came through… his affection, his laughter, his love.
From there, Din learned how to tend to someone outside of himself— what it meant to have someone that relied on him, and more colossally, someone that wanted Din, as he was. The Armorer branded him as the Child’s father, and the delighted squeal from the little one sealed the bond that Din had been trying to hide for so long. Just as the Child learned to trust Din with his welfare, so too did Din learn to trust the Child with his own mirjahaal.
Perhaps it wasn’t the lessons they taught, but rather the connection they made, and the wisdom they sought.
With this, the true question then inverted from the skeptic ‘what would I teach them’, to the sanguine ‘what will I learn?’...
“...When do we meet them?”
—
To the ade, the former beroya is nothing more than a tall kurshi fit to climb.
Somehow, Din appears endlessly patient and playful with all six of the young children. They utilize their limitless spurts of energy to continuously attack Din as a squad, bringing him to the ground— he’ll exclaim a faux wail, and collapse to his knees— and the collective giggles of the ade begin the cycle again.
Whenever a child grows tired of their battle, they come to you— wanting to be tossed into the air, or onto the nearest surface. Supposedly being gently thrown around aids in their brain development, and ‘it’s good practice for their first sen’tra flight’, Din tells you. The logic is questionable at best, but hearing their joyous squeals makes the ever-growing muscle fatigue worthwhile. Even the child of the Djarin clan is as equally amused, his own little spirit mightily lifted by the experience of being with other kids again.
During your time on Sorgan, the Child was happy to interact with the other children— but mostly, he watched them, rather than play. Perhaps he was still too shy or too wary to fully engage with so many people, but surrounded by these Foundlings now, he looks at home; like he belongs. Amidst this cohort, he’s made a new friend, Mara, the youngest of the lot. Her long and dark hair reminds you— and perhaps the Child— of Winta, Omera’s daughter. The two spent the most time together on Sorgan, and despite the little one’s inability to say, he misses her.
Mara and the Child sit away from the squad play-fighting Din, in front of the single wall of volcanic tuff— embellished with crimps and pockets, graven by many hands. You watch them, as they examine the wall, looking up and down, side to side. Your eyes travel upward to the small cavate, almost eight feet from the floor. You watch as Mara looks to the Child and nods, and begins her ascent up— using her fingers and toes to grip tightly onto the various crevices in the wall— and the Child begins to follow.
You step forward, almost instinctively, wanting to call out to them to stop, wanting to reach out to the children to prevent a fall—
Then, from nowhere, Din appears at your side, extending his hand to stop you. “Don’t,” he says softly, “Let them try.”
You look at him puzzled, and he continues. “If you distract them now, they might fall…” he pauses, and turns his head to watch them, “...but if you allow them to focus, they can succeed. Watch…”
The pair silently step closer, closing the distance between themselves and the wall, watching the two ade slowly make their way up to the cavate. Mara climbs inside first, and lays on her belly, reaching out to the Child to help him trek the final span of the wall. Once inside, the Child turns around, to face the entire room below him. He squeals a little clamor of excitement, proud of his triumph, before looking down to his buire.
“Good job, kid,” Din says. “Come on down, it’s time to go.”
The Child looks at you both doe-eyed, his ears drooping, as he peers over the ledge. He looks back to Mara, and back down over the ledge, contemplating his next move.
You lean slightly towards Din, speaking in a hushed tone. “I don’t think he knows how to get back down.”
“He can do it,” Din says confidently.
You challenge him, “He looks scared.”
Din insists, “Then he’ll do it scared.”
He steps forward once more, his body almost pressed against the wall, reaching one hand up. “Come on kid, climb down.”
The child’s ears droop even lower, letting out a quiet whimper, a little anxious look on his face. He looks back up to Mara, who gives him an encouraging “You can do it,” before he finally begins his descent towards you and Din.
Carefully, his little clawed feet grip into the same pockets he used to climb up, and his hands hold onto the ledge. He looks down at his buire with a slightly quivering lip, then back up to his hands. Slowly, he presses on, his movements deliberate and cautious, gravity tugging at his little limbs with relentless persuasion, clammy clawed-hands threatening to slip free from the cold stone. His disgruntled babbling fading with each tentative step, footfalls growing more steady with every downward stride.
His little foot finally reached something soft— the hand of his buir, waiting for his arrival. With an excited squeal, he looks to Din, holding out his clawed fingers for Din to grasp. Din takes the Child into his arms.
“Good job… I knew you could do it.” Din whispers to him.
