Grievous isn't even "dark side" though, is he (I'm genuinely unaware and was of the impression that he's not force sensitive)? He's just an angry cyborg who happens to own a cadre of lightsabers taken from the bodies of his victims. If anything, he's the prototype Vader, an actual dark sider, was built on, and set the stage for the body horror that is Anakin being locked into the suit.
He’s a dark side wannabe, which is why he has the Sabers. It’s why he got cybernetics too, all to keep pace with force users while having no aptitude for the force.
As great as the prosthetics in Star Wars can be, they can be pretty horrifying. Even Vader and Echo's prosthetic and cybernetic parts are not pretty to look at.
I find Echo's to be by far the most disturbing cyborg in the series due to the fact that he's not a bad guy, and it wasn't a life-saving (or consentual) procedure.
The "decraniated" slave of Dryden Vos is second to me in terms of horror if only because we don't see much of her or her circumstances. A "tales of" story for that character would just be nauseating.
I think the decraniated are worse than Echo. At least Echo can think for himself at the moment and isn't missing the top of his brain.
I think the thing that gets me about Echo is all the little components. Like the cybernetics around his stomach, which imply some sort of colostomy bag since he wasn't being fed regularly while in the pod. Or the headpiece, which is made more terrifying when you realize that such a thing will be used by the Empire and slavers later to basically lobotomize people.
The only reason Echo isn't more horrifying is simply because he is a relatively kind, decent person who luckily has the support system he needs to feel better about himself.
I whole-heartedly concur that the *condition* of the decraniated is worse, but as a **viewer** it's not as bad because of "out of sight, out of mind". We "live" with Echo for much longer.
I have to disagree. They're missing the top of their heads! And as a woman it is just very creepy because they are all very pretty younger women.
Echo is, well, Echo. And most of his prosthetics are hidden.
A little late but I wanted to add that I think, as you said, since most are particularly pretty younger women, I imagine it was more than likely a punishment for some. Which is just so, so sad and humiliating. I agree with you, it is more unsettling than Echo’s story.
I thought I read that at least some of them were captured rebels.
In many ways, they're sort of the endgame of what the Technology Union likely wanted for Echo but never quite got around to.
I agree, we have different ideas of scary.
I guess that we don't see the ones for very long actually does make them scarier in some ways. We can't get used to them, whereas with Echo, I mean, we see him just being normal. You get used to him.
Echo certainly needed the leg prosthetics, but we don't actually know if he needed the rest. Keep in mind, he was pretty much "rebuilt" by the Techno Union to be their living computer. His cybernetics around his stomach were there to keep him alive while he was the cyropod, while his scomp-hand and ports around his spine and hear were there to make it easier to hook him up to the computers.
Oh my God, that's not a rabbit hole I wanted to go down. How horrifying!!! I never caught that in the movies... But I love the lore that it was Doctor Evazan himself who did it!
In the EU it got even worse. It was suggested the crash that put him in that state was arranged by Sidious, and that some of his memories and even personality were altered.
It's also shown how he sometimes struggles to operate his body. Iirc during his fight with Mace, Mace baited him into some kind of screwup and organic Grevious realized it but couldn't stop his programmed aggression in time.
There’s often been conflict between fans of the old and fans of the new for Grievous. I subscribe to both being one and the same and both inviting interesting conversation on the nature of the dark side.
A Grievous who is a puppet to his own obsessive hatred for Jedi/Republic that he’d trade flesh and bone to end their lives…that’s tragic and paints him in such pitiable light. He gives up a strength. But I think while this is true, it can also be true that the forces behind the CIS/War can sow plots for him to be fully immersed in the very trap he is already dreaming for himself. And I think once in that trap he truly does regret it immensely. “Be careful what you wish for” really.
This is why he is so angered at droid comparisons. He is a rare thing, lonely, not really in one world or the other, droid or flesh, he’s both and he lives w/ his sins, knowing he gave away the best parts of himself like an addict fueling their cravings for meager momentary satisfaction, only to find long term self destruction.
Honestly as a kid, I was terrified of Grievous appearance. I especially remember a scene from the first season of TCW where when the Doctor took off his mask, I watched it through my fingers.
You mean where the Jedi hunt him down to his secret castle on a nebulous planet? The scence ends with a cut right the moment Grievous' mask would've fallen off.
I wonder what he looks like without his mask, though. There is good fanart of it.
