#ways people cope ig... but also mess is still just a child. she has a really childish and. mean. way of trying to cope with peoples evil

[ink-sinner]

i've actually been brainrotting over mess so hard this past week. like?? everything abt her is so??? the way she's written and her dream was intentionally made to be comical and fun, but every time i think abt it everything abt her makes me so sad 😢

she's clearly been abused (by her parents presumably??) and her whole life she's been used and subjected to malice. her p3 and ecb pictures both show her as scared and her ecb even says "stay away from me... stay away from me... stay away from me..." she's actually terrified of the malice she sees, and in a perfect world, she would be just a blacksmith, and someday, a hero would come and save her and the world for her.

but what gets me is that she's accepted no one will come to save her 😢😢 even so, she still chooses to wake up herself. she doesn't want a happy dream where she just ignores her true fears; she wants to eliminate the root cause of all her fears and nightmares — malice in the world. it's so childish, but it's her way of coping.. to blame man's evil acts onto a big baddie to defeat.

it's also still in line with ptn's overarching theme despite the "lol fun silly game" theme,, how do you fix a broken world? some would just destroy it all, some would try to use the law. some do tiny acts of kindness, some run away, some just accept it. it's hard to know what to fix when both the system and the people are messed up — do you start from the bottom to the top, or do you reform the top and it'll bleed down to the bottom? for mess, the way she's decided to fix the world is.. through a misguided attempt to defeat a big bad dragon that is the source of all human malice, which is impossible, but somehow infinitely easier than trying to fix what's broken in every human heart.

but im so annoyed that even after her interrogation, we know nothing abt her!! she lives alone in eastside, she has a forge and a store, she's rich as shit, she's been selling weapons for 2 years. she intentionally provokes people in an effort to harvest malice great enough to cut off malice/her fears. she likes stuffed toys and cute things. what about her history?? why is the data abt her parents unavailable? who are they? what did they do to her? how did they die, how did she awaken? she can harvest malice, so presumably, before awakening, she wished she could remove someone's malice. but what happened that made her awaken? why did she decide that to defeat malice, you must use greater malice??? what is this zoya 2.0?? to defeat violence, use greater violence — to defeat malice, use greater malice?? like???? 😭😭😭😭 she's so mysterious i just wanna know cmon aisno what is this 😭😭😭

[vaguely-concerned]

I rewatched the mandalorian episode 8 and boy have I got feels for you

- lol gideon’s callouts to all of them though... you have ‘hey cara remember how we blew up your entire planet and killed your fellow soldiers’ and ‘hey din djarin yeah I know who you are lol the mysterious stranger thing doesn’t work on me remember how we apparently murdered a bunch of mandalorian children in one night’ (that’s how I’m taking ‘mandalorian recruits’ anyway) and then finally there’s just ‘greef karga. you’re really old enough to know better.’ 

- oh bb!din doesn’t cry at any point during the whole flashback :((( bb boy. he’s of course terrified but there are no tears. I’m guessing he’s in shock/dissociated the entire time. (probably also due to having a child actor but I think it makes a lot of sense in-universe too! to put on my trauma hat for a moment he’s always read to me as a combined freeze/flight type; he either dissociates or loses himself in work. I suppose he got started early) 

- the look on Papa Djarin’s (I mean I assume) face as tiny din reaches out for him and he knows he has to turn away and leave to save him :) exquisite burning agony

I still wonder so much what his parents did for a living. those red robes look almost like uniforms/religious garb to me or it might of course just be the fashion in this place, people in the background seem to be wearing similar things. 

