gffa:twilightofthe:gffa:twilightofthe:gffa:The Mandalorian | Chapter 7 - “The Reckoning”#WHY UNPREPA
gffa:twilightofthe:gffa:twilightofthe:gffa:The Mandalorian | Chapter 7 - “The Reckoning”#WHY UNPREPARED TODDLERS WITH POTENTIAL GOD-LIKE POWERS MAY NOT BE THE SUPER BEST IDEA IN THE GALAXY#HOWEVER#I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW TINY ANGRY BABY OVERLORDExactly! I love how this show gives almost a rebuttal to everyone who criticizes the Jedi for taking in young children instead of “just letting them grow up with their families who love them!!!”Mando Man obviously loves Baby Yoda very much, he’s also a skilled and dangerous man known as the “best in the parsec”, if anyone could be chosen to raise this baby safe and happy, he’s probably the best choice there could possibly be.And yet, he struggles, he struggles a lot— and I’m not meaning just the typical “new parent” struggles, which he’s got a pretty good handle on, he is a good parent —he struggles over the fact that he is not trained in using the Force and he doesn’t understand it, so if his child with the powers of the universe gets into his little head that Force choking is fun, he can’t really do much to tell the kid just why doing that is wrong besides the whole “strangling people bad” and why it could be dangerous. He struggles because organizations of dangerous people see this baby as a valuable commodity and tool and he and the baby’s lives are in constant danger running from these people after them.The sad truth of all of this is that the galaxy is not safe for Force sensitives, and it never was. Not during the Empire of course, but it isn’t after the Empire either, and it still wasn’t safe before the Empire and that’s why the Jedi Order existed, because as much as these children’s families might love them, they sometimes couldn’t care for these kids they didn’t fully understand in the way they needed, as much as they wanted to. The Jedi provided these kids safety from those that would harm them and training to control their abilities. And if the families really wanted to keep their kids, the Jedi let them but also helped them understand their kids and kept an eye out and gave them advice on how to help their child’s gift flourish.What really gets me about this is the innocence of it.Yes, absolutely, to everything you said about how the Mandalorian is going to struggle with understanding what the hell is going on and how to deal with it, how the galaxy has never been safe for Force-sensitives, how this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this in canon and it won’t be the last, but also how innocent this probably was.I think most of us agree, “The baby was just trying to protect his dad!!!” and that’s what makes it worse.Children naturally have these huge, tremendous, uncontrollable feelings boiling up inside of them, because they haven’t learned to regulate or process them yet, that’s a natural part of the growing up process. The misunderstanding of thinking Cara was attacking his dad, the innocence of getting mad because he thought his dad was in trouble and couldn’t understand the context of a friendly arm-wrestling match, shows off just how awful this could have been.Cara isn’t just a full grown adult, but someone who is a trained fighter and she was absolutely blindsided by this and couldn’t really even fight back. That the baby could make this totally normal and innocent mistake and come this close to really hurting someone over a misunderstanding shows the danger in having a super-powered baby without other super-powered people around 24/7 to deal with these situations when they come up.This was totally a spur of the moment thing. It happened in the blink of an eye. From a baby who is generally pretty sweet and caring. And this moment could have so easily been an absolute horror show.Yes definitely to all you said, but I find it interesting (and fine! Perfectly fine!! It’s probs what actually happened lol) that most people seemed to automatically assume Baby was going after Cara out of innocent overprotectiveness, that Baby meant to seriously injure her (with good intentions), because to me, the first time I saw that, it looked like Baby was innocently playing.Which just makes your point about innocence so much deeper, because from how I saw it, Baby has seen Mando Man and Cara actually fighting before, saw and just quietly sipped soup. Another thing about children is that they take ALL of their cues from those in charge of them, so what Baby saw was harsh combat between two people who later ended up being friendly with one another. Baby thinks “ok roughhousing = friendship”. Now Baby is seeing Mando Man and Cara in what looks like another fight. Baby knows what to do now! Baby can join in with the roughhousing!!! It’ll be fun!!!!!Quoting my grandmother here with her favorite saying that “everything’s fun and games until someone loses an eye”. Kids do that a LOT. They play and then someone oversteps a boundary they haven’t learned yet because they’re little and tears occur. To me it looked like Baby was trying to play with the adults, overstepped, then as you said, everything went horribly wrong because of that innocence. Except this isn’t the same as biting someone or throwing a toy at someone’s head like most little kids do when they overstep in play, this is literal dangerous strangulation because this is a literal superpowered toddler and Baby does not have anyone to show him or help him with how to properly use those powers.I’m really hoping the show explores more of this because this is a really interesting subject to deal with.Whether the baby was taking its cues from the adults around him (”roughhousing is how you do things!! I’m playing like the grown-ups play!!”) or the baby got REAL MAD because it thought its caretaker was under attack, both are entirely innocent, normally harmless reactions from a toddler–until you add Force powers into the mix. And that’s not even getting into the psychic aspect of this–how much is the baby picking up on the aggression around him? Cara and Mando and the bounty hunters going after them, all putting out anger and aggression into the air, how much of that is the baby feeling pressing on his mind?That your point about how this initially looked like playing furthers how scary this was–how do non-Jedi tell what’s playing and what’s dangerous? How can you tell until the damage is almost nearly done? None of these people are psychic space wizards who can sense when a toddler is getting mad and about to turn on a dime without warning. None of these people are psychic space wizards who can send reassurance and calm to the toddler through psychic brain waves or use the Force to gently counter the effects when it’s not just harmless “oh, I’m gonna pull Cara’s hand to help daddy win!”When I first watched the scene, that’s what I assumed was happening, I had an, “Awww! This is going to be so cute!” moment, I was practically already smiling. Which really highlights how there was no warning that this was about to happen, because I can’t feel the baby’s intentions through the Force–and neither can they. No wonder the Jedi adopted younglings so young (though, apparently still gave them a few years, allowing families time to adjust) but also why they couldn’t just teach kids how to control it in, like, a week or have this be a home school thing. There’s literally no warning when this could happen, no way to predict it every time, unless you have the same psychic ability.To paraphrase Doctor Who, “There’s not a child in the universe who wouldn’t tear the world apart to save their family- and this little boy can.”And that’s the situation every family of a Force-sensitive child finds themselves in. -- source link