Satine and Mace holding joint title for most unfairly maligned in fandom… also they were both murdered by sith lords resulting in their people being destroyed. I think they should team up.
big fan of the “I can’t fix him but I can follow him to his tragic and untimely end and love him even as he becomes corrupted and decays into a shadow of his former self” trope
In love with the idea of social media in a superhero vigilante universe. Imagine you’ve grappled with the ethics and morality of interfering with criminal acts and operating on limited information and the possibility of bringing danger to the innocent and the ultimate futility of the criminal justice system and you come out the other side still determined to do what you do and then you read a tweet that says “I used to steal cars for the thrill of it but then one night Power Guy showed up and pinned me to a wall and it was the hottest thing that’s ever happened. Realized I’m onto dudes, joined fetlife, found a great Dom, three years on the straight and narrow, thanks king”
people should ship cassian/din solely because being around someone as distrusting and trigger-happy as cassian would give din a migraine
idk the sw timeline so ignore the inconsistencies but assume din is at least 5-7 years younger than he is in the mandalorian.
as indicated in the episode the prisoner, din was even more terrifying when he was younger. he was quick to kill, referred to enemy combatants and marks alike as “target practice,” hung around with the likes of xi’an enough to start a flirtationship and some degree of rapport with a crude and cruel crew, and also happily left a member of said crew for dead in imperial territory for reasons unknown. this din is colder even than the one we meet at the beginning of the Mandalorian: this din is willing to turn a baby over to the imperials for the right price.
this is the man luthen (or his assistant, or maybe even syril/a third party) hires to hunt down recent fugitive, possible political agitator, and definite loose-end cassian andor shortly after the prison break on narkina-5.
either it’s din who breaks into the prison and busts him out (which i don’t like because that moment is so powerful, and cassian deserves to keep that w), or after the narkinians give cassian and melshi a ride off-world, din shows up, having tracked cassian this far. in another moment of selflessness (which is happening to him more and more often; cassian will deny this if questioned however) cassian leads the Mandalorian away from melshi after making melshi promise to go back to ferrix for the funeral. cassian makes a good effort and almost escapes on din’s ship (breaking the carbonite machine in the process), but din snags him at the last second and takes off with him.
din and cassian begin their road trip to the drop off point, and through bullshit and shenanigans wind up bonding along the way. cassian, who is slowly becoming the budding revolutionary he is at the end of season 1, finds himself trying to bullshit and sway din to the revolutionary cause the way vel and luthen once tried to sway him, only now, he is starting to believe what he’s saying. he’s finally getting what everyone has been trying to teach him — and it’s happening because he’s faced with din, another survivor of a cultural and ethnic genocide, another person who has watched the empire destroy their entire world for profit, another man who has lived in hiding for most of his life, another man desperately clinging to the remnants of who he was and doggedly ignoring the state of the Galaxy around him so long as it doesn’t directly effect him out in the Outer Rim.
(din doesn’t believe a word of what cassian says about the rebellion. marks always lie to save their own skins. cassian is a liar by trade.)
plus, despite the similarities of their backgrounds, din and cassian couldn’t be more different. din believes in honor and has a code and a creed that he lives for, though his morals are gray as hell; cassian has lived for himself and maarva for most of his life and is just now learning that he has a responsibility to others to make the world a better place. they are two dangerous men in a fragile place between realizations, actualization, floating in that uncomfortable plane between fear and growth and change. that they both exist in this place is the only reason their interaction doesn’t immediately end in bloodshed (though they both make more than one attempt).
the drop off goes wrong; it’s a trap, maybe din’s covert is targeted by the people who hired him/the empire because tyranny is brittle and paranoid, and a breach in contract means they’re in limbo together. not quite on the same side, but more than they were before.
don’t know where the story quite goes from there, but i see cassian/din being two ships in the night. there is an opportunity, at one point, for them to sort-of-kind-of be something together, for din to join the rebellion, but it’s impossible. din is more like cinta at this point of time: the covert comes first in all things, and no amount of alleged attachment to cassian will sway him; especially not if it makes the empire eye the coverts. din either lets cassian go, or cassian bribes him with the credits he got from the heist, or cassian abuses the small ounce of trust din gives him after traveling together for so long to sabotage his ship and escape, and even though din is furious and maybe unreasonably stung by this, their last fleeting look at one another is one of understanding. cassian has his own war to fight and people worth fighting for, and no matter the bittersweet tension building between them, the rebellion is more important. din has a chance to shoot cassian and go back to get his reward money, but din doesn’t take it. instead he is silent as cassian steals some of din’s gear and uses it to escape. to return to his precious, doomed rebellion.
