The leading man comment had me chuckling that you may also be on the path of thinking that “The” Mandalorian of the show “The Mandalorian” is not and apparently never has been Din Djarin.

I like to tell to tell people about The Journal of the Whills because it was a barely concealed bit of world building I reverse engineered as a kid reading George Lucas’ novel adaptation of the first film, which is far closer to the original scripts than the actual movie turned out to be. I spent a couple decades thinking it just a silly theory, but then Ars Technica actually managed in an interview to get George Lucas to confirm it a few years after the Disney sale and I felt vindicated and special for having guessed correctly.

The Journal of the Whills was the original working title for Star Wars and also a hint at who the original narrator voice was supposed to be. Most of the narrator voice was cut from the movie, though it influenced the serial-style opening crawl (minus some personality). It was supposed to be a mystery: who were the Whills? Why did they care about the Skywalkers?

The Whills were the The Force were “midichlorians”. The closest thing to a “grand plan” of Star Wars was that it was all building up to a microscopic voyage to meet the Whills and hang out with the very aliens that were the actual embodiment of The Force. In whatever acid trip that sparked Star Wars, George Lucas imagined that the biggest twist would be an excuse to Fantastic Voyage into the bloodstream of a Jedi and go hang out with the aliens there!

I can’t imagine Disney will ever give us “Honey, I Shrunk the X-Wing” and fill it with the most muppety Whills an acid trip like that (and “George’s vision” for Star Wars) deserves, and sometimes I wonder if that’s a shame because that’s definitely an element missing in understanding something about the intent of Star Wars, a place where even the most mystical of powers is really just tiny microscopic aliens running around and having their own weird fun.

I can get a hearty laugh any time some too serious fan again suggests that George Lucas’s master-planned sequels would have been better than the Abrams-produced Disney sequels. They would have been a lot weirder, and perhaps crazy amounts of silly fun, but better was probably unlikely.

(I burnt out on Star Wars binging too self-serious EU novels sometime in High School and it took a lot of coming back around to “Star Wars is a silly place” and my love for the [terrible] Ewok Adventures among other things to return to enjoying Star Wars media as an adult.)

As for Dune, Frank Herbert wrote some of the funniest books outside of that series and he had a wicked sense of humor and I honestly don’t think we’ll ever quite know how to be in on whatever the joke embedded in Dune was, especially because Frank himself never got to writing the final punchline. (Brian and KJA may have had his notes but never quite had his sense of humor.) I think there was a joke there. When you get far enough into the acid trip-like escapades of a million Duncan Idaho clones (gholas, lol) fighting each other, I think the only logical response is laughter, but at what is deeply obscure by that point. On the flipside there, parts of Dune were absolutely serious: the climate change allegories and ecological concerns and the pains of all of human history but especially religion and capitalism and fascism. Crudely, that may have even been the intended punchline: that our real history is the terrible and terrifying joke and Dune was just the broken mirror of history repeating itself worse and worse for all time (and with plenty of gholas to keep track of, a word I still sometimes wonder is supposed to be pronounced with an initial ‘f’ because it too was a joke). I probably don’t do the right drugs to truly understand, though.