Twi'lek Species COMPLETE Breakdown (History, Bio, Culture) | Star Wars Species

men of ryloth the time has come to free ourselves it's a color corey a revered twilight heirloom pass from parent to child through generations to see what the empire has done to our world they plunder our wealth and sell our people into slavery this ship must burn for all ryloth to see what's up mr nerds this video will be a complete breakdown of the twilight species using everything from both canon and legends understanding their biology culture history and impact on the galaxy if you learn anything new please hit the like button to help promote the video on youtube and comment any questions you still have or suggestions for future videos as i at least read every comment and try to respond as much as i can but with that let's head back to around 36 000 years before the battle of yavin right away we are met with a mystery that has never been fully understood the rakata were an ancient race that conquered their masters the qua and established their galaxy spanning infinite empire this empire ran on technology that tapped into the dark side of the force literally using it as fuel and also as a means of acquiring personal strength amongst its leaders one of the rules of the universe is that the force always strikes back and they noticed that this uncontrolled drawing on the dark side was leading to defects and degeneracy in their species trying to figure out how to beat this they created an ai called asha and put it in charge of a massive factory that could create living beings using the building blocks of other sentient species that had a connection to the force to try and figure out why it was that the rakata were losing their connection my children are as numerous as the rakata once were i called them twilak zabrak the mystery comes in and that the thoriur the ships from the forced nexus world of tython that brought countless force-sensitive species to tython did pick up twilights in the year 36453 bpy a time that would have been during the peak of the rakatan's infinite empire supposedly before they started this experiment with the shah so we are left to wonder if the twilight species was actually created by a machine or if it was just replicated by asha creating a sort of subspecies with the true original twilight species developing naturally on ryloth this is important because this seeming contradiction may actually be the missing link to understand why twilight's differ so dramatically so keep this in mind throughout the rest of their story a story that starts off with us understanding their biology the first thing most species notice about these people is their head tails or leku in fact the name that they were called by other species was a conjunction of the galactic basic words twin leku or twilik a quick side note here about the pronunciation twilik twilek and twilek are all canonically correct ways to pronounce their species and you'll even hear members of this species use these different pronunciations back to the head tails this species themselves called them their chun chin words that in the real language meant left and right to be completely fluent in real or twileki required a whole array of nonverbal cues in the form of almost imperceptible movements of the leku along with more obvious gestures that meant certain things like crossing both of the tips twice meant i love you and there were simple movements similar to the wave of a hand that meant things like hello and goodbye and it is because of this nonverbal communication aspect of the legus that we see so many of them wearing a headdress though it became a cultural norm to wear some sort of headdress the headdress was actually developed out of a practice by the slavers who used them as a sort of muzzle they figured that the twilights could develop a sort of imperceptible sign language so the original headdresses would greatly restrict the movement of the head tails it may be why we can still see some twilight slaves with wrappings that go the entire length of each leku and why bib fortuna seems to go out of his way to not wear one it was a stylish man draped in the finest ryloth silk and even wrapping his leg around his shoulder in a way that was considered posh but he makes sure not to partake in this fashion that was born from the slavery of his people now some referred to the leku as brain tales tails why this is more accurate than head tails is that the twilight's brain actually extends into the tails though the large majority of it served as storing of body fat that was useful during times of famine newborns do not have these tails so their brains and skulls are growing with the leku for those first couple of years with everything reaching maturity at about the same rate as humans and this connection to the brain is why you can knock a toilet unconscious by yanking on their lekku something that resulted in countless deaths and cantina brawls were at the hands of pranksters and other species in densely packed urban environments then there were the cases of head tails being damaged that also resulted in brain damage and even a cyborg twilight by the name of rihanna sarin who had part of her leicus cyberized i should also mention that they were prehensile meaning they could use them to grab things which makes you wonder if there was ever a time in early twilight history or at least with some common evolutionary ancestor that they might have used these head tails for balance or an extra pair of limbs to hang from things and swing through the forests or navigate the deep cave systems adding on the weirdest note