The Outrage Over Baby Yoda's Egg-Eating In The Mandalorian

Contains spoilers for The Mandalorian season 2, episode 2

Baby Yoda once brought us all together, but his actions in the latest episode of The Mandalorian are now tearing fans apart. Though the little green guy has eaten a variety of creatures since the start of the show, his frog-egg-eating in "Chapter 10: The Passenger" went too far for some fans.

The episode brings a new character onto the Razor Crest: the Frog Lady, portrayed by Misty Rosas and voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) is searching for more of his people to help him get the Child (aka Baby Yoda) back to the Jedi, so he takes on the Frog Lady as a passenger. She's going to give him information on the whereabouts of other Mandalorians in exchange for him ferrying her to the planet her husband is living on. However, they can't jump into hyperspace to get there because it would kill all of her unfertilized eggs. She tells us, through various translation techniques, that these eggs are the last of her ancestral line and she needs her husband to fertilize them to keep their family going.

While juggling an escape from a pair of New Republic X-wings, a broken ship, and a cavern full of ice spiders, Mando also has to continually stop the Child from eating Frog Lady's precious eggs. Like a toddler reaching into the forbidden cookie jar, the Child just pops the tantalizing round orange globs into his mouth every chance he gets.

While some fans were warning others away from the episode because of its giant ice arachnids, others were outraged by the Child's behavior.

As many Twitter users have argued, the problem is that the episode sets us up to care about the Frog Lady and become invested in her plight. She's not just a frog, she's a human-like frog who can speak (through translators) to Mando and, in effect, to the viewers. Then, the show makes a joke of the Child eating her eggs.

Twitter user @oceanselene commented their displeasure, saying, "For the record, the frog lady was very adamant about the fact that her eggs were important to her, and that it was her last and only chance to have kids, so it's actually closer to f***ing up someone's [in vitro fertilization] which would be incredibly upsetting for a wannabe mom. it's not funny."

The controversy became widespread enough that Lucasfilm creative art manager Phil Szostak responded to it, defending The Mandalorian's storytelling and bringing a different perspective to the situation. "For the record, Chapter 10 of #TheMandalorian makes it clear that the Frog Lady's eggs are unfertilized, like the chicken eggs many of us enjoy. But obviously, [chicken eggs] aren't sentient beings and the Child eating the eggs is intentionally disturbing, for comedic effect," he wrote in a tweet. Szostak then added, "Fans of horror know that disturbing things make some of us laugh and some of us squirm, or both. Your mileage may vary."

But not everyone agreed with his take on it. User @briartrash replied to Szostak, saying, "The eggs can either be something unspeakably precious to the mother or a quick gag to be discarded for laughs. It doesn't really work both ways." In the episode, Mando does repeatedly tell the Child not to eat them and that they aren't food, but hey, he's a baby, he doesn't understand.

While plenty of fans are disgusted at the joke, others are giving Baby Yoda quite a lot of credit for a creature who's literally a toddler (by his species' definition of age). Twitter user @kennethwilsonuk said, "I saw a theory on new rock stars earlier that it's not what it seems, that the force sensitive nature the child is protecting them by swallowing them.. i'd like to believe that rather than the fact he's just eating them." Considering that the Child has eaten a live frog before and a spider baby in this very episode, that seems unlikely.

However, if that theory isn't true, this could be enough to make Twitter user @Rajko_KR hate the Child. They commented, "They better have a twist next week where he was protecting the eggs, otherwise I'm gonna end up hating Baby Yoda, then what's the point of watching the show. But making me wait a week to find out if The child is evil is still f***d up."

But even as some fans are disgusted by the egg-eating, others rebuke their critique. User @Whalecola responded to @Rajko_KR, saying: "I KNOW we ain't tryna start this with STAR WARS. We all know Anakin killed an entire room of LIVING CHILDREN and yall stressing over make believe eggs?"

By the end of the episode, Baby Yoda was still less deadly than a hyperspace jump and the Frog Lady had plenty of eggs left. As user @mollybrizzell pointed out, "I think the show made it abundantly clear that she had a lot of them, too — even after the baby feasted on an unknown amount (re: the spring scene). It took her and Mando at least a few minutes to gather them all up. Her family line will still continue, no problem!"

Sure, Baby Yoda shouldn't have been eating those eggs, but can you really blame a toddler for shoving things in his mouth? Who knows? Maybe he'll grow up to be vegetarian, like some people think the real Yoda was.