“Everybody loves babies. Everybody loves Yoda. It’s a no brainer: Baby plus Yoda equals dollars.”

Richard Gottlieb, CEO of Global Toy Group, a one-stop shop for toy resources, tells Polygon that there’s no doubt that the breakout character from The Mandalorian is primed for the market. But three episodes into the Disney Plus series, those big, green ears aren’t flapping around on a single toy shelf. It’s an abnormality for the franchise; since George Lucas first revolutionized the toy industry with his original trilogy licensing deals, every Star Wars person, place, or ship has been reproduced for playtime adventures. Except Baby Yoda.

Baby Yoda — dubbed as such since no official, canonical species or name has been revealed — first appeared at the end of The Mandalorian’s premiere. The “ooo”s, the “aaaa”s, and the memes immediately rolled in — everyone was talking about those eyes. According to Werner Herzog, who plays The Client on The Mandalorian, Baby Yoda is so cute in person, he cried on set.

Baby Yoda’s purpose in The Mandalorian is murky — is it actually Yoda’s descendant? why does the Empire want it? — but its purpose in real life is absolutely clear: to be a plush toy that can sit on a desk or be the treasured companion of a small child. But while The Mandalorian has a full Hasbro line of toys showcasing Pedro Pascal’s character, Gina Carano’s Cara Dune, and an AT-ST raider, there is a void where the wide eyes of Baby Yoda should be. Why can we order a plush D-O, the new droid who will debut on Dec. 20 in The Rise of Skywalker, but we can not yet bring a Baby Yoda home to cradle close during the holiday season? Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?

Showrunner Jon Favreau told Entertainment Tonight that the absence of Baby Yoda toys was a deliberate choice in order to avoid potential leaks.

“The way the cat usually gets out of the bag with that stuff is merchandising and toy catalogues and things like that,” said Favreau, who, as the producer of various Marvel films, is familiar with leaked plot points that come from merchandise. “We really wanted to have it be that you had to watch it yourself, so that every time you watched the show there’d be new twists and secrets coming out. But that requires a lot of restraint from the people footing the bill. Part of that was holding back on things like merchandise.”

Indeed, Gottlieb says that distributors debut prototypes of toys at showcases around 15 months before a targeted Christmas season. For Baby Yoda merch to have been available after The Mandalorian debuted, prototypes would have needed to be out there for the world to see as early as October 2018.

“Chances are that someone would have seen it in their showroom and word would have gotten out,” explains Gottlieb. “There’d be no way to keep it quiet.”

Favreau knows what’s up. While toys and licensed products stand in constant contrast to spoiler culture — Topps’ trading card set for The Empire Strikes Back infamously detailed the entire plot weeks before the movie came out — the last few years have seen fans of giant franchises scrutinizing toy announcements for hints of what’s to come. An Infinity Gauntlet from Avengers: Endgame, painted in Iron Man’s color scheme, signaled to MCU devotees that Tony Stark would at one point wield the stones. Figures of presumably deceased characters like Black Panther, Spider-Man, and Star-Lord gave away the fact they’d be back for Endgame, while a figure of Yoda confirmed the character would likely make an appearance in The Last Jedi. (He did.)

The battle to protect Baby Yoda’s true identity means leaving the 50-year-old alien in a galaxy far, far away. The absence has been a boom here on Earth for Etsy, where one can currently pick up handcrafted plushies, 3D-printed toys, and shirts. Fan-created merchandise is nothing new, and Etsy in particular is a hotbed of unofficial merchandise for every fandom under the sun. (The volume is so great, Taylor Swift once cracked down on Etsy sellers.) But in almost every other instance, there were official sources with licenses, too.

Polygon reached out to several Etsy store owners, though none could comment on the fan response to Baby Yoda demand. That may sound like a Resistance fighting the good fight, but Gottlieb says that Etsy craftspeople doesn’t really pose a threat to the larger toy industry.

“For most of the industry, it’s really offstage,” he explains. “We’re tangentially aware of it, but it doesn’t seem to have a significant impact.”

It’s only a matter of time before Baby Yoda toys arrive in stores, ready for the greater public to embrace them, love them, and shell out a lot of money for them. Reports from MSNBC indicate that Baby Yoda apparel could somehow manifest just in time for the holidays, with pre-sales for the eventual toys possibly going up as early as next week. If this is the case, that means prototypes have been floating around for a bit, but kept under such tight supervision that nothing had leaked beforehand. In a world where plot details are regularly spoiled by merchandise catalogs, that would be as surprising as a Baby Yoda suddenly showing up at the end of a Star Wars TV show.