Ok, so I’m not exactly the most dedicated Star Wars fan out there. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen most of the films, and I might possibly have owned a plastic light saber at one point, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I ever really understood Star Wars at all.
For example, I had no idea about the plants with boobs.
Last night, you see, I ran across a link to the Wookiepedia — the Wikipedia for all things Star Warsy. Specifically, it was a link to the Wookiepedia page on “Breast.” Not breasts, just Breast, though it turns out that there are up to six of them. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
The Wookipedia page on Breast starts off with a brief yet still baffling overview:
Breasts were the mammary glands of mammalian species and some reptomammals, and were normally a distinguishing feature of the female of the species. Males did have breasts, but they were far less developed than their female counterparts due to the sexual dimorphism.
Reptomammals!? And what’s with the past tense? Breasts “were?” I’m pretty sure that breasts still are.
Every sentence in the “Breast” entry raises more questions than it answers. In the “Biological role” section, the Wookipedians explain that
In some cultures, sentient females nursed their own young. This was true of both primitive planetary societies like Dathomir, where the warrior-women of the Singing Mountain Clan would feed their children even during solemn councils of war,[1] and high-tech interstellar civilization.
What the hell is a Dathomir, and why are its Mountain Clans singing? How on earth, sorry, Dathomir, do we know that these singing Mountain-warrior clanswomen are breastfeeding at the war councils? In the Star Wars movies I’ve seen there wasn’t any breastfeeding. (Nor was there a Dathomir. but never mind.) Are there like a dozen secret Star Wars movies out there I haven’t seen that focus mostly on breastfeeding?
Even Tenel Ka Djo, Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium, nursed her daughter Allana herself.[4]
You guys are just making all this shit up, right?
Alternative techniques of feeding infants did exist, as the TDL nanny droid could store up to two liters of milk internally.[5]
Ok, even if TDL nanny droids are a real thing in some expanded Star Wars universe, why do you know the specific amount of milk they can store internally?
Other sentient species retained strong breastfeeding traditions as well: female Wookiees had six breasts, which they used to nurse their litters of cubs.[6] Askajian females also had six breasts,[7] while Gran females had three.[8]
HOW IS IT THAT YOU CAN FOOTNOTE ALL OF THIS. WHY ARE THERE DOCUMENTS THAT SPECIFY THE NUMBERS OF BOOBS THAT IMAGINARY STAR WARS ALIENS HAVE. WHY DO THOSE DOCUMENTS EXIST.
And then there’s a weirdly long and detailed discussion of the breasts of imaginary alien males. From it we learn that Anakin Skywalker — you know, the future Darth Vader — liked showing off his man boobs (not to be confused with the former name of this blog).
As male individuals were not biologically meant to nurse their offsprings, they sported much smaller breasts and produced no milk. Mandalore the Lesser (then a gladiator),[9] Aron Peacebringer (a planetary leader)[10], and Anakin Skywalker (in certain circumstances, such as on Nelvaan) would freely exhibit them.
So fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to dudes taking off their shirts.
Also, whoever came up with the name “Aron Peacebringer,” fire yourself. I mean, what the hell, that is some seriously low effort work on your part.
Some males, such as Anakin Skywalker[16] and Corran Horn would also sleep barechested for comfort, though it should be noted that Horn undressed completely to sleep as opposed to simply going barechested.[17]
Damn, whoever wrote this section is perhaps a little too interested in figuring out when Anakin Skywalker goes shirtless.
Onward. In the “Cultural significance” section we learn, among other things, that
Female patients in bacta tanks could have their breasts covered,[21] but in some cases they chose not to.[22] Leia Organa seemed unperturbed by the sight of Shen breastfeeding in public on Dathomir [1]
I don’t know who Shen is or what bacta tanks are, and I’m sort of thinking that I’m better off for not knowing.
We are also provided with this handy graphic:
And then we arrive at the section devoted to “Non-mammals with breasts,” and that’s when things get really weird.
First we learn that “[a] number of females belonging to non-mammalian species were known to have had breasts.”
And then we get to the shape-shifting, boob-having plants.
