#bitty!boba: ''i want to be an honorable warrior that destroys evil and protects the weak!''

[syn0vial]

miscellaneous expanded universe boba fett characterization details, JUNIOR NOVELS EDITION

hello, hello! i'm here to share more random boba fett details, this time turning towards his younger self—specifically, his younger self as characterized by the boba fett junior novels that i may have had a slight obsession with as a kid. full disclaimer that the events of these novels have been alomst completely retconned by bitty!boba's appearances in TCW, but, well... i still like them, so there :<

and now, without further ado:

bitty!boba is kind of a bundle of contradictions. especially pre-geonosis, he's a genuinely nice kid who likes animals, reading books, and playing pretend. he also thinks murder is a perfectly good way of solving problems. he knows all about major underworld figures and various ways of tracking/harming others. he's also alarmingly sheltered and naive. he spends multiple days agonizing over feeding feeder mice to his pet eel and even attempts to release some of them against his father's orders. he tries to literally murder obi-wan like a week later. the kid contains multitudes, is what i'm saying.

boba: "a sea-mouse is an innocent creature that never knowingly did anything to anybody" [obi-wan enters line of sight] "you, however, i would maim."

boba's life on kamino is honestly kind of depressing. he lives in extreme isolation and only has regular contact with like... four people, one of whom is a droid. he talks to himself constantly because he has no one else to talk to, especially when the adults in his life aren't around. for the first ten years of his life, he never even interacts with someone his own age. needless to say, it's a very lonely existence.

because he's stuck on kamino, boba learns a lot of what he knows about the rest of the galaxy by reading books. for this reason, he has an approximate knowledge of many things! so he's not completely ignorant on the galaxy outside his bubble, even if his knowledge is usually second-hand and incomplete.

for example, he knows JUST enough about the beings known as "mothers" to figure out that the changeling bounty hunter zam wesell isn't his mom—not bc they aren't even the same species, but bc none of the books he's read have ever mentioned moms shapeshifting, QED, zam =/= mom. flawless logic.

in addition, bitty!boba also doesn't know what a gender role is for the first 10 years of his life. when he finds out, he is extremely disappointed with the galaxy. no, i'm serious. he gets stuck on an orphanage ship after his father is killed and is befriended by a non-binary alien kid. the kid complains about binary gender roles and boba is just perplexed and appalled by the whole thing.

the kid LOVES starfighters. he likes reading about them, talking about them, and occasionally even seeing a few at tipoca city's spaceport. in fact, when jango wants to make boba feel better about [gestures vaguely at the state of his life], he takes boba to the spaceport and just lets him info-dump about whatever he sees there. (though, of course, no starfighter could ever beat slave I <3)

something else bitty!boba loves: STARS. he doesn't actually get to see them most of the time bc the sky is always overcast on kamino, but when he does see them, especially as he gets a little older, he's completely awed by them. later on, when he's stuck on that republic orphanage ship, he spends long stretches of time sitting in the rear observation blister, just staring out at the near-stationary starscape.

post-geonosis, boba has to change a lot. the most immediate lesson he has to learn is not to trust others and, of course, he learns it the hard way. after his father dies, this kid is just running up to strangers like "HI MY DAD IS DEAD AND I HAVE NO ONE TO CONTACT AND NO WAY TO GET HOME, PLS HELP." and these assholes are always like, "oh, what a coincidence :) i knew your dad, actually :) just follow me and i'll take care of everything :)" AND THIS FUCKING KID JUST BELIEVES THEM.

jango fett really taught this kid how to disassemble and reassemble a blaster but not about stranger danger, smh

anyway... several attempted kidnappings/robberies later... boba starts to realize that maybe going along with every adult who is vaguely nice to him is NOT a good game plan.

these types of lessons repeat and escalate until boba's general approach to interacting with adults seems to be to assume malicious intent until proven otherwise. which, tbh, usually serves him well. in fact, by the time he's established at jabba's palace (which is when he's like... somewhere between 12-14 maybe?), his strategy has evolved into "pre-emptively come across as a murderous, unhinged little shit to prevent future fuckery." which means this adolescent child is walking around jabba's palace threatening to get people killed and openly displaying a pair of severed hands in his rucksack.

don'tcha love character development

all that said, boba reverts to being a friendly, playful kid when in the company of people he trusts. in jabba's palace, this means the cooks of kitchen 7: a father and daughter who boba inadvertently reunited after killing the guy who kidnapped and enslaved the latter. though lowly palace servants, these two are basically boba's lifeline in jabba's palace, providing him with food, gear, and palace gossip, not to mention much-needed companionship.

bitty!boba is an excellent melee fighter. he spends the majority of the books unarmed facing off against adult opponents with weapons. bc he's not yet at the stage where he can overpower them with physical strength/weaponry, he instead defeats them by being a small, fast-moving target who WILL use whatever random objects are in his immediate vicinity to disarm/blind/distract/take down whoever's trying to kill him.

a sampling of items bitty!boba uses as weapons, off the top of my head: a small table. a light fixture. a squid kebab. a rock. one day he'll be so heavily armed that even his knees can launch projectiles, but until then, he makes do.

he also bites at least one person. ya do what you gotta do.

on a related note: the kid is impulsive af. that time he bit someone? he had a knife to his throat at the time but he still went CHOMP. aurra sing steals slave I? HE JUMPS OFF A BUILDING TO GET IT BACK. count dooku tries to confine him to quarters? HE ATTEMPTS TO BLACKMAIL THAT BITCH. jabba just tried to trick him into indentured servitude? BOBA YELLS AT HIM IN FRONT OF HIS ENTIRE COURT. honestly this impulsivity gets boba INTO trouble just as often as it gets him out of it.

overall, despite being raised by a very morally ambiguous individual on a backdrop of organized crime, bitty!boba's defining feature is that he still genuinely tries to a good person, even if his moral perspective is a little skewed. at times, he really seems to think that a good bounty hunter should be something like a superhero—that, ideally, it means not only taking out unquestionably bad people but also helping those that they would harm. in fact, from the first book, he envisions himself not just as a hunter but a protector and rescuer as well. of course, he kind of loses the plot as he gets older, but even then, there's that seed of idealism within him, however twisted it becomes with time.