Hi Jess! I’m writing a little about Minashee for last week’s Mines Monday and it’s gotten me thinking about the scene in MO in the mind-palace. What inspired you to have the settlements on Minashee be houseboat-like? Do you have any other Minashee headcanons?
ELL!! Thank you for this, and what happy news that we’ll be getting another wonderful piece of your writing! I’ve enjoyed your first two so much, I can’t wait to see what’s coming!! :D :D
Let me start by telling you something embarrassing. For years, I’ve been sure Minashee was a canonical ocean world, but I actually can’t find a source that. In fact, the Legends wookiepedia has it listed as an “Industrial” world. (...which doesn’t exactly sound like the Planet Earth: Shallow Seas biome, does it?) I can only assume that in my infinite, genius creativity, I read that Sifo-Dyas’s father was a fisherman and went “aha. Bet there’s some. *checks notes* water there, gotcha ;D” and proceeded to make too much out of it, forget, and imagine I had read it somewhere. But I'm far from the first person to think that, so... ?!?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I can so clearly see this water world full of floating villages of interconnected houseboats that it’s stuck with me. You know, we've seen Kamino as an aquatic planet with these deep, strange unknowable oceans, but I was picturing the sea on Minashee more... friendly? like the flooded train stops in Spirited Away, like a big bright water plain with underwater grasses and schools of little glittery fish, with water clear enough to see 12-14ft to the bottom in a lot of places.
with a warm, shallow ocean, most houseboats have poles to get unstuck as well as the usual sail/engines
Most of the population of Minashee are near-human, but have expanded lung capacity similar to trained real world free divers (again, I’m in no way the first or only person to headcanon that one)
Knots and woven things are culturally important - they make nets, secure everything from laundry lines to fishing rigs to the connecting anchors that keep the whole floating village together
Soooooo many fun space-seaweed dyes
Once I gave them “Minashee sunshine peppers” which I thought was inspired by some peach ghost peppers I tried and failed to grow the year I wrote it, but looking at the line, I see it was a “numbing” heat which sounds Sichuan-inspired. YOU KNOW LAND-LOCKED SICHUAN? Think it fucking through, Jess.
It’s just as easy to swim wherever you want to go in town than it is to use the floating boardwalks and interconnected docks which can be crowded and uneven and constantly in use for other things
since the houseboats are literally tied together most of the time, everything is very communal
I headcanon Sifo-Dyas's whole hair style and side plaits are a typical men's cultural look on Minashee
once I had teenaged Sifo-Dyas get his Minashee astrological sign as a tattoo, but I'm with Dooku on that one, I kind of think it was bullshit, someone was like "oh, Minashee? uhh sure, kid" and gave him a pretty starfish. I really like Sifo-Dyas's powers being completely out of nowhere, and there's no, like, birth world connection to divination, or fortune-telling great grandma in his backstory
