Given the chance, Chewbacca will eat you and everyone you care about Photo : Stuart C. Wilson ( Getty Images )

In Solo: A Star Wars Story, little Han meets Chewbacca after he gets thrown into a cell while trying to ditch the Imperial military and join up with Woody Harrelson’s crew of smugglers. The implication from the soldiers is that they’re expecting the imprisoned Wookiee to eat Han, not realizing that the two of them are actually destined to become best friends. Previous Star Wars movies had implied that Wookiees have a fabulous penchant for violence, to the extent that they’ll rip someone’s arms off if they lose at Holochess, but this was the first time anyone had directly indicated that a Wookiee would eat a person. Luckily, the new Solo novelization reveals that Chewbacca wasn’t as bloodthirsty as those muddy Stormtroopers in the movie thought.


As explained by Nerdist, the novelization says the dudes guarding Chewbacca would throw him some meat every few days to keep him alive, but when he heard that they were planning to throw him a living thing to eat, he decided that he “hadn’t gotten that hungry. Not yet.” That should be comforting to anyone who was concerned that their cuddly Wookiee pal was actually going to eat a Han sandwich (read it in a Lando voice and it’s a pun), but that “not yet” is still pretty disconcerting. That means Chewbacca could’ve become desperate enough to eat somebody if Han hadn’t helped free him, which is still pretty dark.

Then again, this is just the novelization of Solo, and the old Star Wars canon rules said that anything in a book could be overwritten by anything in a movie, so maybe there will be a scene in Episode IX where Chewbacca tells Rey that no Wookiees have ever felt the urge to eat a person. (Right after he reveals to her that Han Solo’s old girlfriend Qi’ra is her mom.)