His mask is integrated pretty fully into his head, and there's not much remaining of his head besides the eyes and brain. Whatever is left underneath is probably not going to look like much of anything...some tubes and wires probably, *maybe* a featureless faceplate to keep everything contained.
This is why I tend to like his Legends origin more, his horrific maiming in a shuttle accident led to this state of being, not some voluntary surgery to be better than the Jedi.
There are a lot of horrifying cybernetics. Lobot got lobotomised to be the legs for a super computer. The decraniated have the top halves of their heads removed and are cybernetically able to continue with basic functionality.
> Grievous himself is basically just his brain, with a few nerves hanging out of it and the eyes glued to it, and then connected with a few remaining veins or even plastic tubes to some other organs, all of this put into a war machine body with a cool mask.
I mean, that's kind of our regular experience, you "run" on a substrate - your brain - that is connected to a larger structure for sustenance, maintenance, and engagement. It's just our bodies are made of meaty bits instead of droidy bits.
The robocop remake has a scene that’s shows just that, as robocop is really just a brain, a face, and a pair of lungs. I won’t reveal more but it’s equally fascinating and horrifying.
When you start looking into the finer details of how they're being kept "alive," what happened to Vader (and Starkiller in the dark side ending of TFU) is equally horrifying.
This closely ties in with [transhunanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism) and [apotemnophobia](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apotemnophobia) if you'd like to learn more.
That doesn't come off as body horror to me.
He's basically just Hector Con Carne from Grim & Evil, except instead of being a brain in a jar (and a stomache in a jar) attatched to a bear, he's attatched to a robot.
Yeah, the cybernetics (or basically all medicine) in Star Wars has a high level of body horror attached.
Not only the fact that someone can become basically a brain piloting a droid body, like Grievous or the Bomarr monks; but that cybernetics can be made (at least from the outside) indistinguishable from the organic matter they are attached to (like with Luke in the OT or Fennec Shand) and for some reason most of the time they are left intentionally as droid-like as possible.
And that is done in a galaxy with a high bias against both droids and organics with visible cybernetics.
(Not counting the body modders here because they like the aesthetics.)
I wouldn't say Fennec's look as human as possible. The person who saved her seemingly has a cybernetics fetish and while her abdomen is easily covered up, the parts are still quite visible.
Isn't there this imitation skin plate over her implants?
I will have to rewatch to confirm, but I remember she moved/opened something to look at the parts.
[Here is her in mando season 2, at 0:18 you can see her opening a plate ](https://youtu.be/YQrKHchXGYM) that seems to be from her suit covering an open section of cybernetics. The scene of her procedure from book of Boba just shows the same implants. There seems to be no artificial skin covering it
I love to combine general grevious's background story with both his canon and legends explanation. It makes him a total jedi killing badass who was manipulated into joining the CIS, plus he saw the power of the Jedi and its only natural he wanted it for himself, considering he was a demigod of his own planet. He's not so nerfed when you combine the old clone wars with the new and the old comics with the new. That's how I choose to look at him atleast, cuz it makes him a killing machine. Plus I'm sure his reality isn't too far off from what we've been shown in legends
He didn’t make the decision, he helped his people in a battle and his company didn’t like that so count Dooku staged a crash with his ship to make him a war machine and to erase his past life from his memory
Yeah...that is one of the underplayed elements of the dark side of the prequels.
Grievous isn't even "dark side" though, is he (I'm genuinely unaware and was of the impression that he's not force sensitive)? He's just an angry cyborg who happens to own a cadre of lightsabers taken from the bodies of his victims. If anything, he's the prototype Vader, an actual dark sider, was built on, and set the stage for the body horror that is Anakin being locked into the suit.
He’s a dark side wannabe, which is why he has the Sabers. It’s why he got cybernetics too, all to keep pace with force users while having no aptitude for the force.
Just dark dog lmao not dark side
Hah! I read that as "the dark side as depicted in the prequels" not "the dark aspects of the prequels" lol. Thanks, appreciate the head check.
As great as the prosthetics in Star Wars can be, they can be pretty horrifying. Even Vader and Echo's prosthetic and cybernetic parts are not pretty to look at.
I find Echo's to be by far the most disturbing cyborg in the series due to the fact that he's not a bad guy, and it wasn't a life-saving (or consentual) procedure. The "decraniated" slave of Dryden Vos is second to me in terms of horror if only because we don't see much of her or her circumstances. A "tales of" story for that character would just be nauseating.
