Ever since Supreme Leader Snoke’s first teleconference scene in The Force Awakens, fans have been wondering who the heck he is. In fact, what the heck is he? He seems clearly alien in the movie—after all, most humans have a hard time surviving with massive holes in their head and face—but several theorists pointed out that it’s possible that Snoke’s appearance could be manipulated since it’s just a digital projection anyway. If that were true, Snoke is very much not a vain leader. He picked the nastiest-looking avatar possible. And given Rian Johnson’s claims that Snoke won’t make much of an appearance in the forthcoming The Last Jedi, it seems concrete answers aren’t going to arrive any time soon.
But the Star Wars’ supreme story leader, Pablo Hidalgo, decided to announce one major detail about Snoke. Apparently he was tired of everybody’s poor reasoning. According to Hidalgo’s tweets—the story guy, not the horse—Snoke is definitively not human. The proof is in the pudding pages of The Force Awakens’ novelization.
I guess this question has come up. Snoke’s humanity, as described in the novelization of The Force Awakens. pic.twitter.com/0JVcMOhyTe
— Pablo Hidalgo (@pablohidalgo) May 29, 2017
The novel’s quote reads:
Seated on the raised platform that was the focus of the chamber was the blue-tinted holo of Supreme Leader Snoke. Tall and gaunt, he was humanoid but not human …
Hidalgo went on to explain that while Snoke’s appearance and gender had been fairly fluid—uh oh, angry tweets incoming—before The Force Awakens started filming, those things are now written down somewhere. Snoke’s lack of humanity is officially canon, thanks to that information being printed in the novelization.
Other theories swirling around Snoke’s hole-y head are the idea that his name could be Victor, and that he’ll share a scene with Leia in The Last Jedi. Obviously neither of those are confirmed, but if we’re throwing names out, Jeffrey seems just as likely as anything else. Supreme Leader Jeffrey certainly has a nice ring to it.
While Hidalgo’s reveal is certainly interesting, it’s hard to know what to do with the information. It’s certainly unique to an Empire that typically seems to be a human-only organization, but their implied racism is never explicitly stated in the films, so there’s no reason to think they couldn’t have several aliens under their employ or even holding top positions. Since we don’t know what type of alien Snoke is, there’s still nothing to infer about his background or anything like that. Maybe somebody will eventually dig to the bottom of Wookiepedia and find out the truth of Snoke’s past, but until then we’re just going to have to wait like a bunch of neanderthals did in the pre-internet era.
For the latest spicy details on The Last Jedi, click here.