Bad ideas in a trenchcoat

Pre-war Soundwave and Megatron :0

But I really hated Satine when I first watched TCW a few years ago. I couldn't stand the way she treated Obi-Wan, I felt like the entire romance was pretty shoe-horned and ham-fisted and full of a lot of romance tropes between hetero couples that I'm not fond of. And I also interpreted the explanation we get about Mandalore's current peace and what had to be done to make it that way as... not great and kind-of a cultural extermination of some kind.

Since then I've followed a number of people who happen to love and defend Satine and her political choices, read through their metas about why the warriors being exiled to Concordia was a reasonable choice to make at the time. I've also read a few posts that still condemn that choice the way I did initially.

And while I think the INTENTION of the writing here was that this was a reasonable choice for Satine to make, that she was exiling the people who refused to be peaceful and practice their culture without trying to start a war all over again, the way it's said and written does NOT feel like that. At least, not to all of us.

For one, the usage of the term "warriors" in the line. They say they exiled "all the warriors" to a nearby moon. They don't say "we exiled everyone who refused to stop fighting and killing for a war that had already stopped" or "we exiled Death Watch who were a well-known terrorist group" or anything like that. They JUST say "warriors" which does feel vague enough as a description to feel like she is exiling literally everyone who happens to be someone who knows how to fight and has based their culture around being warriors, regardless of whether they were a problem or not. It also then feels hypocritical of her to have done so when she very clearly has guards who can fight on her behalf, so either she didn't exile ALL of the warriors or she managed to get a few people she decided to give exceptions to in order to learn how to protect her.

And because of this vagueness, the natural assumption to make from there is that Satine has basically forbidden everything that WENT ALONG with warrior culture: wearing armor, using weapons, learning how to fight, etc. Everything that we've been told via other media is VERY IMPORTANT to Mandalorian culture. I think we can reasonably decide that this was... PROBABLY not true, there's no canon evidence for this being true that I can recall. She never SAYS anything about forbidding armor or learning how to fight and only forbids OUTSIDERS from carrying weapons. She herself personally refuses to use lethal weapons and doesn't appear to wear any armor ever, but I don't think there's any mention of her not allowing other people to do so. Obviously her guards do in fact wear armor and carry weapons. She doesn't even condemn Padme for picking up a blaster to help fight off some smugglers at one point, despite that theoretically going against the rule of no outsiders carrying/using weapons.

Satine ALSO seems to be someone who does, to some degree, take a lot of pride in Mandalorian culture and traditions. She says as much when Padme shows up. So in some ways, it doesn't make sense that she'd entirely eliminate a portion of that culture so long as those who practiced it weren't using it to actively hurt other people.

That being said, Satine is someone who is... particularly implacable in her beliefs. We see this MOST clearly with Obi-Wan and the way Satine discusses the Jedi and the war with him and the way she condemns his entire people for fighting in the war at all, despite all of the obvious reasons TO fight the war that we have as the audience. It's never made canon in the show itself, but we also know from Lucas's interviews that the Jedi didn't even have a CHOICE about whether to join the war as Generals or not, they got drafted. But Satine appears unwilling to listen to Obi-Wan's reasoning, to hear him out on why they're working to protect people, to re-evaluate her personal definition of "peacekeepers" for someone else's culture. She never budges on this particular issue, not once. She and Obi-Wan basically just stop discussing it at some point.

So with that in mind, it does feel in character that Satine could be so insistent on keeping a war from happening that she could exile everyone who refused to stop practicing warrior traditions, regardless of whether they were hurting someone else or not. Especially if she was a young traumatized teenager at the time, reacting to a civil war that kept her on the run for a year and appears to have done a lot of damage to the planet.

And then we come to the part where they tell us that EVERYBODY who had been exiled had died out. Everyone. Within a span of TWENTY YEARS, which is not that long of a time. Which calls into question certain things like whether the people who were exiled were allowed to LEAVE it in order to find a place to live that accepted them so long as it wasn't within Mandalorian space. Were they allowed to make contact with other people to bring them resources and supplies or not. If they had just said "everybody left the moon and we assume they have since found refuge elsewhere" that would be different. But they all are supposedly DEAD, which to me speaks of a more concerted effort to not allow those people to leave and an equal effort not to take care of them. While it's entirely probable that this report was a LIE given by Pre Viszla and all of those people have simply now joined Pre's Death Watch, neither Satine nor anyone in her government appears to feel all that upset about it. It's not a tragedy that no one was able to stop in time, a dark spot upon their history and Satine's leadership that she acknowledges.

And that feels particularly condemning to me.

But the problem is that I don't think we're intended to see it that way. I don't think it was intentionally written as something the audience would actually condemn Satine for.

