spaceywaceynerd:

elbywoggit:

pep-no:

neitherclosenorfar:

Twilek headtails are basically fat storage, right? Orn Free Taa’s are engorged and he seems to have grown another two. They’re on a planet with regular food scarcity, so it would make sense too. Imagine how much they could do with that. 

Twi’leks who can tell when others are regularly hungry based on the size and consistency of their lekku. Slaves and other vulnerable Twi’leks being easily identifiable, by the way they move. Their lekku movements grow sluggish, the tone changes. 

For people with the observational skills and knowledge it’s easy, but Padme and Orn Free Taa once had to collaborate on a space Power Point on a famine that involved carefully pointing out every lekku marker of malnourishment in holos of settler children so the Senate would understand it. 

Extra lekku being a status symbol because it means that you have literally so much wealth your body has to stretch to hold it all. Cham Syndulla brings back the lean and mean look with his nationalist fervour, and then it’s a bit stylish to have solid well built up lekku, all healthy fat, regularly fed but not overdone.  

Slim lekku coming into ‘fashion’ on other worlds, even though it’s not always as healthy, and everything that would bring. 

Babies with their tiny lekku being fed extra well to make sure they’ll grow up with nice long ones. Grandmothers swear they can tell who grew up in a rich family and who didn’t even when they’re adults, just based off their lekku. 

Young Hera who only eats every few days and then in binges, because even if it isn’t entirely healthy for her it works a lot better for her than for a human. Then Kanan comes on board and he has to eat every single day, basically. (he protests, but she knows how humans work) and she finds it’s better for her as well, that her lekku fill in and grow stronger. 

Aayla Secura giving up rations in a siege situation, because she can handle it a lot better than her men, and her lekku get limp and droopy. All the clones fuss once they’re in safety to make sure she eats enough to get her health back. 

Well, lekku have muscles, too. Not just fat storage appendages.

I love your headcanons, but I must add:

Lekku have a decent amount of neural tissue, too. From what I understand, the upper portions are extensions of cranial tissue. I’d bet on them being similar to cranial nerves, and probably with their own ganglia and whatnot. I’d imagine a decent amount of coordinating and autonomic centers as well (like cerebellar tissue). 

I have always headcanoned that lekku species will joke about their headtails having a mind of their own. And, while they can easily override it, I feel like lekku function semi-independently. They’ll sometimes express emotions that the bearer wants to hide, in subtle ways. 

But yes, even so… lekku are mainly fat and muscle. (Neural tissue has a lot of fat as well, lalalalalala). So the headcanon holds.

Good stuff. A+ 

twi’lek literally means ‘two leks’ so i cant see this working out, leave the third lekku to togruta.not to mention their main purpose is to communicate..i imagine they can fully control it or the communication would be soo embarrassing lol.

edit:fixed it oops

I mean, canonically, very heavy Twi’leks can develop extra lekku, though they probably don’t have the same muscular and neural foundations to allow movement. (Look at full pictures of Orn Free Taa, he has two in front and two in back, four total.)

As for motion control, can you fully regulate your own body language? We telegraph lots of things we don’t mean to, in how we look at things, how long we focus, small facial muscle movements. Even verbal language is a complicated thing, full of small clues and hints. Perfect muscle control is even trickier. Our bodies react on instinct before our brains do, at times. 

cadesama:

windona:

Part of my problem with it is 1) the implications and 2) ignores the Taoist roots

For 1, the implications of the Dark Side being a side instead of a corruption makes the Star Wars universe… suckier. Because throughout the movies, TV show, and all other stuff, the Dark Side is presented as evil, corrupting, and damaging. Anakin goes off the walls when he falls. Dooku aids in the destruction of the Republic and spread of corruption. Palpatine is manipulative. Say what you want, but all presented Dark Siders are perfectly fine with murder and mass slaughter. Which, as a corruption, makes sense. But as a legitimate, and necessary, side of the Force?

That means that balance in the Force requires a degree of mass slaughter and murder. Which makes balance kind of evil. And this ties into the weird dummying down of Taoism.

(Disclaimer: I am no expert on Taoism and Eastern philosophy, so if someone who is wants to comment I am fine.)

Now, I will not deny that Star Wars has always had Christian themes in it, from the virgin birth to Luke’s redeeming of his father. But those aren’t the only themes. The Jedi have a ton of Eastern influences, from the very name ‘Jedi’. The Force is very Taoist in nature. And in Taoism, it’s not a balance of good and evil. It’s a balance of life and death, chaos and order, with imbalance resulting in evil. You need to accept that death is part of life. You don’t need to accept murder and mass slaughter.

Except… balance is apparently between murder and not murder now.

Having a Light Side, and making the Dark Side equal to it feels like a shitty retcon. And it makes the story worse for it in my opinion. I get graying morality, and letting the Jedi make mistakes and have issues. But turning it from an Order that let politics warp their spiritual beliefs into a group that was clearly wrong about the whole basis of their theology from the beginning where they preached balance by not being balanced feels like it dummies down the story and makes things worse.

(Also, the Light/Dark thing seems to arise out of the need to make flawed good guys become bad guys because… good guys apparently need to be perfect now)

I would also add that it is a deliberate misread of both the OT and the PT in terms of acting. I can get on board with the idea that suppressing one’s feelings is ultimately a terrible thing – I do think that much of Anakin’s arc relates to the idea that he is caught in a cycle of anger and guilt about the very act of feeling. It’s not doctrine, of course, but it is an end result of his interpretation of doctrine and the effects of doctrine on his life, re: attachments. But, nonetheless, Anakin is permitted to feel anger. He is allowed to feel joy. He is allowed to fear a whole spectrum of feelings. He is then supposed to process those feelings and, if they are negative, let them go. The fact that he is incapable of doing that doesn’t in any way prove that such a process is wrongheaded, impossible in general, or contributing to evil in this universe.

Do we see Luke express joy post-training? Yes. Do we see Obi-Wan express joy? I’d argue yes. We see compassion and love from both of them, neither in defiance of doctrine or the apparent balance of the Force. To say they are actively contributing to the imbalance of the Force requires a retrospective misreading of the script and acting in the first six saga movies, to say no, actually, they were emotionless. Or that those moments of emotions were violations, moments in which they were bad Jedi.

So, the Light Side does not forbid emotions. The Jedi encourage healthy processing of emotions. Exactly what is the Dark Side contributing? Oh right. Murder.

bedlamsbard:

I was checking my Twi’leki language references today and realized that the Twi’leki word for “hope” is “tann” – which is also the name of Hera and Cham’s home province on Ryloth.  The Syndulla homeland is hope.

That also means that, completely coincidentally, the Forlorn Hope in Devil’s Backbone is named after the Syndulla clan lands, a year and a half before canon revealed that they were from the Tann Province.