Over the last 45 years, Star Wars has become one of the biggest multimedia franchises in the world, and with that has come an almost endless supply of notable deaths. The implementation of Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith was a big one as the Jedi were all but eliminated and the Republic fell. However, from an emotional perspective, the death of a Tusken Raider clan in Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett may have eclipsed it.
The modern era of Star Wars storytelling on Disney+ has proven to be an interesting one. Between animated and live-action series, an entirely new story has been built, and The Mandalorian played a big part in taking things to another level. As a live-action series that played out like a movie, it gave fans an entirely new narrative to obsess over that dovetailed nicely into what they already knew.
One aspect of The Mandalorian that surprised fans was the depictions of Tusken Raiders. Pretty much every time they came up in Star Wars, Tatooine’s native citizens were shown to be mindless savages who were dedicated to violence, but Din Djarin’s interactions with them showed fans that Tusken Raiders were thoughtful, emotional and complex beings who were tired of interlopers taking advantage of their world.
The Book of Boba Fett took what had been built in The Mandalorian and added new layers. When Fett made his return in The Mandalorian, it was quite evident that the Raiders had influenced him greatly. He dressed like them, carried their weapons, and fought like them, and the first three episodes of Boba Fett’s series showed how much of an impact they had on him, as a Tusken Raider tribe helped him evolve in many ways, some more evident than others.
That made their deaths in Season 1, Episode 3 even more heart-wrenching. Much like Boba Fett himself, fans were attached to this clan, and they never spoke a line that anyone outside of Fett could understand. Their deaths played a key part in Boba’s motivations, pushing him back out into the world he was trying to get away from. However, it turned out that there was more to their massacre than meets the eye.
These deaths certainly overshadowed the Order 66 deaths in Revenge of the Sith. Despite the fact that the bulk of the Jedi Order was killed on screen in a matter of moments, fans spent much less time with those same Jedi throughout the course of the prequel trilogy. Some of them only appeared on-screen across all three movies for a few seconds before they were suddenly killed. The fact that many fans knew Order 66 was coming didn’t help things, either.
Ultimately, the emotion infused into the deaths of the Tusken Raiders in The Book of Boba Fett was a testament to the quality of the storytelling. Achieving the same impact for Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith took seven seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. After watching that, fans could finally go back and feel something about all those Jedi deaths because they finally got to know what were essentially background characters in the movies.
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