#mando text

i thought about din's name and what i'm leaning towards is this: i don't see why anyone should stop calling him din, even if it turns out to be his family name. there's plenty of other fictional characters who go just by their last name, and there's no rule that says you absolutely have to use the given name if provided. so it doesn't matter to me that much whether "din" is his family name or his given name. i'm calling him din either way. like if it does end up getting confirmed as a family name? fine, then i'm calling him by his family name, it doesn't have to be weird. if it turns out it's still supposed to be his given name? also fine, then i'm calling him by his given name as it was assumed before. he has been din for the past three years and he still is din now

Do you ever just think about the fact that in order to stay together, Din and Grogu actually have to sacrifice who they really are and keep hiding from their true selves? That for them to be together, Grogu needs to keep being a foundling, a lost soul, and Din has to keep being a cold Mandalorian with a mission (or as he puts it himself a “job”, a “task”) given by a creed he cannot break? But that they are both actually fine with that for a moment because it means being together? At some point they’re both like: I’d rather be a nobody with you than to be somebody without you. Grogu makes that quite clear when he basically says to Ahsoka thank you but no thank you, and so does Din when he lies to Luke by saying “he doesn’t want to go with you.” In the end, they are someone for each other and isn’t that all that matters? Unfortunately no, because they can no longer hide who they are to each other, precisely because of the special bond between them. And this necessarily means going separate ways. Thanks to Grogu, Din finds his way back to himself —the orphan Din Djarin; he basically had no face since it was hidden from everyone but himself. And if you only exist for yourself, then you don’t exist at all (I was about to insert a philosophical speech about Sartre’s “Hell is other people” and how we actually need others to acknowledge our existence for us to be real, but I figure it was too much). No one has seen Din’s face in forever, Din Djarin has died forever ago. But for the first time since his parents last laid their eyes on him, he now exists through another gaze again, Grogu’s. And being someone for someone else is actually what makes you alive. Din Djarin is brought back to life (I’ll say it again but there’s something of a resurrection when he takes off his helmet so that Grogu can see him), he’s confronted with his own past and he knows it would be wrong to keep Grogu as an orphan when the little one actually has somewhere he belongs, a Jedi family. Now that he’s Din Djarin again, he necessarily has to let go of Grogu or else he won’t be able to live with himself. The same is true with Grogu, finding his way back to the little Jedi that he is thanks to Din, and forced to embrace his destiny and go on a path where his daddy does not belong. Accepting to be what he is involves responsibilites he cannot escape from, or else his dad may be hurt in the process. So again, for Grogu to be himself, he necessarily has to let go of Din. They each were someone in disguise in order to stay together, but this led them to accepting who they truly are, which is beautiful but also implies losing the only person they truly care about. Bonus: Din couldn’t afford being sentimental as a bounty hunter, yet he finally opened up his heart again and bonded with a child. But supposedly in the future, Grogu, as a Jedi, might be forced to distance himself from the attachment he’s formed to Din. Setting them, again, on two different paths. Who needs Greek tragedies when you have those two?

me, after not thinking about din djarin for ten minutes: ugh i miss din

what if grogu wants to be a mandalorian instead of a jedi in part because his dad is one, but also because he has seen the jedi fail in the past so now he hopes that if he becomes a cool, versatile, armored warrior, he will never have to experience a similar horror again