My Life, No One Else's.

Reblogging your tags too x) I like the word “vod” too, tbh. 

But yes the Clones’ ties to Mandalorian culture mostly comes from the EU writers (who created Mandalore almost from scratch, btw); they had quite an impact on the fans, but their work was later almost completely invalidated by the (Lucas approved/overseen) 2009 Clone Wars show. Quite a few people called it “character assassination,” which I find really funny because… no? 

Anyway the fans never let go of this romantic notion of an all-badass, on-par with the Sith and the Jedi, essential to the Galaxy, ultra-noble Mandalore (*ahem* they destroyed their homeworlds through global war *ahem* the word “Mandalorian is never used once in Lucas’ movies *ahem*). And to appeal to them, Disney is now incorporating that image into canon. 

Since the fans love the Clones, they want to shine the best possible light on them (which I’m all on board for), so they continue this trend of Mando-worship in their fanwork. And then newer people arrive, read a fic that uses “vod,” have people tell them that “yes, the Clones are totally Mando at heart, Jango taught them everything about it and also he was the disgraced leader of the True Mandalorians, not the pacifists you see in the show,” and the newbies roll with it, and in their fic the Clones use the word “aliit,” and in the next they’re fully fluent, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with the way fandom developed the Clones, of course. Fandoms will do what fandoms do (i.e completely ignore canon and roll with their own ideas). It’s just that it’s not what’s presented in the movies or TCW, or even Rebels. You wanna see Mando Clones, you pick up the pre-2009 Clone Wars comics, or the Republic Commando books (… it’s Karen Traviss, read at your own peril), etc… 

So anyway yeah I was weirded out by the ever increasing amount of fics that have “btw Cody’s real name is Kote” in the AN. Lucas named him Cody after a fictional hero from his own childhood.

Meet Commando Cody the rocket man, Sky Marshal of the Universe. He’s the origin behind Cody’s name, Cody’s jetpack (and thus all of the Clones’ jetpacks), and Cody’s rank of Marshal Commander. 

TCW does address this question of what inspired the Clones as they built their identities. In Fives’ arc, Nala Se says this:

NALA SE: I’m afraid the Jedi have inspired creative thinking in some of the Clones. That is the cause of this type of divergent behavior.

We also see that a huge influence on the younger Clone troopers is Shaak Ti - she’s the one who teaches Echo and Fives the importance of unity, tying her own understanding of it directly to her identity as a Jedi.

We see Yoda teaching the Clones that they have value at the beginning of the war:

YODA: Come, sit. Your helmets, remove them. Your faces I wish to see.

THIRE: There’s not much to look at here, sir. We all share the same face.

YODA: Deceive you, eyes can. In the Force, very different each one of you are. Rys, always focused on the enemy, are you. For inspiration, look to yourself, and those beside you. Jek, concerned about weapons you are. Weapons do not win battles. Your mind, powerful it is. Outthink the droids, you can. Thire, rush not into fights. Long is the war. Only by surviving it, will you prevail. Yes. Clones you may be, but the Force resides in all life forms. Use it, you can, to quiet your mind. 

And we see Plo do the same in the very next episode:

WOLFFE: We’re just Clones, sir. We’re meant to be expendable.

PLO: Not to me.

(By this point the Clones already have tattoos, painted armors and unique haircuts, but these are superficial ways of expressing your identity. It’s illustrated very clearly with the episode Innocents of Ryloth. Boil has a mustache and a Death Watch symbol on his helmet. Great! But he spends most of the episode griping about the hassle of protecting civilians, and using his duty as a soldier as an excuse not to take care of Numa. With the combined influences of Waxer, Obi-Wan and Numa’s delightful nature, Boil actually shows who he is by the end of the episode: a deeply caring man. That’s who is is, more than anything else. When Numa hugs him, he has his helmet on but she’s not afraid of it anymore. Because his face isn’t synonymous with who he is, no matter how ‘customized’, his actions are who he is.)

tldr: we’re told that the Jedi are the one who most fostered unity and creativity in the Clones. 

(Again, visible in Innocent of Ryloth, when Obi-Wan’s influence makes his men appreciative of Twi’Lek culture - he even teaches them a Ryl word). Decades after the war, the GAR is remembered as the Jedi and the Clones (see Hera reminding Kanan of the bond between Jedi and Clones in The Lost Commanders.)

Also, remember the remembrance thing fics are so fond of using? 

Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum - “I’m still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal” Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la - “Not gone, merely marching far away”

from Wookieepedia 

Guess what? The Jedi had memory moths in the pre-2009!TCW EU. 

You whisper a name to the moth and it repeats it forever. 

And actual canon has so much stuff about not actually being dead but passing into the Force, and just being on a path everyone will eventually walk, yada yada yada. 

From Return of the Jedi:

LUKE: I can’t do it, Artoo. I can’t go on alone.

OBI-WAN: Yoda will always be with you.

