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Star Wars‘ next movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, raises a lot of important questions. Can The Mandalorian sustain a leap to the big screen? What’s next for Grogu after rejecting Luke Skywalker’s New Jedi Order? Why is Martin Scorsese voicing a four-armed little weirdo? But one question has lingered above all: if Jabba the Hutt has a son, how did that happen?
Star Wars sickos have known that Rotta the Hutt—Stinky, to his friends—has been a part of canon since the 2008 Clone Wars movie. But now he’s back and distressingly buff, and every time new information about Rotta’s role in The Mandalorian and Grogu appears, the question re-emerges of how Hutts have sex.
We have the answers. Several answers, even!
While there isn’t all that much known about hutt procreation in Star Wars, it was detailed more in the old Expanded Universe, because of course it was. Despite their slug-like appearance, Hutt physiology was drawn from many different, familiar species. Hutt gender was inherently fluid and could be changed at will, and all hutts were hermaphroditic, possessing multiple sets of sexual organs.
This meant that any given hutt could procreate asexually—as was the case with Jabba, who was the sole parent of Rotta. But they could also partner with other hutts to birth a child: Ziro Desilijic Tiure, Jabba’s uncle, had two parents, for example, Mama and Papa (it remains unknown if these two hutts in particular were actually named Mama and Papa or simply referred to as such, but that’s a mystery for another time).
Little is known about the actual act, but we do know that once a new hutt is birthed—a huttlet—they typically spend their first 50 years of life inside a brood pouch, which all hutts have regardless of gender, after which they emerge with the approximate maturity of a 10-year-old compared to other shorter-lived species. A huttlet does not necessarily have to remain in their parents’ brood pouch; on Nal Hutta, communal nurseries were commonplace, allowing hutt parents to have their children looked after by surrogates in their own brood pouches while they focused on clan matters and business ventures.
Jabba himself took an unorthodox approach in raising Rotta, opting to let the huttlet mature outside of his brood pouch to gain better experience of the world around him—no doubt an unfortunate factor in Rotta’s kidnapping by Asajj Ventress in 22 BBY as leverage to pressure the Hutt Cartels into denying the Galactic Republic access to their hyperspace routes in the early days of the Clone War.
Oh, and hutts were famously very sexually virile. Just thought you should know that.
Contemporary Star Wars canon is much less informed when it comes to hutt reproduction. One significant detail we do know that is different in current continuity is that hutts are no longer genderfluid, having a singular defined sex at birth: the factoid was confirmed by a senior member of the Lucasfilm Story Group, Pablo Hidalgo, during a 2015 storytelling panel at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim as a divergent factor between the Expanded Universe and the then-nascent rebooted canon.
However, due to the nature of Star Wars: The Clone Wars bridging both a primary level of the prior Expanded Universe continuity and remaining a part of the new canon, previous facts established through Clone Wars about Jabba and Rotta remain true, including that Jabba was Rotta’s only parent and that hutts could therefore reproduce either asexually or with another sexual partner.
Mostly that Rotta’s here to be buff and fight stuff in an arena. God, I hope that’s all it means.
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