Before we get into this, it’s important that you understand something: No one is a happier person for having asked about the anatomy of sci-fi characters. Sure, we all wonder about these things from time to time, but what good can possibly come from finding out whether or not Watto is using his potbelly as an organic, doughy vanity cover for his otherwise exposed monolith of a sub-thoracic uni-nipple? You’re just happier not knowing.
But if you really want to go down this road? Yes, it’s perfectly legitimate to wonder how Star Wars’ Ahsoka Tano and other members of the Togruta species hear anything, what with the enormous decorative skin tags that careen down either side of their faces. Do they have ears under those things? And if they do, how is every other line of Ahsoka’s dialogue not “Huh?”
There’s been a passing curiosity about how the Togruta hear anything ever since their first appearance in Episode II back in 2002, made all the more common thanks to the introduction of Ahsoka in The Clone Wars. Wildly for such a prominent species in a franchise that once built a whole backstory around a guy carrying an ice cream machine, the facts about the Togruta sense of hearing haven’t been fully explored, not even in the extensive, shunned and abominable Legends stories, declared by Holy Disney Edict to be “no-counts takes-backsies.”
Still, there are clues. According to the 2015 book Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, Togruta montrals – the fleshy spikes coming off of the tops of their gourds – are actually hollow extrasensory organs which evolved to allow the species a sort of echolocation. If it works anything like the version of echolocation used by mammals here on Earth, these horns would need to be able to process sounds the same way that an ear would. Until some poor writer putties-in a paid-by-the-word novelization of Episode XXIV with an agonizingly dry chapter where Ahsoka describes her tympanic membrane to a rapt audience of Autobot younglings (assuming Hasbro buys Disney in 2031), the smart money is on the Togruta hearing through their montrals, not traditional ears. Meanwhile, their lekku – the meaty tails coming off to their temples – serve only one discernable purpose: to do irreparable damage to Rosario Dawson’s cervical vertebrae.
One last thing: I don’t want to check Wookiepedia in a couple of hours and see that somebody changed the entry on Toydarians to say that they have “a monolithic sub-thoracic uni-nipple,” okay? Nobody edit the Wookieepedia entry on Toydarians to say that. I mean it this time.