To the Clone Wars:

YODA (s5ep18): One with the force, they are. And our job it is to remember that we will, in time, also pass on. Luminous beings are we, but temporary vessels, our bodies are. And we shall all find ourselves here in time. A moment of silence, I ask, to remember and to move on.

So even fanon Clone culture is directly linked to the oldest and most basic Jedi principles. 

So if the Clones actually had traditions and philosophical/theological views in canon, they’d more likely to be inherited from the Jedi than the Mandalorians. No one in TCW states a connection between Clones and Mandalorians (not Maul, not Bo-Katan, not the Jedi, not Satine, not Almec, not Boba, not Hondo, not the bounty hunters, not the Republic authorities…) but TONS of what we see in the Jedi/Clones interactions points to Jedi culture being a HUGE influence on the Clones’ way of expressing themselves. 

Last little note: Jedi culture is hugely emphatic on the irrelevance of where you come from compared to who you decide to be. While the Jedi have nothing against embracing your birth traditions (see their various traditional clothes, tattoos, jewels, their different accents/languages, their acceptance of other faiths - see Barriss’ prayer statue - and the fact that they keep the names given to them by their biological parents), not all Jedi feel the need to identify with their biological people, their identity is rooted in their role as peacekeepers, as they routinely states, and in their connection to the Force and their fellow Jedi. 

Similarly, the Clones have different views on whether or not their origin defines them, some express themselves with alterations to their appearances, some don’t, and their sense of identity is most commonly rooted in their role as soldiers, their loyalty to the Republic, and their brothers. 

Same basic structure.

Clone culture draws on Jedi culture.

Pass it on.

Fandom Problem #16,044:

They burned down churches in retaliation for something that never happened.

Zero apologies from the people who instigated or perpetuated any of it. The Canadian government issued apologies for the killings that didn’t take place but nothing for the people victimized by the hoax.

They didn’t even wait for the first body to be exhumed before the madness started, just on the accusation that they might have found bodies.

The entire article is based on a book by Tom Flanagan at the Fraser Institute (a libertarian think tank that proudly hosts articles describing their opposition to the very idea of aboriginals having rights), who has spent most of his adult life writing papers on why Canada should end aboriginal rights and fight against native land claims. In "First Nations? Second Thoughts." he very clearly shows that he believes aboriginals are uncivilized savages:

In order to become self-supporting and get beyond the social pathologies that are ruining their communities, aboriginal people need to acquire the skills and attitudes that bring success in a liberal society, political democracy, and market economy. Call it assimilation, call it integration, call it adaptation, call it whatever you want: it has to happen.

— Flanagan, 2000. First Nations? Second Thoughts p.195)

Denying the existence of abuse of aboriginals in Residential Schools is in the best interest of his entire narrative that aboriginals are too savage to self-govern (which he also fights against).

This is a quote from the above article, written by Flanagan. Here is the Kamloops media release. One thing you might notice: Casimir refers to them as "potential unmarked graves." Not "mass graves".

Here is a screenshot regarding the exact area and school they were talking about if you're too lazy to open it:

215 student, Kamloops. This is what Flanagan, and the above article, are specifically referencing.

The issue is, they didn't find "nothing". They human remains including a child's rib bone. This article also states $12m was put towards not excavation (as the article falsely claims), but towards research, mental health and community support for the survivors of the schools, that the NSMR has a confirmed list of 4100+ currently identified victims who died within the walls of residential schools.

So what are they referencing? After some digging, I found it. They are talking about how an excavation under a church in Manitoba revealed no evidence of human remains. As an addition, no one made the claim that there was, for sure, unmarked graves under the church. The ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies, but they were never reported as being confirmed to be remains.

Flanagan also makes the bewildering claim that the reason they had found "no" human remains was because they, according to him, did no due diligence. Despite the fact that they had already identified 51 student deaths via church and state documents.

To add to that, it wasn't Casimir that spread the idea that the Canadian government was hiding mass graves under former residential schools. She actually makes it very clear that this is NOT the case.

The idea that there was a "mass graves" hoax was, in and of itself, the hoax. The people making the claim that there were mass graves weren't the First Nations, but the far-right.

Yet the national post claims that worldwide media was reporting "fake stories about mass graves, almost universally"...!

Therein is the lie. From a 2023 paper by researchers Sean Carleton and Reid Gerbrandt, only 6.5% of 386 articles covering the news referred to the unmarked remains as "mass graves", some of them using the term with the context of "mass graves may still be found" (not that they had, but that they could.)

The paper finds that 93.5% of Canadian articles released between spring and fall 2021 did not refer to the findings as "mass graves"

Fandom Problem #16,032:

Fandom Problem #16,029:

Harry Potter is still cross shipped in a lot of things and so is Supernatural.

You all aren’t looking. And no, I’m not just talking about Fanfiction.net. AO3 has a lot of these on there. Especially in the Batfamily and no, it’s not just them being taken in by Bruce, it’s actual ships. (I can’t get away from them because no one puts the correct titles on a lot of the fics.)

Hell, even the Disney crack ships are there.