But technically pups can do too. I was very happy to draw this piece because it contains two of my three favorite parts of this fandom. This is our OC Pulpar jai Soraha from an AU. One of Grievous' youngest children, wounded by the war before he was even born. @koyato has already mentioned our headcanon on what caused the Great Hunger. Chemical weapon used by Huks in a desperate attempt to stifle a counterattack. Children of survivors of the influence of chemical weapons suffer from many chronic diseases, deformities of the body, delays in physical and mental development... Soraha was lucky enough not to have conditions incompatible with life and to become capable enough to fit into society. But of course he wasn't untouched.
His head is deformed, although this is almost invisible behind traditional clothes. The most noticeable are large bulging eyes. But its features are most clearly manifested in behavior. He is infantile and naive even for his age, he learns slower than his peers, it is more difficult for him to adapt to society and stressful situations. He is kinda in his own world. But this does not deprive him of a normal life, Kaleesh looks surprisingly tolerant and loving to those who have fewer opportunities or more difficulties than most. His family also cares about those who are much less fortunate than Soraha. But Soraha has another characteristic. He is force-sensitive. The force didn't have much impact on his life until a certain age, except that sometimes he had strange dreams about things that hadn't happened yet. Until the moment he met Jack.
Jack 14 is not canonical character from the lego cartoon "The Yoda Chronicles" and I LOVE him. You should check it out if you haven't watched it yet, it's a great show (and not thanks to the name in the title, Yoda literally feels like a minor character for some reason). But you can understand why I can't accept that Jack is not in the canon, a force-sensitive clone with a glowing cybernetic prosthesis and a power equal to the ancient Sith, and at the same time his only desire is to be left alone and not be part of all the bs that's going on in the galaxy. He is beautiful and I love him and I will show him to everyone.
But going back to Soraha. It is dangerous for a young force-sensitive being to remain without training. The force can be confusing, especially for a child who doesn't understand what's going on and can barely control it. But most of the teachers are Jedi... And Kaleesh won't let the Jedi get within rifle range of their children. But Jack is not a Jedi. Never was, for that matter, he was closer to the Sith. But he has been free for a long time and is ready to help the young Kaleesh master the basics of the force.A living force uniting all beings in the universe.
In this art, he probably explains to Soraha how cloning works, and there is no better way to explain something to a child with learning problems and lack of attention than through beautiful magical pictures.
Pango and the droid family. She's an OC from our AU with a seriously altered plot, so keep that in mind.
Pango grew up in a droid family on the planet Abbaji in the Kalee system. She is disconnected from the culture of her race and considers the droid colony her real family and home. Punk with a passion for mechanisms and metal. It was expected though.
She was abducted by Yam'rii at a very young age. It is unusual that she survived, usually Yam'rii do not bother to raise Kaleesh children to turn them into slaves, there are plenty of adults who can be broken and thrown away for sale, so children are usually just eaten. But things were different for Pango because of her unusually dark, almost black skin. She is a melanist and stands out among most brown and reddish Kaleesh. And this difference makes it an exclusive product. So Yam'rii decided to keep her until marketable age. Her tusks were torn out, as were the tusks of all Kaleesh captured by Yam'rii at that time. Symbol of dehumanization.
She was rescued pretty soon, but it turned out that the psychological trauma of what she saw was severe. She was afraid and disgusted with all Kaleesh or other creatures, everything organic, everything that bleeds. The only ones she wasn't afraid of were droids. With age, she was able to outgrow the trauma mostly. But the circumstances of her life were set, the gap between her and the other Kaleesh began to grow. And it's not something bad, she just grew up in a different culture, and even chose it herself and is happy about it. Simply due to other circumstances, the distance has turned into a conflict that is difficult to ignore. However, being one of the first misfits she paved the way for others. She will be an example and an idol for many young creatures looking for their place in life.
Bentilais san Sk'ar. Khan, a member of Izvoshra, a friend of Grievous and the future leader of the Kaleesh people after the death of the last Khagan.