With his ad in hand, Din looks back to the cavate, where Mara sits silently. “You too, Mara, come down,” he says.
Mara, unlike the little one, is less graceful, only climbing down two feet of wall before leaping off. You instinctively reach your arms out to catch her, but are a few seconds too late, as she lands confidently on her feet, smiling up at you. She giggles, asking the Child “Wasn’t that fun!” and the little one cooing affectionately with a bright smile.
“They need to rest.” Din says, before leading Mara and the Child back with the other ade. You follow him in toe, and aid him while he attempts to settle the children in preparation for them to sleep.
The chamber is bathed in the soft, warm light of the cressets along the walls. The ade sit and lay in a circle on the floor, looking up at the two adults expectedly, waiting for you both to join them. Din gently places the Child in Mara’s lap, seating himself amongst them.
The ade demanded a story before they would agree to their midday nap, and with only one long sigh, Din relented. As you sit beside him, the tale of Akaanati'kar'oya begins.
—
In ages past, when cosmic realms were naught,
Two gods emerged, each with a purpose sought.
Kad Ha'rangir, embodiment of change,
A dance of growth, His essence did arrange.
Arasuum, the god of slow decay,
In stillness thrived, where life would fade away.
Eternal foes, in battle they engaged,
Ideals clashed, the cosmic script was paged.
Kad Ha'rangir, with eyes of vibrant light,
Envisioned galaxies in endless flight.
His very step, a ripple through the void,
Transforming all, where life and change enjoyed.
Arasuum, with eyes as deep as night,
Desired a realm where stasis held its might.
Decay His touch, a silent, withering breath,
A universe in stillness, touched by death.
In ceaseless clash, their cosmic struggle roared,
A dance of gods, where destinies were stored.
Stoic truths emerged from this grand design,
A tale of action, life's breath so divine.
"For action is the breath that life bestows,
A vital force, as mighty river flows.
Inaction, slow demise, a creeping shade,
A silent death in stillness' dark cascade."
Through galaxies and time, the story spread,
Of Kad Ha'rangir, where change was bred.
Arasuum's touch, a cautionary tale,
A realm in stillness, where all things frail.
So heed the moral, in verses spun,
That action is life, beneath the sun.
For inaction's grasp, a silent breath,
A slow demise, an encroaching death.
—
The ade rest together in a haphazard heap of limbs on various bedcovers and furs draped across the floor. Exhausted from their Beroya Battles and abseil adventures, they finally sleep, leaving the two adults to quietly watch over them together. In the chamber’s silent embrace, the air hangs heavy and chilled— a symphony of stillness envelops the room, broken by the muted shuffle of shifting bodies, and the hushed breaths of the ade. The only audible rhythm is that of the pulsating cadence of your own heartbeat and the rush of blood moving inside your head.
Your eyes scan over the ade, finding a sense of calmness watching their steady breaths, in… out.
In… out.
In… out.
Your gaze once again falls onto the Child, cuddled against Mara, also breathing steadily. In the gentle cradle of his friend’s arms, he looks peaceful. Had he ever slept this soundly on the Crest?... Who held him every night before us? Who will take care of him after us?
In the softest whisper, to not disturb the ade, you lean closer to Din, telling him the obvious— “He’s happy here.”
“...Yes,” Din replies, just as quietly.
“Was this your experience, too? After the Mandalorians saved you?”
“No.”
His visor is trained on the little one’s sleeping face—the same face of a child who was once trapped in the suffocating darkness of a sealed cradle—a cage, a cage whose opening only revealed another prison, in the form of two bounty hunters hovering over him like… a B2 Battle Droid, with a blaster pointed in a child’s face. A child rescued from death at the last possible moment by a shiny warden, offering an adiaphorous detainment.
“It was… a time of war. I was trained to fight in it. I hope… that they never have to.” Din says, his gaze scanning over the ade once more.
“I thought all Mandalorians were warriors.”
He, too, believed the same notion for many years. Training from the day he was rescued to the day he became an adult, after his verd'goten, life became a perpetual streak of jobs. Commission, retrieval, payment. Commission, retrieval, payment… Until a strange, golden, aureate armorsmith joined his tribe, bringing tales of the “Great Forge of Mandalore,” and the songs of the artificers that echoed through the speos as they worked. He remembers the first time he kneeled in front of her small, austere forge, in a dark room beneath a busy market above, listening as she spoke of the ethos, the rites, the latria, the true way of the Mandalore.
