What would Satine Kryze think of these characters:
Din Djarin
and
Boba Fett
She might like Din quite a bit but I think she wouldn’t know what to do with Boba. Especially given who his father is.
Karen…… that’s the vibe I get sorry
Bo-Karen
She’s gonna play nice when meeting them and then when they are out of earshot she’ll tell her assistants to make sure they don’t sleep in the palace lest they leave fleas
Little does she know but Boba and Fennec have been painstakingly sifting for sand fleas for a month and they’ve turned them loose in Kryze’s room.
Hope you get some cream for that itch bitch 😈🖕🏾
!” Boba cackles as he locks her in.
Satine, later that night: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA KRIFF
imo the fandom hatred of satine feels kinda… like right-wing garbage? like yeah we see satine rejecting the warrior aspect of mandalorian culture… but surely warfare and violence isn’t the only aspect of mandalorian culture? do we see anything that says that satine is doing other things to crush mandalorian culture?
people bring up the absence of mando’a… but mando’a has never been used on-screen by even death watch or din’s covert. there’s no indication it’s present in current canon.
mandalorian culture may hinge on a warrior aspect, but is that worth preserving for culture’s sake? is there anything inherently wrong with a pacifist movement rising up to discourage needless death? obviously, star wars frames pacifism as weakly as possible, as a strawman designed to be torn apart in favor of well-intentioned people with guns and laser swords to fight the bad people with guns and laser swords.
satine is murdered by maul. her entire character existed to be a “will they or won’t they” counterpart to obi-wan, incapable of standing on her own narratively. this is most obvious in her murder, which is a tragedy for obi-wan rather the loss of satine’s life being a tragedy in and of itself.
most fanfiction revolving around the mandalorians, especially obi-wan/jango pairings, take an actively negative approach to satine, adding onto her canonical pacifism and snootiness the more explicitly hateful qualities of usurper, killer of culture, and, sometimes, abusive ex. it’s almost like satine is built up as hateful to be less of a threat to the obi-wan/jango ship. (I personally don’t pair satine and obi-wan, just pointing this out)
I wonder how much of the hate directed at satine (and her sister, who doesn’t have that pacifist ideology) is because she’s one of the only notable female mandalorians that isn’t from disney rebels.
the hate towards satine reads to me like conservative attachments to “traditional values”, militarism, and outright misogyny.
I have not read star wars books that may have more information regarding what satine’s government is like. I do know that satine’s government is uncomfortably all human white blond and blue-eyed, but we don’t exactly get a more diverse glimpse of the other mandalorian factions, and the death watch is led by a human blond-haired blue-eyed man. if there really was a problem about diversity in satine’s government, wouldn’t that be a talking point to bring up in the show?
My apologies to my Satine-loving followers for having to endure many of the responses on this thread, but I wanted to thank @corvusian for being willing to offer a different view than the people above and expand on all the points they made:
1. Violence is certainly not the only aspect of Mandalorian culture. And Satine herself literally is given a line showing that she prioritizes, appreciates, and cultivates non-violent Mandalorian tradition.
2. Blaming Satine for a Mandalore that doesn’t speak Mando'a is an example of attributing an out-of-universe creative decision to the in-universe fictional character (a recurring theme with her character).
Mando'a is not really present in The Clone Wars, but it was never meant to be a statement about Satine. Instead, it’s likely that Mando'a was avoided because of the (understandable) bad blood between Karen Traviss, the original creator of the language, and the creators of the show, when George Lucas wanted to tell stories about pacifist Mandalore that effectively went against Karen’s novels.
However, Mando'a is not completely absent from the show. In Season Two, “The Mandalore Plot,” we hear a couple lines of Concordian Mando'a. Again, likely because of a desire to distance themselves from Karen’s language, the Mando'a that we hear in the episode is basically gibberish, both in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
(There was some legitimate Mando'a that was eventually used in Star Wars Rebels, so perhaps something changed after Disney acquired the rights to Star Wars, but that’s just my speculation.)
But you know who is the one named character who speaks the language in TCW? Satine Kryze. And she speaks it to the Death Watch bomber who tried to kill her, as a way to comfort and honor him – a traditionalist warrior – as he is dying. So the idea that she was somehow suppressing the use of Mando’a is ridiculous to me.
3. People who like to say that Satine committed cultural genocide failed to consider the fact that canonically, Death Watch was a small splinter group, and the rest of the Mandalorian population seems to have generally supported Satine and the New Mandalorians.
This isn’t explored in great detail on screen, however it was explored in the junior novelization Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy. Basically, the book sets out that Satine rallied the Mandalorian warlords to the pacifist cause, but she never forced it on any of them. Instead, it’s set out that the vast majority of the clan leaders were simply tired of fighting, and they chose peace.
In Season 2, “Voyage of Temptation,” Obi-Wan says that “a civil war killed most of Satine’s people.” Is it so audacious to consider that even a people that honored war may at times look at the destruction war has caused and decide to choose a different way?
(Beyond that, we don’t even have time to get into the fact that not only did Satine exile the warriors who refused to accept peace to Concordia, arguably the most habitable planetary body in the Mandalore system, but she also gave them their own independent governor, so they weren’t technically even ruled by her.)
Further, on screen, what we do see is full support for Satine from the Mandalorians in Sundari. Satine rules by the will of her people, and when they turn against her, she also steps down at the will of the people. She knows that her authority comes from them, not because she holds the Darksaber or has killed the previous leader in battle (hooray for democracy!).
Literally, when her prime minister asks if they should attempt to stop the Death Watch, she says “How can we? The people are on their side now” and lets herself be removed and imprisoned without bloodshed (in the book, she says that she knows this will lead to her death)
4. As to the final comment about the homogeneity of Satine’s Mandalore, this is another instance of fans taking an out-of-universe production decision and applying it to Satine, in-universe fictional character.
The Mandalorians were designed as generally white, blond, and blue-eyed because George and Dave wanted space-Vikings, so they gave them a stereotypical Scandinavian look.
The entire population looks like this because crowd design and animation takes tons of work and time that the designers and animators did not have. That’s why if you look at the crowds, you notice that all of the characters are basically the same few designs with their features mixed-and-matched.
But you know who also is completely white, blond, and blue-eyed?
Death Watch, save for the exception of Bo-Katan Kryze (ironically, if Satine is in favor of some sort of blond/Aryan Mandalore, her family is the biggest offender considering her sister and nephew are both redheads)
This was not a statement on race. It was simply the design that they gave to all Mandalorians in this stage of Star Wars animation production.
Thankfully, in Rebels and in The Siege of Mandalore, they began to vary the look of the Mandalorians (both Death Watch and the Sundarians), indicating that the intention was never to have them all be white.
Ultimately, I don’t care if people dislike Satine. What I do have a problem with is when people justify that view by saying that she’s supposed to be a villain-esque figure, when that is completely different from what’s actually shown onscreen.
