The hype about the next and last (yeah, sure) Star Wars film is building up, ahead of its release 20 December, and Boing Boing have shared with us Max Gladstone’s very interesting theory about who we’ve been watching all this time.
There are no humans in Star Wars, so what are the creatures we are watching? – BoingBoing
The title card tells us that the story takes place long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. So the characters aren’t actually human or even necessarily from a human-like society, they’re just played by human actors.
What can we learn about the creatures true nature from studying the first six movies?
Firstly, gender is wildly off-kilter. But so is family.
Star Wars: A long time ago, in a hive far far away? – Max Gladstone
Family is a second important clue—or, rather, the absence of family. With one notable exception, people in the series don’t talk much about parentage. No non-Force sensitive male ever describes his family, if I recall correctly. Han, Lando, Wedge, Biggs, Tarkin, Dodonna, and so forth, all might as well have sprung from the brows of their ships. In six+hours of film about war, I would expect to see someone to drop at least a single reference to parents of some sort. The lack of strong family ties suggests that parenting relationships are much less close for most GFFA ‘humans’ than for Sol 3 humans—which in turn suggests large brood sizes, short gestation periods, young ages of maturity, or all of the above.
So we’re looking for an organism with large brood sizes, young ages of maturity, short gestation periods, and relatively few fertile females who naturally assume positions of social and organizational authority.
In a word—bugs.
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