Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#114)

The Massive Index (Posts #1-#100)
The Less Massive Index (Posts #101-#110)

1131. Tof. Okay, this is pretty hilarious.

The Tof are invaders from the Firefist/Companion Besh galaxy, the Star Wars galaxy's neighbor whose inhabitants have had the most interaction with the galaxy itself. (They're also the only Firefist inhabitants I haven't covered yet.) With me so far?

They're enemies to the Nagai, the Faruun, and the Maccabree, who are basically all the other Firefistians; they apparently rule an old empire known as the Tof Kingdom which has ruled over most of Firefist for a very long time, taking the other species as slaves and whatnot.

Now, you might be speculating that they must be pretty tough customers, and in one sense, at least, they sort of are.

On the other hand, they're actually medieval lifestyle fetishists, because they're huge hairy almost-human beings who refuse to bathe and use perfume to cover their stenches. (They're also sexist dudebros at best and an army of rapists at worst.)

I find myself wondering, especially since they apparently wield clubs as their weapon of choice (check out the page quote on them), just how they managed to contain a race whose entire known membership wears flying artillery-equipped exosuits? (The Maccabree, in case you didn't follow the links.)

Rating: 3/5 for amusement factor. Ah, Marvel Star Wars, why must you do such things?

1132. Togorians. Togorians are cat aliens.

Male Togorians can be about nine feet tall while female Togorians range to nearly seven feet. Their bone structures are denser and more durable than most species, meaning they can withstand a lot more punishment than one might expect. Considering they're giant cat aliens, that must be pretty considerable.

Anyway, the Togorians once universally lived in a nomadic lifestyle that involved a symbiotic relationship with awesome-looking giant flying reptiles called mosgoths where the mosgoths serve as mounts in exchange for the Togorians protecting the mosgoths' eggs, which were preyed on by another flying animal called a liphon that was also a threat to the Togorians. Apparently, having adult mosgoths to ride gave the Togorians the resources they needed to fight off this threat, and in more recent times the liphons' main relationship with the Togorians was that the Togorians would tie up trespassing outsiders on a second transgression to expose them to liphon attack as punishment.

The Togorian men still follow their nomadic traditions, but the women came to prefer a sedentary lifestyle with more advanced technology, forming settlements where they would raise their children; male Togorian children would remain there until adolescence, and then join the men's tribes. The divide between the male and female Togorians was quite wide during the time of the Galactic Empire; male Togorians wouldn't tolerate outsiders or especially stormtroopers or droids in their vicinity, while female Togorians were technologically sophisticated enough that they were on the cusp of independent starship production. Despite this deep-running separation, Togorians practice monogamy.

The Togorians are also apparently among the earliest species to associate strongly with the Mandalorians, possibly the first after the Taung and humans. This association came because the Togorians are not only monster-huge cat dudes but because they had effective enough tactics and strategy to stand against the Mandalorians; the Mandalorians essentially responded to this with "you guys are cool, wanna join our club?" Thus, Togorian mercenaries, bounty hunters, and pirates aren't terribly unusual because many former Mandalorians took up such professions.

Rating: 4/5. There's something distinctly lovable about the Togorians. I should mention that the main Togorian I'm familiar with, Muuurgh, is essentially a loose Chewbacca substitute that an author used for a story because it was too early for Han to have met Chewbacca just yet, and even though Muuurgh (what a cat alien name) was actually a minder that a sinister t'landa Til employer had put on Han, there was something rather adorable about him.

1133. Togruta. The Togruta are fairly human-looking beings who have big horns and also a set of head-tails (which is a common word for the tentacular growths that come from the heads of many hairless human-like Star Wars aliens). Their horns are actually hollow and used for passive echolocation. They also apparently have retractable fangs that they use to kill prey; the prey they kill this way spasms violently, and they allow people to incorrectly believe that they are venomous because of these spasms, apparently because they like intimidating people.

Supposedly, most Togruta are not very individualistic, and considering that nine out of ten Togruta characters look basically identical, I can sort of see why. They also don't like shoes.