- I LOVE the mando who saves him as a kid because that’s apparently the same actor who’s in the mando suit when it’s not pedro pascal or another stuntman (brendan wayne, I think it is?) so it gives this wonderful feeling that you get now where a lot of din’s body language and general bearing comes from but there’s also just enough difference that it’s clearly another person. with din there’s always this edge of reserve and a slight stiffness no matter how relaxed he is, and this guy has the same basic steadiness as him but seems a bit more open just from these few short shots. (there might be a little bit of character design in this as well -- din’s shoulder pauldrons are naturally uh ‘higher’ than this guy’s, who has smoother/flatter and more rounded shapes, giving the feeling of shoulders just slightly raised and relaxed down respectively)

it’s nice to see the mandos as a protective force even if they have the death watch symbol there to make you go ‘?!?!?!’, there wasn’t a lot of that in clone wars but it’s an ill wind and so on I guess 

- this confused jawa looking at the dead stormtroopers is everything. don’t worry you’re doing amazing sweetie

- the context for why din picks up the e-web (channeling the spirit of baze malbus, a man who also didn’t let the fact that his weapon was really meant to be mounted on a tank stop him :’) ) makes it even better: he sees that IG-11 has the baby and that he’s getting overwhelmed and he literally grabs the biggest gun he can find and goes to town to let him get away.  

- “I haven’t heard that name spoken since I was a child” ooof but also what are the logistics of that? I’m wondering if it might be the ‘Djarin’ part, if that’s his family name? maybe there hasn’t been a use for that among the mandos? surely someone has needed to call him by name somehow at some point in the last 30+ years lol

- one of the reasons gideon works so well as a villain is that he can get past the beskar. he knows exactly how to kill mandalorians because he’s done it before. he’s not only a huge threat emotionally -- he wants the baby and he’s done some fucked up shit to din’s culture -- he’s also one of the few people who can nullify the physical protection of our main boi in the helmet. and that scares me. because he’s my dad and I love him.

- I’m fairly sure din is properly unconscious for almost half a minute there. (which is very very bad. always go see a doctor if you lose consciousness after hitting your head if an IG unit with appropriate training and equipment is not on hand)   

- baby yoda passing out after doing one (admittedly spectacular) thing is a wholeass mood, #same buddy ilu 

- din is the first person to explicitly call the baby a foundling ;____;

- poor cara she’s already lost so much and her new bro is trying to convince her to let him throw himself on any sword made available to him. (I do love that neither she nor IG-11 buy mando’s bullshit for a moment here tho lol they’re openly saying they’ll take him with them anyway while he’s listening) 

- oh. oh din starting to jumble his words even as the gun remains rock steady in his hand is hitting me really hard this time. ow.

- I think the baby can sense din and IG coming (he gives a little sound right before they show up) 

- when cara checks in with him in the tunnel she touches her fingers to his chest so very lightly and he almost falls over backwards sdfaksdljhf

- well he definitely is trembling while picking up that helmet from the pile. so have fun knowing that with me 

it’s so messed up too because there’s not that many of them left; he’s all but guaranteed to have known every single one of them. 

- this image of him on his knees in front of this pile of the empty armor of the dead feels. I don’t know how to describe it but like a repeat. like he has been here before, this isn’t the first time and it’s hitting him all over again. (considering how things have been going for the mandos recently that might very well be true too. metaphorically this is essentially what’s going on in the background of the entire show, anyway. Friends I think mando Saw Some Shit during the night of a thousand tears or a similar event) 

maybe what gives me this feeling is how clearly he is in another time in some way during this part, before the armorer diagnoses him with Dad and brings him properly back. he’s trying to send them away with the baby, who’s like. basically the symbol of his will to live at this point. “I can’t leave it this way”, he can’t leave the dead behind and be alive, some part of him wants to stay with them. 

you can see this from how he talks about the baby too: in the scene where he’s hurt and trying to get them to leave he consistently calls him the child or the baby (not to mention the first foundling we get!) and focuses very specifically on keeping him safe. in this triggered state the baby briefly becomes it again and he doesn’t even mention him, he just tells them to take his ship and leave. in that moment all he wants to do is fight and probably die on behalf of those who are already gone. (I think bessel van der kolk has called PTSD ‘a profound loyalty to that which is lost’ or something like that. that rings very true to me here)  

the talk with the armorer is basically a very short debate between ol’ coping mechanism!din being like ‘hey I just remembered before all this I was doing my very best to work myself to an early and likely shallow grave, I should get back to that’ and Papa Wolf!din being like ‘except this is my son so we’re not doing that we’re gonna have to improvise something new on the fly here’. bless. 

