I was doing some shopping Saturday night and some guy’s cranky two year old was annoying the entire store. It was obvious the toddler in question had zero interest in shopping and was letting the entire world know with high pitched screams and frustrated attempts to Houdini his way out of his stroller. One of the store’s employees tried to distract the little guy by showing him the cutest thing they had on the shelves: a Baby Yoda calendar.
While it managed a weak but confused smile from the otherwise inconvenienced and highly uninterested two year old, dad quickly shut it down. “Oh, it’s a cute toy,” he said “but it’s from such a violent show. The most violent on TV. And last week he was doing genocide . . . “
I almost fell over. I had seen that sort of gibberish all over the Internet since the second episode of The Mandalorian’s current season dropped, but I never thought I’d encounter an actual “Baby Yodagator” (my term, fully copyrighted) in the wild. It’s one thing to encounter these kinds of . . . opinions . . . online, but in the really real word? I’m petty sure even Santa Claus, the Boogeyman and a dozen guardian angels all did a double take as well.
Just to recap (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!) in The Passenger, the Mandalorian reluctantly takes a job to transport a woman (part of a humanoid frog species) to another planet so her husband can fertilize her eggs. During the ensuing adventures, everyone’s favourite space baby decided to chow down on some the frog woman’s eggs, sucking more than a few down when he thought no one was looking (though Mando caught him once or twice).
While I was a little surprised to see it, I was equally dismayed to see so much online caterwauling as a result. Caterwauling that seemed to increase in volume over the course of the week with some critics claiming that if the show didn’t rectify it or offer some explanation of Baby Yoda’s culinary habits in episode three, they were going to abandon The Mandalorian altogether.
I had thought this was pretty much restricted to the world’s message boards and chat rooms. Until I encountered a member of the cancel Baby Yoda fan club walking around in the actual world, even voicing what passed for his opinion out loud with neither hesitation nor shame.
So here’s a few takeaways on why this is all really, REALLY stupid.
Let’s get the Nerd sandbox nitpickiness out of the way first, shall we? If memory serves, Mando’s passenger needed to get the eggs to her husband to fertilize them before they had a chance of hatching. So while valuable, they were sort of inert. And she was also capable of laying more as she proved half way through the episode when she discovered a hot water pool and presumably replaced the ones the Yodster dined out on. So while I am not discounting the importance to her gene pool (they were apparently the sole key to continuing her blood line), they weren’t exactly unborn fetuses and were replaceable.
OK, now that’s out of the way . . .
There is no Baby Yoda. There is no frog woman. There aren’t spaceships or human/frog eggs and I hate to break it to you, there isn’t even a Mandalorian. The show is-and let me slow down for the hard of hearing-FICTION. It doesn’t exist. It’s made up. You know how many people Michael Myers has killed? Zilch. You know how many times James Bond has saved the world? None. How many bullets do you think Wonder Woman has deflected off her mystics bracelets over the years? The answer is a great big steaming zero. And that’s exactly how many frog eggs Baby Yoda ate. No genocide was committed during the filming of that episode . . .
And did I honestly see people genuinely criticizing Mando’s parenting skills? Yelling at the intergalactic bounty hunter for not swiping the eggs out of Baby Yoda’s hands before he could suck them into his pie hole? Did I actually see people upset that Mando didn’t discipline the adorable little green force monster more when he did manage to scarf an egg or two down? People do remember that before Mando hooked up with Baby Yoda he made a living by beating people up and shooting them? That his day-to-day was full of tracking people across deep space and freezing them alive so he could return them to crime lords and corrupt governments? If that’s your example of prime parenting, you need to re-examine a lot of your life choices. Maybe don’t expect parental perfection from the guy who literally has flame throwers up his sleeves.
But here’s the big one. While I hate judging or condemning what people find offensive, Baby Yodagate is truly absurd. Seriously. I’ve had this conversation with a number of living breathing human beings in my orbit, many of them politically engaged and sensitive to the feelings of others, and they all agree the outrage over this is dumb. But still, some people have lost their minds over this episode. Including some important writers on some pretty popular and well known nerd sites that attract plenty of eyeballs every day.
So what happens when something legitimate comes along that deserves the nerd media’s attention, condemnation and outrage? What happens if we’re faced with a second Gamergate and genre media needs to rally its attention and energy to slap it down?
Nothing, because it sacrificed it’s credibility. Nothing will happen because when it opens it’s mouth the entire world thinks the following.
“Wait, wasn’t this the person/columnist/website that was really upset when baby Yoda ate a couple eggs last year? Didn’t they actually call it genocide? Jesus, what are they whining about now? These snowflakes, it’s probably nothing at all. Again.”
Look at it another way, when I walked into work Friday a co-worker-someone who has never watched single episode of The Mandalorian and doesn’t care about Star Wars in the slightest-ask what I thought about Baby Yoda committing cultural genocide. The “controversy” was trending in his news feed, right up there with politics, sports and the weather. That’s what the rest of the world was seeing.
You can’t always be chicken little, running around and screaming that the sky is falling beneath the weight of moral offence or absurd outrage. You don’t always need to “be on,” looking for any excuse to shake your fist indignantly while perched on your soapbox.
You can’t always cry wolf.
Yodagate should never have stolen a single second of airtime, virtual or not. Both the world and the Nerdosphere face plenty of legitimate problems with new ones springing up every day. We all need pick to pick our battles wisely and this never should have even been a dust up.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need some room to get off my soap box.
Image www.screenrant.com