“No. Everyone is trained to survive. But… we used to live, too.”
“...Until Mandalore was taken.”
“Yes.”
So'haale, urman'gedete, eparave, cyarir evaar'la, alii'aliit… A cultus he could only dream of, but never truly have. Spoken knowledge fades into whispers, slipping through his fingers like sand as the voices of the ancestors grow ever fainter. Each decampment a dissolution of tsad res publica, each step forward a battle against oblivion.
“I’m sorry.” You lean over, resting your head on his pauldron. “...Maybe there’ll come a time when we’ll live in the light, on a planet that welcomes us.”
Din knows that within every Mandalorian is a patchwork of unfamiliar faces and ever-changing landscapes, their solace and safety as elusive as a bes'ede itself—and yet they endlessly repugn the kandush they have faced time and time again, guided by the conviction that within the uncertainty of the cosmos lay the promise of a sanctuary forged from the resilience of their spirit.
He tilts his head, resting it atop yours. “There will.”
Ali'nare vencuyanir yaim. This is the Way.
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@foxstronaut:
#YEAH SO I DID IN FACT WANT TO SEE IT#this is so good……this au just keeps getting better……….tysm for the link to this post!!#the wider context of the time travel……the fallout of bens betrayal…..#positively eating this up#also if i can ask- what is the ‘shereshoy’ mentioned in ur tag? :0
Shereshoy is the capstone of my Vod'e An Star Wars series, which is ALL about time travel, but I keep copy-pasting the intro scene into different AUs because it is. Definitely one of my favorite bits of writing to date.
Here's the series summary:
Have you ever seen a time traveler dropped into the middle of someone else's butterfly effect? How about several dozen someones? AKA I nabbed all my fave clone troopers and sprinkled them into a much happier galaxy, with a touch of violence on top. As a treat.
Aaand just for laughs, here's the intro scene in question:
---
The Force screamed in the middle of the night, and Ahsoka lurched awake with one overriding thought: not again.
Both lightsabers immediately flew to her hands as she rolled out of bed - boots and outer robes left behind in her sprint for the door. For the first time since constructing her own hab at Luke’s school, Ahsoka regretted putting herself on a neighboring ridge instead of down in the valley among the students.
Even as she ran, the Force flickered with another youngling’s death.
Beams of red light in the darkness, matched to knots of Dark power, drew her forward at even greater speed. Bounding off rocks and trees, the togruta remained nearly silent with every leap; she instinctively shielded herself with the Force to mask her approach, until the moment she burst out over the heads of three Sith acolytes, and let her own power flare.
Their helmeted heads snapped upwards. In the span of two heartbeats, her white sabers slashed, and those same heads fell to the ground, their bodies following after a brief pause.
Ahsoka landed in a battle-ready crouch, positioned defensively over a boy collapsed on the ground. When no further Sith revealed themselves, she deactivated and tucked away one lightsaber, freed hand reaching for the teenager at her feet. “Jacen?”
“I’m okay,” he rasped, heart pounding hard enough her lekku could feel the vibrations. “What- what’s happening?”
“Another Purge,” Ahsoka said, fighting hard to keep her voice level. “Can you feel Ezra?” After a moment’s pause, his face scrunched with desperate concentration, Jacen nodded. “Then let’s go. I’ll watch your back.”
The boy staggered upright, and led her around to the far side of the school buildings: student sleeping huts, a kitchen and meal hall, storage and laundry and library. Most of them bore scorch marks and other damage, while further up the valley, the actual temple where Luke handled meditation and combat training burned.
Storm clouds rumbled overhead, an echo of the fury roaring in Ahsoka’s mind. Twice, cracks of lightning revealed fallen bodies as she and Jacen ran past.
Another set of Sith attempted an ambush, only to falter when they registered her white lightsabers. Ahsoka didn’t hesitate to leap forward and deal with them swiftly, before any attention could be turned to the padawan beside her. Jacen, thankfully, didn’t attempt to join her, nor did he comment afterward - but his Force-presence shivered and pulled in even tighter on itself.
The next enemies they came across were a squad of stormtroopers, concentrating fire on a solitary figure, who deflected incoming plasma bolts and shot back his own with the same weapon. Ahsoka could sense two more younglings hidden behind Ezra’s billowed cloak, and increased her speed.