the cultural aspect of the leku shape and size that makes them something of a status symbol while they were culturally developed complex and abstract ways that the girth and length of wanzaku was a sign of wealth and power the less abstract and more blunt fact about it was that these were erogenous zones places on the body that were sensitive to sexual stimulation and to both males and females the bigger the leku the sexier making coruscant biologists list the leicu as playing a crucial role in sexual selection make it even weirder there is the odd case that some twilics would have four lekus this does seem to be incredibly rare but it's actually found in one of the most famous members of the species ornfrittal though i would suspect that his other physical features took away from this great natural endowment i doubt even with these four lekus that he was anything of a ladies man the rest of their biology is very similar to all the other humanoids out there with a pair of arms legs and eyes and then a nose and a mouth but their ears do differ in males it was very similar to humans but the females had what were called ear cones both sexes had blunt teeth but it became a cultural norm for the men to sharpen them to points and thanks to the chiss who have a sort of heat vision overlay to their eyesight we find out that the twilights have a higher body temperature than any other humanoid species neither sex had body hair except for their eyelashes which was most likely a very useful adaptation to the harsh sandstorms that could kick up on ryloth they did not have eyebrows though some females would paint them on or get eyebrows tattooed in order to be more attractive to humans and then there are a couple individuals that are considered to have genetic mutations as they do sport armpit hair and chest hair there's also a wide difference in the expression of these skull nodes some being incredibly prominent others barely noticeable and some are shaped so much that they look like a different species while there's also the odd fact that they come in so many colors their skin color and eye color have more variety than any other species in the galaxy with each coming in just about any color you could think of and in any combination along with different color stripe patterns and mottling each of these colors was about equally expressed in the population though there was some belief that there was a subspecies that developed into the red and blue hues blues were called rudians and were the most common all the red were called latin and were the most rare all of this variation from the number of lekkus hair and color expression head nodes etc left many biologists to wonder if this was solely the result of natural mutation or the result of genetic manipulation by some advanced alien species perhaps evidence of the ricotta and a shaw involvement the artificially created twilex mixing with the naturally evolving ones here i should note that some later researchers in the new republic felt that the avita species was a genetic relative to the twilight though why they thought this isn't really clear as for their diets they were omnivores even having multiple stomachs in order to process just about any sort of calorie source they came across this was likely developed out of the incredibly harsh conditions on ryloth their homeworld was tidally locked meaning it rotated with one side always facing the sun and the other side always facing the darkness of space so this temperature difference created intense weather conditions in a climate that reduced their forest to a band along the equator with some bioluminescent jungles on the dark side heat storms were a catastrophic seasonal issue that were faster than a category 5 hurricane and hotter than an oven enormous storms that would consume the bright lands so on top of this the terrifying creatures like the dalshem lilac and gutker and you can see why the earliest of twilights developed by setting up in this world's deep cave systems they came to eat small rodents and various types of mosses which really pushed the capabilities of their stomachs over time they would domesticate the rye crit and expand their cities out of the caves but never far from the cave openings mostly carved into the face of cliffsides with some smaller buildings and villages nearby even the capital of lesu although it appears to stand alone from the mainland is likely connected to a vast series of underground caves or at least artificial tunnels that connect to other cave systems and for almost all of their history up to this point they were a civilization that was supposedly relatively peaceful and modest having close family ties and their highest technology being things like wind turbines but nothing advanced enough to allow them to be a space-faring race ryloth would be discovered by old republic explorers in the year 10 000 bby and the twilight species would quickly go from a simple backwater people to one of the most recognized species in the entire galaxy ryloth is located in coordinates r-17 in the outer rim but it was along the important and lucrative corellian trade route the only problem was there wasn't much to trade nobody was interested in their wide array of artisanal molds or cuts of tough rykrit steaks at this point no one had discovered any useful minerals gases or oils nothing that could really fetch a credit in the galactic markets but there was one thing that caught the eye of the alien visitors i want you to really think about this imagine what it was like from the point of view of the twilights how strange scary and immoral this series of