Quite different from the one we know. But I'm drawing for my and @koyato AU. And we have a long-established headcanon, according to which he is not really a Kaleesh (at least physically), but a Nelvaanian.
We will talk about this headcanon in more detail later, but if you want to know part of the thought process, you can look at the brilliant picture that Koyato made uner the cut. This is just the beginning, but there are already a lot of coincidences.
Thank you @tuberculosis-bot-9000 for the opportunity to share our hyperfixation with people! You are a gift for this fandom!!
Bentilais has been our headache ever since we found out about him. Because what are you?? He doesn't look like a Kaleesh, he doesn't act like a Kaleesh (in fact he does, just not on a surface level), and at first glance he has no reason to be a Kaleesh. He's a three-meter pink Godzilla from a comic book from the Seventies. We could just imagine him as an ordinary Kaleesh, but we always choose the difficult path. We wanted his canon image to make sense.
Basically everything went really wrong when we just watched Tartakovsky's Clone Wars show and discussed the plot of the Nelvaans, which is already a whole different story. But then I read their wiki and... the height of mutated Nelvaanians men is exactly three meters. From that moment on, we started noticing things.
A very unexpected approach, but I'll explain. This image was formed in the context of the plot of our (with @koyato) AU. We really love messing around with Kaleesh mythology. And since we were given almost no official information, welcome to fanon.
@tuberculosis-bot-9000
Briefly on foreign policy: Order 66 did not happen, the Empire did not happen, the Republic and the Separatists did not collapse. In the post-war chaos, most of the galaxy left the Kalee system alone fortunately. But the outside world still managed to seep into their lives on the border of Wild Space when new neighbors suddenly appeared, but that's a completely different story.
What is important is that Grievous' eldest son (the eldest of the alive ones) was able to track down and eventually steal and bring home his father's body. For Kaleesh, with their cult of death and the afterlife, not being able to bury a loved one properly is devastating. Especially when it is literally a living god. But there wasn't much left of the Grievous they knew. Literally, how much organic matter was there, about 20%? Of course, they buried everything that was THEIR Grievous, but what to do with a bunch of metal parts that grotesquely copy the distant features of their god?
By that time, they knew enough to understand how these prostheses had changed him... How those who made them corrupted him. Enough to see these prosthetics as a curse. As a cold prison for a spirit that should have left this world long ago. As a violation of nature. As a demon.
However... At the same time, due to the events of the AU, the Kaleesh culture has increased attention to metal. Thanks to the alliance with more technologically equipped neighbors, many Kaleesh began to wear cybernetic prostheses. For very bad reasons, mass loss of body parts does not happen from a good life. However, it helped them to see prosthetics not as a curse, but as an opportunity. "You can break our bones, we will replace them with metal." "You can break us, we will come back stronger than ever." This is such a Kaleesh mentality.
And the mythological consciousness responds to changes in society. Metal and specifically prosthetics have become an important part of life, which means they needed a place in mythology and culture. And on the one hand, metal was a prison and a curse that captured their beloved leader. And on the other hand, now it serves as a support and protection for many Kaleesh.
This is the basis of the Iron God. Twofold. The curse is in the wrong hands, the chance and the opportunity in the right hands. A cold sea demon who redeemed himself by helping those who needed his strength and support and earned the status of a god (or demigod for that matter). He has no head, because Grievous' metal mask was not buried on Kalee, it remained on Coruscant. It consists of iron bones, distantly referring to the mechanical body of Grievous mixed with the skeleton of a whale (they have a strong motif of the sea as a hostile element, so that huge marine animals like whales can be perceived as something demonic). He carries a star fire in his chest, as the spirit of Grievous once wore, and symbolizes both burnout and the flame of life (and the flame of the forge, since he is the god of metal ...). He is not unambiguous, he is not perfect, but he is here to help, to give strength to survive another day, to give the fire of will to melt the limitations of the mortal body. And so that the enemies of those whom he guards do not forget that he is still a demon. And he has an eternity to tear them apart.
