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The lore is that the saarlac actually keeps you alive while digesting you. ~~Like, it puts roots in that act as life support so it has a constant source of protein or whatever. ~~ eh, that last but might not be accurate but there is some kind of enzyme in their stomach that keeps you alive? Whatever.
That makes as much sense as The Matrix using people for energy. You can’t feed people to keep them alive and get more energy out than just digesting (or in the Matrix burning) that food for energy.
I could be wrong, but I think the original idea for the matrix was that they were using human brains for processing power and not energy. But someone in the movie making process decided people wouldn’t understand that and instead went with the battery analogy.
Studio executives made the decision, you know… because there hasn’t be a long list of projects they’ve fucked over the years with their notes. 🙄
I feel so bad for the people who remade The Thing because the studio executives literally forced them to make everything CGI.
Sort of a remake, sort of a prequel.
A premake
Morpheus is the only one we ever hear the battery analogy from anyway. He might well be wrong about that interpretation, and the brain processors are what’s really going on.
My headcanon is that he tried the more technical and correct explanation, but most people he told it to started to go a bit glassy-eyed during that part, so he simplified his pitch.
The showing of the battery is a good visual to sell the explanation too, regardless of it not making sense “realistically”
The humans blocked out the sun, and probably dashed all other power sources available to the Machines. What you have left are self-replicating humans. Makes sense to keep them alive and farm them just enough to tide you over before their next breeding cycle
Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.
Isn’t that basically the mechanism of how early complex cells formed millions of years ago.
First it was just basic cells … they fed off one another and at one point … one cell became incorporated into the other and essentially evolved into an organ of the cell … like mitochondria inside the cell, isn’t it basically thought that it was one it’s own organism at one point and just evolved into an organ inside other cells.
Same with the human body. I think the estimate is that we are only about 50% of our own generated cells and the rest is just other beneficial cooperative bacteria our body has evolved to take advantage of.
So the Sarlac taking you in is just incorporating you into it’s body for some function and keeping you alive to fulfill that role … you just happen to be conscious of it and unable to escape the entire time over a thousand years.
You also can’t choke people with your mind so idk what your point is
Could be it’s using you for nutrients it can’t get normally, so it keeps you alive to milk you for your calcium or whatever for as long as it can.
Like mitochondria
I thought it also used them for neural CPU cycles but maybe I’m misremembering
No, that’s exactly the original thing. “Wetware”, basically… But test audiences got upset and confused, so it was changed to “batteries.”
The batteries things was also Morpheus’s explanation, and not necessarily a definitive fact of the fictive universe. Morpheus could have been talking out of his ass, or deliberately over-simplifying for the benefit of Neo, who he knew was kind of a dumbass.
I think that was the original idea but they changed it to energy because they thought the audience wouldn’t understand the CPU stuff.
The sarlaac isn’t eating your body; it’s eating your mind.
Sarlac that lost the ability to grow ‘roots’ and instead worked out venom and energy storage (fat and muscle) would outcompete and supplant the sarlacs still producing energetically-expensive, overly-complicated stasis bellies.
What happens if they momentarily fail to keep their meals alive, do they starve or become poisoned by the rotting meat? Do they have issues keeping a varied diet alive? How do they maintain a net positive energy balance after producing all that is required to keep organisms alive? Why not stun them and stash them, like wasps and spiders? Why not fatten up like -gestures broadly at all life-. Fat requires very little maintenance.
Could one, in theory, rescue one’s friends were they trapped in a sarlac?
Sounds like an organism that would quickly be out of business were there any competition at all.
edit: How do they handle the waste produced by the meals-in-stasis?
As long as we’re coming up with overly convoluted reasons that a minor plot device from a fantasy space opera makes sense in a rigorous scientific way, why not assume that they were genetically engineered specifically as a torturous punishment for the Hutt syndicate? Bioengineering is apparently canon, so there’s in-universe justification.
Tbf that’s totally something the Hutt clan would do
Wouldn’t Jabba being ‘stupid as fuck’ and making erroneous claims about nature be the less convoluted answer here? Bioengineering, canon or not, sounds like the more complicated explanation.
The worst thing about this is ‘threepio’
The worst worst part is that’s actually how it’s spelled in novelizations (or at least how they used to spell it). Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio.
I’ve never read a Star Wars book but this makes me unreasonably unset.
You should get reset
deleted by creator
I used to have a copy of the original novelization of ANH I could post a picture of that had it but I have no idea what happened to it.
…Why?
Because the only rational reason to spell it Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio is if they got paid by the word and they wanted to bolster their paycheck? The alternative that they somehow thought this was a good idea is even worse.
FBI not eff-bee-eye.
NTP not en-tee-pee.
RNC not arr-en-cee.
I was seven when I learned this and I’ve always hated it.
Have I got some ‘news’ for you:
Not just 70s and 80s, even 90s and 2000s. I grew up in 2000s thinking it is called Arturito, and I’m sure a lot of people (mostly non fans) think the same.
Damn, I quite like that now.
This is hilarious
It’s symbiotic guys, the sarlaac obviously gives you nutrients to keep you alive as it extracts nutrients it needs.
Like carbon dioxide and oxygen from plants.
Choogana goona, youwanna wonga. Ah ha ha ha!
Well we know Tatooine orbits a pair of stars somehow and it’s still in the Goldilocks zone just enough to make it semi habitable still. My assumption is that these are white dwarfs or something smallish.
Could this be explained that the local year is much shorter? Add in that Hutt is well versed in his own biology which assuming a he isn’t strangled by a tentacle, could be slowly digested alive for a 1000 Tatooine years? He probably forgets that about his pathetic cute biped pets.
They absorb their prey into their own bodies
It’s Star Wars. Of course someone took an offhand comment that wasn’t meant to be thought of past the scene it’s in and wrote a whole story about it.
It’s canon
Luke seems clueless about how information is conveyed in conversation
C3PO is translating for him
The sarlaac keeps you alive, duh