T’ra Saa, who was a shape-shifting Neti—a sentient species of plants— had breasts in her pseudo-Human form.[27]
In case you have trouble picturing a sentient plant with huge knockers, the Wookipedians provide a helpful illustration.
Apparently, there’s nothing in the Star Wars universe that can’t have boobs. Humans, wookies, robots, lizards, houseplants — you name it, and whoever is involved with that little facet of the extended Star Wars universe has probably put boobs on it, anywhere from two to six of them.
Actually, that’s not completely true. In the section of “Breast” devoted to developments “Behind the scenes,” we learn that
During the development of Star Wars Galaxies, the team worked with Lucasfilm to determine the female Mon Calamari’s physiology. Because Mon Calamari were not mammals, early concepts showing Mon Calamari with breasts were eventually rejected.[29]
Congratulations, Star Wars Galaxies creators! I award you the first annual We Hunted the Mammoth Award for Restraint in Putting Boobs on Things.
H/T — Zoe Quinn on the Tweeter.
EDIT: I figured out where I found the link to the page, and added a blurry picture of a tree with boobs.
@Broken:
No, I do this as well. I love looking into how nature works and how it can be applied to various other things in new ways. The idea of boy / girl X / Y human-only sex characteristics is really a very limited scenario ( hell a lot of nature is using something other than XY – or in the case of insects, hello wolbachia ), when we look at how far nature takes things.
The sad thing, to me at least, is when people utilise actual nature and don’t realise they’re doing it. Good example off the top of my head: Harpies in MG universe. That’s based on a real concept – gynogenesis – where males provide semen but not genetic material to allow females to conceive ( so, for example, one species of lizard is capable of mating with other, different species of lizard because it only needs the presence of sperm to bring on conception, not the actual mixing of genetic material ). Of course, with harpies some genetic expression does occur ( children have the male’s eyes or hair or some sort ) and that is not how gynogenesis actually works.
Other neat examples for world building are like Weber / Ringo’s Empire of Man that had an alien species where the males provided eggs via ovipositors to the females who gestated the young but the females provided the sperm – leading to interesting ‘autocorrections’ in human translation equipment, alien anger at being misgendered, and general male ego defeatism because the aliens had such huge cocks… I mean ovipositors. It’s kinda sad how a majority of fiction tends to be limited just because we feel the audience won’t be into it if they can’t immediately grasp what’s happening.
I mean, Scotty’s ( Doohan ) book series with Stirling has some of the coolest spider-like creatures I’ve ever read and he didn’t have a huge amount of development. Just the idea, at the core, that said spider-like sapient aliens would be as disgusted of us as we are of them – in their case, because our faces are so mobile and expressive ( whereas their exoskeletons prevent such motions ).
Little details like that I personally think go a long way in building worlds, but I can understand also where OP is coming from with the obsessive tendencies by some to capitalise on things that have been done over and over again. There is most surely an element of laziness there, but unfortunately it’s the lesser of the evils being employed.
World building is all well and good, but I imagine one would describe a species’ breasts in an entry dedicated to said species (species->female->breasts), rather than breast(!)->species A, species B, etc.
The latter format kind of shift the focus to the concept of breasts like it’s an important part of the universe (probably is for some people).
Also what’s with the Ayla Secura picture? Is that from a comic or something, and what did she achieve by “impressing” that guy with her breasts? Weird.
I fail to see how this falls under the heading of “The new misogyny, tracked and mocked.” The fact that the SWEU tends to stick breasts on anything female (or cause all its “sapients” to have binary sexes) is a result of being a big dumb space opera setting where the hero or heroine has to get the girl or the boy at the end of the story. I’m actually pretty sure that most male SWEU sapients have penises of some kind as well; if I recall correctly there is a human character in the Rogue Squadron series who had a Bothan girlfriend, and it was made explicit that while their genitals fit together somehow (which would mean that Bothan males have a phallus of some kind rather than using sperm packets or something) the fact that they couldn’t have children of their own made them sad.
