Mandalorian Culture and Real Life

[ParjaiTracyn]

Just like there is no single Mandalorian community, ...

So many we're missing that intergroup link. Between forums. Between clans. Maybe we should push for something like that between different groups of those who actually want to live a Mandalorian way of life. Seperation, compartmentalization, individualism, but those mean nothing without the whole, right? What do you think?

To put it bluntly, the different groups will never come together. Aay'han, Oyu'baat, MandoCreator, Project Shereshoy, and the Way of the Mandalore have all had members visiting each others' servers over the years. The visiting members have attempted to sharing ideas, but the views in each place are simply too different from each other.

Project Shereshoy was intended to be a place where people with different ideas about being a Mandalorian on Earth shared and learned from each other. A cultural hub, even as it promoted no single vision of Mandalorians. It ultimately failed. MandoCreator took on some of that ideal (the two servers were founded by the same people) and expanded its mission from simply being a website-support server to being a hangout for Mando and Star Wars enthusiasts, but it does not have the same focus on realism that Project Shereshoy had wanted.

Additionally, there are so many people out there who call themselves Mandalorians yet have no interest in finding a community to support. I suspect that some people may be secretly afraid that they'll have to compromise their interpretation of being a Mandalorian — which is absolutely true. If you want to be an active part of a community, you must be willing to adjust your lifestyle to fit into that community and the culture it has established so far.

People have been adapting the snippets of Mandalorian life that they've seen in Republic Commando books since the material came out in 20 years ago. Mandalorian realism has been created and re-created an uncountable number of times, largely without any community support. All anyone needs to create their version of the culture are the books ... and nowadays, many people don't even need those, getting versions of Mandalorian culture from "The Mandalorian" show or Tumblr posts or fan-fiction stories or Wookieepedia, many of which have completely revised what Karen Traviss first created.

The people who don't want a community on Earth are not exactly alone, though. They have the characters from the novels, comics, video games, and television shows to connect with, even if it's just in the imagination. I'm sure they also have other types of real-life communities that fill the need for support, even if not directly related to being a Mandalorian realist.

So would you say you are a scholar of Mandalorian culture or someone who would consider themselves a real Mandalorian? Either way, it seems you've been recognized by others as Mandalorians. I will make a point about the importance of that.

I am a scholar of Mandalorian culture, though my knowledge and research are skewed toward specific versions of it. I also consider myself a Mandalorian, largely because others have called me that, but also because I have spent so much time supporting Mando-realism servers that I think I earned the right to adopt the name. Nonetheless, I know that there are those who don't think I do enough to fit their views of what it means to be a Mandalorian on Earth, and therefore I am not truly one, even in the servers that I support. The irony of that judgement is that those people also twist and reinterpret the source material to suit how they want to live, including being self-proclaimed Mandalorians, something that never happens in any of the official media.

Not sure how important that is to anything, aside from having a different way of engaging with the culture and community than nearly all of the people who I hang out with.

[Augest Kayd]

Wow. The history on this is quite deep.

[Augest Kayd]

It's weird to take in. Cynically, I recognize that no one wants to compromise on their own version of ideals, but that in and of itself is Mandalorian to me, as long as it doesn't go back to harm what is important to them. And yet, it's weird to me that a central hub that doesn't push any one particular variation of the culture failed, that somehow the internal conflict always reached a boiling point between perspectives. Is that also Mandalorian, given all the civil wars and splinter groups in Canon and Legends?

[ParjaiTracyn]

Project Shereshoy did not fail because conflict reached a boiling point. Anyone who was offended that others weren't bending to their point of view either left or were asked to leave. Rather, the server failed because it couldn't draw enough Mando realists together who wanted to share their struggles and triumphs, despite being advertised in a few places (unlike the Oyu'baat, which requires work to track down).

As I mentioned elsewhere, I don't think that conflict is being created in order to replicate what's seen in-universe, in the source material. Rather, it's a byproduct of the kind of people that a fictional culture attracts: those who have strong wills (necessary to adopt something that isn't main stream) and who created a version of the culture before finding other people, a version that they cling to like a rock in a storm. In particular, Mando realism attracts a number of fierce, solitary survivalists. The heroes of the tales that they admire don't bow to anyone; why should they?

Yet even if there is no one place that all Mando realists want to join, places like Aay'han and the Oyu'baat continue because they have enough people who can hold civil conversations about the culture.