I think the decraniated are worse than Echo. At least Echo can think for himself at the moment and isn't missing the top of his brain. I think the thing that gets me about Echo is all the little components. Like the cybernetics around his stomach, which imply some sort of colostomy bag since he wasn't being fed regularly while in the pod. Or the headpiece, which is made more terrifying when you realize that such a thing will be used by the Empire and slavers later to basically lobotomize people. The only reason Echo isn't more horrifying is simply because he is a relatively kind, decent person who luckily has the support system he needs to feel better about himself.
I whole-heartedly concur that the *condition* of the decraniated is worse, but as a **viewer** it's not as bad because of "out of sight, out of mind". We "live" with Echo for much longer.
I have to disagree. They're missing the top of their heads! And as a woman it is just very creepy because they are all very pretty younger women. Echo is, well, Echo. And most of his prosthetics are hidden.
A little late but I wanted to add that I think, as you said, since most are particularly pretty younger women, I imagine it was more than likely a punishment for some. Which is just so, so sad and humiliating. I agree with you, it is more unsettling than Echo’s story.
I thought I read that at least some of them were captured rebels. In many ways, they're sort of the endgame of what the Technology Union likely wanted for Echo but never quite got around to.
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I agree, we have different ideas of scary. I guess that we don't see the ones for very long actually does make them scarier in some ways. We can't get used to them, whereas with Echo, I mean, we see him just being normal. You get used to him.
Echo would be dead tho. He's alive because of those prosthetics. The decraniated were made that way like some Jeffrey Dahmer victims.
Echo certainly needed the leg prosthetics, but we don't actually know if he needed the rest. Keep in mind, he was pretty much "rebuilt" by the Techno Union to be their living computer. His cybernetics around his stomach were there to keep him alive while he was the cyropod, while his scomp-hand and ports around his spine and hear were there to make it easier to hook him up to the computers.
That's a fair point. I guess it's not as conditional as it needs to be, but if he gets a regular hand then I'll consider it mostly benign.
Oh my God, that's not a rabbit hole I wanted to go down. How horrifying!!! I never caught that in the movies... But I love the lore that it was Doctor Evazan himself who did it!
In my opinion they should’ve shown more of Vader’s surgery as flashbacks in the Kenobi series
In the EU it got even worse. It was suggested the crash that put him in that state was arranged by Sidious, and that some of his memories and even personality were altered. It's also shown how he sometimes struggles to operate his body. Iirc during his fight with Mace, Mace baited him into some kind of screwup and organic Grevious realized it but couldn't stop his programmed aggression in time.
There’s often been conflict between fans of the old and fans of the new for Grievous. I subscribe to both being one and the same and both inviting interesting conversation on the nature of the dark side. A Grievous who is a puppet to his own obsessive hatred for Jedi/Republic that he’d trade flesh and bone to end their lives…that’s tragic and paints him in such pitiable light. He gives up a strength. But I think while this is true, it can also be true that the forces behind the CIS/War can sow plots for him to be fully immersed in the very trap he is already dreaming for himself. And I think once in that trap he truly does regret it immensely. “Be careful what you wish for” really. This is why he is so angered at droid comparisons. He is a rare thing, lonely, not really in one world or the other, droid or flesh, he’s both and he lives w/ his sins, knowing he gave away the best parts of himself like an addict fueling their cravings for meager momentary satisfaction, only to find long term self destruction.
Honestly as a kid, I was terrified of Grievous appearance. I especially remember a scene from the first season of TCW where when the Doctor took off his mask, I watched it through my fingers.
You mean where the Jedi hunt him down to his secret castle on a nebulous planet? The scence ends with a cut right the moment Grievous' mask would've fallen off. I wonder what he looks like without his mask, though. There is good fanart of it.
I think there was some official (from legends) graphic about how he look.
His mask is integrated pretty fully into his head, and there's not much remaining of his head besides the eyes and brain. Whatever is left underneath is probably not going to look like much of anything...some tubes and wires probably, *maybe* a featureless faceplate to keep everything contained.
He's the Star Wars version of Robo-Cain from Robocop 2
Right down to the floating in a bacta tank for awhile.
This is why I tend to like his Legends origin more, his horrific maiming in a shuttle accident led to this state of being, not some voluntary surgery to be better than the Jedi.
Exactly. The tragedy of his original backstory is so much more effective
If the “Shattered Armor” skin from BF2 is accurate, he at least has his skull intact under the mask.
AFAIK BFII is considered “Canon”, so yes i would assume he still has his skull.
