#almec

For one, I don't buy that Almec is always a bad person or even always a bad politician. He obviously DOES end up being bitter and siding with Maul and Death Watch by the end, but that is after he's left alone to deal with the mess Satine's insistence on neutrality left him with and he's then summarily imprisoned for the decision he made to turn to the black market when Satine's choices left him with none (and also presumably for his treason when he chooses to more explicitly turn on Satine, but given that Satine's political choices have forced them on a path to starvation and she refuses to take any responsibility for it or consider any alternative options and is starting to threaten innocent people with imprisonment for questioning her choices, I'm kind-of with Almec on wanting to depose her by this point, especially when she's painting HIM as the true corruption in the government for trying to clean up her mess for her). I dunno, I think I'd be pretty upset about that, too.

Almec clearly didn't COME to Satine to talk to her about the issues that neutrality had left them with regarding trade, but he IS the Prime Minister and it's a little unclear how much Almec actually HAS to come to Satine about those kinds of decisions. He IS deliberately hiding some of it from her because Satine is an extremely black and white kind of person who won't understand why he's doing what he's doing and why he believes it's necessary given their complete inability to get supplies any other way, but it's entirely possible that he doesn't HAVE to explain every decision he makes to her given his position in the government.

I'm willing to bet that Almec probably was a perfectly good politician, and the only reason he ends up otherwise is because Satine manages to put him in an impossible position when she insists on their neutrality. She's asking him to figure out how to acquire food and other supplies for an entire system's worth of people whose main planet is completely demolished to the point that the people themselves have to live under domes (with a moon that USED to be an agricultural center but was mined so much that it's only barely starting to recover from that) and who can no longer trade with almost anybody else in the galaxy given they chose not to side with either the Separatists or the Republic*. She SHOULD theoretically be able to look to the other Neutral Systems for trade assistance, but those planets are in the exact same position she's in (unable to trade with most of the rest of the galaxy) and are likely unable to spare a lot of their own supplies at the moment. It's entirely possible that Almec TRIED that route and it didn't work. I dunno, what is Almec supposed to DO in this situation? It's his job to apparently come up with a solution to a mess Satine created, and he DOES do his best to find one! It's not like he just threw his hands up and said "Fuck you, you did this to us, you find us a way out of it" when he absolutely could have done so and I honestly wouldn't find it an entirely unsympathetic choice on his part.

*Theoretically, they should've been able to turn to planets/moons like Kalevala and Krownest for help, but they didn't exist yet I think by the time this narrative was written, so I'm not taking them into account here as the obvious solution to the problem of acquiring food.

Almec made connections that he hoped would keep his people FED when he had no other alternatives, and his reward for that is life imprisonment by the person who made it impossible to keep their people fed in the first place. Almec does go a little off the deep end by the end, but I don't think that that automatically means he's ALWAYS been a complete asshole who hated Satine or a completely incompetent politician or even just that he's always been lying about everything and nothing he ever says can ever be trusted.

Which means that I don't think people's arguments that Almec is lying when he speaks to Obi-Wan at the very beginning of the very first episode of "The Mandalore Plot" hold a lot of water. There's no indication that Almec is lying here, nothing in the dialogue or the episode or even the whole ARC ever really makes it seem like Almec can't be trusted with what he says. You as the audience are being introduced to Mandalore and to Satine and the political situation and Satine's history for the very first time. Almec is providing exposition so that Satine does not have to and they can just focus on the dynamic between her and Obi-Wan without pesky exposition getting in the way.

I don't think Almec is just lying when he says "all of our warriors were exiled to Concordia" or when he says "they all died years ago." I don't even think he's intentionally spinning things. What would it benefit him to do so at this point? There's clearly armed guards who walk in with Satine like 30 seconds after he says this, so if he's intentionally lying then it's about to be disproven and he can't be unaware of that. And some of Satine's dialogue after seems to indicate a similar story. She's absolutely utterly convinced that there are no Mandalorian warriors of any note who could possibly have attacked a Republic vessel. She says that ALL of her people are as trustworthy as she is. If there were exiled warriors on one of her moons, I find it hard to believe she'd consider them trustworthy given, you know, the exile. You tend not to exile people you trust, that just isn't usually how that works. Satine absolutely 100% believes that there is no threat to her or anyone else within her borders and then is proven wrong. That's literally a major point of that whole episode, that there's a hidden terrorist group that Satine didn't even really know existed (or that she's been wildly underestimating for a while, take your pick). So given that all of Satine's behavior indicates a similar belief to what Almec says earlier, it seems unlikely that Almec himself is just straight up lying to Obi-Wan for some unidentifiable reason.

We don't really know if Almec was elected to Prime Minister or appointed as Prime Minister by Satine, but everything about their dynamic in the first arc seems to indicate that he IS trustworthy and that you as the viewer are intended to take his statements at face value.

Feel free to reblog with a gif or pic of your favorite moment from this episode. 😊

Half the time they're trying to portray her as this weak, naive, passive, silly little woman, and then the rest of the time she's a scheming, evil, cold-blooded killer who could also secretly be working with the Separatists.

—————

The turquoise-blue sea of Kalevala was restless, its waters darkened, reflecting the weary grey sky above.

Bo sighed as she gazed at Castle Kryze from the distance—the sweeping courtyard, the beskad walls strong and austere, their dark stone uneven after years of wind and sun. The windows rose tall toward the sky, their pointed arches sharp as blades.

Sumptuous. Imposing. Formidable.

It stood proud atop the promontory as the waves crashed against the rocks below. A jai’galaar shrieked somewhere on the horizon, its cry tearing through the salt-laden air. Bo’s chest tightened; it sounded like mourning, as though the fortress itself remembered who it had lost.

But no. Those memories could not be allowed to take root—not in her heart, not in her mind. Even if the walls still echoed with them.

She ground her teeth and looked away, scanning the landscape through her T-shaped visor, fingers curling tightly around the hilt of her beskad.

It had been a necessary evil, she told herself. To rescue tradition. Honour. Glory. Almec had said so—and how persuasive he had been. Too persuasive. She had clung to his words like a lifeline, desperate for the recognition she had never received. Not from Satine. Not even from her buir. She told herself it didn’t matter—she didn’t need them anyway.

And yet… the castle whispered otherwise.

Like sir where do you get this kinda armor?! Imma need you to set me up with whoever made it👀