This installment of Pets of the Old Republic features a creature not with too few eyes but a pet with too many: the Earthen Thurrb. This is one of the most distinctive pets in Star Wars: The Old Republic. This baby Thumb and its grown up kin are found, for now at least, only in SWTOR.
In the game, the source of the Thurrb pet is the harvest themed Feast of Prosperity event, and had I kept to my original schedule for this project, this entry would have appeared while the Feast was still active. If you have leftover Feast tokens, you can still purchase this pet from the Feast vendor on Nar Shaddaa. Even if you have to wait until next year, it is worthwhile to highlight pets that are available from the game’s many factions and events.
As of this writing there is not much information known about Thurrbs, but I think I can conclude a few things from the pet itself as well as the three Thurrb mounts. Two of the three existing Thurrb mounts were found on the second Galactic Season reward track and for the moment are otherwise unavailable to new players, but the third, the Conflagrant Thurrb is available from the “Classic and Non-Seasonal Rewards” vendor as part of their rotating offerings past Season rewards.
Adult Brumal, Tellurian and Conflagrant Thumbs keep watch over a tiny Earthen Thumb while explaining the value of a strong vocabulary.
Because of their colorful hides and names, we can assume that Thurrbs thrive in many diverse habitats from fiery hot to wintery cold and everything in between. Thurrbs are mammals but based on their frog-like faces and fish-like fins and ears, seem to be adapted to thrive in aquatic environments and might even be amphibious.
At this point in this series, it should not surprise anyone to learn that Thurrbs are inspired by all sorts of creatures whose parts combine into a unique whole. Fully-grown Thurrbs have massive tusks like a walrus, eyes like frogs, and the cavernous mouth, the thick hide and hefty frame of a hippopotamus. Unlike hippos, which are aggressive and dangerous to humans, one fact we know about Thurrbs is that they have a much milder temperament.
It’s hard to maintain eye contact with the prequel era Aqualish and the original trilogy Talz when you don’t know which eyes to look into.
The first thing you might notice about a Thurrb, however, are its four eyes. While creatures with a single eye are somewhat rare in Star Wars, aliens with four are remarkably common. During this very project, I have already covered the quadruple eyed Ginx, the Mewvorr and the Nexu. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of four-eyed aliens in Star Wars lore. Other examples include the Lisk found on Ilum, some species of Aqualish, and the Talz which was first seen in the cantina scene of A New Hope and will be familiar to SWTOR players from the Sith Warrior’s companion Broonmark. It makes sense that strange monsters with extra eyeballs are common in Star Wars. Extra eyes immediately make a creature into a literal “bug eyed alien” and mark it as something very far outside our usual frame of reference.
I want to conclude with some remarks about how the Thurrb was introduced and discuss how the game’s approach to pets are has changed over the years. The large majority of pets featured in this project were created specifically for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I think this speaks to the goal of the game’s developers to tell stories not just within Star Wars’ existing setting, but to add to it and create worlds and characters and creatures all their own. Certainly much of the fun of SWTOR is getting to dig in the Star Wars sandbox and play with the toys we recognize from its lore, but a big part of what makes the game so memorable to me are the people, places and things we’ve never seen before.
The Curious Rodir Cub is another unique pet that debuted during the Feast of Prosperity.
The Thurrb is one of those. It was introduced first as an adorable and silly pet, and reappeared in a different context as a full sized creature we can ride across the galaxy. Many (but not all) of SWTOR’s original pets were simply miniature versions of their fully-grown counterparts, but in recent years, extra care has been given to the detail and texture of the pet models to make them both cute as babies and distinct from their adult versions. We can see this with other pets such as the Rodir, the Varactyl, the Pritarr and many more.
As for pets inspired by other Star Wars stories, I’m all for adding those too. My unsuccessful years-long campaign to get SWTOR to add a Porg pet is proof of that! But I will never object to seeing something unexpected and fresh, and I look forward to seeing what tiny robots and cuddly critters they can come up with next.
If and when we can explore alien planets, I wonder how common multi eyed animals will be. Here on earth they are fairly uncommon, at least in terms of animals that have advanced eyesight. For example, vertebrates, cephalapods, and athropods have all independantly converged on “two is enough” when it comes to really complex eyes.
The only animals I can think of off the top of my head that have really good vision and more than two eyes are spiders and perhaps certain scallops. Even in the case of spiders, when you get to the ones that have the most advanced vision (jumping spiders), two eyes are clearly the “main” eyes while the rest are less complex. In a similar vein, some vertebrates have a “third eye” on the top of their head that mainly senses light and dark so I guess technically you could include them.
Scallops are a great counter example though. They have really good eyes and lots of them. According to Dr. Google box jellyfish among cnidaria and certain starfish among echinoderms also have multiple well developed eyes. I guess I could go phylum by phylum and look for more.
In any case, still loving these posts!
You make an interesting point on about eyes. Adding extra eyes is a good way to make an creature immediately more alien since we so rarely encounter multi-eyed animals in our daily life. You mentioned jumping spiders, and in my notes I considered comparing the Thumb to the Aqualish, who originally was more well known to kids from its Kenner action figure name of “Walrus Man”. Since Walruses and adult Thurrbs are known for their tusks, I wondered if Thurrbs might also come from Ando Prime, which would loosely connect them to SWTOR’s story. But I always thought the Aqualish looked more like spiders than walruses, and when the prequels gave them extra eyes, that just settled it for me.
The Aualish is another one of those Star Wars alien species with a lot of inconsistent portrayals. Even in the OG cantina scene in some shots Ponda Baba can be seen with weird spoon hands, but when Obi_Wan cuts off his arm it’s shown with a normal human hand (which Aqualish seem to all have in further portrayals). When you google Ponda Baba images you will often see images linked of Ponda Baba sitting at a table with his orange jacket having short sleeves, this is in fact NOT Ponda Baba, but Teak Sidbam from the Star Wars Holiday Special (which reused the Ponda baba costume and mask, including the spoon hands, but had both jacket sleeves shortened because it seems they actually cut off one sleeve of the jacket for the cut off arm sequence in A New Hope). The Senator Po Nudo in the prequels not only is portrayed with 4 eyes, but 3 fingered hands as well. All this was later retconned into different sub-species.
I only just noticed that the caption for the image with the four thurrbs calls them “thumbs”. Honestly, it’s impressive you made it through most of the post without that autocorrect kicking in!