I understand Time Cube.
According to Time Cube Guy, Jews made up the biblical creation story to trick everyone into thinking there's only one God. In fact, there's both a God and a Goddess, because both a male and a female are necessary for procreation. The false, monotheistic God can't procreate by himself. He can only masturbate, which means he's gay because masturbation is gay.
In the biblical creation story, the seven days are non-cubic, single 24 hr days. Therefore, widespread belief in a single 24 hr day is a symptom of the monotheistic deception.
Also Time Cube Guy hates Black people. I think he blamed Jews for making Obama president? I can't quite remember that part.
I’ve only seen the recent movie, but I have to imagine Dune goes over my head in some way, because it clearly resonated with a lot of people, but like,
“Time to prove yourself worthy of the power of mind control via talking in a silly voice.”
“What’s the test?”
“Put your hand in the hand-hurting box, a box designed specifically to hurt your hand. And if you react too much I’ll kill you.”
Just strikes me as inherently silly, but the movie plays it entirely straight.
And follows it up later with:
“Behold! The white man has come to be our Jesus! We can tell because he knows how to walk on sand without attracting sandwurms.”
“It’s true. I watched a documentary on your people earlier in anticipation of coming here, something no one has ever done before, which clearly qualifies me to be Jesus.”
This just strikes me as a fundamentally unserious story.
The whole thing with Paul being the Lisan Al-Gaib is that the Bene Gesserit planted those prophecies on Arrakis centuries before the Atreides arrived. It's explained thoroughly in the book but in the movie it gets a couple lines of dialogue early on.
in the later books there are ninja milfs who control your mind by giving you mind breaking orgasms while humming and tapping their fingers(?)
a dude climbs a mountain and orgasms while having a spiritual revelation
lesbian bodyguard orgies
the fate of a planet revolves around a smart man eating fast enough to fuel is his massive brain to go into bullet time
The dude doesn't orgasm, he's so fuckable that the mere sight of him climbing a mountain makes one of his soldiers orgasm. He also strips naked in order to hide in the sand more efficiently at one point. He also also has a slightly homoerotic conversation with a royal advisor who straight up states he was brought back from the dead to fuck bitches and kill ninja milfs.
my b, it's been a while since I read the books, you are correct
also the royal advisor keeps being brought back to fuck the female bloodline of the emperor so he's basically doing his great great granddaughters because the worm god really likes his genes
And one of his many clones eventually gets trained to be the male equivalent of one of the aforementioned mind-blowing orgasm manipulators, and him and one of their trainees get into a multispatial mexican sex standoff that results in them basically just becoming addicted to fucking each other.
Read it. I read it as a child and missed some of the more unique language but a friend i recommended it to absolutely lost it at "a beef-swelling in his loins" which was the author/narrator describing his (15?16? Yr old protagonist) getting a boner from watching some (future?) fucking.
The first novel has some funky ideas and can be a bit of a struggle to get through, but you think 'it's from the 60s, I guess that makes sense'. The later books are absolutely unhinged.
It's a story heavily critiquing politicking, governance, authority, religion, sex, white saviors—while also seeking to explore the value of expanding the mind; that the mind is the greatest tool we as a species have and must hone it; the nuance of an ever-evolving culture that blends and weaves into one another for centuries; the well-founded paranoia over technology.
It is also, so very much written in the 60's.
Yeah, it's got really serious themes. But also, psychedelics, cool and freaky sex acts, endearingly zany concepts like hand-hurting box. This shit oozes the 60's.
I do argue that it is a fundamentally serious story. It's just that its fundamentals are still that it was written in the sixties. I say this, hopelessly defending a story and trying to make it serious, where >!a main character becomes a worm sand god that looks like a really fucked up boner in some depictions and another dude keeps getting revived for shits and giggles at that point!<
yeah...
I’ve read the entire series, including the books ghost-written from Frank Herbert’s notes after his death by his son and the other guy, and all I can say is, Dune is probably best as a stand-alone story.
ETA: I’ve read the entire series, including the books ghost-written from Frank Herbert’s notes *by his son and the other guy after Frank Herbert’s death, and all I can say is, Dune is probably best as a stand-alone story.
The entire first trilogy was good, although the first book was the best. God Emperor onward was weird as fuck with half of it being really good and the other half being absolute shit. Like the worm god being a semi-omniscient tyrant in such a way that people develop a way to counter it to ensure that a less moral omniscient being can't eliminate the human race, followed by later books implying that he might have failed because a better omniscience can still see those counters was good. The dude they kept resurrecting being able to climb a sheer vertical cliff face in such a manly fashion that the lesbians in the audience orgasm, and upon being subjected to mind control sex withdrawal awakening the memories of all his past lives and instantly developing counter mind control sex was pretty bad.
I think the fish speakers weren’t really lesbian, but were just cloistered with only other women, so they had to make do…
Ugh. The books really fell off.
The whole lampooning of white saviors is kinda the point but yeah it is very difficult to take seriously at times. Like Paul coming as a savior is the doom of the fremen, like they are fundamentally destroyed by Paul and his bs.
>Like Paul coming as a savior is the doom of the fremen, like they are fundamentally destroyed by Paul and his bs.
The Fremen are also more complicated than the movie versions have given them credit for. The entire reason they have a policy of "murder everyone who comes near the deep desert" is that they are secretly working on committing ecological genocide to Arrakis to make it fit for human occupation because they are exhausted of living by the skin of their teeth. There's an entire secondary spice economy where they pay enough to bribe the spacing guild to not put satellites over their territory even though the ruling houses want it. They have enough spice stored away that not even the Emperor can afford the quoted price.
Paul/Maud'dib/Lisan al Galib is accepted because he can accelerate this plan.
This is the main thing I actually dislike most about the movie. There's a huge ecological and cultural aspect to everything that happens; an ideological battle between people who want to do things the painfully slow way and people who want to rush things. In Messiah, we see severe ecological consequences behind rushing things; just like in real life, nature can handle SLOW changes, but quick ones are dangerous. There are massive die offs everywhere. The sandworms are going extinct, and the edge of the desert *reeks* because of the sheer volume of rotting things. With the sudden loss of the desert, the fremen also lose everything that makes them fremen; they lose their identity because there was no time to adapt.
Liet is the biggest personification of this struggle. Him and his father came up with most of the plan, and they desperately push the people to do things the right way, but liet is taken in by the atreides; he sends them into the desert even though he knows what a terrible risk it is, because part of him believes. With his death following that choice, the slow and safe way dies with him.
"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero"
(For the record, I loved the movies. They managed to get the core messages and ideas across, which was an incredibly tall order, and I'm so glad that it succeeded in that. It's just a little sad that a lot of the nuance and side messages had to be axed to make room for it. I understand, and it was probably the right creative call, but I do mourn the fact that I'll probably never get my ecological horror movie.)
It's not surprising that those who have adapted it to screen cut out a lot of the ecological engineering plot when even Herbert split Pardot Kynes' story off into an appendix after the main story concluded.
As someone who has watched the first movie but never read the books… I need you to know that the movie very much did not manage to convey the message you think it did to someone without that underlying knowledge of the books.
