Basic

Well, there's Jek Porkins. And that rancor trainer guy. They weren't exactly slim.

Yeah, that's the thing. If we did encounter life on another planet, would we even recognize it as such?

 

Yeah, sure there's overweightness here and there in GFFA humans, but really, skinny is the common thing, and obviously the out of universe explanation is no one wants a 400 pound Alema Rar parading around in a skimpy bikini, but in-universe they could have faster metabolisms.

Obviously if the life we encountered came at us with a big frelling knife or a blaster we'd go "not good not good not good" but if something came up to us babbling incoherently (it's language not ours) are we going to think about it's sentience?

 

Obviously Earth's scientists cannot be so stupid to think that all alien life will be humanoid and English-speaking. That's just the damn sci-fi influence talking.

I doubt that they haven't thought of looking for creatures that breath things besides oxygen. If we thought of it, you could bet that they've already thought of it. Plus, there are creatures that don't "breath" oxygen here on Earth: plants take in carbon dioxide.

 

Remember that many of the people we see are wrriors, soldiers, etc. who usually try to stay in shape. There's portly humans though, wasn't there som Alderaaninan guy who could only move around in a hover chair? (I think he was in Courtship of Princess Leia). And Wuher.

 

I'm not saying scientists don't know to look for non-oxygyn breathing life-forms, obviously you misunderstood me. I'm saying that as high as high-school I'm seeing teachers telling students "life can obsolutely not exist without oxygen". It's a teacher, I'm just saying if you raise your hand and say something therwise you'll get a spiel, blah blah blah science fiction blah blah blah, obviously scientists are going to look for it. Sheesh sorry for generalizing.

 

Again, I never said there weren't I'm just saying skinny is the norm. You don't have to tell me every over-weight person in Star Wars liturature, I know they're there, but not as abundent (sp?) that's all.

 

I think on all issues like this, you can't just think in in-universe terms, you have to consider things with an additional out-of-universe perspective. Thinking of things purely in the sense of why Lucas, his peeps, and the authors did what they did almost makes debates like this *too* easy. However, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe by ignoring all the aforementioned factors is an impossible ordeal. There are simply too many plotholes present.

The whole point of these arguments is to come up with viable in-universe theories on the supposed realities of this fictitious universe. All fine and dandy, but this has its limits. Star Wars is simply too mainstream, too big, with too many people writing too many different stories for all the SW-hungry fans out there for there not to be a plethora of mistakes and retcons floating like eyesores among relative harmonious scientifically-pseudo-semi-accurate entertainment.

99.9% of these plotholes were avoidable, but Lucas' policy is one of "write about what you want, as long as it doesn't interfere with X, Y, and Z and I can make money off of it. As far as I'm concerned, it's 8 credits short of being an alternate reality from my stories anyway", with the additional policy of Lucas writing his story one step at a time instead of having most details known from the outset. With different policies, we might have seen a universe without Jaster Mereel identity crises, questions of who was the first Darth, and a Grand Blue/Green Lightsaber Conversion shortly before AotC.

However, by no means I'm I saying that Star Wars is the only franchise that fell prey to this formula. It's just the only example I know of.

On to the matter at hand, we really don't have sufficient evidence that humans are generally such and such in the GFFA. Most of the characters we see in the movies, books, etc. are physically fit because it's a requirement of the positions they serve. Jedi and military make up the bulk of the character cast, with politicians being the strongest third party. Without an offical source telling us that X percentage of humans throughout the galaxy are overweight and/or green-eyed, we really don't know. Humans are too generalized in Star Wars. The truth of the matter is that traits like obesity and being a different species are mostly used as character quirks in Star Wars. Being overweight is usually associated with corruption (the Alderaanian politician, Orn Free Taa, Jabba the Hutt) or a factor to induce disgust (Jabba again, Yarna d'al' Gargan, Gamorreans). Aliens are used to show a desired status quo of exoticism depending on the setting. It sounds harsh, I know, but I'm not following this philosophy, I'm just pointing it out.

Certain elements like the KotOR games show no human (or anything besides Hutts and Gamorreans) being overweight. This is due to the fact that they did not find it necessary to show varying body weights.

It's like selective hearing. They show us only what we wish to see, not what things are most likely to appear as. Their formula is one of entertainment above reasoning, to its credit and discredit. That's because Star Wars isn't about scientific accuracy or realistic aliens. It's about Jedi, lightsabers, and all the bizarre things that sell the Kenner toys and other frivilous merchandise. A simple-minded attention-grabbing book of whimsical tales. People don't look to Star Wars when they crave the intellectual or the philosophical, they look to Star Wars for flashy explosions, fierce lightsaber duels, and memorable characters that growl, beep, cackle, breath funny, or talk funny.

George Lucas himself said that Star Wars is first and foremost a science *fantasy*, not a science fiction. That detail alone is a big enough red light to tell you that you can only analyze it from an in-universe perspective for so long before you end up with a square peg and a round hole.

The essence of the matter is that we are simultaneously discovering and challenging the barrier between science fiction and science fantasy in Star Wars. Discussions l

 

Perhaps the relative lack of overweight SW characters is not genetic presisposition (or not entirely, at least), but the type of food they have available to them. We look at the GFFA and rarely see people eating. No Pie-eating contests no nothing. People eat to live in the GFFA not live to eat. Also, it could very well be a point of the type of available food. Perhaps there's more to Yoda's "How you get so big eating food like this?" line. After all, in Star Trek, which is set in our own universe, there are also very few overweight people (although they are in the military) it could just be the natural evolution of human-produced foodstuffs to become less fattening over the years. And 20,000 years is a loooong time to figure out how to not get fat.

 

Anything's possible, but we can't have a definitive answer unless an official source confirms it. Real physical descriptions are only given about meaningful characters, and whenever we see a big mass of citizens (the scores of refugees in NJO come to mind) they aren't described well enough. All the human characters we've seen in Star Wars probably come to less than one hundred thousandth of the entire human population of the galaxy.

I would still maintain the opinion that the human homeworld is Coruscant or somewhere close to it. It seems most likely that the human homeworld is an inner planet in the Coruscant system.