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Baby Yoda is the Being of the Decade

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“And in the time of greatest despair there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as: THE SON OF THE SUNS.” — Opening titles for George Lucas’ The Star Wars, Draft 2, 1975

For a decade full of nightmare fuel, the 2010s also saw more than its fair share of good, pure, and adorably precocious creatures. This was the era of Grumpy Cat, a close friend of Mashable since 2012; of Fiona the Hippo, social media star at the Cincinnati Zoo; of Porgs, the fair fowl featured in The Last Jedi, which spurred online fandom from the first trailer onwards. 

But the same internet that brought us cat memes also brought GamerGate, Cambridge Analytica, and a YouTube algorithm that elected a forest-burning would-be dictator in Brazil. Facebook began the decade stirring revolution against authoritarianism, and ended it enabling authoritarian politicians by letting them spread lies. Porgs seemed pure, but a minority of loud Last Jedi viewers made liking anything about the film seem like a political stance. See, we said, this is why we can’t have nice things

By the end of 2019, all the good seemed to be gone from the internet. Grumpy Cat left us, aged 7. Fellow feline star Lil Bub made it to 8 before making the leap to the great cat tree in the sky. Viral pets, it became clear, would only break our hearts by leaving us too soon. Meanwhile, the increasingly tribal internet had less and less to unite us. Battle lines became as entrenched and as toxic as no-man’s land in one of the decade’s last great films

Into this desolate blasted landscape stepped a savior. A creature so good, so pure, so perfectly cheeky, that we all fell in love instantly no matter whom we favored for president. Just for a moment, at the holidays, silence fell across the culture war’s trenches. And we all gazed up adoringly at The Child. 

That’s all he’s called in the story he has hijacked, The Mandalorian on Disney+, now the world’s most-wanted and most-pirated show. Remnants of the former Galactic Empire call him The Asset. (If you’re not in the cult of The Mandalorian, then here be spoilers — though you’ve already seen the biggest series spoiler of all, and seen him literally everywhere.) 

Baby Yoda Meme 464,706

Baby Yoda Meme 464,706

Star Wars fans call him Baby Yoda, fully aware that this is merely a term of convenience. (Yoda is not the name of Yoda’s species, which was kept deliberately obscure by George Lucas; the show is following his lead so far). Fans of memes call him the greatest thing to happen since Grumpy Cat, if only by sheer volume. 

For example, Mashable‘s popular internal Slack channel dedicated to the show, “The Mashalorian,” is now pretty much just a library of Baby Yoda miscellany. We’re out there every day sharing fan art, videos, our custom emoji, pies and cakes, (there seems to be a curious obsession with eating Baby Yoda), and even music. Big shout out to The Ringer for this excellent Hamilton-style “Dear Baby Yoda,” and to the maker of this two-hour Baby Yoda lullaby. (The lyrics are telling: “The galaxy has gone to hell/but we’re all under your spell.”)

We’re prepared to call him one more thing. Despite stiff competition, despite only being eligible at the last minute, and despite this whole craze likely having a limited shelf life, Baby Yoda arrived in our hearts at exactly the moment we most needed him. He is our pick for Being of the Decade. 

Love or love not, there is no why

There is no complex reason for this: Baby Yoda is simply the most alive non-being our visual culture has seen in a long, long time.

Part meticulous animatronic puppet, part extremely inspired lighting and editing, Baby Yoda is a true magic trick that engages our hearts, minds, and capacity for self-deception. We do not care to think that he is not real. We wish only to gently pet the tiny hairs on this tiny being’s ridged forehead and wide floppy ears, to find out if they really do feel like velvet, and — if necessary— to throw ourselves in front of any blaster bolt that threatens to harm those hairs. 

Baby Yoda is, in short, our Space Son. We are, millions of us, co-parents. And The Mandalorian is not really about the Mandalorian, as compelling as Pedro Pascal’s flawed bounty hunter is and as much as the Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic needs a wolf. It is really a show about our Space Son, who for some inexplicable reason is not in our arms but in a galaxy far, far away, with an accidental dad whom we enjoy berating for his parenting skills. For crying out loud, Mando, you literally tried to lock our son in a closet while you went to a bar on Tatooine! What were you thinking?!

Those in The Mandalorian cult know that watching this show is no longer a choice. Its makers can give us episodes light on Baby Yoda, and we’ll hunt for scraps, scanning every background scene he’s in for the slightest change in expression. 