The Star Wars universe is really weird since it was highly ad hoc and altough Lucas was supposedly the person in chief, tons of the universe seems to have been made up on the fly by whoever worked on a SW project (books, TV shows, video games, etc).
I’d recommend checkingout RedLetterMedia’s video about Darth Vader’s armor. All their information came from Wookiepedia, and it was baffingly in depth and accidentally hilarious because it seemed that the Emperor purposefully made the suit put Darth Vader through excruciating pain for kicks and giggles
@Ayy Lmao Looking at the Wookiepedia article on Gossam (they’re a species that has only appeared in stories derived from the Clone Wars cartoon show), it appears that Gossam females (no male Gossam have appeared on television, it seems) do not have breasts, or only very small ones. Maybe the (possibly male) Gossam is impressed by the grotesquery of such over-developed glands, or maybe large breasts on a Gossam female indicate some special status (“brood mother?” “clan leader?” “mythical heroine?”).
From following the response tweets, apparently the breast page was made for April Fools. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wookieepedia:April_Fools%27_Day_2014/Main_Page
@runsinbackground
Fair enough.
It’s reassuring to know that, with hundreds (thousands? millions?) of sentient alien creatures to choose from, all of them are binary-gendered and have some form of similarly shaped mammary glands. I’m sure there’s a reasonable evo psych explanation for this, involving cave-wookie tingles.
It’s a pretty sure bet the galaxy also had MGTOW, threatening feeemales with extinction by nanny droid.
Fairy Tail, an anime/manga that is very much in love with breasts, even puts them on giant lobster-like monsters.
Hell, even the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, which is pretty damned far from a feminist work, had an entire arc centered around an alien species that had three genders, and handled it with a lot more respect than ‘stick breasts on everything’.
And of course, that’s nothing compared to the Uryuom of El Goonish Shive
To be fair, not all species are like that. Hutts, for example, shift from male to female and back again over the courses of their lives, and there’s no discernible difference between the sexes in terms of secondary and tertiary characteristics.
TV Tropes has a page all about it, called “NonMammal Mammaries.” I won’t put a direct link to it because it’s TV Tropes.
I’m not sure the mocking of fictional worldbuilding is particularly productive. Star Wars has an expanded universe that’s been going for decades, there is bound to be tiny, insignificant details that can be catalogued by a Star Wars wiki. Its not exactly like this article shows any sort of prominent info about the fictional universe it informs about. Don’t really see the point being made here. (And Star Wars fans are not obsessed with breasts just because they appear and are mentioned in Star Wars stories. That’s just silly, frankly.) (Also, I love Dathomir. One of the best SW planets, with some of the best worldbuilding I’ve seen!)
@ Broken Butterfly
I like to do that as well. I just felt a bit disappointed that David seemed to be mocking that in the article, which doesn’t exactly fill me with good feeling.
Honestly, it seems to be shorter than the article on Xim The Despot, who died tens of thousands of years before nearly all the stories set in ancient history.
Wookieepedia has, at this moment, 124,557 pages, to give you some idea of the scale of how much minutiae they’ve cataloged.
There are thousands of ways of adhering to sexist binary stereotypes (which are misogynistic by themselves anyway) without adding boobs to anyone.
Adding boobs and thinking “yep, that’s it, now’s a female” and calling it a day, that’s not only sexism and misogyny, it’s relying on them because you’re too lazy to think of the literally millions of other ways you could be doing it.
Lack of imagination isn’t always bigotry, but when you replace imagination with bigotry, that’s when you get boobs on everything. Ta-da!
I’m going to channel MRA-dom and pull an Evo-Psych explanation for an unlikely amount of boobage in the SW universe out of my ass:
Those species that nurse their young tended to have fewer at one time given both the time and energy demands required for the direct feeding and care of dependent individuals.
Especially in those species which only produce one or two offspring per spawning, this allowed for a more protracted childhood / dependency & learning period which in turn allowed for greater efficiency in calorie procurement.
Said increased efficiencies allowed both for a greater proportion of ingested calories to go towards neural development and for a greater proportion of time to be spent on social bonding and cultural / technological development.