There are a disproportionate number of Togruta Jedi (and it's noted further that most of them are women), as far as I can tell, and Anakin Skywalker's apprentice Ahsoka Tano from the recently ended Clone Wars TV series is one of them.

Rating: 3/5. I kind of like how the Togruta look, and aspects of their cultural personality amuse me, but... boy there's not a lot of visual variety, and there really should be.

1134. Tolanese. The only known Tolanese is an always robed and masked bounty hunter, who had some slaves that had outwitted him and cornered him in his own ship; they forced him into an escape pod. He crashed and burned, and was left hideously scarred; this is presumably why he covered up so thoroughly.

He would then go on to hunt down the escaped slaves with a gang of mercenaries and kill them. I presume he was so determined to do so because not only did he want revenge, he probably didn't want it getting out that he'd been outwitted by a pair of Gamorreans, who are stereotyped as among the very dumbest of the dumb.

Anyway, apparently the main other thing we know about these Tolanese guy is that before he got messed up, he was one of those guys who wandered around using his good looks to seduce rich old ladies and take their stuff. ...Nice.

Rating: 1/5.

1135. Tolos. The Tolos come from Toloran, the second planet of the Panto system, home to the Lomins of Pantolomin. As such, their planet was the winter resort portion of the system's tourist industry.

Rating: 3/5. Hum, I'd probably rate the Lomins higher now.

1136. Toma. The Toma look like people wearing low-rent wolfman costumes, except that their hair and skin are bright green.

Rating: 2/5. That's good for a chuckle.

1137. Toong. Hilariously, the Toong are noted as not to be confused with the Taung, the Mandalorian founders mentioned earlier in this article. Considering that the Toong are short guys with huge cartoonish faces, I don't think confusing the two would actually be a problem.

The Toong seem to be rather neurotic as a group, such that first contact threw their homeworld into a violent civil war even though they'd been notably peaceful beforehand.

Later, a poisonous comet (?!?!) would threaten to collide with their homeworld, and so they were relocated to Tund, the adopted homeworld of a sect of pureblooded Sith known as the Sorcerers of Tund. If this sounds like it couldn't have ended well, presumably it didn't: Rokur Gepta (main villain of the Lando Calrissian Adventures) leveled the planet with a weapon that would leave it uninhabitable for at least billions of years. In effect, it would be uninhabitable for possibly longer than the star it was orbiting was going to live.

We don't really know what this means for the Toong, however.

Rating: 3/5. I think more than one of those might be pity points.

1138. Torine. Near-humans determined to protect their homeworld's environment. D'aw, how cute.

Rating: 1/5.

1139. Toydarians. Toydarians are vaguely pig-faced hummingbird/fly-inspired people. They appear rather corpulent, but their guts are apparently actually buoyant, simplifying the fact that they fly constantly in order to survive the dangerous environment they evolved in, marshy areas inhabited by creatures called grabworms. Apparently Toydarians are fully capable of flight from birth, and their constant hovering means that they need a lot of food to sustain their metabolism; most Toydarian wars are fought over food.

Like the Hutts, Toydarians are, as their movie character representative Watto so elegantly demonstrated, immune to mental manipulation through the Force. In a peculiar coincidence, their homeworld was within the bounds of the old Hutt Empire, and they had long been subject to the Hutts. More recently, they were allied to the Old Republic at least briefly during the Clone Wars, oppressed by the Galactic Empire, and briefly (but harmlessly, amazingly enough) conquered by the Yuuzhan Vong.

Rating: 5/5. There's just something very charming about the Toydarians.

1140. Trailians. Not much is known about the Trailians proper, other than a claim that they are/were beautiful humanoids of some manner, and lived some form of primitive lifestyle in a jungle.

At some point, some Sith guy turned at least some of them into some kind of monster-zombie-something-or-other warriors.

Rating: 1/5. We don't know anything about them, and we don't even know that much about the monsters that they (at least partly) were transformed into.

-Signing off.