Why does everyone want to go back to Mandalore?

In Season 3 of The Mandalorian, Din Djarin and Bo-Katan Kryze spend eight episodes trying to reclaim Mandalore. Although they ultimately succeeded by the season’s end, many Star Wars fans spent the entire eight episodes wondering what the point was. Why go back to Mandalore at all? It was no longer a reasonable place to live, and no one seemed to be stopping them from returning if they really wanted to.

These questions ignore an important underlying thread, however: Taking back Mandalore wasn’t just about physically returning to the planet as a unit and settling there. It was about so much more than that — mostly, it had everything to do with rising above oppression for good.

While Mandalorians’ stereotypical depiction as tough, fight-to-the-death warriors may paint them as a dominant societal culture — and at one point in galactic history, they may have been just that — The Night of a Thousand Tears changed everything forever. On that day, many Mandalorians were completely wiped out — and most of them were innocent people just going about their lives. Many of them had nothing to do with the previous battle that caused the Empire to retaliate in the first place.

With so many Mandalorians slaughtered and their capital city destroyed, many fled to different parts of the galaxy to try to start over. Bo-Katan was the one who eventually convinced enough Mandalorians to face Moff Gideon and his forces and return to take back the planet. But why was that so important to them — and why fight the Empire to do it?

Imagine calling a place home, surrounding yourself with people and customs and locations and memories that made your life worth living. Imagine doing everything you could to protect all of the people and things that mattered to you, and then one day for no logical reason, it’s all taken away from you. You’re forced to flee — if you’re lucky enough to get out. You can’t take anything with you other than what you can carry. Everyone you loved won’t be coming with you.

Maybe you don’t have to imagine it.

If you got the chance to go back to that place after all that, stand tall and tell the people who drove you out of your home that they couldn’t keep you away anymore, wouldn’t you?

That is why they had to go back and take what was always rightfully theirs.

Because it never should have been taken from them at all.

All episodes of The Mandalorian are available to stream exclusively on Disney+.

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