Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#70)

691. Mikoans. Ambiguously canonical green-skinned almost human beings, rather stereotypically one member of the species is named Jade. Real creative, guys.

Rating: 1/5, because there are no pictures of them, either. (A picture of a sufficiently attractive woman could have bumped it up to 3/5, for instance. I can be kind of a sucker for that.)

692. Mimbanites. There are two species called Mimbanites. One is a quadrupedal entity that is entirely incidental and would be generally called "Mimbanite" in the same sense that we'd say that, say, a cat is an "Earthling."

The other are cousins of the Coway, who are "Mimbanite" in the same sense. This particular kind of Mimbanite are also known as "greenies," and basically live as beggars, as opposed to the prouder, fiercer Coway, who go all super-Ewok on anybody who intrudes in their caves. They are helped in their begging by their big long tongues, which are handy for quickly consuming puddles of booze that jerky xenophobes dump on the ground to taunt them.

For such a downtrodden species, they've got awfully bright plumage.

Rating: 3/5. The contrast of their bright feathers with their marginalized hobo status is rather interesting.

693. Ming Po. They're basically kind of short-looking humans who wear quasi-oriental clothing.

Rating: 1/5. Boringness. They don't even consistently keep the quasi-oriental theme, with personal names like "Pieter" (German) and "Tryla" (...).

694. Minyavish. The Minyavish apparently are roughly humanoid, covered in bright feathers, have slit-pupiled eyes, and have honey-colored blood. They enslaved a species called the Jessar, which I haven't talked about because I covered the "J" part of the alphabet before the book that covered them was published.

Huh.

Rating: 2/5. Reasonably interesting appearance descriptors, but they're also rather vague.

695. Miraluka. The Miraluka look essentially human, but they don't have eyes, and instead see through the Force. They can see an aura around Jedi, and a large proportion of them are sensitive enough to become Jedi or rarely Dark Jedi/Sith. (Their sensitivity gives them some degree of empathy, so they're less likely to turn to the dark side than most, though it has happened to several of them, at least supposedly. Of the five characters listed as notable Miraluka, all are trained Force users-three Jedi, one Sith, and one Dark Jedi. That doesn't actually sound like that good a track record.)

Rating: 3/5. It's interesting to note that all Miraluka wear stuff over the tops of their faces, presumably because that big patch of eyelessness disturbs the heck out of humans, to whom they have an uncanny resemblance otherwise.

696. Mirialans. They're basically human, but with unpleasant yellowish/greenish skin tones and lots of tattoos.

Rating: 1/5. They're really a smidgen pointless, as is unintentionally pointed out by the article when it notes that "some characters... bear a similar appearance to that of Mirialans, but are not officially labeled as such."

697. Mishtak. A Mishtak was hit by a blaster bolt. The event was staged to look like Han Solo or a Bothan had been responsible, but it was actually set up by an Imperial remnant group.

Rating: 1/5. This was from a Zahn book, though, and there was quite a bit of clever stuff going on there.

698. Mixtwirk. They're insectoid, hear with their antennae, and squawk to communicate.

Rating: 2/5, because the thought of squawking bugs makes me smile.

699. Mizx. The Mizx believe that iblitons, huge shelled nautilus/arthropod creatures that prey upon them and are impervious to primitive weapons, are the avatars of a being from their mythology called Hershoon the Destroyer, who upon his death put his soul in the iblitons' bodies so that he could wreak vengeance upon the Mizx. The Mizx would consecrate the corpses of those killed by iblitons in order to keep them from coming back to life as new iblitons.

However, iblitons apparently appear in the fossil record well before the existence of the Mizx species there, and so these assertions are found very dubious by the archaeological community.

Rating: 3/5. Don't be harshing on our mollusc/arthropod-based religion, man!

700. Mlukis. These hunchbacked otherwise-very-humanlike beings apparently hit adolescence by seven years of age and are considered old by thirty.

Rating: 2/5. This is mainly because the lifespan/aging thing is about the most realistic for a sapient species that lives less long than modern real-world humans that I've seen.

-Signing off.

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