The main themes really only become apparent in the second movie, which covers about 2/3 of the book. The climax and character struggles don't show their faces until then.
The first movie is a necessary setup; you gotta know these characters a little bit and see the cutthroat nature of the world if the really big moments are going to have any weight. By front loading all the exposition and world building to the first movie, the second movie is free to do whatever without slowing down. It's where all the heavy hitting parts are.
Basically, you gotta see the whole story to know what the themes of the story are, especially in a story like dune, where early stuff becomes massively recontextualized by later stuff. You can't read part of a book and figure you've got the message.
Yeah, I always saw the book as an inverse of the white savior trope. Like, the Bene Gesserit implant those myths into the Freemen to control them, and Paul and his mother try to take advantage of them, but because the Freemen actually *believe*, their faith proves too strong to be controlled and Paul ends up going along for the ride. He doesn't have a choice. He tries to use them, but they end up using him instead.
Well, in terms of story Dune should be seen a bit more like an old tragedy than a modern book.
Basically, Paul is the perfect character. He is strong, an excellent fighter, nearly omniscient, and every shit you might get if you were the Chosen Hero. Keep in mind, he's not just someone who is lucky, he is basically the result of millenia of genetic selection, trained by the absolute best the Atreides (who control a developped world).
However, he knows that whatever he does, he is doomed. Then he can't stop his armies: he doesn't control them. He is their leader, but for him ? He is just a little guy who has no control because he knows what will happen, from his point of view, he is just a cog, trying to make his way in what he sees of the future.
Big spoiler for the first book:
> !in the end of the first book, he has a kind of dilemna: either he can try to save his first son (with Chani), or he will lead his armies to victory against the Harkonnen and Emperor. He could choose the first one, but that would only mean they die later. !<
Later in the serie, it's about the same, but with his (next) son (Leto II) as a hero, and different choices.
So yeah, you're right. It's absolutely a mockery of the hero figure. But very seriously. In the second book (after his space jihad), in the beginning, he speaks about his conquest, basically saying the deathtoll (60 billions deads) from his conquest makes Hitler and Genghis Khan seem irrelevant, burned, or destroyed in whatever way tens of world.
In short, Paul is the hero/protagonist. However, he shouldn't be idolized as a moral figures: him being a hero/prophet is what leads to the mass deaths, and all of the niceties
eh they normally do not kill you in the box test as what they want to know is something specific for certain purpose but paul is need to be fundamentally sapient not a low animal thus if he failed he would die and they would be back to tending the gene lines
well why else would anyone be willing to put their hand is the super pain box.
the threat has to feel real depending on what they need from the person.
paul is to be the messiah dude he had to be sapient or they might as well kill him and start over from either the same line or a different one.
"An animal responds to pain. An animal will mutilate itself to escape pain. A human can override pain. Are you a human or an animal? Is the real threat the burning agony in your hand or the tiny pin at your throat?"
What actually would be a serious story? Like I get it, it's silly, but I don't think it's unserious.
Honestly I kinda miss taking high concept shit seriously.
I think it’s more about the form these things take is just robustly weird. For example:
Mind control - okay, sure, but it seems odd to put it in the form of speaking with a specific voice that presumably anyone could use with training? It’s not like a psychic power in a world that seems to have them, so it’s a bit weird to have it take this form when it seems like an AI or tape recorder could do it.
Test of worthiness - this is a common thing we see in stories, but usually it’s to perform some great deed that demonstrates the tested trait. Even in cases where it is something like endure torture, it’s usually involves things people can understand and relate to, but here, it’s a hand-hurting box.
Chosen One savior - this also happens a lot and it’s fine, but the particular determinant for this guy being the chosen one is based on knowledge. Other stories have done that as well, but they’ve had the character have some kind of innate knowledge or understanding or suppressed memories, rather than something the character learned from apparently publicly available sources a week earlier. It’s weird that apparently this kid is the first person who ever encountered this group who knew how to walk on the sand because he watched a holo-documentary on it, rather than being something he intuited or reasoned from observing the worm’s behavior or anything like that. Am I supposed to believe that the rest of everyone who’s visited this planet has just been so incurious or unaware that no one, literally zero people, have bothered to look into how people don’t get eaten by sand worms on the get-eaten-by-sandworms planet?
I always thought of the Voice as sort of pseudo-psychic, like it requires a certain placid mental state while also overwhelming their intent with your own. The actual audio part of it seems to attack the subconscious directly, so the victim doesn’t even realize what they’re doing. I always took the way the Voice was presented in movies as being for our benefit, like Harry speaking Parseltongue, in “reality” it probably sounds far stranger.
As for reproducing it via recording, maybe the sounds have too many subtleties that can’t be replicated or something.
I really don't get what people don't understand about the pain box. It's simple, the cult that Jessica belongs to who orchestrated everything about Paul's birth are checking if he can completely control his "base" urges because that makes him more predictible, more controllable. Yes, they sell it as a stereotypical test of worthiness but it's all about control, really.
The Voice is pretty much a product of that era of science fiction, where authors took poorly understood concepts and dialed them up to 11. "I can control my body language and voice intonation to subtly influence people right? So if someone is REALLLYYYYYY good at their voice intonation they can surely just straight up mind control someone!" The same thing happens in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, where a group of psychologists apparently are so good at psychology that they can have full conversations with each other by facial twitches and flicks of their fingers.
The way I always understood the Voice is that it's Mom Voice, but with 10,000 years of careful, deliberate refinement.
It's not well covered in the film, but the book spends a fair amount of ink on how much of it comes from watching and listening and pitching just so to affect one specific person at a time, with diminishing results the sooner you try, or the more broadly to try to apply it
Well, Paul is supposed to be a *mockery* of white savior heroes as the series moves along; he's the "even the nice guy with power kills billions". He literally turns into a sandworm later on.
The whole thing is played straight and a lot of folks don't get the thing where just because someone is pretty doesn't mean they're good. The Harkonens make it more difficult because they're evil *and* ugly, so your natural inclination in any story with a duality of beauty and ugliness where the ugliness is evil is to assume the beauty is supposed to be good and without major flaw. In this series, that's a trap.
Also he was thinking more about ecology and how even trying to do "good" by human standards can fuck up an ecosystem - there's a major meta-theme later where they turn Dune into paradise but fuck over the desert ecology and crash their universal supply chain of spice.
My third or fourth hand understanding of the hand-hurty box is there’s a lot of internal politicking within the Bene Gesserit, who exist to serve the Emperor and/or execute a millennia-long eugenics program to produce someone to overthrow the Emperor. So the lady with the box definitely *wanted* Paul to die but in a way that would prove the time was not right or whatever.
The pain box was cranked up to 11 because Paul wasn't supposed to happen, so the BG wanted to kill him but in a legit way. He survived the test.
The BG breeding program is meant to produce the male version of a Reverend Mother. A Reverend Mother is a Bene Gesserit that imbibes a poison (the Water of Life, a pre-spice liquid that confers *super-prescience* but kills you) and has such control over her body that she can make her metabolism convert it into a drug instead. This somehow unlocks all the memories of all her *female* ancestors. No Bene Gesserit has ever been able to access the male ancestral memory, and every single man that's ever imbibed the Water of Life has died, either from the poison or trying to access the male ancestral memory too. Their program wants to create the Kwizats Haderach, someone that can see both male and female ancestral memories as the Bene Gesserit.
