Haat Mando'ade - Tumblr Posts

I'm not really sure who the "True Mandalorians" are, but they cannot be the good guys.

Like. Imagine a political party called "The True Americans/British/French/Chinese/whatever". YOU'D KNOW THEY WERE FASCISTS JUST BASED ON THE NAME.

At the very least, they're a walking "no true Scottsman" fallacy.

Mmmm not quite.

Ironically, the True Mandalorians are basically centrists, by Mando standards. They aren't revolutionary pacifists like the New Mandalorians, but they aren't hardline traditionalists of the 'we need to take over everything and bring back our warlord glories' Death Watch variety.

"…the Mandalorians fractured, giving rise to a chaotic splinter group. They called themselves the 'Death Watch' and followed a barbarian called Vizsla, who believed that the Mandalorians should conquer the galaxy. Vizsla orchestrated a bloody coup against the True Mandalorians, still loyal to a reformed murderer named Jaster Mereel, who held that the Mandalorians were merely highly paid soldiers."

- Count Dooku

Jaster (the man who founded this True Mandalorian political faction) was known as 'The Reformer' due to his attempts to revise Mandalorian warrior culture to be more honorable than the slave-taking, genocidal history they have. I wouldn't call him actively anti-fascist, mostly because he didn't seem to have concerned himself overly much with large-scale government at all, but his political beliefs and attempts to change himself and traditional society definitely weren't fascist. Death Watch, who were very fascist, actively hated him for this.

While I can't find any evidence of True Mandalorians calling themselves 'Haat Mando'ade,' I don't think it's too big of a leap to think that they did when not interacting with people who spoke only Basic. As such, it follows that the way their language works probably had influence on the wording they chose.

The reading I take for the "true" part of that title is a little less "we're the REAL deal and the rest of you suck," and rather more like... 'in pursuit of an ideal.'

A traditional Mando phrase in Legends is "Haat, Ijaa, Haa'it" - "Truth, Honor, Vision"—said when sealing a pact. Other usages of the term haat also seem to have more to do with true in the sense of truth, rather than in the sense of purity.

With the way that Jaster's ideals are portrayed in the oblique sense, it seems most reasonable to say that they mean 'true' as in 'trustworthy, honorable, determined,' the way an old fairytale may use a phrase like 'gallant and true' to describe a knight. It's not fascist, just... flowery and evocative of what they want to be, in comparison to what their people used to be.

Im so happy that i found this. On one hand i wanna read it so bad, but on the other hand i have a mind of doing my own version of this and dont wanna accidentally plagarize this GLORIOUS person. The moral dilemma of fictional academic nerdery.

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