Kal Skirata the Hypocrite

I have come to the conclusion that Kal Skirata is not a true Mandalorian. He is a dynamic character, but, despite Traviss's influence on Mando culture, Kal does not seem to represent the Mandalorians the way she described.

As a comparison, I will use the KOTOR 2 Mandos.

Kal Skirata is a family man. He has a great influence over those around him, and will do anything for his family. Fair enough, I suppose. But that same fatherly compassion also puts his soldiers in danger. In the Republic Commando series, too many times, characters who interact with him place too much hope in Kal to set things right.

This explains why so many of his squads were decimated over the war. Kal was always there for them, ready to fix a problem for his boys.
His fatherly attitude comes before his sarge routine. Rather than letting his boys learn from their mistakes, he always takes the blame. This doesn't allow his troops to learn from experience.

Compare this to the KOTOR 2 Mandalorians. The backstory pieced together through Mira and the Mando camp shows that you were not immediately accepted as a Mandalorian. Mira was a slave to them, forced to be an ammunition runner. Until she was old enough, and experienced enough, Mandalorians would pay little attention to her. But after time and hard fought experience, she was inducted into a unit. She earned her right to be a soldier, it wasn't a free ticket.

All Mandalorians must answer the call of the Mandalore. If Kal was such a patriotic Mandalorian, he still put his family before the Mandalore. This just doesn't jive right. Were he a Mandalorian, he would have joined up, and fought for the cause. But he abandons them, staying with his family. And his family, all being influenced by his actions, follow suite.

This brings up a point that was only marginally addressed in the novels. Kal only gets called out once on his brainwashing of pretty much anyone he meets. At this point, he becomes depressed, because he knows that Maze is right. So what does Kal do? He goes back and starts doing the same thing like nothing ever happened. There is no big revelation, just a sorry, ignorant man refusing to look at things from a different perspective. And why should he? Everyone around him automatically agrees with anything he does already.


Now for the part that really bugs me. Kals hatred goes against everything that the Mandalorians stand for. KOTOR 2 Mandalorians did not hold grudges. They were obliterated by the Jedi, and they just got back up and dusted themselves off. They knew they were beaten, and they respected the Jedi for that. If an opponent was good enough to beat them, the Mandalorians honored that warrior with the same respect held for their own people.

Kal on the other hand, looks for ways to hate anybody who doesn't remotely think like him. His irrational hatred of the Jedi clashes with the Jedi and Mandalorian's long history. He doesn't respect them whatsoever, even though these were the same Jedi who kicked the Mandalorians ass a couple decades earlier. But you know what? Kal wasn't at Galidraan. Just another time he didn't respond to the Mandalore. So he hates Jedi for beating the Mandalorians in a fight he wasn't even involved with, and then with them for using a clone army. He tends to make blanket statements about the Jedi from his experience with a select few. Kal generalizes all the Jedi as being like Quinlan Vos or Rahm Kota.

So, we have a character who influences others to speak like him, unintentionally limits his soldiers learning, doesn't hold true to Mandalorian Code, and holds perspective hindering grudges.

Doesn't sound much like any Mando's I've heard about.

Of course, its all from a "certain point of view."

 

Sure, Kal's a hypocrite, but he's a star of a book series which revolves around other hypocrites and mental midgets, so he comes off not too bad.

 

For all of Karen's other issues with the GFFA and the fandom, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't think that she was pretty up-front about Kal being a hypocrite. That was kind of the point, no?

 

Most of what this thread's author stated is indeed true. Kal is not a saint at all, he got several bad qualities and he does several bad actions. However, neither is he a monster, he's got many admired qualities and he did a lot of good things for the people he cares about.

Just like real people, right? Neither of us is unquestionably good or bad, we all have both positive and negative qualities and we all do both very good and very bad things in our life (though proportions are indeed different). That's why I like to read about characters I can at least loosely identify with a lot more than about certain "carton cupboards" (No, that isn't aimed on any fictional character directly).

 

What's his positive traits?

I mean, the way I remember him, he only excels at caring for psychopath clone kids and forming a clan. But he's neither a mother hen nor a Care Bear. He's defining himself as a Mandalorian and a soldier trainer. Him and his pal putting on their old mercenary armour when leading their "kiddies" (who are perfectly capable of going on missions without mom and dad) actually gives me the creeps. Everybody should take a careful step back if their military trainer suddenly starts running around in uniform from another timeframe of his life and from a completely different affiliation.

 

Now, I'm not saying that I dislike Kal. I actually find him to be an intriguing character. I just find it ironic that he calls himself a Mandalorian when most of the stuff he pulls seems to be in opposition to actual Mandalorian tradition.

