Part of the joy of the Star Wars universe (the joy of any expansive fictional world, really) is that it allowed fans the room to dream, to fill in the details of back stories only barely alluded to, and imagine rich lives for characters only fleetingly glimpsed. It’s how Boba Fett became such an icon despite having approximately 20 minutes of screen time—most of it silently nodding, a chunk of it spent haplessly plummeting into a giant space-mouth. You could look at his battle-scarred armor, and hear Darth Vader take pains to warn him, “No disintegration,” and just imagine all the assuredly cool adventures that took place leading to that moment.
Alternately, the prequels argued, you could see Boba Fett as a little boy who loves his daddy! And with the release of the new, officially canon Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View—an anthology of short stories told from the perspective of various secondary characters—you could learn, in detail, that Boba Fett actually once disintegrated some rebel spies and Darth Vader refused to pay him his bounty. He doesn’t want another disintegration, see, so that’s why Darth Vader tells him, “No disintegration.” Finally, it all connects.
Likewise, have you ever wondered why the bounty hunter Greedo was after Han Solo? Sure, it seems like he was just there hunting for a bounty. But as From A Certain Point Of View also reveals, their encounter was really about the ultimate shipment dropped at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser: Love.
[Greedo] would never understand what Uncelta had found so appealing in Solo all those years ago. The smuggler had always been a worthless excuse for a man, while Uncelta had been everything Greedo had cherished in a woman.
Greedo would have loved her as she deserved to be loved. Not dallied with her like that Corellian scumbag had chosen to do.
Yes, it seems the unspoken subtext of that scene was always that Han Solo and Greedo are but two points on a love triangle—the tension between them not the product of the shadowy gangster netherworld they inhabit, but rather Greedo being jealous that Han slept with his would-be girlfriend. And whereas their Mos Eisley rendezvous was once merely an introduction to the saga’s coolest character, it’s now been thoroughly enriched as a story about a bitter alien who can’t take rejection.
The book also posits this grudge as explanation for why Greedo would take that first shot—as seen in the controversial, also-now-canon Special Edition scene—but ultimately, what does it matter, the why of things? Such are the elusive mysteries of the heart, which someone will just write a book about.