Julia and I finally finished watching Season 3 of The Mandalorian the other day, mostly in preparation for watching Ahsoka, as she and I are both proud fans of that titular renegade Jedi. As I cheerfully watched the Mandalorians retake their homeworld in a violent conflict with Moff Gideon’s Imperial remnants, I found myself wondering why, exactly, I cared so much about these weird armored space guys. Because I do, against my better judgment. For all the reasons a reasonable person should have for disliking modern Star Wars (which I mostly do) I do care about the Mandalorians. Despite the many silly things in the last few episodes of this season, I experienced a genuine thrill at the sight of Bo-Katan Kryze1 flying a jetpack through the air, wielding a black lightsaber and cutting stormtroopers into pieces. This is the way, indeed.
Nor is my fondness for Mandalorians a fluke. I, like many nerds, am very fond of the Proud Warrior Race Guys of genre fiction. I had to choke back some bile to write the previous sentence, by the way. I am, by any reasonable metric, properly described by words such as “nerd,” “geek,” and “gamer.” I play videogames, I love sci-fi and fantasy, I have a small comic book collection, I play a lot of D&D, my office has many little models of Star Trek spaceships in it, my sole tattoo is from Darkest Dungeon, etc. But years marinating in the horrors of Internet geek culture have made me almost pathologically averse to claiming such titles in any sort of mixed company. Gamergate and its ilk forever cured me of any sort of geek pride. I have long considered ending everything I write, à la Carthago delenda est, with the phrase “burn geek culture to the ground, salt the earth, and spit upon the ashes.”
Anyway. Like many nerds, I love the Klingons, the Protoss, the Qunari, the Fremen, the Greyjoys, etc. Tolkien’s dwarves, messy and complicated as they are, don’t quite fit into this same mold, but there is some overlap there and I’m sure my love for them stems from some of the same places. But why is this? Given that I am a Christian socialist, and not much given to valorizing violence or the subjugation of other peoples, there is little in my philosophy that would point towards the glamorization of such fictional cultures. So why do I, and others, love these weird warrior-guys so much?
There are two obvious answers. The first is the correct one, and everything else that follows this is really just explication of this idea; everything else could have been left as an exercise for the reader. This first answer: we like Proud Warrior Race Guys because they are very cool. But however true this answer is, it’s not very satisfactory, and probably warrants unpacking.
Before we do that, however, there is the second answer, which I actually don’t want to spend too much time on, but which is probably too important to ignore. Thus: nerds like Proud Warrior Race Guys because many of us are disaffected men who grew up bullied and with an enormous chip on our collective shoulder, and the Proud Warrior Race Guys let us live out a Conan-like fantasy of being able to crush the skulls of the jocks on the playground who were mean to us. Perhaps Nietzschean ressentiment drives many into the clutches of Klingon cosplay.
But I don’t think this is the entire story, though it might go some way towards explaining why so many otherwise apparently well-adjusted people dress up as fascist foot soldiers as part of the 501st Legion, a famous and international group of semi-professional Star Wars stormtrooper2 cosplayers.
For one thing, the fans of Proud Warrior Race Guys are not limited only to disaffected young men and their adult counterparts. Julia likes the Mandalorians and the Klingons, too, as it turns out. Further, speaking only for myself, I am 34 years old and, I hope, no longer particularly motivated by a desire to prove myself to the bros. (Perhaps I flatter myself.) No, I think it’s more complicated than this, so here are some ideas.
Obviously, the Proud Warrior Race Guy is violent, but he’s also usually honorable. The specifics of what “honor” means varies from Warrior Guy to Warrior Guy, and does usually involve a certain willingness to bludgeon people to death for insulting you, but duplicity and falseness is anathema to the Proud Warrior Race Guy. Perhaps more important than his honor (and it is usually his, though not always; see Bo-Katan) is his honesty. You know where you stand with a Proud Warrior Race Guy, and for all that he’s dangerous, it’s not particularly difficult to coexist with him, as long as you remember his quirks and what sorts of jokes you’re allowed to make in his presence.
Once, years ago, I was living in Savannah, GA, surrounded by art students. I was not an art student; I was a miscellaneous guy who was married to an art student and was putting her through school (read: putting some food on the table while student loans and her folks were putting her through school). One of the other art students who was friends with my wife was living with a guy we will call Korvax. His name was not Korvax, of course; I honestly don’t recall what his name was, but it was probably something like Kyle. Korvax’s girlfriend (who also had a name, but she’s not really important enough to the story to pseudonymize in this fashion) was an art student, and was living with Korvax primarily, I think, to piss off her parents.
I shouldn’t be so mean; Korvax and Korvax’s girlfriend (okay, this is making me uncomfortable, let’s call her Sally) may have had a very real love betwixt the two of them, though last I heard it hadn’t actually, uh, lasted. Sally’s parents were paying for a very nice apartment on Broughton3 Street while Sally went to grad school, and Korvax was also living there. Sally was an MFA student; Korvax was, I believe, a drug dealer, though not, I think, a particularly successful one. They had met at some previous point in their lives and fallen in love, but now, Sally talked about Deleuze while Korvax talked about the time he and his buddies burned down an abandoned elementary school.