Which means that this is where we hit upon the Padme Problem. Which is when they care so little about their female characters that the nuances that are implied by the dialogue and writing are glossed over to the point that the character ends up seeming more of a terrible person than they were intended to be. Padme's brushing off of Anakin's massacre of the Tuskens makes her seem like a racist whose grand values suddenly don't exist, solely because Padme's motivations aren't the ones that matter in this scene and nobody cared enough about her when writing this to realize exactly how it would come off to an audience. With Satine, it's the unfortunate usage of the vague term "warriors" and the fact that they all died combined with her implacable attitude towards Obi-Wan and the Jedi which is a result of them using bad romcom tropes of the time for that relationship. All of which leads to Satine feeling like a tyrant who advocates for cultural extermination, because it's the only way some of these inconsistencies make any sense sometimes.

@touyas

You're going for an in-universe explanation to the problem here, which is fine, I've done a few of those myself, but quite honestly, there actually isn't a good in-universe explanation.

Padme at the time of AOTC has been a senator for about 6 years, and was a Queen of a relatively nearby planet for 4 years before that. She's 24 years old, there's no reason for her to be perfectly aware of what a Tusken is and at least a very GENERAL idea of the history of Tatooine. At no point do we ever see her ASK what a Tusken is or show any confusion about what they are. You can assume she doesn't, but there's other canon evidence to show that people in the GFFA are perfectly aware of what Tuskens ARE even if their views of them are prejudiced.

But if you go the route that Padme just holds normal prejudices against the Tuskens, now we're in "Padme's just space racist" territory, which is fine except for the fact that it radically goes against the general presentation of Padme as someone who fights very hard for sentient rights in the galaxy.

So what you end up with is that Padme reacts to the Tuskens the way she does because George Lucas based the Tuskens on racist depictions of Bedouin Arabs and Native Americans in older movies that he liked. That's honestly it.

Anakin killing the Tuskens isn't supposed to look equally as bad as what he does to the Jedi later, and Padme's VERY different reactions to the two situations tells you that. YOU aren't supposed to react the same way to the massacre of the Tuskens as you're clearly supposed to react to the genocide of the Jedi in the next film. Anakin killing the Tuskens is violent perhaps, and MAYBE a step too far with killing the kids, but all we've ever seen of them is, as you say, the Tuskens shooting at podracers for no obvious reason and attacking Luke without warning. You're already predisposed NOT TO LIKE THEM and to see them as almost animalistic yourself, and then you get to see poor Shmi Skywalker's traumatized body moments before she dies.

So which party are you inclined to be more sympathetic towards? The group of people that you've only ever seen doing horrific violent things to characters you like, or the crying main character whose mother was just tortured to death?

From a modern perspective, it's really clear just how racist and awful the depiction of the Tuskens was prior to this scene. And more recent depictions of the Tuskens have attempted to give a more sympathetic and nuanced view of them (though they could still use work obviously). Both of which make that scene look at LOT worse in hindsight and it turns Padme's choice to immediately be sympathetic to Anakin into something immensely questionable and contradictory to the character we're supposed to understand her to be. How could someone who has spent literally her ENTIRE LIFE dedicated to standing up for sentient rights only show sympathy towards someone who just admitted to murdering an entire village of people? How could she love him afterwards, MARRY HIM afterwards? How did this not raise about a million red flags?

And the answer is because it wasn't seen as red flag worthy at the time by the people making the story. Anakin massacring the Tuskens is probably only meant to be seen as about as evil as going out and killing a pack of wolves, even the puppies. Violent, yes, but not necessarily unsympathetic or impossible to come back from. This was just one step towards darkness, not a fall into the void in and of itself. Anakin is supposed to still be, effectively, fine at the beginning of ROTS. And this is because, to the people writing it, that massacre truly doesn't matter all that much. It's not the condemning action that we see it as now.

Uhhh, Commenter? It's one or the other of those, not both. You have to be sentient to shoot at something. Simply seeing the tuskens shooting at podracers would be proof of sentience. An animal that accidentally triggers a gun like a cat on a keyboard cannot take aim.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

like. we can defy the christian god, in a way, because we can choose to not do what he says we ought to. sure. but we cannot defy greek gods in the same way, because the god is not just an entity that commands you but the very thing you are doing. apollo does not just send plagues, he is plague. you know apollo is real because there is plague. plague is not apollo acting in the world, it is an instance of apollo, in the same way that insight is athena, love is aphrodite, harvest is demeter, storms are zeus. gods are not commanding nature and sending signs and acting upon the world, because signs and nature and human nature are themselves the gods. the gods cannot be absent, because we still get ideas, and harvest, and go to war, and feel desire, and hunt. the gods cannot be defied because you cannot defy "getting ideas" or "harvesting" or "having sex" or "dying." to attempt to is entirely futile. like you cannot defy poseidon because you cannot defy the sea. you cannot defy aphrodite because you cannot defy love and reproduction. nature and human nature are unbeatable, and so the gods are unbeatable, because they are nature and human nature.