Raunch Reviews is a series about profanity. Not real profanity, but speculative swearing. Authors often try to incorporate original, innovative forms of profanity into our own fantastical works as a way to expand the worlds we build. Sometimes we’re successful. Often we’re not. In this series, I examine the faux-profanity from various works of sci-fi and fantasy, judge their effectiveness, and rate them on an unscientific and purely subjective scale. This is Raunch Reviews, welcome.

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The Author: Rockne S. O’Bannon

Work in Question: Farscape

The Profanity: “Dren”

If there is one series that gets requested for Raunch Reviews all the time, it’s Farscape. For the uninitiated, it’s a cult Australian-American sci-fi show filled with great story, fully realized characters, incredible muppets, and not-so-incredible faux profanities. Which leads us to today’s word of choice: “dren.”

Ha! I bet you thought I was going to focus on “frell!” But no! I pulled a fast one on you and switched it up. Why? Well, because “frell” is bad—it’s used in confusing ways and is born from the same onus as “frak” nothing more than a slip around censors. Those don’t rank highly on Raunch Reviews. In comparison, the word “dren” is much more elegant, if not stinkier.

First, its use is not original (we have to be honest it’s another censor-slip/replacer-word), and, similar to its real-world comparisons, it’s idiomatic. “Dren” is used as a vulgarity, meaning essentially an “unwanted substance or act.” It’s easy to pick up on its English counterpart when it’s used in phrases like “piece of dren.” But, unlike “frak” and “frell” it doesn’t follow similar patterns in pronunciation and it spelled nothing like its real-world counterpart. I think that’s important. For these sorts of faux-vulgarities, you want them to be punchy—longer words drift and shrink, becoming manageable enough to work as modifiers. “Dren” does that—and it does it pretty well.

If you’re going to make poop jokes, at least get creative with it and the writers of Farscape did exactly that in this case. Creativity goes a long way and while this is still a censor-slip, it’s a more creative censor-slip. The uniqueness and originality set it apart from others, so “dren” gains some points for that.

Score:  (3.0)

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🤬 Previous Raunch Reviews

• “Quiznak” from J. Dos Santos & L. Montgomery’s Voltron: Legendary Defender
• “Smeg” from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s Red Dwarf
• “Burn Me” from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
• “Slitch” from Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday
• “Yarbles” from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
• “Cuss” from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox
• “Feth” from Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts from Warhammer 40k
• “Shazbot” from Garry Marshall’s Mork & Mindy and Dynamix’s Starsiege: Tribes
• “Seven Hells” from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire/Game of Thrones
• “Mudblood” from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
• “Frak” from Glen A. Larson’s, Ronald D. Moore’s, & David Eick’s Battlestar Galactica
• “Jabber” from China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series
• “Storm it”/”Storms”/”Storming” from Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archives

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Have a suggestion for Raunch Reviews? It can be any made up slang word from a book, television show, or movie. You can email me directly with your recommendation or leave a comment below. I’ll need to spend time with the property before I’ll feel confident reviewing it, so give me a little time. I have a lot of books to read.

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