Korvax was well out of his element when it came to the art students. He was an enormous and not terribly smart man, who was honestly, I believe, trying his hardest with Sally’s friends, but who was poorly equipped for both the charms and the downsides of graduate art students. Some of Sally’s friends, for instance, were gay, which Korvax never said anything about in my presence but which I gathered he found perplexing. Yet Korvax and I got along swimmingly. I don’t mean that we were ever going to be bosom friends, or even that I particularly liked Korvax, but I understood Korvax in a way that none of the art students seemed to. This is not to say I understood Korvax particularly well, but we were both trailer trash, and even a weird trailer trash outcast is more familiar to another member of that class than your average art student.
One time Sally threw a St. Patrick’s Day party and invited all the art students and, by association, me. (St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah is, to use the technical term, a Whole Fucking Thing. Savannah’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration at least used to draw more people than Chicago’s, which, given that it is significantly smaller than Chicago, means that the town is overwhelmed for several days by drunk jerks. All of you New York City people should thus go ahead and replace “St. Patrick’s Day” with “SantaCon” in your brains). I attended this party and brought a large bottle of Jack Daniel’s as a gift for the party, which I presented to Korvax.
I had intended for this bottle to be open to everyone, but Korvax (who was very drunk at this point) kept hiding it, not because he wanted to keep it for himself, but because he said it was mine, and he didn’t like that all the art students (some of whom had not brought much of anything to this party) kept pouring from it. He did something else at this party which annoyed some of the art students, though the mists of time have obscured the specifics from my memory. A few days later, discussing the incident with the art students, I told them that it was not difficult to get along with Korvax, you just had to remember that he was a Klingon. This did not shed as much light on the situation as I had hoped, but I stand by it as a description: I had brought a tribute to Korvax and Korvax’s woman. He recognized me as, in some small way, a kindred spirit, and thus wanted to protect this tribute from the various parasites (as he saw them) who were leeching off of this gift. I would not say this is the right way to behave as the host of a party (also we are talking about a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, here, not, like, a high-end Scotch) but I do understand it in a way I do not necessarily understand the complexities inherent in the social dynamics of higher society.
All this to say: this guy I once knew, Korvax, was easy to get along with as long as you treated him as a Klingon, and that is true of all the archetypical Proud Warrior Race Guys in franchise fiction. Worf or Stilgar may not be your best pals, but as long as you treat them with respect and make an effort to learn their customs, you will do fine. But most importantly of all, they will never lie to you. Piss off a member of High Society and you may not find out for years; piss off a Proud Warrior Race Guy and you will find out within seconds, as he pulls out a dagger and challenges you to a duel, at which point you can either fight him or apologize. I won’t say that’s the right way to live, exactly, but it is refreshingly straightforward and, most importantly, is not that complicated to deal with.
So, Proud Warrior Race Guys live in a world of very specific social cues, which appeals to socially maladjusted nerds. But perhaps more important than this, Proud Warrior Race Societies are memetic. Think, if you can, of all the many phrases associated with each of the Proud Warrior Race Societies I mentioned earlier. “Qapla’!” “This is the way.” “Shai-hulud!” “The Demands of the Qun.” “My life for Aiur!” “Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu!” “What is dead may never die.” These repeated phrases burrow their way into your brain, as you read/play/watch the relevant texts, and it is hard not to shout them alongside everyone else in the room when circumstances demand it in the right company.
This is undoubtedly connected to the fact that many of us first encountered these phrases when we were children, such that proudly shouting “My life for Aiur!” evokes not only quasi-memories of charging Zerg swarms but also of college LAN parties.
But it is also, I think, connected to the idea of honesty, in that we can all predict what someone else (who is acquainted with the proper shibboleths) will say when we make the appropriate reference. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis’s “Unreal Estates,” one of the great strengths of fantasy and sci-fi is its ability to present us with new experiences. One of these new experiences can be the experience of other cultures and even a desire to belong to them in a way that can’t cause problems for real human beings in the living world. Being a weeb is kinda gross because it trivializes a real culture; having (as I do) a weirdly patriotic response to Tolkien’s Song of Durin harms no one.
Anyway, I liked the back half of the Mandalorian. This is the way.
A few months ago a friend of mine complained that a lot of this season of The Mandalorian was about Bo-Katan rather than about Pedro Pascal’s character; I explained that this was a selling point for me. No disrespect to Pascal, who does a great job with an often-underwritten role, but my heart obviously belongs to Bo-Katan, who is A) a badass warrior princess and B) always played by Katee Sackhoff, who has had my undying allegiance since Battlestar Galactica.
This I have never really understood. I’m not a cosplay guy myself, however much I respect the artistry, but if I was to get into cosplay, “stormtrooper” would be very low on the list of cos-es I would want to -play.
I know none of you know what that connotes, but if you New York City fuckers keep assuming I know what it means when you talk about places being North of X Street or whatever I am going to force you to do some quick Googling about Savannah, which is a wonderful-if-preposterous place that is near and dear to my heart.