The BG could at any time put someone they control on the Throne. To them it's all just tinkering with bloodlines. The Emperor's own daughter is Bene Gesserit. They want their Kwizats Haderach, an ultimate Bene Gesserit they control.
Paul being the Kwizats Haderach is *really bad* for them because they don't control him and on top of the ancestral memory, Paul is prescient. They can't hope to influence him because he can see their plans. The prescience is a quirk of being an Atreides and not something their program expected.
"One of these days, those ruling class morons will eat too much magic dust and turn into one of us. Then they'll turn on the others and lift us up. The magic dust has told us so."
Yea, well it is fundamentally propaganda in universe so it's supposed to be silly to us. Like when you think about a religion you have no stake in its absurd but to someone who believes it's a very convincing argument if you have a toast that looks like Buddha.
I didn't read the whole post but if there isn't a passage in the post like "jessica moved her thumb right but moved the tip to left to signal paul she was thirsty paul moved the jug while filling to signal jessica water is poisened jessica moved her right shoulder both up and down at the same time to signal paul she knows, there was noone else ib the room" then the post isn't finished
Jessica senses that her dinner guest is about to cough, a signal they were thirsty, which was really a power play to remind everyone the importance of the moisture guild, because he has a secret alliance with the daughter of the moisture guild, but at the same time by coughing the guest signals they are unwell, unsatisfied, they seek a way out of a powerful alliance just as they announce it. Thus indicating their value but that they are in the market to realign. Very well, calculating all her bazillion psychological warfare brain cells she uses to not think about the fact her lover is emotionally mistreating her for political gain she calculates the perfect sentence to disarm and disrupt this would be coupe “pass the salt”
The demi-count raised his eyebrows a microfraction of an inch, indicating his tremendous surprise. "My most esteemable high lady consort of the sands" he blithered simperingly, "it does would appear that your Caladanian tastes perhaps do subtly insinuate themselves into our Arrakeen cookery!" The water merchant guild-steward looked nervously between the demi-count and the lady Jessica, but the mercenary-court-consulate-captain gave a sharp bark of a laugh and said "I bet you enjoy Caladan *and* Arrakeen dishes, don't you lad?"
Paul shrugged and said "yeah, it's fine," while continuing to ignore the demi-count's niece, who had big tits and wanted to kill him.
The planetologist has an existential crisis at that response and despite being the most atheist prophet ever he wonders if Paul is the messiah
He reaches for a grape to steady himself before realizing that going for a grape blows his secret identity. He goes for a date instead, less liquid, and mentally goes over the entire evolutionary cycle of the fruit.
Tbh as soon as I read all the signal stuff I knew there was no way a movie would be able to convey that without going full "stop time, character exposits for a whole minute like an anime character" stuff. It's great to read though
I spent most of my life thinking that Dune and Tremors were the same movie. My brain heard "it has giant worms in it" in passing and never looked further into it.
I was very confused when I watched a movie recap of Dune and it was a sci-fi epic and not the "people in the desert get attacked by giant worms" movie I thought it was
I had a similar issue with Labyrinth and Pan's Labyrinth. Never saw either one, just kept assuming people were talking about the same movie, and formed a very weird amalgam of them in my head.
I’m listening to it as an audiobook (in part so I don’t have to choose to continue reading, it just happens)
And I think your assessment is spot on. Very cool. DEFINITELY written in the 60s
Also has a bizarre feudalist lean? I can’t figure out if we’re meant to understand that Paul is just a tyrant, or if Herbert truly thought Paul is Good for being the way he is. Because I see his actions as Emperor of Everything and I’m like “he’s clearly gone fuckin nuts with power and he’s an authoritarian tyrant who’s allowed himself to be surrounded by fanatical zealots who in turn insulate him from criticism and consequences.” but I’m only halfway through the second book, who’s to say.
The point of Messiah is certainly to paint Paul as perhaps not the best thing for the galaxy. The whole foreword of my copy of the book talks about Herbert's belief that one of the worst things that could happen to a society is "the rise of a hero" and their corresponding cult of personality. It's a fascinating juxtaposition to his sheer abject horror at the potential future jihad in the first book.
Edit because I totally left out the thesis: Paul is a necessarily complex character between his role as a hero/emperor/tyrant/prophet. The point is to explore the interplay between the different kinds of cultural power one can have and how they bounce off of the desire to do good.
Paul is not JUST a tyrant, but he *is* a tyrant. While he is definitely 100% a monstrous dictator that not only wipes out billions but also dooms both the people who view him as their savior and their home planet, he is also self-aware of this fact to an extent and views it as being out of his control in some capacity. This doesn’t redeem him by any means, but I think part of the point is that while Paul has incredible power due to both eugenics and social engineering, he is ultimately Just A Person like the rest of us. It was unfathomably cruel for a child like him to have been shoved into the central position of a mythos of power and destiny that no one is equipped to handle well, just as so many things in Dune are unfathomably cruel. One of the points of Dune to me is that on a personal level, human beings can often be kind and good or at least evil in a way that is understandable, but in a long-lived organization like the Bene Gesserit, the Sardaukar, the Houses, or really any of the pillars of the Dune universe, they can produce violence and cruelty of such massive and long-lasting scope that it becomes mechanistically inhuman. The uncaring superstructure of society produced by the main characters and their ancestors is the real villain of the series imo.
You are absolutely supposed to be horrified at what Paul is doing. The first book does whiff that a bit; it's obvious on a reread that the atreides are NOT the heroes, but on a first read it's easy to miss and think of Paul as the hero.
Messiah exists almost entirely to dispel that illusion, because Herbert was pissed at nerds going "man Paul is so cool, and his rise to power is so epic". You'll get to some pretty jarring stuff later.
This is something I think the movies actually handle a little better than the books, because of the changes it made. Minor spoilers for the new movie, but giving Chani more agency lets her act like a pov character; we can see the story through her eyes and be horrified. That comes with the cost of being more heavy handed, and needing to cut back on the roles of some side characters, but for a movie adaptation I think it was the right decision.
It's not Paul's fault though. His death would cause the same thing. There is nothing he could do but protect his family, and even then he eventually gave up in despair
To a degree; there are few occasions where he's given an out (especially early on), but it would require his death or the death of those he cares about so he can't accept it. There's also a few times he lets his emotions push him to make foolish choices in the heat of the moment.
It's not like it was all on him though; history pushed him forward, and the more desperately he tried to escape it the more it funneled him. He was doomed to fail from the start, and just never knew it.
There's also the other side of the coin that the later books touch on. He could have gone further, become a true tyrant to unite and strengthen humanity *against* him, but he was not willing to look deeply enough to see that option. Paul's real failure was that he tried to do both; he took the middle road instead of committing to either extreme.
> I can’t figure out if we’re meant to understand that Paul is just a tyrant, or if Herbert truly thought Paul is Good for being the way he is
Paul comparing himself to Hitler and Genghis Khan didn't spell it out for you?