Spin the wheel of time forward a few hundred thousand years, and the end result of these forces acting upon one another in continuous feedback is often a species with forward-facing eyes (being characteristic of predation, the most efficient calorie source); articulating digits on its forward limbs (usually also not weight bearing, therefore allowing for enhanced manipulation of the material world / more refined tool use and development); and something like breasts on one, both, or all sexes (indicating that the species engages in a direct transfer of nutrients to its neonates / invests a great deal in their single or low-numbered young).
If you wanted to get extra just-so-y about it and narrow mammaries / mammary equivalents down to just the females / female equivalents, you could also throw in that binary sexes and accompanying discreet secondary characteristics are often found in such species due to the fact that greater specialization allows for greater efficiencies which in turn allow for greater gains / relative fitness as well as more overall time for tool, technology, and culture development.
Gawds, this could go on forever.
No wonder the Manosphere’s always in such a foul mood – it’d be exhausting to have to spin up justifying stories for every little aspect of one’s “facts”.
Oh! And re: their location (relatively close to the face): This proximity while feeding allowed for more pronounced bonding with offspring. This bonding (1) encouraged a greater investment of resources in young (part of the investment / learning / advancement feedback cycle mentioned above) and (2) encouraged adult / fully physically functioning individuals to care for their parents past the time when they could contribute physically or materially to survival BUT allowed for a greater accumulation and transmittal of generational knowledge which translated into overall gains in survival.
Agree with many above that this is reaching a bit. Sure, there’s something to be said about the necessity in sci-fi/fantasy to put boobs on things to denote them as female, but that’s not something at all exclusive to Star Wars, and I don’t think that this post is the right angle on it.
Most of the post’s incredulity could be answered with a simple: Yes, there is an extended Star Wars universe; it’s huge, and it all happened “A long time ago.” Past that, it mostly just feels like picking on nerd pedantry.
Isn’t there an Asimov short with something similar?
It’s something like the giant, sapient spiders are ready to put aside that the humans that have landed on their planet look like what they generally eat because the humans are obviously also intelligent and communicative but the humans radio (or whatever) back to their government that they recommend total annihilation of the species because – yick – spiders.
@AsAboveSoBelow
God, ain’t that the truth. I’m dating one of them, and he loves to explain things
Yeah, I agree, but as ashley pointed out
And, yep, that’s an April Fool’s page, if that link is legitimate.
I also agree with a couple of peeps on this page that have pointed out that this is a world building problem and has nothing to do with the manosphere.
It’s a fun little article pointing out a problem that many franchises have – just have male/female and stick boobs or make the female one’s sexier – but, yeah, that’s not new.
But if you find some manosphere media and dissect that world building…
Ah, it appears someone is a goody-two shoes that doesn’t want to suck away hours and hours of time from people.
I, however, am not so merciful
@dlouwe: I mean, hell – didn’t Star Trek pull something out of the æther re: “Why are there so many bipedal humanoids with often binary sexes?” (some time during Enterprise…I have a lot of knowledge gaps on that one).
I think the Grand Explanation was that an ancient species seeded solar systems all over the galaxy with their DNA in order to jump start the evolution of similarly concious / intellegent species.
So, yeah.
I mean, the main stance that I take on this is that almost all Sci Fi and Fantasy (and just about all of it that gains popular traction) either is unfettered allegory or ends up being read as such.
So, lots of amazingly human-like aliens have bewbs and people who’re way into the details of world building have documented the elebenty-billion nitpicky details of this aspect of the Universe in question.
OK.
To me, the stories that are told within this existing framework are way more telling of where the Fandom was and is.
The evolution of the stories being told is just as fascinating.
I’m a way casual SW fan compared to the people who know all of the details of the expanded universe (or legends, whatever), but, to me, it’d be cool to see where that representation is now compared to where it was in the 80s and 90s (25+ years ago..*cries on phone*) rather than worry about what the documentation says.
/stream of conciousness weirdness
@Makroth – Try as I might, I haven’t yet been able to get my kids into the America(the band)-infused awesomeness that is The Last Unicorn.
Or: Thanks for the creepy tree picture.