events would be they went from not having any kind of space-faring capabilities not even reaching any of ryloth's five moons going from that to being contacted by a federation of aliens that contained not just one but multiple strange species all saying that there was a booming galaxy of trillions of individuals all partaking in the miracles of an interconnected galactic economy talk of hyperdrives to slip out of this plane of existence psychic monk warriors that protect the government in addition to the countless mundane everyday pleasures and goods that could be provided if the twilights would simply join the galaxy at large but again what could they offer these alien visitors took an instant liking to the women of your species and quickly found out that they could interbreed with them resulting in no harmful side effects in fact a pretty nice mixing of traits just like you might expect of two humans bred these aliens say that if you would sell off your women your people could have access to this miraculous technology massive slavery operations were not yet seen on ryloth instead it would be the individual families that sold off their young girls to the alien visitors while her family back home would be given a sum of credits that would get their foot in the galactic door some males would sell themselves off and all of this was allowed by the republic because they were technically indentured servants they accepted payment for their services and there was a fixed start date and end date regardless of whether this wage was so low that no one could ever get out of this bondage or if the contract range lasted the equivalent of a twilight's lifespan and so the twilight leadership sacrificed their youth on the altar of high technology and from then on out they would be one of the most ubiquitous species in the galaxy next to humans twilights can be seen in more places and on more planets than any other species all tied to the fact that so many alien species found them attractive and that the males also sold themselves off to anyone who was buying so everything from mines and shipyards clubs and cantinas to palaces and penthouses were filled with some form of twilight servant their government on ryloth was run by the five leaders of the five different clans that were based in the five largest cities on the planet they did nothing to stop the trade and many just reasoned it as being a necessary step in the great leap forward into the galactic economy one of the ways this was rationalized by some of the clan leaders was that it may have been better for the children to grow up as slaves in a high-tech society than stay back on ryloth with its gross foods terrifying beasts primitive medicines and yearly fiery death hurricanes but what was reasoned as necessary for the twilights to catch up to the galaxy would become a staple of this world and made this species one synonymous with slavery as the trade grew it was no longer families selling off their children but many twyleks took up the new profession of slaver launching raids on villages to collect as many people as possible often with the assistance of high-tech alien weaponry and then things got even worse with the advanced medicine communications travel and entertainment came the tech that could do more detailed scans of their homeworld it was discovered that the surface of ryloth contained incredible quantities of a psychoactive substance one that would come to be known as real spice various worlds like kessel had spice but real was unique to this world and hence the name it had a unique combination of euphoric and sedative properties that combined excellently with another type of spice known as glitter stem to produce the new drug glitteril a process that involved feeding rill to an energy spider and distilling this compound out of the spider's excrement users across the galaxy didn't care how it was made they just love the high and almost overnight real became one of the most expensive substances in the galaxy the slaver warlords now went into the drug trade and ryloth was quickly becoming scarred by countless mining operations again their five clan government did not intervene either being impotent or outright corrupt as there does not seem to be any recorded pushback during this time and while many twilikes had hopes that they would quickly become the wealthiest people in the galaxy the hutts had other plans the huck cartels were at the peak of their power during this time having fleets of ships that were behind only the republic sith and chiss and so taking over a bunch of feuding warlords was child's play the hutts were already the masters of the galaxy's vice trade having the infrastructure and connections to keep the real spice flowing to every part of the galaxy this drug went from the twilight's golden ticket to the dura steel chains that brought them even more slavery over the next several millennia the huts would turn ryloth into one big slave camp and drug production site and it should be noted that the republic claims that the slave trade started with the hutts but this may just be semantics as there are accounts of twilicks being sold off as entertainers long before the hutt invasion it's just that with the huts came open slave markets with no pretense of indentured servitude but from the point of view of the girls who danced their entire lives in cantinas slavery was not some new hutt invention the sith empire also had no qualms with saying that their strength came from the subjugation of various slaves but the republic had to claim a higher ideal and the explosion of outright slavery under the hutts