 

Exactly. Saying "Kal Skirata the Hypocrite" is basically stating the obvious and was Karen's intentions for the Skirata character.

 

Bardan "Gotab" Jusik on the other hand...

 

Kal's not supposed to be a good and honest character. Of course he's a hypocrite. When he describes himself, he says something along the lines of "I'm not good man, but I do love my boys." Isn't that good description? He's not a good man (and I think he's seeing it from a Mandalorian perspective), but he does pretty much anything and everything for his kids.

 

Being upfront about the fact that he's a jerk doesn't make him much more fun to read about, funnily enough, especially since the story tends to treat his rather tribal 'anything's okay if it's for my boys' attitude as somehow admirable. Which it is, for some, probably. YMMV.

 

I agree to most of your points, but about him not following the Mandalore I've got to excuse. Compare him to Rohlan Dyre. He was a true Mandalorian warrior, and because of that he went on his own mission to find out the truth about his leaders. But that didn't make him any less of a Mandalorian. Kal was a fringe mercenary when Jaster went to war, and at that time there were many who stayed neutral. By the time of the Clone Wars, he already had a mission to save his boys. And family in the Mandalorian code comes before following the call of Mandalore, so I don't see how he broke that.

 

Kal's always been a hypocrit.

I'd argue the idea that he can't claim himself as being "Mandalorian" though is too far of a stretch. He certainly doesn't embrace everything about Mandalorian culture, but that doesn't make him un-Mandalorian in any way.

I mean if I disagree with the approach of the Canadian government am I any less Canadian?

I'd also say that part of his hypocrisy swirls around his hatred of the Jedi.....because he doesn't really hate them. He's using the Jedi Order as a scape goat to make excuses as to why things didn't go his way, but is doing this while helping Jedi left, right and center.

Kal doesn't hate the Jedi even if he thinks he does.

 

The only thing that makes a Mandalorian is the six actions, the central code of the Mandalorians. They simply say that a Mandalorian must wear armour, speak Mando'a, defend themselves and their family, raise their children as Mandalorians and contribute to their clan's welfare and answering the call of the Mandalore when it is made. They say nothing when it comes to anything else, and all that makes a Mandalorians is adhering to that code. There were additional ethics Mandalorians adhered to, and that is where I think Kal failed.

Kal was a hypocrite when it came to him saying the Mandalorians don't hold grudges (Kaminoans, Jedi, Hutts, Walon Vau, Death Watch etc, etc,), don't discriminate against other species (he himself hated Kaminoans and was prejudiced against the Hutts) and that family comes first (his wife). But when I think about it, he wanted to make it up to himself by taking on saving his adopted sons, but that makes him a character. He is flawed and very relateable. He is very Human. The only thing we see going for him in the series is his tactical and combat abilities, which are failing him with age.

In my mind, he was very much a hypocrite and a failure in life, but what I like about his character is that he did try to make up for it. He was a true Mandalorian for the simple fact that he did fulfill the Resol'nare, as we don't know if Mandalore did call during his lifetime. The Resol'nare only say that a Mandalorian must follow if called. We know Rohlan Dyre was called, yet he deserted. But he was very much a Mandalorian to his core. He had a mission that he felt was justified flirting with the Resol'nare.

Again, I agree - but I think these points should at least show that he might have been a true Mandalorian, even as a hypocrite.

 

Kal should know that humans aren't the only species that are Mandalorian.

 

As a species, Kal hated Kaminoans. Not as Mandalorians, but as a species. Mandalorian Kaminoans might have touched his senses differently, but we don't know how that might have played out.

Mandalorians consider themselves as a culture, and as a culture they don't disciminate. But an individual in the culture might. Compareable, the US. There are bigots in the US, and there are the Americans. Not really seperate, yet seperate.

 

It's worth pointing out that OOU KT actually said Kal disturbed her, because on one had what he SAID at times about caring for his family was noble, but what he did included murder, theft, lying, treason, and on and on.

It's revealed at the end of O66 that Jango didn't even want Kal as a Cuy'val Dar and that Walon talked him into it, which should tell you what sort of person Kal was.

The thing was...the Nulls possibly DID make him better, which means he was a real piece of work before them.

Bardan is pretty honest in 501st about being a follower, and Zey, when he finds Bardan again, is clearly shocked that Bardan has fallen so far.

In the EU any one of these characters wouldn't have been out of place, but putting them all in one series was probably over-egging the cake. However, the long term plans seemed to indicate the plan was to show Kal as a hypocrite and pull his fangs a little. It's somewhat close to the story-arc that Shan Frankland goes through in the Wess'har Wars series.

 

I know what you said bud.