Following the season three premiere of The Mandalorian, there was some discourse floating around on social media comparing the “dumb fun” the original Star Wars television show brings to the table in comparison to more thought-provoking projects in the Lucasfilm universe, like last year’s Andor.
While the general consensus in that discussion is that not everything in Star Wars has to be super-serious and picked to pieces, that it’s okay for The Mandalorian to play out like a “cartoon,” the show is being compared to yet another medium – video games.
Responses to the thread over on the Star Wars subreddit by u/Refiscindiando continued building on the video game analogy – throwing in the fact that the show’s ‘hub’ grows and expands as Din Djarin completes quests, how every port he arrives him finds itself in a predicament in need of his help, and the protagonist’s reluctant to accept the role of Marshal because he’s too busy questing.
Granted, if we’re going out and saying every single piece of media that has A stories and B stories is like a video game, then just about anything could be a video game. However, in the way it is outlined above, there’s certainly a sense of ‘open world role-playing game’ trope-iness playing out on the screen, particularly as Mando grows more and more powerful and revisits old locations to see how people and places are getting on and growing around him.
We’d even go so far as to call Din Djarin “Space Geralt,” considering all the larger-than-life conflicts he ends up unwittingly involved in and all the nigh-unkillable beasts he ends up tackling head-on wherever he goes.
In any case, the adventures of Space Geralt will continue when the second episode of The Mandalorian lands on Disney Plus this Wednesday.
Published: Mar 6, 2023 06:06 pm