Hanna Rebecka

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.

(And I’m saying this as a fan of Mandalorian language, also, Clone Troopers calling their partner Cyare and their brothers Vode, uff, me encanta)

But it is obvious that, if you spend a lot of time with someone who is from a different culture, you are going to pick up some words, some mannerism, even some beliefs from that culture. Do you imagine a clone saying a single word of Dai Bendu? (the half canon/half fanon language of the Jedi)

Also, since some of them are close to young Padawans, it could be even more easy for the younger troopers and younger Jedi to get along and share things with each other. 

To me, it is kinda cruel to made the clones mando and nothing more. I mean, those guys have been their whole lives either in the horrible white halls of Kamino or in some horrid battlefields, or, in case of Coruscant Guard, in one of the most corrupt buildings of all the GFFA. 

In Republic Commando books, where some clones are all mando, with mando names and mando beliefs, they didn’t choose, they didn’t have an option. It was “you are mando because I want to you to be, so you will be, period”

It might have to do with me being French. Kote and Cody sound very different to me because my ear is trained to differentiate the “t” sound from the “d” sound way more than a native anglophone’s. (No I don’t watch Star Wars in French, promise. It’s a brain thing.)

Btw I saw that ask you got, I guess we could clarify that YES I do like Mando Clones!! I think it’s a super fun way to fill in that cultural gap from canon, and I love the use of mandoa and all that so writers seeing this post, pls keep writing that! We love that!

I’ve talked about how I see SW like the different marvel universes. Canon Star Wars doesn’t have this. Which is why we get canon and EU and Legends and Fanon that is so mixed up and weird. But when I see a post like this I just go ok so in THIS version of Star Wars in my head we got mando clones, but in THIS new one I wanna explore something a little closer to canon.

So take stuff like this as inspiration! Let’s explore these ideas and see where they take us, and still enjoy and produce other headcanons fandom has created!

So if you wanna know where the US is as a country, Fox News (donnie’s news network of choice) recently made up a Swedish official and had him speak on TV.

Just, y’know, fabricated a member of the Swedish government in order to push their narrative. 

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.