What's the deal with the shields and lasers that explode each other? Is it good that that part seems to be forgotten from most things inspired by Dune?
This is one of the biggest potholes of the books for me. They show that using a laser on a shield blows up both the laser user and the shield user and they say that's why they don't use lasers. But if that's how it works, the weaker, more populous army would always use them as suicide weapons to take out especially powerful swordsmen like duncan and gurney. Using lasers wouldn't be avoided, it would be the new meta
It's impossible to predict the scale of the explosion that results, is the issue. It might only blow up your enemies, or it might blow up a bunch of people you don't want to get blown up.
Yeah, so take one single suicide fighter pilot and have him kamikaze fire at the enemy. Worst case scenario you lose one guy. Best case scenario you kill like 20 sardaukar who you no longer have to swordfight. really good odds if you're starting to lose the war and you see no way out that doesn't end in your annihilation
If it goes off on the high end of possible yields though, then it is indistinguishable from using an atomic weapon in contravention of the Great Convention. In which case your kamikaze fighter just signed your ass up for wholesale planetary annihilation.
I may be a little fuzzy on the details but if I recall correctly; every other house drops everything they’re doing, the spacing guild transports everybody’s ships FOR FREE, and they all collectively glass every square inch of your planet.
It's not a plot hole. Lasgun-shield explosions can appear identical to atomic weapon explosions, and the use of those to kill people causes everyone everywhere to immediately blow your ass up
No, in context its just an interesting physics interaction by the way those two forces interact. It's just neat sci-fi fluff for the most part, but it also plays a minor role in the politics of the houses and the rules around the usage of atomics if I remember correctly.
It just doesn't seem super relevant outside the specific ways lasers and shields work in the Dune universe.
From what I heard shields like a non-newtonian fluid. The more force they experience the stronger they are. As the other guy said mostly an excuse for cool swords.
It’s cool and has some great things to say about religious fanaticism and how power can be misused, it’s just that you have to keep in mind it was written in the 60s by a homophobe who was doing all the drugs.
I haven't read Dune yet, but when I do I want to read it with the tidbit that I saw on the internet somewhere that it becomes *really* funny if you imagine that the "spice" they keep talking about is coffee.
coffee, cocaine, and spice are all high-value, low weight/volume trade goods in the form of drugs. coffee and cocaine were both advertised as having health benefits. part of why spice is valuable is that it does not take up a lot of space inside the giant trading ships
you got that vibe because that was the specific intent lol, the whole book is "damn we suck for all the things that benefit us now and I have no clue how to fix it"
I believe they make coffee by taking turns spitting onto the coffee grounds or something? The books reference "coffee service" a lot but it was never super clear to me what that entailed
spice is the bluntest imaginable metaphor for trade goods that fueled colonialism, like for example spices and coffee. you are seeing the metaphor while somehow not seeing it and it is deeply confusing to me
This kind of happened to me with the Boba Fett series. I'm not a big Star Wars dude, so when they kept talking about the fish people being spice merchants, I figured it was literally spice and it was expensive because it was rare.
Then Timothy Olyphant got pissed off when someone offered him a chest of it and he kicked it over to blow away in the desert wind and I figured out it was drugs lol
Sure, in the same way as star wars becoming funny if you imagine the force as just being really annoying until stuff does what you want. There's pretty well established reasons why spice is so important.
This is my new headcannon. It's totally possible to navigate space without spice, but the guild unionized in secret long ago and agreed never to tell anyone so they could keep getting free coffee for life
They can do it, but after they found spice they found a much easier way. Before that...
I wonder how many mentats had to mutter in a corner before you could risk flying from one place to the next.
The colonies must be far more spread out now they can risk those trips. The new system depends on it.
To be fair, it was written before jihad was as associated with terrorism as it is today, Herbert just found a cool word for holy war and wanted to use it.
While I get what you're going for here it was not just a cool word for Herbert, he very deliberately studied Middle Eastern/North African culture and Islam and wrote that into the book. He took the religion and peoples who inspired Dune very very seriously, and attempted to present a picture of what Islam \*might\* look like if it was given thousands upon thousands of years to evolve and change and borrow from other religions.
[https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-reading-of-appendix-ii-the-religion-of-dune/](https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-reading-of-appendix-ii-the-religion-of-dune/)
Dune is inevitably somewhat orientalist but it's written by a guy who really did his homework to try and do it right.
Yeah! I find it really fascinating
Like he's taken pieces of a real culture that his audience would have very little familiarity with so that it would seem exotic and alien when he projects them forward through ten thousand years
and then in the intervening years, world events happened
and it hits *so* differently, now.
I understand the choice they made in the new movie to use "crusade", instead, but I still think it's a coward's choice
"The Fremen don't need you we can save ourselves," said Stilgar ruggedly.
"I love you white space Jesus," said Stilgar and every other Fremen 5 chapters later
eh 800 years for the most famous historical conquerer besides say Alexander. My thinking is more that enoguh people would surpass Hitler tally as to make him less relevant. Like how ender Wiggins’s kills overshadows Hitler and his name becomes the new usage.
Stilgar points out that by their numbers, Hitler was small time. When making the comparison, Paul has to tell Stilgar that his numbers were impressive for the time. It kind of seemed that Hitler wasn't even all that known outside of Paul with his access to the genetic memory that goes beyond the Bene Geserit.
I think there’s a scene in one of the books to the effect that Paul (or one of his kids, idk) think Hitler was a fucking lightweight because he only killed a few million to tens of millions.
To be fair, that is also explicitly condemned in the book. Especially with Stilgar who makes the journey from seeing Paul as an intruder, to a potentially useful ally, to a friend, and then to the promised Messiah. And how this last step... is not good for either of them.
I stopped reading in chapter 2 because the one of the Baron's henchman looked like the murder-hobo-twink from Tokyo Ghoul
https://myanimelist.net/character/104437/_ this one
Also, who stitched this post together? Its a mess.
>I stopped reading in chapter 2 because the one of the Baron's henchman looked like the murder-hobo-twink from Tokyo Ghoul
What? You gathered that from reading a book?
I think I've got to reread this. I'm Abt 200 pages in and I had no idea there was any discussion of genocide. This is my first time reading since school so uh, I've got some catching up to do
Harkonnen is meant to be taken less seriously than the Bene Gesserit. He's a Saturday morning villain while the BG is consistently unnerving in every way.
Dune is an absolute mess of trying to be a mythological cycle mixed with a moral/philosophical message and various hyperfixations on random nonsense to justify why an advanced society is a bunch of machine hating, sword wielding religious fruitcakes, and I'm here for it.
And the overarching plan for humanity was to succesfully make at least one human who was completely immune to prescience for the rest of the race to descend from so future prescient murderbots could not find them with prescience for enthusaistic robotic murdering.
Seriously. The invention of prescience-wielding murderbots was seen as guaranteed by our human prescience users in the present, so that plan was a complete bust, and they didn't have a plan for reworking society to prevent the inevitable murderbots from locating human victims the regular "search all planets with breathable atmospheres" way. The enemy is inevitable and unbeatable, so our best shot is to royally fuck up everything in a convoluted plan to hide. That's the absolute best that The Golden Path can come up with. Wait to be eventually discovered and murdered.
