Friday, September 19, 2014

Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#134)

The Massive Index (Posts #1-#100)
The Less Massive Index (Posts #101-#110)
The Second Less Massive Index (Posts #111-#120)
The Third Less Massive Index (Posts #121-#130)

(Skipped some podracer's species.)

1331. Mos Espa scavengers' species. This species has an interesting real-world origin story: They were created to replace Gamorrean guards that were removed from a game by order from Skywalker Ranch.

For something created for so trivial a reason, and for something as low-poly as they are, they look pretty neat; some kind of vaguely demonic things with kinda weird mouths.

They seem to be simpleminded thugs for hire by nature, which is too common but at least slightly forgivable. (They at least don't seem to be depicted as universally irrational or anything, not that they really exist very much.)

Rating: 3/5 on the weight of the design.

1332. Mice. ...

This is just an entry to explain what Mickey Mouse is doing in Star Wars.

Write your fanfic on your own time, Disney-wait.

Rating: 1/5. Nothing against the Mouse, but he's such a Mary Sue character here, surviving the Jedi Purge and all that.

1333. Mzerc's species. A guy named Mzerc (and his wife) were members of this species.

They basically look like bipedal fuzzy-antennaed beetles, which is nice.

Now here's something screwy: The sole named member of the species is the husband of the species' known senator. We don't know his wife's name.

Rating: 3/5.

1334. Nampi's guards(' species). Some cheerful-looking purple guys with eyes on top of their heads served Princess Nampi (whose species can be found below) as guards. (Jabba the Hutt killed all of them.)

Rating: 3/5. They're just so cheery I can't help but like them.

1335. Nilash natives. They apparently live in trees and can form group minds.

Now, this is another case of a screwy article: There are three pictures on the page.

All these pictures are of characters.

None of these pictures are of Nilash natives.

What the heck, guys? If there's no pictures in an article, don't cram it with pictures of something only tangentially related and confuse people who skim the article.

Anyway, some Sith lord guy enslaved them because their group minds made them useful, yadda yadda yadda.

Rating: 2/5.

1336. Norky's species. All I know about Norky's species is that its named member, Norky, was a sort of kangaroo-rat-thing that lived on Endor with his parents, and his species is good at jumping (which is what one would expect).

No information on his parents. No information to speak of on Norky beyond the fact that he was an overly mischievous child.

I mention it because usually the Ewok cartoon gives me something to go on, even if I pick it apart mercilessly or flip out because it's actually awesome.

Rating: 1/5.

1337. Nuso Esva's species. I mentioned Nuso Esva as being the Moriarty to Grand Admiral Thrawn's Sherlock Holmes some while back (look at the Stromma section).

Anyway, Nuso Esva apparently mostly looked human, but had multicolored, shimmery skin, at least somewhat insect-like eyes, and black hair. Sounds interesting enough.

Rating: 3/5. I kind of like the efforts Timothy Zahn made to try to drive home the point that the Star Wars galaxy is frikkin' huge and that the same species, people, and planets shouldn't be recycled so often. Too bad his efforts were too subtle for almost everybody ever and even more too bad that his work isn't in canon anymore.

1338. Unidentified Orooturoo species. This species' sole known member was Princess Nampi, an enormous purple creature with a notable but mostly superficial resemblance to a Hutt. It's hard to gauge exactly how big she was, but she ate one of Jabba's human-sized minions in maybe two bites, so I'd have to say she's pretty darned huge.

The same author, incidentally, wrote the comic in which Jabba ate a member of Cabrool Nuum's species; while I wouldn't put sophontophagy (eating sapient beings) past Jabba, the author's/artist's use of it feels pretty weird, especially because it comes across as just a teense (and by "a teense" I mean very) sexual-Jabba ate a woman and Nampi ate men, and in Nampi's case it was explicitly tied to her mating ritual; she married the guy before she ate him... and kinda didn't mention that she intended to, which amuses me probably more than it should. I've always been under the impression, for that matter, that she was "interested" in Jabba himself.

Anyway, Nampi was a crime lord or something and wanted to steal Jabba's loot and probably marry/eat him, but that dude she ate? Jabba put a vial of super-mega-destructo magic acid in that guy as a failsafe to prevent his treachery, and set it off after Nampi had eaten him to kill her. Which was itself depicted in a way that was exploitatively gross, since we're on that subject.

Anyway, long story short, the story with Nampi in it was super-gross but I like her design quite a lot-it's kind of a marginally more alien version of the Hutt design.

Rating: 4/5.

1339. Orphne's species. Orphne was some kind of strange magic/Force user that lived in the same Underworld inhabited by the Kindalo. Other than her general faerie strangeness existing in the middle of Star Wars, she's not very interesting, and she could have been basically any vaguely-not-exactly-human species.

Rating: 1/5. I can't regret an instance of being reminded of the Kindalo, though. They're still pretty darned amazing.

1340. Pink pachydermoid species. Okay, seriously? Pink elephants in the same article as Mickey Mouse? It's like somebody planned this!

Anyway, regardless of their presence alongside the Mouse, these pink elephant guys are pretty neat-looking and kind of adorably tiny. I'm totally cool with them.

Rating: 3/5.

-Signing off.

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