#the one about the sarlacc is good but the one about the trash compactor monster is better

[hashtagloveloses]

this is actually really funny because they just came out with the CANON version of boba being swallowed by the sarlacc in a new short story (in the from certain point of view: return of the jedi anthology), from the sarlacc’s point of view and it is kind of similar but sad in a different way - the sarlacc is LONELY but also doesn’t like being fed all these people and things and hates boba being there. people keep feeding them living beings, and they meet threepio who is the first person in millennia they can communicate with bc threepio is fluent in many forms of communication, and they’re sad when threepio gets picked up by the magnet in the sand and goes away. and when boba escapes the sarlacc and comes back in BOBF, from the sarlacc’s point of view they were scared someone might throw people into their mouth again.

while i agree that the storytelling in BOBF was…less than stellar, and i never want to defend the mouse, i think it also was the medium of prose (novel, short story, etc) that allowed the writer in legends and now the writer in canon to explore this tiny interesting side story from the perspective of this hivemind being, that would be hard to get across in a visual format.

that being said every star wars TV show (and marvel, and…every TV show in general) deserves a full writers room rather than like one guy (jon favreau) with just different directors, which is what the writers strike is all about, so it’s not just one corporate entity but the very structure of entertainment right now that creates this issue.

it’s also interesting because every star wars book or comic (or any continuation licensed IP book or comic or video game or anything) only exists in the first place because a corporate entity wanted to wring that IP for more money, whether it was lucasfilm on its own back in the day, or disney now. writers then and now are hired to write for IP they don’t own something creative and wonderful simply because they love it but at the end of the day as a marketing tool for the rest of the IP. so it’s never been more ideologically “pure,” but a part of this push and pull between the corporate want to wring storytelling of every drop of money and the genuine creativity that comes with letting people play in these worlds.

When I was a kid I had the expanded universe star wars book in which Boba Fett is being digested by the Sarlacc and interacting with the personalities of various minds the creature had absorbed, like it was a psychic collective, a HAUNTED space monster. It was one creature but it was driven mad with the combined traumatic memories of everything it had ever eaten so when fett kills it at the end of the story it's framed more like he's putting a tormented spirit to rest, though it's implied a part of that entity might be buried in his own psyche for the rest of his life.

Disney's version: it's a big dumb animal he escapes from the day after he got eaten