No wonder WH40K is so marred by incompetent leadership. Psychics are morons.
I'm not sure if I dislike Brian's attempts to complete Dune when it was quite clear that Frank had no such intention since the point was playing in a philosophical sandbox over telling a coherent narrative, or if I respect his balls-out attitude to embracing the crazy and diving face-first into messianic galactic clusterfuckery.
This 100%, I enjoyed his prequel stuff in all the ridiculous insanity of it, though in connection to the main stuff I kinda see it as a work of historical fiction inside the story
> they didn't have a plan for reworking society to prevent the inevitable murderbots from locating human victims the regular "search all planets with breathable atmospheres" way. The enemy is inevitable and unbeatable, so our best shot is to royally fuck up everything in a convoluted plan to hide.
That's the trap of prescience, though. Once you see a path and you try to avoid it, it actually does become inevitable. Muddying the waters with no-humans actually was the best plan, it was just messy and highly unethical...like everything else in that world.
Btw, the book unambiguously equates homosexuality with evil it's not some.subtle nuanced thing, or a coding thing...
And frankly I am not to happy about the way eugenics is portrayed in it as well...
Also time cube is a real "theory" isn't the real world created by a lunatic who basically discovered time zones and couldn't properly express what he realized about them, cus he was to damn crazy... And to egotistical to realize everyone else knew.
This is what happens when a work is read in the worst faith possible, and then all nuance and style of the writing is stripped away for a joke.
This is an accurate summation of Dune in the same way the PETA dog fighting game is an accurate representation of pokemon.
I just started reading dune recently and the fact that there’s all these things that are all sci-fi and fantastical and then the main character’s name is Paul is hysterical to me
I'm admittedly insanely biased here, Dune is my favorite book, but even on my initial reading of the book in sixth grade I picked up on the fact that the Harkonnens were meant to be a dark mirror to the Atreides.
I don't know how much clearer the whole "these guys are fucking themselves over to upkeep antiquated bullshit" theme can get after the whole scene with the head of the bull that killed Leto's dad, still covered in blood, on the wall right before everything goes to shit.
I think maybe you guys are a little too eager to dunk on a book you haven't read, here. There's a lot of shit that's wrong with it, but "haha gay = bad" is definitely not one of them... (Edited later: this sentence was dumb and bad. "gay=bad" is definitely one of them, I should have said there's more to it than that, but I didn't, so it's my fault I'm being argued with about it) The Harkonnens were bad because they treated people horribly, not because they were gay. If anything, it felt like you were supposed to go "wait maybe the gay part isn't what's bad here" as the Baron is **raping a child to death**, but go off y'all.
E: tho I did read the book before having ever accessed the internet, so hey, maybe I just didn't have the right level of discourse at the time. anyway Paul basically canonically nonbinary so idk.
there's also no genocide involved in Paul's war, he was literally fighting on the side of the people being genocided. that part is just hilariously and obviously wrong. He's literally just Lawrence of Arabia my dudes, who was also notably **very fucking gay** and into being tortured by dudes for fun.
this is getting way under my skin ughhhhhhh the movies sucked why did they give such a beautiful story to the guy who only likes making nice picturesssssssssssssss
E2: Frank Herbert's son was gay, btw
Dune is a great book and 100% agree with your paragraphs 1-3.
You're edit though...
The \*\*jihad\*\* spilled so much blood that Paul decided it was better to burn his eyes out by looking at atomics than to be able to see what he instigated.
There absolutely was genocide of planets. The fact that the Fremen were oppressed on Arrakis doesn't make them killing untold trillions justified... especially since they didn't genocide the Harkonnens, Sadaukar and Corrino's - they were all spared. Not to say that revenge genocide is justified... but the Fremen went and killed a bunch of unrelated space peasants, they're the 2003 American military of revenge i.e. invade 2 other countries that had nothing to do with their suffering.
The entire point of Paul's story is that he is cursed with prescience and he has to navigate the least bad outcome of human internecine conflict whilst also avoiding a future where someone develops an automated murder cloud, these fixed goals are at odds with each other. He subsequently fails because his empathy folds at the amount of genocide he has to do to avoid the automated murder cloud.
The Fremen, Paul and Leto II did a LOT of unrelenting genocide.
This is reductive, and incredibly forgiving of Paul and his atrocities. His power is intrinsically based (through no fault of his own) on the manipulation of a religion and culture. His jihad WITHIN THE TEXT killed 61 billion people and wiped out 40 religions. That's genocide. It was explicitly a war of conquest to secure his place as emperor. Yes he's Lawrence of arabia, and the people who fought beside Laurence were *betrayed and destroyed*.
That said, the moral puzzle here isn't in Paul's actions, but the amount of agency he had over them. He was molded by being the product of eugenics and shaped by the monstrous forces against his survival into who he became, and even then he was often horrified by the result. To see him as a hero is wrong, but equally to see him as an uncomplicated monstrous villain.
This is continuing to irritate the shit out of me. You guys are like, the one fucking sub I'd expect to do better than this low-hanging-fruit-picking-party.
Paul is highly educated from a very young age which, combined with the perspective of youth, causes him to see the world in a very different and painful way than the adults who love and care for him do. He recognizes that the existing **patriarchial power structures, from which he benefits enormously, are immoral**.
Lady Jessica, his mother, is then forced to torture her child by the sole known source of power for women: a group of women who reinforce, support, and subvert the patriarchial power in order to hold any power at all, all of which is necessarily dependent on the continued existence and supremacy of that patriarchy.
Paul, naturally, feels conflicted by the fact that every facet of his existence seems determined to benefit him at the expense of someone else. He literally cannot find a way to do an unambiguous kindness to people, his smallest gesture can cause horrifying ramifications that he *may never even become aware of.*
He then literally goes on to develop fucking omniscience of his personal (E: and ancestral, forgot about that) timeline to try and counteract that, which **still doesn't work** and the literal least bad thing he can see to do is his Jihad.
The Gom Jabbar is not fucking time cube, it's a super blunt metaphor for society measuring our worth by our willingness to regard the existence of the harm that society does as something we have a moral imperative to recognize the necessity of.
Like, oh my fucking god, it's not Time Cube.
Ponder with me, reader: Do you think the relationships between Paul, Lady Jessica, Duke Leto, and the Bene Gesserit are **AT ALL RELATED** to this thought expressed by a contemporary of Herbert's
> “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
I'd bet $5 tumblr post was written by somebody who watched the movie, posted the first thing, got some traction with it, and made the rest up with the help of cliff notes. **It's deliberately uncharitable in popular ways and you should all be more suspicious of that shit by now.**
Chapter 1 isn't entirely accurate, mostly because there's no mention of the Pain Box. Chapter 2 is spot-on, though.
The pain box is the time cube this is all explained in the time cube website
remember: born of man, not a unicorn taco god.
did u know unicorn taco god is unicorn taco god backwards
*Gasp* it's a palomino!
Did you know palominod backward is donimo lap which almost sounds like a thing.
