Socordiam

Us: (call for the guillotine)

Hozier: (a bittersweet lad, sings an ancient song to the departed)

Of all the money that e’er I had / I spend it in good company

And of all the harm that e’er I done / Alas it was to none but me

For all I’ve done for want of wit / to memory now I can’t recall

So fill to me the parting glass / good night and joy be with you all.

Of all the comrades that e’er I had / they’re sorry for my going away

And of all the sweethearts that e’er I had / they’d wish me one more day to stay

But as it falls unto my lot / that I must go and you must not

This post contains minor spoilers. Proceed with caution.

In the season two finale of “The Mandalorian” there is a scene near the beginning of the episode in which a strike team (minus Mando himself) storms onto an Imperial ship, blasts stormtroopers, etc. It’s an extended action sequence. Two of the characters are helmeted.

I was well into the scene before it hit me that all four of the characters on this strike team were women.

The fact that there was this all-female action team wasn’t new. I’ve seen that before. What was new about it was that this was the first time I’d seen a team of women that didn’t feel performative.

Remember that scene in “Avengers: Endgame”, the “she’s not alone” scene where All The Lady Characters Assembled, and you could tell the filmmakers were getting some kind of weird boner of “looooook at how many Strong Female Characters we have, let’s put them all together and have them be Strong Female Characters at the same time” and it felt super gross? That was performative.

I’ve heard and used that term before but I’m not sure I really grokked what it meant until I saw what its absence looked like, in “The Mandalorian.” 

It didn’t feel performative because each of those characters had been part of the narrative in their own time over the previous two seasons, with their own agencies and backstories. They were characters in the story as it needed to be told, they weren’t Strong Female Characters introduced for the purpose of being that (in a sexy way, of course). There was never a sense of ticking off the “kickass lady character” boxes. When Cara Dune is introduced, or Fennec Shand, or Bo-Katan, there was never that subtext of “Okay here is our Lady Character, isn’t she such a great Lady Character, look look we’re Doing the Thing you want us to do with having Womens in our Boy Stuff.”

No. It was, here’s a Rebel soldier. Here’s an assassin. Here’s a Mandalorian exile.  Here’s a Jedi. Here’s a magistrate. They have functions to perform and stories to tell in this narrative. Those functions and stories happen while these characters are women, not because they are women.

And it’s so, so subtle, the difference. It’s hard to put your finger on how it’s usually done wrong until you see it done right. It’s not just the writing although that’s a big part of it. It’s in how they were filmed, framed, shot, costumed, and lit. It’s in how they were directed, how the camera treated them - i.e. no differently than the male characters. None of these women were sexified, either. Not that they weren’t being portrayed by attractive women, but that wasn’t remotely played up or displayed in how they were styled, costumed, and made up.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

After all, last time they declared Bilbo Baggins dead— which involved filling out all the paperwork necessary to declare somebody dead without a body— he had the rudeness to show up again, forcing them to do a lot more paperwork, and this time with an indignant Bilbo having a go at them while they did it.

As a result, the magistrates have decided that they’re not going to declare Bilbo Baggins dead a second time unless they have a body, a coroners reprt explaining the cause of death, and a three day wake to make sure that he doesn’t get up and walk away again.

You are chased out of your village the moment your powers bloom at fifteen years old, and the skies turn black with your fear. A rock hits you between your shoulder blades just as you make it to the main road and you stumble, falling to your knees in a mud puddle at the very moment the skies open up.

“She’s cursing us!” the midwife who delivered you screams over the thunder. “She’s damning us with her!”

Your mother is crying, but she doesn’t raise a hand to help you. She did everything she could, keeping your Role a secret all these years. She won’t risk anymore with another little girl to take care of.

No one tells you that you have a choice. No kind stranger drags you out of the rain and into the warmth of their home where a wise sage tells you it is not how we are born, but what choices we make.

Instead, you take the little pack your mother hid for you in the depths of the forest and sling it over your shoulder. There’s money, provisions, and more wraps to cover the evil mark on your left bicep.

“Your destiny will find you,” your mother told you only hours ago. “I forgive you for it.”

She meant the words as a comfort, but you only heard condemnation in it. Without having killed so much as a fly, she is already blessing you with forgiveness.

Exactly one week later, Thursday at 3:13 PM, the next one looks up, blank-faced, and uses a car key to scratch the word ‘CAMEL’ into the side of their car. There are memes. 

The week after that, in the middle of an interview, the third victim turns to the camera and says ‘THROUGH.’ He drops dead. 

The man who writes “EYE” is in a private underground bunker. Enough radiation shielding to survive a direct nuclear strike. There are fifteen guards posted at the door- surveillance confirms not one of them left their post. 

look at that

Every single time you do something good, you’ve made a decision to make the world a little brighter.