“don’t look so sad,” cassian smirks. “i’ll bring it back.”
din says nothing. just watches cassian escape, committing that face to memory, certain it is the last time he will ever see it, because cassian is, first and foremost, a liar.
and din is right.
until five years later, when luke skywalker shows him images of the rebellion crew who died to destroy the Death Star, and the blue glow of the holofeed lights up that sharp jaw, pinched smirk, and dangerous dark eyes that din would know anywhere. even over years of absence he can hear the man’s barbed, sharp laugh, the haughty toss of his head as he flouted death again and again, like his luck would never run out.
The fact that Anakin was given Ahsoka and immediately built her what is essentially a rear facing booster seat for his Y-bomber is not only desperately charming but easily the funniest shit I have ever seen in my life. I imagine him carefully drafting this on his little engineering lap desk he carries with him during the war, and then at last second is like, in a panicked “holy shit I have a child now” haze, remembers a single line about infants sitting rear facing that he read in a pamphlet once at the space DMV and is like OH NO THATS RIGHT THE BABY HAS TO BE REAR FACING and on his actual honest to god y-bomber that he fights in WAR attaches that shit and is like cool cool cool no doubt no doubt no doubt I can raise a child I can do that
Except Ahsoka is 14 which means this is a grave insult upon her dignity in all ways
Look at this image you just know in your marrow she bitched about this for twenty minutes before Anakin finally bodily put her in himself, this is the PEAK of comedy
i don’t even think of anidala as toxic and unhealthy, but everytime i see some stale post about it in the anidala tag the more i genuinely and unironically support padme joining anakin in the dark side. give me empress amidala with darth vader as her devoted consort and right hand. he worships her as a living goddess, the twisted, eldritch horrors of the cosmos made flesh, to which he sacrifices all those who’d dare speak her name with the slightest amount of degradation. they will burn down the whole galaxy and rebuild from the ashes. their children will inherit an empire built on top of graveyards. the words “toxic” and “unhealthy” aren’t even worthy of them. they could be so much worse, and i would love them for it.
The more I think about it, the more I think they did Padme dirty by shaping her character as this pure ivory-tower angel to provide thematic contrast to what Anakin was going to become.
They should have made her an overachieving child prodigy who was raised to be a goody two-shoes but took the first opportunity she got to go absolutely feral, took the first crack in the facade to stick her head through and scream bloody murder about what she finds, took the first crisis of her reign as an opportunity to find her element, and spend the rest of her life having to be held back so as not to overturn the universe.
They should have let her be furious. They should have let her be someone her security team of handmaidens has to know how to wrangle. They should have let her dance on the launchpad of revolution, with huge amounts of Republic and Sith strategic bandwidth devoted to keeping her from actually launching.
They should have had the fake Queen tell the Jedi to take three handmaidens with them, using her borrowed authority to make her Queen take bodyguards with her. They should have had her form an instant bond with Anakin, talking for hours about the nature of the galaxy and people and how things should be, a pair of preteens building castles in the air. They should have had her go back and rescue Shmi and set her up with a whole community center to provide support and education to the slaves of Mos Espa. They should have had her betrayed to the Tusken Raiders by resentful slavers rather than just casting the Tusken Raiders as opportunistically evil, and they should have had Anakin launch a full-on slave rebellion afterwards with Padme’s support. They should have had her so visionary, so brilliantly eager to make the galaxy a better place, that Anakin wouldn’t have reason to doubt for an instant that she’d support the Empire.
She should have been a bright and blazing star whose sudden collapse and death forms the black hole that bound Anakin to the Dark Side.
She should have been killed by Palpatine’s arrangement via the secret life-siphoning tactics he taught Vader, not because the Mustafar situation went pear-shaped but because there was no way to keep her alive without her being Palpatine’s competition.
Time-travelling Reva would be peak Terminator. And she’s perfectly positioned to hijack one of Vader’s desperate attempts to use dark sith magic to get Padme back. And she would surprise murder Palpatine and hunt a very confused Anakin relentlessly, wielding her conspicuously red saber. I don’t know about you but I appreciate the chaotic energy she would bring.
