may i share with you the best video on the internet
hey y’all! i had a rough day today, which means it’s time for me to share a bunch of various boba fett characterization details from the expanded universe! though i recognize that none of these are officially canon any longer, i figure they still might provide some inspiration to fic writers and others who want to know more about boba’s original characterization :D
without further ado and in no particular order:
when interacting genuinely with another person, boba tends to quite wry and self-deprecating. this is particularly evident as he gets older and becomes a little humbler. his quip of “i was aiming for the other one” in the mandalorian is a great example of this demeanor carrying over into new canon.
boba’s companionship is described by his close friend as swinging unpredictably between “scrupulous detachment” and acts of what seem like “pure sentimentality.” these acts of “sentimentality” usually manifest as unexpected gifts and favors, or outbursts of sudden concern for the friend in question.
this dichotomy seems consistent with boba’s own self-description as developing an “on/off switch” for his emotions after his father’s death. when the switch is “on,” he feels everything at “full intensity,” particularly more negative emotions, and when it’s off, he feels only “cold logic.” he himself claims that one day he just couldn’t “switch on” again but lol, nah bud. you’re clearly still feeling shit. you just have the emotional awareness of a tablespoon
boba fett, having an emotional breakdown: “this is fine and i am entirely unaffected and emotionless currently, as we speak”
boba is not a touchy person. he flat-out admits that he wouldn’t know what to do if someone hugged him. that said, he is not as completely averse to physical contact as one might expect. forms of positive physical contact he seems comfortable accepting include a playful nudge or a reassuring hand against his back.
as for positive physical contact he himself initiates, boba doesn’t do PDA so much as he does “public displays of extreme distress or concern.” these are usually rather intense and the two examples we see are: 1) him grabbing a loved one by the shoulders looking for all the world like he’s about to start shaking them and 2) gripping someone’s hand so hard it feels like he’s going to break their fingers. you know. like someone incapable of emotion would do.
if boba cares about a person A LOT, like A LOT A LOT, they can unlock a secret third form of “public display of extreme distress or concern” which is very, very gently touching a person’s hair/face. we only ever see him do this with family and only in response to seeing them wounded.
boba is not a fan of loud noises. curiously, this is something depicted both in the kids’ series and in the legacy of the force. when briefly housed on a republic orphanage ship as a child, boba’s first reaction to the cacophony of other orphans crying/laughing/screaming/rough-housing all around him is terror, followed by sheer misery, to the point where he spends the first day in his bunk with a pillow wrapped around his head. as an adult, he is similarly unhappy having to put up with loud noises unhelmeted, to the point where he internally remarks that he’d rather spend another round in the sarlacc than have to sit through dinner with beviin’s very loud and demonstrative family.
he snaps “volume,” at another mando for shouting over comms, lol
(this is sensible when one considers his upbringing on kamino–due to the secrecy with which he and his father lived, it’s unlikely that boba regularly found himself in the company of more than a couple of people at a time. naturally, loud multi-party conversations would not be something he would’ve become accustomed to)
possesses at least some curiosity about music. following one mission, he ends up with multiple info-chips full of various music suppressed during the empire’s rule. he is particularly transfixed by one piece that is described as vaguely orchestral and featuring a singer of indeterminate gender singing in a language he doesn’t understand
can be a troll, at times. one notable example includes him hiding a timer on a rival bounty hunter’s ship… just a timer. the other bounty hunter hears the ticking, assumes it’s a bomb, and subsequently tears his ship apart looking for it. he finds the timer just in time to see it count down to zero and… nothing. boba could have planted a real bomb but decided to mess with the poor guy instead lmao
My inner introvert is screaming 😂😂😂
in-universe (watsonian) explanations and meta are useless if the irl (doylist) reasons are rooted in racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, misogyny, or any other type of bigotry and i will die on this hill
listen to me. LISTEN. when i say boba fett is bad with words i mean that purely in a verbal/social sense. as mentioned in my previous literature: he either says too much or too little and can’t really gauge which is which. he’s unsure about deliberately changing his tone according to who he’s speaking to so he more or less adopts a one-size-fits-all approach (albeit with notable exceptions such as fennec, bo-katan and koska) - this can be called his “work voice” and it’s part of his scary professional bounty hunter persona etc etc etc. he can very effectively speak when he adopts the role of his own reputation (and uses this skill in tbobf) but when he’s just “boba” he’d rather not say anything than flounder through all those words unnecessarily.
HOWEVER. this hesitancy to speak casually does NOT reflect on his vocabulary. he reads and reads and reads (has been doing so since he was a boy) and enjoys fiction and poetry. it’s a hobby that has made him an eloquent man SPECIFICALLY when the situation calls for it. that’s all. now carry on w your day 👍
Okay imagine That's for whatever reason Din can't go pick up Grogu one time so he sends Boba no big deal That's his husband He calls Luke ahead of time and tells him that his husband's going to pick up Grogu.
And everything is completely normal until the second Boba Fett steps out of the ship wearing his armor and Luke is like "how are you not dead?!"
Consider: crabs.... but with paws
dont touch
Have a great day today.
Boba Fett’s reputation as the best bounty hunter in the galaxy comes from him pulling off an insane number of jobs throughout his life, some of which were even deemed impossible for a lone hunter to pull off
funnily enough, he doesn’t actually remember completing all of the ones people attribute to him, but after seeing the footage and biometric proof, he assumes that he’s been blacking out and entering some sort of exhaustion fugue state, or maybe he’s just had a few too many concussions
it’s not until he tries to claim a puck from the guild and is told that he’s already working that job that he starts to figure out that something more is going on, and decides to investigate who it is that’s been working this job
as it turns out, there’s actually like ten different escaped clones pulling bounties under his name, considering they all share the same DNA and face, who’ve put together a few fake versions of his father’s armor
many of them even work in teams, trading off who gets to ‘play Boba’ to the guild or clients
(they’ve also been using their shared DNA to access his space netflix account, which explains why the recommendation algorithm never seems to figure out what he likes and keeps telling him that he’s already watched shows he finds)
(strangely, he realizes that they haven’t touched any of his bank accounts, despite the fact that they could certainly have gotten through their security measures the same way)
after discovering this, he considers confronting them, killing them, even just turning them in to the guild
but then he’d lose some of his reputation if it comes out that impersonators can mimic him well enough to get the job done just as well as he could
so he just sends them all a message telling them to not fuck this up and continues with this life
I really like the word “smitten”. because at first glance you just think of sappy lovey-dovey stuff but also you have to remember this is a word that’s born of the word “smite.” a devastating word. a word that, summarized, means stricken. smitten means stricken as well — struck with devastating affection.