(all of this is so subjective and probably me reading things into it that don’t really exist so don’t quote me on any of this but his anger at greef karga sounds to me like that of a younger, emotionally rawer man too, it’s so openly hurt and... active? I guess? these days when he gets angry he seems to tend more towards getting deathly quiet. then again this is one of the most genuinely upsetting things in the whole show so it could just be that)  

- hahahahahaha greef rests his hand on his gun before he follows them into the armorer’s workshop; it would seem he did not think it guaranteed either she or maybe especially mando wouldn’t try to shoot him  

- the way the armorer’s voice gains a brightness/warmth when she sees the child! the mandalorian ‘protect babies’ instinct in action haha, she’s like ‘oh this is why you did this bugfuck insane thing. perfectly reasonable, keep up the good work’.  the foundlings are the future is not just lip service it really is a central tenet of their culture even when it’s inconvenient 

there’s this sense that... in the face of his hurt she’s basically telling him to go be alive, to raise this child, to choose surviving and healing. I think she understands him very very well, I wonder how long they’ve known each other. (she had the mould for his signet ready <3)

- he sounds so crestfallen and lost when he asks if the baby is an enemy. and then she’s just fondly like ‘no it’s your son you absolute dummy’ and he’s like ‘...yeah I know’ 

- I. love that in these scenes he’s hurt (and not just physically) and other people are there to carry the baby until he can pick him up at the end fully as a father would.  

- I have talked about it before but I must restate how hilarious and endearing I find it that mando conscientiously leans the thing he tries to pry the boat loose with against the wall again while cara shoots the place up. one is never too busy to mind one’s manners. (this scene really showcases each of the characters too. greef: just keep fuckn pushing! mando: briefly kicks the thing with a growl then tries attacking the problem from a new angle. cara: GUN.) 

- oh the absolute sweetness of how IG says “And you will live”. there’s so much emotion in his droid voice there and all of it is peaceful and affectionate. I agree with din IG don’t goooooooo don’t leave us we need an adult

I keep whispering ‘pls someone think to shield the baby’s eyes’ through my tears in this scene, he didn’t need to see that happen D:

- I really need to repeat that despite what IG-11 says, he goes ahead with his plan anyway even though mando never satisfies his ‘programming’s’ demand. droid’s got free will and a huge big heart Y___________Y anyway... droid rights in the star wars universe when (...it would be very funny if din became embroiled in that fight somehow after this, oh how the turntables) 

- another continuity error: mando puts the jetpack on, then we get a shot of cara shooting and he’s standing there with it in his hands again haha. unless he realized he put it on upside down the first time around or something that seems unlikely. (he’s also lying in slightly different positions between cuts in the scene where IG-11 heals him, but that’s so small and subtle I don’t even really count it) 

- the jetpack scene is a beautiful encapsulation of din’s fighting style. he flails and gets jerked around a lot. he nearly blows himself up. I don’t think he’s fully in control of anything that whole time. and yet he gets the job done yet again. a disaster, but a glorious disaster still standing at the end of it all. one simply must stan. 

- a) I think din remembered how to take off better than he remembered how to land haha and b) BABY’S HAPPY LITTLE FACE WATCHING HIS DAD COME BACK DOWN c) THE BABY & MANDO MUSIC PLAYING WHEN DIN NOTICES THE BABY CLUTCHING HIS LEG *elmo surrounded by flames gif* (it’s a calmer/more grounded version of the same song that plays when they have that moment of connection right before the other mandos come to the rescue in ep 3 and also a few other times)

- baby’s joyful little trilling sound when his dad turns his head to check on him 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 and he strokes the cape with such contentment because it’s a safe familiar texture because this is his dAD (officially and legally too now, mandalorian-wise :’) im so happy)

- the unsympathetic comedy stormtroopers at the beginning could conceivably have survived (if not uh happily lol). if they become a recurring duo who show up and get more and more screwed every time I wouldn’t be mad haha

- I support these jawas in everything they do, I feel a great kinship with these lil goblins 

- anyway I love this show so much and I hope season 2 is good too and knows it holds my fragile heart in its hands