of this era is what's being used by republic historians to act like the hutts brought this sin to ryloth when in reality the hutts only refined and expanded the practice that began that fateful day when those old republic explorers set foot on ryloth and both the people of the republic and twilight families began trading people for goods and services this hut cartel reign is what permanently changed the galactic census with only a billion twilaks residing on world with 24 percent of the population being alien species a vast majority of twilights were found off-world spread over countless planets and over the generations many felt no connection to ryloth just the generic galactic basic speaking monoculture that developed in massive melting pots like coruscant this hut rule would traumatize the toilet consciousness with even senators in the new republic era circa 35 aby reminding the galaxy of their time under the fat green thumb of the hutt overlords the history of my planet and my people is well known for centuries we suffered under the oppression of the hutts and their criminal enterprises this terrible fate was somewhat assisted by a cultural mindset that was instilled by the weather of ryloth with things like those massive heat storms there was a popular proverb that said you can't defeat a storm you must ride the storm the twilights that sold their own people during these ancient times and even the later bib fortuna used proverbs like this to explain their behavior thinking this slave economy was an enormous storm produced by the conditions of their place in the galactic economy just as ryloth suffered from its place in rotation the twilight could not defeat the slave trade better to find their place in it but i need to point out that obviously this was not accepted by all twileki there were many tulips that possessed incredible connections to the force and were picked up by jedi or sith and others were able to work their way out of indentured servitude and establish legitimate businesses across the galaxy not every family sold off people to the aliens and many were able to find lives that were full of a sense of righteous honor several would join the mandalorians a people that may have seemed like war-loving monsters but from the twilight point of view they just saw a people that ran their society in a pure meritocracy if you could earn your respect you got it mandalorians did start off as the name of a species but very early on in their history they started to include any species that would vow to live in accordance with the mandalorian codes of honor a reaction to a time when the mandalorians lost their homeworld something many trollix felt a connection to as many felt that ryloth was lost to the hutts the twilights were one of the most abundant non-human mandalorians rising to high positions in many clans and even inventing things like the cheradaki starfighter in the year 3643 bby a slave revolt aided by off-world forces was able to drive the slugs back onto their ships and off of this planet but things really didn't get a whole lot better the clan leadership did not figure out ways to develop any new industry just continue the lucrative spice operations essentially they became the new warlords and the huts simply used their control of the black markets to dictate the prices of real to the point that the hutts may have actually been making even more profit by just letting the tailheads deal with managing the mines and then you might think that they might start to turn away from slavery but their leaders actually felt that if they cut off the supply of slaves some other powerful off-world force may come and take them over so the spice and slaves flowed for the next couple thousand years all under twilight leadership and with no meaningful intervention by the republic just occasional lip service by senators seeking votes but at the end of the day it was just some outer rim problem the republic let countless wounds like this fester for thousands of years eventually leading to the push to secede a movement that came to a head in the clone wars with the rise of the confederacy of independent systems senator oren freeta would keep ryloth in the republic but the population was torn about 50 50 on who to support there were good arguments for both as the republic had undeniably let them suffer by not intervening for what was now ten thousand years but some of the companies in member worlds within the cis were the ones currently profiting off of their slave labor and although you might think that the republic aligning with the hutts the hated once overlords of the twilights would make it so they could never align with the republic it seems like the clan leadership and senators actually liked the fact that the hutts were official allies ryloth's whole economy still revolved around serving the hutts so really their choice was decided for them when jabba pledged his cartel to the republic in an attempt to strike a monetary blow to the republic's powerful hot allies dooku launched an all-out planetary invasion of ryloth early on in the war showing that the clan leadership was correct in identifying that they would never be allowed to work with the hutts and be a part of the cis if dooku could hold ryloth perhaps he could get jabba to go back on his word and at least be neutral during this conflict allowing neither the cis or republic to travel through hut space or use it as a staging area something that would hurt the republic a lot more as most of the outer rim was under the control of the cis though about half of the rylothens welcomed the cis as liberators