Chat corner 122: creatures

[annathecrow]

Welcome to the Monday chat corner!

This week, the topic is “creatures”, i.e. non-sentient beings (I know, I know, sometimes that’s debatable).

If you want some inspiration, I recommend browsing the Wookieepedia category page for Creatures - a few decades of creators have come up with quite a list of critters!

Also, because I stumbled upon it when looking up the above page, there’s apparently a Holographic Museum of Extinct Animals on Coruscant, which is (again) canon.

 

Comments

[havendale]

I fell down a Wookieepedia rabbit hole on the subject of pets in the GFFA and have now discovered that apparently Darth Maul had a pet dog in at least one LEGO continuity. Which is an oddly cute mental image.

Slightly tangential question: Has Star Wars ever done a storyline that revolved primarily around the issue of sentience/sapience? I’m thinking of something along the lines of “The Devil in the Dark” from Star Trek or H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, in which our heroes meet a new sort of alien and end up having to reevaluate their ideas about what sentient life looks like.

[annathecrow]

Darth Maul's dog -- aww! Now I want an AU where canon!Maul gets a dog. :D

sentience/sapience -- maybe the Zillo Beast from The Clone Wars TV show? I think the show played with it possibly being sentient. I mean sapient. (Am I being tortured by the fact that SW uses the wrong term? Possibly!)

[yourlibrarian]

One thing I have noticed is that SW seems to be big on creating creatures for temporary dramatic purposes with apparently no thought to how these creatures can survive in the environment they appear in. For example, the current Mandalore. What are their food sources??

[annathecrow]

Huh, I never thought about that. But yeah, SW tends to use alien creatures as visual flavor without necessarily thinking them through, so I'm not surprised by this. The example that always catches my eye is when canon books use "alien" to denote non-Humans. Because, this is ostensibly a universe where Humans are just one of many sentient/sapient species, and has been such for millennia. Surely Basic wouldn't use that kind of word anymore...