Sylvanspice

"Motherf… Tongue!"

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.

Barbossa is the most exasperated character in any scene he's in, unless he's winning. then he's the smuggest son of a bitch on screen (he literally returns from the dead smugly eating an apple). but majority of the time, he's 'why am I the only adult here'. man rolls his eyes so much I half-expected him to turn straight to the camera.

when Will asks Elizabeth to marry him while they are fighting Davy Jones' crew, stuck in a maelstrom, and trapped in the final battle, the first word out of her mouth is "Barbossa!". she then continues by asking Barbossa to marry them, but for a split second Will's face goes like 'Barbossa? Barbossa?? I didn't even know he was on the map of this convoluted love quadrangle!'

when they're in Singapore and Sao Feng threatens the spy he found and Will, Elizabeth, and Barbossa all look at each other to confirm that none of them have snuck in a spy they forgot to tell the others about, before shrugging and telling Sao Feng to go ahead and kill him.

Barbossa's eyes just getting wide and wider the more weapons Elizabeth pulls out of her clothes. c'mon man, let a woman have her toys!

rewatching really gives you the full picture of how many people are scheming at any given time and how each person's schemes intersect with the others, even if they're nominally on the same side. everyone also gets So Upset when their scheme is foiled, accidentally or intentionally, by someone else's scheme, as though they themselves aren't scheming at that very moment.

Barbossa's iron balls. I'm sorry, this is the funniest dick joke in the trilogy that defines how many dick jokes Disney can stick in a movie before it stops being PG-13. Jack's reaction really says it all.

It’s a little too perfect a metaphor for what the whole Mandalorian show/story has become.

Because I love the Razor Crest. Seriously, after the Ghost, it’s my favourite ship in all of Star Wars ever. There’s so much thought in its design, it’s grungy and practical and just so darn cool. I hate that they nuked it in season 2. I wanted Din and Grogu to fly and live in it forever. In universe, it has such significance to Din: we don’t know how long he’s had it, but it has been a very, very long time if the bounty hunter crew he used to work with in his younger years remember it. It’s the ship that got him his clan signet (convoluted, yeah, but he wouldn’t have had to fight that mudhorn if it weren’t for the Jawas stealing his ship’s parts and holding them hostage).

I know I’ve seen a lot of people say Din getting another Razor Crest is like buying the same model of car you loved and got used to. I get it. If my car packed up, I’d scour the second-hand dealers to find another one just like it. But this is a story and the Razor Crest’s destruction served a narrative purpose, so whatever happens next has to as well.

The new Razor Crest isn’t a restoration, it’s Grogu returning to Din just a few episodes after leaving with Luke, it’s Din reswearing the creed as soon as possible and never bringing it up again, it’s Din snatching the flimsiest excuse to give up the Darksaber, it’s Bo-Katan becoming Manda’lor for the third. kriffing. time: it’s a hasty “let’s get back to the status quo we had at the beginning, logical plot and character development be damned.”

Rebels went through this but guess what? They did it right.

In the start of season 3, they lose the Phantom: the Ghost’s excursion craft. This had major story significance: season 3 is when the stakes rise to their highest point yet, it’s where we cross the point of no return, and every character undergoes massive, irreversible change. Losing the Phantom is a tangible representation of the change in the status quo, and a harbinger of the losses to come.

They go a few episodes without an excursion craft and then they get a new one. But! It’s different. They find an old Clone Wars-era shuttle in a decrepit Separatist base. It fits in the old craft’s port and they dub it the Phantom II, but it’s clearly different: it has a different shape and a different interior (most notably: two pilot seats side-by-side rather than just one), Sabine gets to paint it and she covers it in far more paint than the previous one ever saw. This little ship silently serves as a signal that what’s lost can be restored, it will be different, but that can be for the better.

Imagine if they just found another Phantom—the exact same model as the last. It would’ve seemed so pointless losing it in the first place, wouldn’t it? And what would be the takeaway message?

This new Razor Crest is not the ship Din flew for years and years alone, modifying here and there, wearing it in with his ways and routines. It’s not the ship he had to fight a mudhorn to restore. It’s not the ship that became home to him and Grogu. It’s just looks the same.

Much like the story itself.

Since TBoBF and season 3, The Mandalorian’s become a hollow version of itself. Anything significant happens, any character development occurs, it gets reversed as soon as possible so it can stay the Din and Grogu Show. Din’s armour never changes, Grogu never grows; Din stays a bounty hunter (except we sanitize it now, make it that he only goes after Bad GuysTM), Grogu never hones his Force abilities (doesn’t even use them until the flimsy story demands a deus ex machina, then suddenly he can do anything he wants with it).

The original ‘Crest’s destruction comes at a majorly significant point in The Mandalorian’s storyline. It shows us a point of no return, a point of massive, irrevocable change. Din’s called on the help of allies before but now he has to rely on them like never before. He’s lost one of the most useful tools in his arsenal. And if he can lose something we have come to see as permanent and a part of him, what else can he lose? What will be left? What will he become?