#tukki

One thing I've always kind of liked in Star Wars, even before I liked any of it, was Jawas. Because.. you know, Jawas. They're awful little gremlins with high pitched voices who steal anything not nailed down and come back with hammers to pry the nails out so they can take the other things too. That’s pretty great! I love their designs too, artistically speaking. They’re super iconic and just in general, whoever came up with them is super cool.

Wanna know what sucks, though? Compared to almost every other species as recognizable and visually cool as them, in both Legends canon (btw as someone from a fandom where canon has no rules, having declared literally everything written about your story in the last quarter century and some change non-canon besides a few things? Fucking wild, man.) and in actual canon, there’s... surprisingly little? 

Oh, there’s stuff, at least in Legends canon, but... how to say this? It feels like... it feels like they wrote exactly enough to have it be rude to ask for more, but not enough that someone like me would be satisfied. There’s a lot about their physiology, besides their face, and a good outline of how their little gremlin tribes are run, but very little about what they believe and what their actual culture is. There’s like, one or two stories from a Jawa’s perspective, but NOW IT’S NOT CANON??? How is someone supposed to navigate this universe? At least in Star Trek, historically, the show itself doesn’t give a fuck about continuity so you can just say ‘fuck it’, but basically all the supplementary canon could technically be considered basically garbage in terms of canonicity now so what the hell?

Anyway, sorry. Tangent. Sort of, since I planned to talk about it, it’s more like a planned detour. But moving on anyway; I want to know more about their terrible gremlin culture. If I do not find canon, I will create it myself. At least the ‘actually, never mind about literally every book published about our universe in the last 35 years’ thing lets me decide what I want to do and say ‘ok, we’re just doing something better with this’. 

I looked for an excuse to do something and then had a dumb thought; what if Baby Yoda was raised by Jawas instead? And then I thought, well that’s a dumb idea, why should I do that? ... Because fuck you, I can, that’s why.

After encouragement from a Mandalorian/Baby Yoda discord server, I just said fuck it and came up with an AU.

So this is an AU where during the attempt to scavenge a mudhorn egg leaves Din Djarin’s quest to fulfill his bounty sadly incomplete and he’s gored by a mudhorn. I love you, buddy, but it’s for the greater good of my nerdy fixation on terrible gremlin people.

Baby Yoda is left alone because if he wasn’t, there’d be no story, so for whatever reason, he’s just in a floating egg in the middle of the desert, when a young (former) first time mother Jawa named Tukki, who lost her biological child to disease a few months ago, wandering out to scavenge for parts (she claims) comes along and decides that.... hey, free baby!

Technically, she claims to her clan that she just wanted the floating crib for parts and didn’t bother to throw out the baby, but it absolutely was ‘hey, free baby’. 

She declares herself the mother of the weird baby, and that’s kind of it. They’re surprisingly able to accept it. The main idea I had for Jawa society is that they don’t really have a traditional concept of ownership besides in the broad sense of ‘clans’ and only consider it not ok to steal from Jawas. It’s basically ‘only we own things, the rest of you should try harder to keep your stuff if you don’t want it stolen’. So as soon as the argument is over that the baby is theirs, by right, he’s part of the clan.

So now Baby Yoda drawings! I had more but I actually have friends over to entertain and now that he’s awake, better things to do than write this.

1.  Baby Yoda stealing a Mudhorn egg! Technically, I have been informed that the egg in the episode was larger than/the same size as Baby Yoda, but I already drew it and wanted to draw it so this is a runt or something.

2. Baby Yoda with a toy X-Wing, shoving it in his mouth because that’s what toddlers do.

3. Tukki and Baby Yoda, for scale and as the first drawing.

4. Tukki unmasked! I know there’s no canon info on this, but when I googled ‘Jawa unmasked’, this image came up, so I went ‘well, that’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. I love it’. She loves her tiny baby!