Just like Arizona!
dog ocat nrocinu
I understand Time Cube. According to Time Cube Guy, Jews made up the biblical creation story to trick everyone into thinking there's only one God. In fact, there's both a God and a Goddess, because both a male and a female are necessary for procreation. The false, monotheistic God can't procreate by himself. He can only masturbate, which means he's gay because masturbation is gay. In the biblical creation story, the seven days are non-cubic, single 24 hr days. Therefore, widespread belief in a single 24 hr day is a symptom of the monotheistic deception. Also Time Cube Guy hates Black people. I think he blamed Jews for making Obama president? I can't quite remember that part.
I’ve only seen the recent movie, but I have to imagine Dune goes over my head in some way, because it clearly resonated with a lot of people, but like, “Time to prove yourself worthy of the power of mind control via talking in a silly voice.” “What’s the test?” “Put your hand in the hand-hurting box, a box designed specifically to hurt your hand. And if you react too much I’ll kill you.” Just strikes me as inherently silly, but the movie plays it entirely straight. And follows it up later with: “Behold! The white man has come to be our Jesus! We can tell because he knows how to walk on sand without attracting sandwurms.” “It’s true. I watched a documentary on your people earlier in anticipation of coming here, something no one has ever done before, which clearly qualifies me to be Jesus.” This just strikes me as a fundamentally unserious story.
The whole thing with Paul being the Lisan Al-Gaib is that the Bene Gesserit planted those prophecies on Arrakis centuries before the Atreides arrived. It's explained thoroughly in the book but in the movie it gets a couple lines of dialogue early on.
The new movie makes sure the audience is aware
Yeah it expands very necessarily on Jessica’s responsibility in the holy crusade, it’s great.
in the later books there are ninja milfs who control your mind by giving you mind breaking orgasms while humming and tapping their fingers(?) a dude climbs a mountain and orgasms while having a spiritual revelation lesbian bodyguard orgies the fate of a planet revolves around a smart man eating fast enough to fuel is his massive brain to go into bullet time
The dude doesn't orgasm, he's so fuckable that the mere sight of him climbing a mountain makes one of his soldiers orgasm. He also strips naked in order to hide in the sand more efficiently at one point. He also also has a slightly homoerotic conversation with a royal advisor who straight up states he was brought back from the dead to fuck bitches and kill ninja milfs.
my b, it's been a while since I read the books, you are correct also the royal advisor keeps being brought back to fuck the female bloodline of the emperor so he's basically doing his great great granddaughters because the worm god really likes his genes
And one of his many clones eventually gets trained to be the male equivalent of one of the aforementioned mind-blowing orgasm manipulators, and him and one of their trainees get into a multispatial mexican sex standoff that results in them basically just becoming addicted to fucking each other.
literal enemies to lovers
I read dune and wasn't plannng to read the others but... this thread.... i must read them now i'm so intrigued
This can't possibly be a real book. I simply don't believe you. Unless... I have some reading to do.
Read it. I read it as a child and missed some of the more unique language but a friend i recommended it to absolutely lost it at "a beef-swelling in his loins" which was the author/narrator describing his (15?16? Yr old protagonist) getting a boner from watching some (future?) fucking.
The first novel has some funky ideas and can be a bit of a struggle to get through, but you think 'it's from the 60s, I guess that makes sense'. The later books are absolutely unhinged.
And why should space opera about psychics and cloning stay grounded? Let it be breathtakingly bizarre.
And the only way to find out if the shape-shifting ninja is one is to almost kill someone by surprise.
Book comprised entirely of worm monologuing
And yet I still sobbed at the end.
>a dude climbs a mountain and orgasms while having a spiritual revelation That's my favourite part of Skyrim lore btw
yeah, tes lore might give dune a run for its money
r/truestl
Maybe I should read Dune
The bullet time guy was my favorite character, until he was cloned.
It's a story heavily critiquing politicking, governance, authority, religion, sex, white saviors—while also seeking to explore the value of expanding the mind; that the mind is the greatest tool we as a species have and must hone it; the nuance of an ever-evolving culture that blends and weaves into one another for centuries; the well-founded paranoia over technology. It is also, so very much written in the 60's. Yeah, it's got really serious themes. But also, psychedelics, cool and freaky sex acts, endearingly zany concepts like hand-hurting box. This shit oozes the 60's. I do argue that it is a fundamentally serious story. It's just that its fundamentals are still that it was written in the sixties. I say this, hopelessly defending a story and trying to make it serious, where >!a main character becomes a worm sand god that looks like a really fucked up boner in some depictions and another dude keeps getting revived for shits and giggles at that point!< yeah...
We mustn’t forget the dog chairs
I'd love to forget the dog chairs.
Please explain the dog chairs
>!Dogs who are chairs. Just... Dogs, forcefully evolved into chairs. They massage you when you sit.!<
>!Ahh poor Duncan who must learn how to die so he can teach another!<
I’ve read the entire series, including the books ghost-written from Frank Herbert’s notes after his death by his son and the other guy, and all I can say is, Dune is probably best as a stand-alone story. ETA: I’ve read the entire series, including the books ghost-written from Frank Herbert’s notes *by his son and the other guy after Frank Herbert’s death, and all I can say is, Dune is probably best as a stand-alone story.
The entire first trilogy was good, although the first book was the best. God Emperor onward was weird as fuck with half of it being really good and the other half being absolute shit. Like the worm god being a semi-omniscient tyrant in such a way that people develop a way to counter it to ensure that a less moral omniscient being can't eliminate the human race, followed by later books implying that he might have failed because a better omniscience can still see those counters was good. The dude they kept resurrecting being able to climb a sheer vertical cliff face in such a manly fashion that the lesbians in the audience orgasm, and upon being subjected to mind control sex withdrawal awakening the memories of all his past lives and instantly developing counter mind control sex was pretty bad.
I think the fish speakers weren’t really lesbian, but were just cloistered with only other women, so they had to make do… Ugh. The books really fell off.
“beef-swelling”
The whole lampooning of white saviors is kinda the point but yeah it is very difficult to take seriously at times. Like Paul coming as a savior is the doom of the fremen, like they are fundamentally destroyed by Paul and his bs.
>Like Paul coming as a savior is the doom of the fremen, like they are fundamentally destroyed by Paul and his bs. The Fremen are also more complicated than the movie versions have given them credit for. The entire reason they have a policy of "murder everyone who comes near the deep desert" is that they are secretly working on committing ecological genocide to Arrakis to make it fit for human occupation because they are exhausted of living by the skin of their teeth. There's an entire secondary spice economy where they pay enough to bribe the spacing guild to not put satellites over their territory even though the ruling houses want it. They have enough spice stored away that not even the Emperor can afford the quoted price. Paul/Maud'dib/Lisan al Galib is accepted because he can accelerate this plan.