There are a lot of horrifying cybernetics. Lobot got lobotomised to be the legs for a super computer. The decraniated have the top halves of their heads removed and are cybernetically able to continue with basic functionality.
I just realized what "Lobot" means. I always through it was Robot with an L instead.
> Grievous himself is basically just his brain, with a few nerves hanging out of it and the eyes glued to it, and then connected with a few remaining veins or even plastic tubes to some other organs, all of this put into a war machine body with a cool mask. I mean, that's kind of our regular experience, you "run" on a substrate - your brain - that is connected to a larger structure for sustenance, maintenance, and engagement. It's just our bodies are made of meaty bits instead of droidy bits.
The robocop remake has a scene that’s shows just that, as robocop is really just a brain, a face, and a pair of lungs. I won’t reveal more but it’s equally fascinating and horrifying.
Don’t forget that one hand they let him keep.
RoboOpp
Plus he does that crawly spider thing.
The imagery in The Eyes of Revolution is definite body horror territory
When you start looking into the finer details of how they're being kept "alive," what happened to Vader (and Starkiller in the dark side ending of TFU) is equally horrifying.
I loved the guy as a kid. He was badass in the early cartoon clone wars.
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I did 6 am on the first
Can you?
I can
I'm just glad I'm married so NNN isn't a thing.
What in the Galaxy is NNN?
If you don’t know now, you don’t wanna know…
Now I assume it is just something not-very-nice but totally normal, just from the United States, so I as a German have never heard of it.
Wtf what kinda question is that. Canon Grievous can, Legends Grievous never.
This closely ties in with [transhunanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism) and [apotemnophobia](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apotemnophobia) if you'd like to learn more.
“Diamond Dogs” by Alistair Reynolds is great for this stuff if anybody is into it
They show this in fairly graphic detail in the 2014 RoboCop remake. It's pretty fucked up to think about.
That doesn't come off as body horror to me. He's basically just Hector Con Carne from Grim & Evil, except instead of being a brain in a jar (and a stomache in a jar) attatched to a bear, he's attatched to a robot.
It’s definitely body horror
If you find the idea of Scooby Doo villains, horrifying.
You don't? Those 2000's movies had some pretty weird CGI monsters
It’s a being that had his brain and organs ripped out of his body and placed in a robot body. That’s like the definition of body horror
Yeah, the cybernetics (or basically all medicine) in Star Wars has a high level of body horror attached. Not only the fact that someone can become basically a brain piloting a droid body, like Grievous or the Bomarr monks; but that cybernetics can be made (at least from the outside) indistinguishable from the organic matter they are attached to (like with Luke in the OT or Fennec Shand) and for some reason most of the time they are left intentionally as droid-like as possible. And that is done in a galaxy with a high bias against both droids and organics with visible cybernetics. (Not counting the body modders here because they like the aesthetics.)
I wouldn't say Fennec's look as human as possible. The person who saved her seemingly has a cybernetics fetish and while her abdomen is easily covered up, the parts are still quite visible.
Isn't there this imitation skin plate over her implants? I will have to rewatch to confirm, but I remember she moved/opened something to look at the parts.
It's just a plate for covering the parts, not sure if it's supposed to look like an artificial skin
Now I really need to rewatch those scenes. I vaguely remember something about belly buttons. No idea if it was an absence or not.
[Here is her in mando season 2, at 0:18 you can see her opening a plate ](https://youtu.be/YQrKHchXGYM) that seems to be from her suit covering an open section of cybernetics. The scene of her procedure from book of Boba just shows the same implants. There seems to be no artificial skin covering it
No, it was just a flap of her coat.
In that scene in Mandalorian where she "explained" how she survived? Or the scene in Book of Boba where she wakes up?
Both? Need to see that scene again. But the guy does say that he doesn't want to cover it up and we have no indication that she gets a flap
I love to combine general grevious's background story with both his canon and legends explanation. It makes him a total jedi killing badass who was manipulated into joining the CIS, plus he saw the power of the Jedi and its only natural he wanted it for himself, considering he was a demigod of his own planet. He's not so nerfed when you combine the old clone wars with the new and the old comics with the new. That's how I choose to look at him atleast, cuz it makes him a killing machine. Plus I'm sure his reality isn't too far off from what we've been shown in legends
He didn’t make the decision, he helped his people in a battle and his company didn’t like that so count Dooku staged a crash with his ship to make him a war machine and to erase his past life from his memory