#dare i.jpg

[agoddamn]

Getting it down on paper for the sake of posterity because I'm about to have my first canon encounter with Satine and I'd like to see how my opinions match up after I actually watch this episode:

I can't stand fanon Satine. No idea how much it's aligned with her canon incarnation, but she tends to victim-blame to a truly gross degree.

And for reference...I do identify as an actual, real-life pacifist. Not in a video game fiction kind of way; I truly believe that if we're at the point where "war will solve this problem" becomes a viable answer, it's because everything up till now has been wildly mismanaged and we are not in a "good" situation where we're the heroes, merely a disaster in which we're stuck addressing the problem in dehumanizing, unproductive ways that are 'least bad' but in no way good.

(nobody in the history of the fucking planet has ever declared "oh, you just had to kill my friends and family for me to realize I was wrong"! Getting to the point of war is a failure in the first place.)

So I don't criticize Satine from a place of knowing absolutely nothing about pacifism, philosophically speaking. I may not have a doctorate in it, but I've thought a lot about my beliefs and I feel that I understand them.

But goddamn, the Satine I've seen in fanfic dances on the border of cultural genocide for how much she doesn't seem to understand that it's difficult for people to revise their entire understanding of life and they must channel their needs of expression in some way and (again, fanon) Satine doesn't seem to be able to understand that.

I've occasionally boiled down my personal perspective to "I hate Mandalorians", but I don't, actually--I just hate the fanon engagement and fetishization of Mandalorians as some kind of "better" culture. I really enjoyed KOTOR's take on Canderous Ordo, with him having complicated feelings about how his society deifies honor through violence and eventually accepting that there isn't a binary concept of "weakness" (again: all of your missions on Dxun are essentially wrangling his lost, incompetent kids, but by K2 Canderous accepts that people have to be allowed to learn and boiling everything down to BLOOD AND HONOR doesn't work).

I really enjoy that approach to Mandalorians and their culture, but I don't think I've seen that anywhere except the KOTOR games, hah. Fandom--and 98% of the EU--seems to approach Mandalorians with a completely unironic Fremen deification and that's what I can't stand.

I back button when I see the Obi-Wan/Satine tag at this point lmao (fanon) Satine doesn't seem to understand that the foundation of pacifism is understanding your enemy and feeling like they don't deserve to die--instead, she's just angrily condescending about people that don't have her perspective. It's as if that, rather than intending to engage with the "enemy" and reach some sort of compromise, fanon Satine subtly expects other people to kill her enemies so she doesn't have to dirty her own hands with them.

I've also frankly got no idea what the canon Mandalorian history is now. I've seen people that I respect saying that "the idea of Satine perpetuating cultural genocide is preposterous", so I'm totally willing to believe that I have a fanon-tainted perspective. I'm just making this post to detail what fanon is tainting my perspective before I watch the actual episode.

...and just from a meta perspective, wow we've really put ourselves in a weird position by declaring that the blonde, pale Mandalorian is the righteous, correct one and the darker-skinned ones are violent animals. That's very much a meta problem, I repeat (seems like devs distilled what they personally found "pretty" without realizing that it's...a little Aryan), but I can't pretend it's not there.