mills

Hate bonding, the best kind of bonding. First off, thank you! This blog is just me rambling, so it’s really cool that someone is connecting with it lol. I don’t have a set favorite starwars character, but Satine is definitely in the rotation so I love being asked abt her. My take is that Satine was basically set up to fail (like many sw characters, unforch), from a writer’s standpoint, and it feels very obvious to me, but many fans seem to not care and hate her for DF’s bullshit anyway (which is interesting to me, because I don’t think for example the clones are particularly well written in post CW08 projects either, and yet they’re given loads of carefully thought out fanon and their flat writing for the most part isn’t held against them. Interesting. Wonder why). Satine had one purpose for existing: making revenge of the sith hit harder. That’s it. She was supposed to be a “oh, see, Obi-Wan understands Anakin, but put his duty first, so sad!” and that’s pretty much it. I mean, they literally brought Maul back for the sole purpose of fridging Satine. Her writing was not approached with much care, so I understand and share criticisms of that, but there still IS so much that can be appreciated about her if people were willing to think about her for more than three seconds.

I don’t think that Filoni knows what a pacifist is? At least, has an extremely narrow view of pacifism. The Republic was supposed to be pacifist (pre war, obviously). So I think attempting to make this a point of tension between Satine and Obi-Wan was a really, really dumb move. Even if their ideals were that different, with what we know about both of them, they have so much more in common than not. And with such a weak foundation to their interactions, (+TCW dialogue being clunky in the first place) those scenes with Obi-Wan really only read as “gasp! Obi-Wan and a woman! How scandalous!” I think their “arguments” at least should’ve honed in more on the fact that Obi-Wan is working for a government that now wants to occupy his friend’s homeworld, and that can extend to his guilt over Satine not having much of a support system, exactly as alone as she was when she had to rebuild Mandalore all by herself, and Obi-Wan still not being able to help. Not, like, whatever that was, with Obi-Wan calling her delusional or something.

I think when fans call her incompetent they’re largely going based off assumption of what she had or hadn’t done, and since we have so little time with her, we really can’t say. It’s kind of mind blowing to me that so few people have gone “hey, maybe there’s a reason she’s so headstrong about this subject, I mean how would you feel if your parents died because of war and a fascist cult groomed your little sister into hating you.” Satine isn’t bad for being opposed to war and violence. I don’t think fans have to agree with her on all fronts, but when people start calling her a bad person is definitely a red flag. (Also anon mentioned DW sympathizers… yeah, if I am debating someone about Satine and I realize they’re a DW apologist I immediately end the conversation, because if we are that far apart in our views there’s no way we’re gonna get anywhere productive. There’s absolutely no point). It’s too often forgotten as well that Satine was the head of the Council of Neutral Systems, which is up to 10,000 systems (if I recall correctly), so it isn’t just her people looking to her, she speaks for many, many worlds. That’s like a massive thing and people never talk about it. Again I don’t think you have to agree with everything she’s ever said but god when you glaze the hell out of characters like Jango and Boba and then call Satine the devil I am gonna look at you sideways. Kinda insane that this has to be said. This brings me to a side note that really bothers me. So many fans view her as incompetent and weak because she’s nonviolent, and because of that there seems to be a lot of fanon where their view of her ideals being weak and passive leads to them thinking her personality is the same. And this directly contradicts with canon. She is headstrong, and yells at like a hell of a lot of people in CW. She almost never stays silent. So for a good number of fans, it seems to be not only that they might disagree with her on whatever, but that she’s not strong or edgy or badass in the way they want her to be, and they’re completely unwilling to see her as such. How are Jango and Dooku your goats, but Satine is malicious and stupid?

Anyway, DF doesn’t care about the Kryze sisters. Satine was created to be fridged, and Bo-Katan has no discernible arc. Really unfortunate because imo Satine has the potential to be one of the most fascinating starwars characters. In fact, I enjoy the idea of her being such a polarizing figure, if only so much of that wasn’t rooted in misogyny.

(Another side note, you brought up mando clones in fanon and I just wanted to say I also don’t like how that whole situation is treated. I doubt all clones would want Jango’s culture. Jango possibly raising the first batches with the culture could be interesting, but I definitely disagree with the whole clone = mando thing. Many would definitely choose differently. That’s a whole separate issue, but I am so far removed from the idea of Cody or another clone being the Mand’alor I don’t have much to say about it other than… typical fandom stuff, I guess. I largely ignore it. I don’t think most fans who write mando’a speaking clones understand how bilingual people talk anyway lmfao).