One trooper spotted her mid-charge. He and his neighbor turned to shoot at the new target, but their bolts went wild, too far off the mark to even require deflection. Ridiculous, Ahsoka could hear in her mind, as she spun and slashed, No brother would have gotten off Kamino with aim like that; do they even bother training these shinies, or just hand ‘em armor and a blaster and a new set of orders?
Faster than droids, but not nearly as fast or coordinated as clones, which meant Ahsoka carved through the stormtroopers within moments. As the last blaster fell in pieces to the ground, she saw Jacen dash past to crash against his favorite teacher with a desperate hug. Ezra wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders, the other still holding his lightsaber. “Ahsoka?”
“Get to my ship,” she ordered, as another peal of thunder rang above their heads, and the first few raindrops began to fall. “Don’t wait for anyone else, just take off and get to safety.”
Expression grim, Ezra nodded, and turned to drop into a crouch. He helped Alora get to her feet, the girl holding Grogu against her chest. “Pypey?”
The teenager shook her head, headscarf gone, face covered in tears. Ezra didn’t waste any more time before hustling her and Jacen off, towards the hidden landing pad where they kept hyper-capable craft. Ahsoka barely waited before hurrying onward again.
She passed more bodies; some students, some stormtroopers, the occasional Sith in black and red armor. The rain began coming down harder, turning the ground slick with mud, dragging visibility down to mere feet and severely impacting how much Ahsoka could sense with her hollow montrals.
But the Force didn’t falter. Every leap took her from one mostly-stable spot to another, following further death knells and surges of power, all the way up to the front steps of the old Jedi temple set into the mountainside. All the way to Luke.
Despite his much smaller stature, he moved like Anakin, and she could feel the intense emotions racing through him. One trooper after another fell, Luke refusing to let any of them put so much as a single foot on the steps into his school, his Academy. More bodies sprawled across the stones behind him; only one still flickered faintly with life.
Ahsoka took over the fight.
She landed ahead and just to one side of Luke, better positioned to defend the one student still gasping for breath. “Go! Take her and go!” Her fellow Jedi hesitated, clearly torn between multiple directions. “She’s dying, Luke, take Jaina and go, NOW!”
His Force-presence flared, then settled, decision made. Ahsoka felt the man lunge, scoop up his wounded student, and bolt into the Temple. She knew he’d follow a secret route out to the far side of the mountain, where an overhang sheltered his old X-Wing. With any luck, Artoo would be waiting, engines already fired up and ready to take off.
Even without luck, Ahsoka would buy them enough time to escape. Raindrops sizzled off her lightsabers as she swept them through the air, evaporating into steam that trailed after her every movement.
The whole ramble about #the cin vhetin problem makes me want to expand to other colours, but there we’d quickly run into planet-specific or species or colour vision specific associations.
On Earth, the most common metal ion used for oxygen transport is iron, which makes red the most common colour for blood (but not the only one: there’s also green, blue, and colourless blood). Which then follows that red = colour of blood, bloodletting, often life, perhaps war or action; in different cultures the colour of weddings, war, or bravery.
Blue = the colour of skies and seas/water, but that’s because of Earth’s oxygen rich atmosphere and abundant water. Planets with different atmospheres or less abundant free water (desert or ice planets) might disagree.
Green = colour of leaves and living things because of chlorophyll, but nothing says that chlorophyll is the molecule for photosynthesis on other planets (unless green plants were popular in ancient terraforming efforts).
Yellow = the colour of sun (our star is actually white, but can appear yellow/orange/red because of Rayleigh scattering), fire (because the carbon-based biomaterials we have historically burned for heat and light burn mostly yellow), or gold (which many historical cultures used as a medium of exchange).
There might be some universality to some of these, just based on chemistry. Oxidation is a powerful way of releasing chemical energy, and so far as we know, the only way to produce enough biochemical energy for complex life (but that could be our sample size of 1) and iron is particularly well-suited for transporting oxygen. And if oxygen and water are necessary for complex life, then planets that support life might have some similarities in their atmospheres and available water. Carbon really is great for building complex structural molecules and it does burn with a yellow flame, so fire = yellow/orange/red could be a fairly common association if not the only one.
But we have a sample size of 1, so I wouldn’t say it’s strong evidence. Just considering the variety of colour visions on Earth, there’s little guarantee that alien species galaxy over would agree what to associate a colour with. These might have weak correlations for humanoid species and humanoid-inhabitable planets, and they might or might not be relevant to Mandalorians. The colour meanings in mandalorian culture could very well be inherited from the Taung, who weren’t human and lived on Coruscant (the biosphere of which has long since been destroyed, so who knows what grew there originally).