the twilight resistance movement rose up to face the droid army cham syndulla would work with the jedi and republic forces to eventually capture wat tambor the success of syndulla's forces led to a new populist movement that opposed their clan leaders and senators all these past years of talk and been framed as pro-cis or pro-republic the majority of twileki were now calling for an independent ryloth and at the end of the clone wars the empire actually granted this wish ryloth was finally a free world and if this seemed too good to be true that's because of course it was this is ryloth the sleazy senator ornfritta convinced his people to allow him to stay on a senator but promised this was only a name a formality in this tumultuous transition to empire but that officially they would be free emperor palpatine was fine with taking away whatever powers from the senator that the tailheads asked for because they were too slow to pick up on the new position of imperial moth this was where all the power was in the time of the empire and moff dillian moore's was the effective ruler of ryloth let the twilights form whatever on-world government they wished it all had to pass through them off after five years of this cham syndulla reformed his fighters to what he would now call the free ryloth movement this was a network of hundreds of spies and soldiers and not just from the twilight species that would raid dozens of imperial sites ranging from outposts to imperial star destroyers chan decided that the full force of his movement would be used to take out palpatine and vader all in one attack when he learned that they were visiting ryloth via the isd perilous space mines repurposed vulture droids and even rebels posing as a rescue crew still could not bring about the deaths of their targets his daughter hera syndulla would see that this empire was too skilled too large and too powerful to be taken out by just rylothens she felt this newly forming rebel alliance was their answer while her father felt that she would just be replacing one master for another but after a decade she would be able to get her father to see that the free ryloth movement and rebel alliance could and needed to be allies during the clone war you didn't just fight for a village you rallied everyone to liberate the entire planet you inspired me the rebellion is no different after grand admiral thrawn brought the full might of his empire to bombard ryloth into submission hoping to force them into giving up the dissidents amongst their population during thrawn's campaign we see how much he studied the twilight culture it's a color corey a revered twilight heirloom pass from parent to child through generations now think about just how large the sendula compound is how she still has this connection to her ancient family ties and how that old proverb about riding out the storm may have applied to her ancestors i don't want to say that any successful family on ryloth has to be tied to spice and slavery but if the syndullas were it does put hera and sham's movement in greater context not just rebelling against the corruption of the republic and then empire but standing up against thousands of years of twilicks accepting and becoming complicit in this corruption they would continue this fight for the next several years battles which prove that betting on the rebel alliance was the right move and these new allies would actually help them continue the fight on ryloth eventually completely freeing the world from any foreign influence in the year 5 aby and for once they actually stayed free they elected a former twilike rebel soldier named jendor to be their representative in the senate but just as an emissary providing the senate updates on the twilight's wishes and their opinions on galactic policies but not being bound to the decisions of the senate and then he would provide updates on galactic affairs to the more democratically elected government on world the only threat to their peace came around 30 years later after the abrupt death of jabba the hutt there had been a power vacuum that attracted thugs from every parsec all wanting to be the next big infamous mob boss a nicto by the name of ren rivendai was quickly earning this reputation in the underworld and his organization relied on the font of real spice emissary yendor would travel to hosnian prime to make a plea to the new republic pointing out that this was not just a ryloth problem rin riven's cartel presents a danger to ryloth's future tomorrow however it could threaten the rule of law in the new republic itself as the hutts did in both the old republic and the empire leo would personally investigate and discover that this crime empire was being sponsored by some mysterious military organization in the unknown regions the first order was using ryloth as a way to poison the galaxy at large investing enormous amounts of credits into the spice trade reaping incredible returns on this investment that fueled their war machine while also weakening the citizenry of their soon-to-be enemy and in this time the ethic of fierce independence instilled by cham worked to nearly get the resistance killed after leia reached out to contacts on ryloth to provide her ragged fleet a place to hide after their devastating loss on crait they found a great hiding spot in one of the thousands of cave systems of ryloth but the fo received a tip that they were harboring resistance fighters they set up capital ships and atmosphere threatening a full planetary bombardment and blockade if they were not given the location of the resistance members leia's forces tried to scramble