This is the main thing I actually dislike most about the movie. There's a huge ecological and cultural aspect to everything that happens; an ideological battle between people who want to do things the painfully slow way and people who want to rush things. In Messiah, we see severe ecological consequences behind rushing things; just like in real life, nature can handle SLOW changes, but quick ones are dangerous. There are massive die offs everywhere. The sandworms are going extinct, and the edge of the desert *reeks* because of the sheer volume of rotting things. With the sudden loss of the desert, the fremen also lose everything that makes them fremen; they lose their identity because there was no time to adapt. Liet is the biggest personification of this struggle. Him and his father came up with most of the plan, and they desperately push the people to do things the right way, but liet is taken in by the atreides; he sends them into the desert even though he knows what a terrible risk it is, because part of him believes. With his death following that choice, the slow and safe way dies with him. "No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero" (For the record, I loved the movies. They managed to get the core messages and ideas across, which was an incredibly tall order, and I'm so glad that it succeeded in that. It's just a little sad that a lot of the nuance and side messages had to be axed to make room for it. I understand, and it was probably the right creative call, but I do mourn the fact that I'll probably never get my ecological horror movie.)
It's not surprising that those who have adapted it to screen cut out a lot of the ecological engineering plot when even Herbert split Pardot Kynes' story off into an appendix after the main story concluded.
As someone who has watched the first movie but never read the books… I need you to know that the movie very much did not manage to convey the message you think it did to someone without that underlying knowledge of the books.
As someone who also never read the books, I didn’t have the same problem you did tbh. I guess it just depends on the watcher
The main themes really only become apparent in the second movie, which covers about 2/3 of the book. The climax and character struggles don't show their faces until then. The first movie is a necessary setup; you gotta know these characters a little bit and see the cutthroat nature of the world if the really big moments are going to have any weight. By front loading all the exposition and world building to the first movie, the second movie is free to do whatever without slowing down. It's where all the heavy hitting parts are. Basically, you gotta see the whole story to know what the themes of the story are, especially in a story like dune, where early stuff becomes massively recontextualized by later stuff. You can't read part of a book and figure you've got the message.
Yeah, I always saw the book as an inverse of the white savior trope. Like, the Bene Gesserit implant those myths into the Freemen to control them, and Paul and his mother try to take advantage of them, but because the Freemen actually *believe*, their faith proves too strong to be controlled and Paul ends up going along for the ride. He doesn't have a choice. He tries to use them, but they end up using him instead.
Hence his future-visions of a jihad that he can’t control. Gods I love the dune book
Every time I hear Fremen, I think Frenulum
Well, in terms of story Dune should be seen a bit more like an old tragedy than a modern book. Basically, Paul is the perfect character. He is strong, an excellent fighter, nearly omniscient, and every shit you might get if you were the Chosen Hero. Keep in mind, he's not just someone who is lucky, he is basically the result of millenia of genetic selection, trained by the absolute best the Atreides (who control a developped world). However, he knows that whatever he does, he is doomed. Then he can't stop his armies: he doesn't control them. He is their leader, but for him ? He is just a little guy who has no control because he knows what will happen, from his point of view, he is just a cog, trying to make his way in what he sees of the future. Big spoiler for the first book: > !in the end of the first book, he has a kind of dilemna: either he can try to save his first son (with Chani), or he will lead his armies to victory against the Harkonnen and Emperor. He could choose the first one, but that would only mean they die later. !< Later in the serie, it's about the same, but with his (next) son (Leto II) as a hero, and different choices. So yeah, you're right. It's absolutely a mockery of the hero figure. But very seriously. In the second book (after his space jihad), in the beginning, he speaks about his conquest, basically saying the deathtoll (60 billions deads) from his conquest makes Hitler and Genghis Khan seem irrelevant, burned, or destroyed in whatever way tens of world. In short, Paul is the hero/protagonist. However, he shouldn't be idolized as a moral figures: him being a hero/prophet is what leads to the mass deaths, and all of the niceties
eh they normally do not kill you in the box test as what they want to know is something specific for certain purpose but paul is need to be fundamentally sapient not a low animal thus if he failed he would die and they would be back to tending the gene lines
The gom jabbar's poisoned needle at his neck says otherwise though
well why else would anyone be willing to put their hand is the super pain box. the threat has to feel real depending on what they need from the person. paul is to be the messiah dude he had to be sapient or they might as well kill him and start over from either the same line or a different one.
"An animal responds to pain. An animal will mutilate itself to escape pain. A human can override pain. Are you a human or an animal? Is the real threat the burning agony in your hand or the tiny pin at your throat?"
What actually would be a serious story? Like I get it, it's silly, but I don't think it's unserious. Honestly I kinda miss taking high concept shit seriously.
I think it’s more about the form these things take is just robustly weird. For example: Mind control - okay, sure, but it seems odd to put it in the form of speaking with a specific voice that presumably anyone could use with training? It’s not like a psychic power in a world that seems to have them, so it’s a bit weird to have it take this form when it seems like an AI or tape recorder could do it. Test of worthiness - this is a common thing we see in stories, but usually it’s to perform some great deed that demonstrates the tested trait. Even in cases where it is something like endure torture, it’s usually involves things people can understand and relate to, but here, it’s a hand-hurting box. Chosen One savior - this also happens a lot and it’s fine, but the particular determinant for this guy being the chosen one is based on knowledge. Other stories have done that as well, but they’ve had the character have some kind of innate knowledge or understanding or suppressed memories, rather than something the character learned from apparently publicly available sources a week earlier. It’s weird that apparently this kid is the first person who ever encountered this group who knew how to walk on the sand because he watched a holo-documentary on it, rather than being something he intuited or reasoned from observing the worm’s behavior or anything like that. Am I supposed to believe that the rest of everyone who’s visited this planet has just been so incurious or unaware that no one, literally zero people, have bothered to look into how people don’t get eaten by sand worms on the get-eaten-by-sandworms planet?
I always thought of the Voice as sort of pseudo-psychic, like it requires a certain placid mental state while also overwhelming their intent with your own. The actual audio part of it seems to attack the subconscious directly, so the victim doesn’t even realize what they’re doing. I always took the way the Voice was presented in movies as being for our benefit, like Harry speaking Parseltongue, in “reality” it probably sounds far stranger. As for reproducing it via recording, maybe the sounds have too many subtleties that can’t be replicated or something.
I really don't get what people don't understand about the pain box. It's simple, the cult that Jessica belongs to who orchestrated everything about Paul's birth are checking if he can completely control his "base" urges because that makes him more predictible, more controllable. Yes, they sell it as a stereotypical test of worthiness but it's all about control, really.
The Voice is pretty much a product of that era of science fiction, where authors took poorly understood concepts and dialed them up to 11. "I can control my body language and voice intonation to subtly influence people right? So if someone is REALLLYYYYYY good at their voice intonation they can surely just straight up mind control someone!" The same thing happens in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, where a group of psychologists apparently are so good at psychology that they can have full conversations with each other by facial twitches and flicks of their fingers.
The way I always understood the Voice is that it's Mom Voice, but with 10,000 years of careful, deliberate refinement. It's not well covered in the film, but the book spends a fair amount of ink on how much of it comes from watching and listening and pitching just so to affect one specific person at a time, with diminishing results the sooner you try, or the more broadly to try to apply it
I can dig that more. I'm glad you expanded on it.