As it happens, we do have linguistic evidence that the Taung, original Mandalorians, or whoever spoke the language when it developed, did indeed bleed red (ge’tal, red, lit. almost blood), and live on a planet with a blue sky (kebii’tra, daytime, lit. blue space) and green plants (vorpan’oy, vegetation, lit. green life).
The one I find interesting is green = duty in combination with mandalorians historically being agricultural people. So the colour of green would have the implication of feeding your clan, because agriculture is a collaborative effort that produces food for a community, not an individual.
Blue = reliability either has nothing whatsoever to do with water, or else Mandalore historically had very reliable rains (like monsoons). It probably doesn’t refer to river floods (like the Nile), because rivers tend not to be very blue (have you noticed that rivers are more often named black, dark, red, brown, etc. than blue?). I’d also posit that traditional mandalorian agriculture would be more likely to be rainfall based than irrigation based, which would promote independent villages over centralised government. Reliability of blue could also have something to do with the permanence of sky—or the impermanence of it: viewed from the space, the atmosphere is the thinnest blue line yet all life on the planet relies on it to breathe. Or maybe it’s just a nice colour; I’m not sure if there’s an obvious connection here.
It would be very tempting to draw the connection between red = blood = honouring a parent, but I hesitate to do that because 1) mandalorians were and are aliens who may or may not have red blood, and 2) mandalorian family is not based on blood, at least not obligatorily. Even if there is a connection with blood, I’d prefer to say it’s because of its connection with life. I.E. your parent didn’t necessarily give you your life in the flesh and blood sense, but they did nurture you and teach you what it means to be a mandalorian and how to live your life. So red in mandalorian culture is perhaps a more figurative life’s blood.
The etymology of shi’yayc, ‘yellow’, is unclear. Shi means ‘just/only’. ‘yayc could be from oyayc, ‘alive’, or it could be ya- + -yc. If it does come from ‘barely alive’, it could be a reference to dying vegetation or flickering yellow flames. But I’m going to go with this idea from @izzyovercoffee :
So, there’s no word for orange in mando’a at this time.
Consider: Yellow is sometimes indicated to also mean lust for life, depending on who you ask and what source material you’re comparing it to.
It’s entirely possible that mandalorians don’t have a way to differentiate between yellow and orange. Some cultures do display a limitation in language, seeing what we would consider a range (yellow to orange) as all one spectrum under the same banner.
So while Yellow may mean barely alive/barely dead, yellow may also mean nothing but life.
So Mando’a doesn’t have a word for orange, yet orange is used to symbolise shereshoy, an important mandalorian concept. They’ve dedicated a whole colour to it in the same vein as justice, duty, reliability, honouring a parent, vengeance and remembering the fallen have their own colours. But there’s no word for it? I call bullshit.
Isn’t it more likely that “yellow” is in fact a spectrum of colour from yellow to orange (like Yiddish blue/green) and the meaning is indeed related to both flames and the passion for life, i.e. ‘only life’ = shereshoy.
ETA: It occurred to me that an alternative solution to the problem of not having a word for the colour orange would be to use the word ‘shereshoy’ itself. Kind of like English uses ‘orange’ both for the fruit and the colour. ‘Shereshoy’ comes from shereshir (‘seize’) + oya- (the root for ‘live’ and ‘hunt, chase’). I’m not sure how you’d get from an abstract concept to the colour word, though, unless the connection is literally the colour used to paint armour.
This is Mar Vizsla, @anxiety-riddled-mando OC, and the protagonist of Shereshoy, one of my favourite fics! I love the character to bits and finally had the time to draw him! Thank you Tailor for creating Mar!
Fandoms: The Mandalorian (TV), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Relationship: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Characters: Din Djarin, Bo-Katan Kryze, Paz Vizsla, Admiral Gial Ackbar, Mon Mothma, Cara Dune, Grogu (Baby Yoda), Luke Skywalker, Borsk Fey’lya, Doman Beruss of Corellia, Kerrithrarr (Star Wars)
Additional Tags: Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker Switched Places, Prince Luke Skywalker, Mand’alor Din Djarin, Planet Chandrila (Star Wars), Politics, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Canon Divergence - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Mandalorian Culture (Star Wars), Eventual Romance
Din frowned. “Mandalore doesn’t need your approval. We don’t want it. What we do want is food, technology for repurposing building materials, even terraformers to break through the glass from the Empire’s bombardment. Can you give us that or not?”
