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)
1461. Ciasi. The Ciasi have a vaguely tusked shrewish look to them, although they're rather slimmer than most shrews.
The most interesting thing about them is that their representative member apparently came from Tund, homeworld of the Sorcerers of Tund (a distinct offshoot of the Sith order who also happened to be among the last pureblooded Sith) and adopted home of the Toongs. Seeing as how Tund was rendered into an eternally dead wasteland by Rokur Gepta (probably, anyway-there's like, a single sentence in the relevant story that hints that Rokur Gepta might have been a little too confident in his own abilities and that at least some of the other Sorcerers of Tund may have survived), one hopes that it wasn't the species' homeworld, or that'll be a third possibly dead people associated with Tund's depopulation.
Perhaps the most interesting sentence of the article:
Ciasi could be found with gray-colored skin and could grow prominent tusks.
If only because it acknowledges that these things might not be universal features and that a species can have significant variation. I must approve of that, anyway.
Rating: 3/5. Eh, not especially interesting all in all, but the minor connections to other things elevates it a bit.
1462. Colony creature(s). The colony creature(s) is/are yet another sapient inhabitant(s) of Dac, the Mon Calamari homeworld, which has more indigenous sapient species than perhaps any world but Endor (which is saying something).
The colony creature(s) may be a sort of bacterial quorum, as it's described as the collective of many billions of individual cells, or perhaps is analogous to a slime mold. It/they was/were able to telepathically influence several groups of dianogas (?!) to attack some people that disturbed it during the Clone Wars, but then-Captain Gial "It's a trap!" Ackbar negotiated a deal with it that protected it in exchange for it using its telepathy to track Separatist intruders on Dac.
In ways, the colony creature(s) is almost too similar to the Knowledge Bank. This usually wouldn't bother me, but the Knowledge Bank is also native to Dac! (Told you that place had a lot of native species; eight all told, unless Wookieepedia missed some.) But I think I can forgive it, because the Knowledge Bank is awesome and so is this.
Rating: 4/5.
1463. Coral-monks. Despite an intriguing name, we know basically nothing of the coral-monks.
Rating: 2/5 for the name, even if it doesn't sound like a species name to me.
1464. Crast. The Crast are also known as food-kin. They exist in a symbiotic relationship with the Priapulins, wherein they must be eaten by Priapulins to complete their reproductive cycles (if I recall the original context correctly-Wookieepedia drops the ball a bit and merely states that their eggs must incubate in the Priapulin digestive tract, but it's very strongly implied that the food-kin can't actually lay their eggs).
Thus, Priapulins raise and nurture Crast, who likely see the much larger and longer-lived creatures as somewhere between parents and deities. That's a complicated symbiosis right there, made a touch more unsettling by the fact that the Crast are capable of communication and reasoning but don't seem nearly as bright as the unambiguously human-equivalent-intelligence Priapulin.
Rating: 3/5. I like the Priapulins and rated them well; these guys would probably have pushed them up a notch through their complicating the Priapulins (which would have made them a 5/5, natch) if I'd remembered to talk about them before. (Glad this article exists; otherwise I'd have forgotten them entirely!)
1465. Culroon. These guys exist entirely for the sake of the backstory of some Imperial officer I don't care about. All we know of them is that they 1) have a long history of violence (big surprise, that) and also 2) don't have a traditional ceremony wherein their leader symbolically turns over a weapon in a big ol' ceremony to show that he's surrendering.
Rating: 1/5. Meh.
1466. Dactrurians. A well-known actor was a Dactrurian.
Rating: 1/5. Double meh.
1467. Dargas. The Dargas were blue-skinned and red-eyed descendants of humans mutated by a local radioactive material.
Wait, blue-skinned and red-eyed? Do we have another Chiss-alike here?
It's hard to tell if this was purposeful or not, because the Dargas were created for a(n ambiguously canonical) French roleplaying magazine, and were published in 1994, three years after the original publication of Heir to the Empire, Thrawn's first appearance. I don't know if the novel would have been published in French yet, or how much precisely that matters.
Interestingly, their homeworld has banthas which they domesticated; that makes their heavily desertified homeworld Zender basically a red version of Tatooine.
Rating: 2/5, because the apparent urge to have a red Tatooine is funny.
1468. Del Andue. Supposedly "strange-looking," but we'll never know because they were written out of the early drafts of Return of the Jedi before it was filmed.
Rating: 1/5. Eh.
1469. Deltrons. Deltrons have a long list of features-"a torso, lungs, a heart, a lipped mouth, and iron-based blood"-which initially sound interesting until you realize these are things they have precisely in common with humans.
"At least one individual" (thank you, less obnoxious wording!), Brisha Shard (which is a great name) had golden skin and "bronzium-colored" eyes (just say bronze, guys, bronze is a color too), which sounds like a potentially interesting color scheme.
Most interesting, however, is that they were apparently created for a prequel to a 1979 Marvel comics story written by Chris Claremont (of "first guy to write decent X-Men stories" fame)!
That is bizarrely specific.
Rating: 2/5 for the interesting color scheme.
1470. Dirconites. ...That guy, huh? That guy. You had to make that guy an alien, as opposed to an ugly, fat human?
Sorry, got away from myself for a moment there.
There was this ugly fat guy in the Droids cartoon, and somebody decided, because he was ugly and fat and had what some people interpreted as yellowish skin, that he was an alien.
STOP THAT, YOU GUYS.
This is not the first time or even the second time this nonsense (that is, real-world racism) has intruded on things; heck, it's not even the first time it's intruded on the Droids cartoon specifically.
Rating: 0/5. Frickin' racism.
-Signing off.
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