DUNE: FREMEN LUNCH BREAK
Exploring the bizarre corners of the Dune books.
I was listening to the book How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers the creator of The Onion and he was teaching about how you take a funny concept and then you keep making it more outrageous and extreme with every progression or scene. That’s what I did here in my very mini satirical piece. I’m stretching what a meme even is here. My memes often have characters talking to each other in balloons more like a comic strip. I’m becoming a cartoonist in a way, only I can’t draw, and I can’t settle on one group of characters to have a strip about.
What you need to know to understand the above meme is that in Dune, the Fremen, who live in the harsh desert climate, conserve their water with “stillsuits” that recycle all their body moisture. If you take what that means to the next level: they are recycling their pee and poo. Then I imagined what if they just dropped diarrhea loads from bad fast food they just ate? You get it.
The meme was slow to get likes on /dunememes but the moderator posted “people hate this meme so I’m stickying it for a couple of days,” and he was nice enough to pin it to the top of the page. It eventually got some comments from people who recognized my brilliance and racked up 118 likes.
If a third Dune film is made it will be based on the second Dune book Dune Messiah. In it the Bene Tleilax, or the Tleilaxu, are a bizarre race of human’s that have special skills in genetic engineering. Like the Harkonnen’s are a look at what the future of human fascism could become, the Tleilaxu represent the future of where unethical scientific practices could bring us. The Tleilaxu breed a ghola of Duncan Idaho, who was played by Jason Momoa in the first film. A ghola is a clone that once it gets to its teenage years (and is tortured) can regain the original memories of the person it is cloned from, including the memory of its death. The Duncan ghola is the only character who is in all six books because he can be revived. It is believed throughout the series that these ghola’s are bred in tanks. The reader would imagine a big tank with a person floating in fluid kind of like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. But no, we get a big reveal in Heretics of Dune that the reason we never see the female Tleilaxu are that they are the tanks and have been stripped of their humanity just to become incubators. It’s a real WTF moment.
The meme got hundreds of likes and mostly positive comments. A few people got pissed I had posted a spoiler for Heretics of Dune, so I had to put up some spoiler filter over the post. Sorry, I thought the Dune memes sub was full of nerds who had read all the books. I wish that sub would explore weird details like this more and not just post obvious things about the movies.
Finely the last meme is all about the fourth and most interesting book in the series, God Emperor of Dune, about how the son of Paul Atreides, Leto II, lives for four thousand years and consumes so much spice mélange (magical worm shit) that he metamorphosizes into a worm. He can out-think his universal opponents because he has the power of prescience and can communicate with the minds of his deceased ancestors. The Return of the Jedi came out two years after God Emperor of Dune and it was clear that Jabba the Hutt resembled the God emperor (that’s why Jedi mind tricks didn’t work on him) and the Sarlacc pit was based on the Dune worms. And remember Han Solo was in debt to Jabba because he had lost his shipment of spice. What spice is and does in Star Wars is never really defined, however. But I am playing with the idea here that perhaps Jabba was originally a man who metamorphosized into a slug after ingesting massive amounts of spice. A man had played him in the original cut of Star Wars but George Lucas changed him into a slug-like creature when he made Return of the Jedi. Years later the extended Star Wars universe retconned Jabba to be from a race of Hutt’s or some shit. But my guess is that George Lucus’s original intention was that Jabba was a singular entity that ruled because of his connection to the spice.