They can give us the most by-the-numbers imitation of Seven Samurai in a long history of them — they did, in fact, and we cared not, because in that episode we got to see bébé happy, with kids his own age (well, relatively, as technically bébé is 50). And because we got the Baby-Yoda-sips-his-soup-while-watching-a-fight meme out of it. 

Long after everyone alive today is dust, that meme will be deployed any time there’s conflict on whatever comes after Twitter.

The soup moment gets to the heart of Baby Yoda’s wildly intense appeal, and of why he has become a greater meme than even the mighty Grumpy Cat was. It’s his silent insouciance, made all the more acute by his snuggly loungewear. He is, as they say, too much: part vulnerable infant, part Force superweapon, part trickster god, all ears. 

There is much to emulate here. Baby Yoda moves easily and lightly through the universe (except in heartbreaking moments when he feels fear, ears bent back, eyes wide, downturned mouth, and we once again find ourselves pledging the lives of our firstborns if it’ll keep him safe). He exemplifies what Buddhists call Soshin, or Beginner’s Mind: the absolute, effortless presence in the present moment that is so much easier when you’re a kid and still learning everything. 

And by delivering the lesson silently, Baby Yoda became a universally accessible guru — and it’s almost enough to make you regret that this species, whatever it is, grows up and learns to talk. 

When 900 years old you are, Baby Yoda, rather more annoying you will be. 

The Merchalorian

Success has a thousand fathers, and not all of them are Space Dad. In this week’s TIME story naming Disney CEO Bob Iger the Business Person of the Year, Iger takes a fair chunk of credit for spotting the potential: “As soon as those ears popped up from under the blanket, and the eyes, I knew,” he says, likening it to the moment Iger saw a young Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time when running ABC. 

The article also says that Iger “made the call” that there would be no Baby Yoda merchandise this year in hopes of preserving the big reveal. However, Mandalorian showrunners Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni weren’t even sure during filming (when merchandizing discussions would have had to have started) that the puppet would even work. They shot all its scenes without the puppet as insurance, in case they needed to use CGI. (They did this regardless of the fact that Werner Herzog once joked they were “cowards” for doing so, a story that has been overplayed.) 

Either way, the showrunners were adamant that merchandise companies not spoil the big reveal well before Iger was. This may well have been because merch and marketing has a history of spoiling Star Wars reveals. And it was a risk: As I noted at the time, the marketing for The Mandalorian was the most lackluster I’d seen for any Star Wars property. But the gamble paid off, and here we are.

The upshot is that this is the first holiday season since 1977 when the in-demand Star Wars toy will not be available. Baby Yoda dolls will not hit stores until spring 2020. And even when they arrive, the models revealed by toy companies so far don’t seem to capture the magic of the on-screen version.

We could be in the calm before the merch storm. But for the moment, Baby Yoda is still untouched by the tacky trappings of commercialism. For the moment, he belongs to the meme makers — and through them, all of us.  

The end of Baby Yoda?

Early look at a Hasbro 'Black Series' collectible of The Child, frog and mug included.

Early look at a Hasbro ‘Black Series’ collectible of The Child, frog and mug included.

This cannot last, of course. No savior ever does, especially not in a Star Wars narrative; not even the creature who seems so perfectly described by George Lucas’ original concept of the “Chosen One,” the “Son of Suns.” 

Right now, the dynamic of The Mandalorian is still fresh and works every week: Mando’s bounty-hunting lifestyle gets the kid in a ridiculous amount of trouble, and they get out of the scrape again inside thirty minutes, but not before your heart has stopped a few times. In all that action, there’s no time to further explore exactly what this young creature is. 

I’m not saying Favreau and Filoni are likely to kill Baby Yoda off, especially not on the flagship Disney+ show, although we should be ready to march in the streets of Burbank outside Disney HQ just in case. I’m saying that from a storytelling perspective — and both of these guys are seasoned storytellers — the situation isn’t sustainable. Either Baby Yoda gets delivered to safety somewhere, or the show has to start revealing details about his species, irking George Lucas and many fans who prefer the mystery. More likely, it’ll be the former. 

The longer he appears on screen, the more merchandising appears, the less pure Baby Yoda will seem. As with any craze, the coolness factor vanishes as the mainstream customer arrives. By next summer, we’ll be awash in Baby Yoda figures and tchotchkes; by New Year 2021, they’ll likely be in the bargain bins. 

But for now, we exist in a shining moment of culture-uniting wonder, the equivalent of warring soldiers climbing out of their trenches to share beer and play football. We know the moment can’t last, but that just makes it all the more precious. 

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