but they were betrayed and the fo swarmed the cave system and compounded the losses from krait poe dameron was more morally defeated by this saying that twilight's betrayal made him lose hope that they would be taken in by anyone but this was just the result of his ignorance of ryloth history we have to see why the rhinothens would be afraid to be dragged into another war with galactic superpowers the resistance endangered them by hiding out on ryloth and while it's true that the fo would have almost certainly returned them to slavery this reaction was understandable with the star destroyers in orbit but after the destruction of the first order ryloth would see the longest stretch of peace in ten thousand years no longer a world that was only exporting spice and slaves they worked to rebuild and unify the twilights that had been spread throughout the stars so that's it for the complete breakdown but you definitely want to hear these cool facts and behind the scenes stuff i got into more detail on this and bib fortuna's complete life video but after laying out all the slave history i thought i should mention how bib was an evil genius he says that he wanted to uplift his people out of slavery and spice and hope to take over the hutt cartels from within eventually developing the twilights into spymasters and assassins using the fact that the galaxy just took for granted that a twilight must be a lowly servant and turning that into their advantage nobody would suspect them and they were ubiquitous not really out of place anywhere from a coruscant penthouse to a tattooing cantina his plan was never realized but hera would help to change the perception by becoming one of the most beloved veterans of the galactic civil war after she achieved the rank of general toward the end of the civil war and into the new republic era wedge antilles was working alongside twilight's and they explained that his name if read in the normal way actually translated to one so foul he could induce vomiting in a rancor but just by dropping a letter and using their comma name breakup convention they referred to him as wedjon tilleys which was much better and meant slayer of stars the first appearance of a twilik was bib in return of the jedi but the name twilek was not mentioned until 1987 in the rpg guide the star wars source book one of the clone wars writers henry gilroy said that he and dave filoni created the liberation of ryloth ark to help show a different side of the twilights other than the sexualized depictions of ayla sakura darth talon and oola but also that choosing the twilic was great for that first season because it was easier to work off of the human templates the french accent that the twilights used was something that was specifically chosen by george lucas there's no official explanation as to why but many fans think that it's a reference to the french resistance fighters during world war ii originally the twilight species could not interbreed with humans explicitly stated in order 66 a republic commando novel an imperial commando 501st they state that if you were to transfer something to the womb it required extensive genetic engineering and related to the subject have some fun with or be horrified by what you can find when googling twilight on google there are so many people asking weird questions that when you type in something like twilight sith so many people have also searched why are twilight so attractive that google has the snippet already queued up for you with a hilariously circular answer the x-wing video game called their homeworld twilak and over the years they've been seen in almost every star wars game created and as for some lore resources canon stuff comes from the book star wars absolutely everything you need to know complete visual dictionary a new dawn galactic atlas and the star wars source book while in legends there's the essential guide to alien species guide to characters ultimate alien anthology and the force and destiny core rulebook so that's it for the complete breakdown of the twilight species a question to you guys is how do you think detrillic people should have responded to the alien visitors we see tons of species that stay with the culture and tech they had pre-first contact they didn't sacrifice their people to get all kinds of new stuff but then again the entire galaxy wasn't after tuscan or wookiee women so what do you think they should have done and also comment what video you'd like to see next if you made it this far could you please attack the like button like a glitter real fiend and check out the description for awesome metal print art free audible audiobooks and our patreon or paypal special shout out to our supporters over on patreon especially our 25 tier chris garcia sarah diaz cass costello c7 go matthew beltrami and bill payne but most important of all remember if you're going to sell your people off to join the high tech galactic economy use your slave and spice profits to actually develop some high-tech industries and the force will be with you always you

Channel: MetaNerdz Lore

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Keywords: star wars, star wars species, star wars explained, twilek kotor, twilek jedi, twilek dancer, twilek species, togruta, togruta species, togruta star wars, hutt species, kaleesh species, sith species, nautolan, mon calamari, pantoran species, chiss, chiss species, tusken raider, zabrak, rodian, bothan, bith, kaminoan, jawa, metanerdz, metanerdz lore, metanerdz species, wookie, yoda species, muun, lasaat

Id: 8urgg086OEw

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021