Mandalorians

Mandalorians get the job done and look great while doing it. They have been developed in significant, sometimes overlapping, often totally different ways across Legends publishing, video games such as Knights of the Old Republic and Republic Commando, and in canon on the small screen—across Clone Wars, Rebels, and now the Mandalorian. If you want the inside scoop on the vast background on Mandalorian culture and the discrepancies and departures across the Canon/Legends divide, this is the reading guide for you, and you won’t be disappointed.

To get a full picture on Mandalorians, you’ll certainly need to take a step into a larger world. While this list is all Legends for now, you can take this list alongside Clone Wars and Rebels to get the fuller picture of how Lucas, Filoni, and Favoreau have gone a different direction. The Canon Mandos, as of the Clone Wars, are warriors of old now living in a reformed pacifistic society, while others rebel in secret. This militant group, Death Watch, and Clan Vizsla, overlap from Jango Fett: Open Seasons, which functions as Jango’s Legends origin story. Karen Traviss has certainly been the architect of Mandalorian culture in Legends continuity, seen in The Republic Commando series and much later in the timeline in her Legacy of the Force entries, and her work is beloved by many.

Traviss’s Mandalorians are as fully-formed of a culture as you’ll find in the Expanded Universe. Her superb world-building encompasses all aspects of what it means to be Mandalorian. She develops the Mando’a language, the Dha Werda Verda dance (reminiscent of the Maori Haka), the concept of loyalty and honor to Mandalorian warrior ideals as more important than biological bloodlines, and even spirituality and the afterlife. She wrestles with the Mandalorians’ history as morally-ambiguous mercenaries and how that competes with their code of honor. We even see the rivalry between Mandos and Jedi, from the Clone Wars to the Legacy of the Force series.

We look forward to expanding this list when tie-in material is published alongside The Mandalorian, but in the meantime, shoot straight and run hard!