Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#77)

(This entry excludes "Nelwyn" because they're an April Fool's gag. Well, their inclusion as inhabitants of the Star Wars galaxy is.)

761. Nelvaanians, or Nelvaans. The Nelvaanians are a group of primitive tribal wolfish people. Their primary appearance appears to have been in Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars shorts, where the Separatists kidnapped a vast number of their men to transform into ugly hulking cyborg mutant troopers. (Apparently they were sick of their battle droids being defeated by stiff winds and swarms of insects.)

They called Anakin Skywalker "Ghost Hand," which is a really cool thing to call someone with a prosthesis, all things considered.

Supposedly, the mutations rendered unto the Nelvaanians were passed on, but only to their boy children. ...Righteo then.

Rating: 3/5. Eh, they look interesting, even if I'm having trouble with the mutations thing (both believing it being passed on and the thought of it now being their default appearance).

762. Neo-Bespinians. Neo-Bespinians are ambiguously canonical gaseous people (what did I tell you about laughing?) who are obviously from Bespin and who can suffocate living beings by sucking the air out of their lungs. In Bespin's atmosphere, they're invisible, but in other atmospheres they become visible and detectable, and must periodically find isolated places and purge themselves of the effects of other atmospheres or die.

Rating: 4/5. That's a pretty interesting consequence for a weird species to have as a weakness off their homeworld.

763. Neolians. They're from Neoli.

Rating: 1/5.

764. Nerrians. They're from Nerria.

Rating: 1/5. Can't waste time on these guys.

765. Nessies. The "Nessies" are twenty-five races of essentially human beings from the Stenness Node, a cluster of mining worlds in the Outer Rim. Their main claim to fame is using the corpses of gigantic space wasps as spacecraft hulls.

Rating: 3/5. Riding around in the remains of half-mile-plus-long space predators is pretty awesome.

766. Neti. The Neti are (or perhaps were) incredibly long-lived plant beings. They seem to be able to shapeshift extensively and in short periods of time, and can be human-shaped and human-sized or tree-shaped and tree-sized. Or presumably many combinations of the two.

They're apparently originally from Myrkyr, which is an interesting planet because it's got at least two native animal species that use the Force naturally, and the Neti continue that trend, having a large proportion of their membership if not all of them as Force sensitive. (Basically all known members of the species seem to be Jedi or Sith.) They apparently moved to a planet named Ryyk, which was destroyed in a supernova at some point, and so the species is extremely rare and possibly on the brink of total extinction (in the post-movie era, there's only one known individual, who dies, and then there's an infant sprout left behind who might be able to survive, but we haven't heard anything about it in a while-over a real-world decade and multiple in-universe decades). They don't eat, being plants, and clearly can spend much of their time inactive.

Of course, they might not be extinct, because they're so long-lived, and even one individual might possibly be able to bring the species back to the brink over time; also, while apparently reproduction is rare, their seeds can survive for at least a thousand years. So, yeah, I'm not counting them out.

So what else? Oh, they're just one of the coolest-looking alien species I've ever seen. They're depicted as always being made of gnarly branchy stuff, and their faces and whatnot come across as the almost-sorta-not-really faces you might see in an old, twisted plant. This is really neat.

Rating: 5/5. I've seen very little of the Neti, but I like them quite a lot.

767. Nevoota. The Nevoota were an insectoid species who are "disdainful" of death. They apparently were considered to be really dangerous.

Note I said "were." Apparently, in a three-year-long war four thousand years before the movie era, the Mandalorians killed 'em all. Supposedly, this shaped Mandalorian culture extensively.

Rating: 3/5. There's something about the phrase "disdainful of death" that amuses me.

768. Nharwaak. The Nharwaak teamed up with the Habeen to build a hyperdrive that could fit in a normal TIE Fighter; this didn't end well for the two species because the Empire liked that idea, and just beat them up and took it.

Rating: 3/5. As I said when talking about the Habeen, multi-species collaborations ought to show up more often.

769. Nhoras. The Nhoras and the Clatear didn't get along. Five generations' worth of Jedi tried to get them to, but it never worked. Eventually, the Empire conquered the Clatear, and the Nhoras laughed, because they were ignored. Then the Empire fell apart, and the Clatear kept the military hardware that was used to keep them in line. The Nhoras stopped laughing (and hired some mercenaries and stuff during the Caamas document crisis, which was a generally unhappy time).

Rating: 3/5. Incidentally, "Nhoras" is apparently both singular and plural.

770. Night-Soarers. The Night-Soarers have a dopey name. (I'm sorry, but it's true.) They're winged, bald, mostly humanlike (other than wings) flying battish people. They originated in the silly ol' Marvel Star Wars comics, and I reckon that pretty much explains that.

Supposedly, they have a reputation as cunning assassins or somesuch.

Rating: 2/5. Kind of... all over the place, and not in a good way.

-Signing off.