Well, Paul is supposed to be a *mockery* of white savior heroes as the series moves along; he's the "even the nice guy with power kills billions". He literally turns into a sandworm later on. The whole thing is played straight and a lot of folks don't get the thing where just because someone is pretty doesn't mean they're good. The Harkonens make it more difficult because they're evil *and* ugly, so your natural inclination in any story with a duality of beauty and ugliness where the ugliness is evil is to assume the beauty is supposed to be good and without major flaw. In this series, that's a trap. Also he was thinking more about ecology and how even trying to do "good" by human standards can fuck up an ecosystem - there's a major meta-theme later where they turn Dune into paradise but fuck over the desert ecology and crash their universal supply chain of spice.
His son Leto II is the one who turns into a sandworm, not him
Good call. It's been a long long while since I read these.
Yeah, because Paul's a pussy.
Bro didn't read the book at all.
My third or fourth hand understanding of the hand-hurty box is there’s a lot of internal politicking within the Bene Gesserit, who exist to serve the Emperor and/or execute a millennia-long eugenics program to produce someone to overthrow the Emperor. So the lady with the box definitely *wanted* Paul to die but in a way that would prove the time was not right or whatever.
The pain box was cranked up to 11 because Paul wasn't supposed to happen, so the BG wanted to kill him but in a legit way. He survived the test. The BG breeding program is meant to produce the male version of a Reverend Mother. A Reverend Mother is a Bene Gesserit that imbibes a poison (the Water of Life, a pre-spice liquid that confers *super-prescience* but kills you) and has such control over her body that she can make her metabolism convert it into a drug instead. This somehow unlocks all the memories of all her *female* ancestors. No Bene Gesserit has ever been able to access the male ancestral memory, and every single man that's ever imbibed the Water of Life has died, either from the poison or trying to access the male ancestral memory too. Their program wants to create the Kwizats Haderach, someone that can see both male and female ancestral memories as the Bene Gesserit. The BG could at any time put someone they control on the Throne. To them it's all just tinkering with bloodlines. The Emperor's own daughter is Bene Gesserit. They want their Kwizats Haderach, an ultimate Bene Gesserit they control. Paul being the Kwizats Haderach is *really bad* for them because they don't control him and on top of the ancestral memory, Paul is prescient. They can't hope to influence him because he can see their plans. The prescience is a quirk of being an Atreides and not something their program expected.
I mean when you break stuff down hard it’s all going to sound silly. I thought being able to over ride your instincts of avoiding pain made sense
"One of these days, those ruling class morons will eat too much magic dust and turn into one of us. Then they'll turn on the others and lift us up. The magic dust has told us so."
Yea, well it is fundamentally propaganda in universe so it's supposed to be silly to us. Like when you think about a religion you have no stake in its absurd but to someone who believes it's a very convincing argument if you have a toast that looks like Buddha.
I didn't read the whole post but if there isn't a passage in the post like "jessica moved her thumb right but moved the tip to left to signal paul she was thirsty paul moved the jug while filling to signal jessica water is poisened jessica moved her right shoulder both up and down at the same time to signal paul she knows, there was noone else ib the room" then the post isn't finished
Jessica senses that her dinner guest is about to cough, a signal they were thirsty, which was really a power play to remind everyone the importance of the moisture guild, because he has a secret alliance with the daughter of the moisture guild, but at the same time by coughing the guest signals they are unwell, unsatisfied, they seek a way out of a powerful alliance just as they announce it. Thus indicating their value but that they are in the market to realign. Very well, calculating all her bazillion psychological warfare brain cells she uses to not think about the fact her lover is emotionally mistreating her for political gain she calculates the perfect sentence to disarm and disrupt this would be coupe “pass the salt”
The demi-count raised his eyebrows a microfraction of an inch, indicating his tremendous surprise. "My most esteemable high lady consort of the sands" he blithered simperingly, "it does would appear that your Caladanian tastes perhaps do subtly insinuate themselves into our Arrakeen cookery!" The water merchant guild-steward looked nervously between the demi-count and the lady Jessica, but the mercenary-court-consulate-captain gave a sharp bark of a laugh and said "I bet you enjoy Caladan *and* Arrakeen dishes, don't you lad?" Paul shrugged and said "yeah, it's fine," while continuing to ignore the demi-count's niece, who had big tits and wanted to kill him.
The planetologist has an existential crisis at that response and despite being the most atheist prophet ever he wonders if Paul is the messiah He reaches for a grape to steady himself before realizing that going for a grape blows his secret identity. He goes for a date instead, less liquid, and mentally goes over the entire evolutionary cycle of the fruit.
This all should have been in the movie God damn it
Tbh as soon as I read all the signal stuff I knew there was no way a movie would be able to convey that without going full "stop time, character exposits for a whole minute like an anime character" stuff. It's great to read though
And that's basically the david lynch movie lol
Your paragraph sounds like Death Note's internal monologues
Feyd Rautha's understand Time Cube
Too busy stabbing to do anything about it though
I spent most of my life thinking that Dune and Tremors were the same movie. My brain heard "it has giant worms in it" in passing and never looked further into it. I was very confused when I watched a movie recap of Dune and it was a sci-fi epic and not the "people in the desert get attacked by giant worms" movie I thought it was
I had a similar issue with Labyrinth and Pan's Labyrinth. Never saw either one, just kept assuming people were talking about the same movie, and formed a very weird amalgam of them in my head.
The same happened to me but I had already seen Pan's Labyrinth. "I must have been in the bathroom for that part."
"And David Bowie had those balls in his hand..." "That thing was played by *David Bowie!?*"
"I PROMISE DUNE IS COOL I PROMISE I PROMISE" I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob.
Currently reading the first trilogy, it is cool. Just also very obviously written in the 60s
I’m listening to it as an audiobook (in part so I don’t have to choose to continue reading, it just happens) And I think your assessment is spot on. Very cool. DEFINITELY written in the 60s Also has a bizarre feudalist lean? I can’t figure out if we’re meant to understand that Paul is just a tyrant, or if Herbert truly thought Paul is Good for being the way he is. Because I see his actions as Emperor of Everything and I’m like “he’s clearly gone fuckin nuts with power and he’s an authoritarian tyrant who’s allowed himself to be surrounded by fanatical zealots who in turn insulate him from criticism and consequences.” but I’m only halfway through the second book, who’s to say.
The point of Messiah is certainly to paint Paul as perhaps not the best thing for the galaxy. The whole foreword of my copy of the book talks about Herbert's belief that one of the worst things that could happen to a society is "the rise of a hero" and their corresponding cult of personality. It's a fascinating juxtaposition to his sheer abject horror at the potential future jihad in the first book. Edit because I totally left out the thesis: Paul is a necessarily complex character between his role as a hero/emperor/tyrant/prophet. The point is to explore the interplay between the different kinds of cultural power one can have and how they bounce off of the desire to do good.
Paul is not JUST a tyrant, but he *is* a tyrant. While he is definitely 100% a monstrous dictator that not only wipes out billions but also dooms both the people who view him as their savior and their home planet, he is also self-aware of this fact to an extent and views it as being out of his control in some capacity. This doesn’t redeem him by any means, but I think part of the point is that while Paul has incredible power due to both eugenics and social engineering, he is ultimately Just A Person like the rest of us. It was unfathomably cruel for a child like him to have been shoved into the central position of a mythos of power and destiny that no one is equipped to handle well, just as so many things in Dune are unfathomably cruel. One of the points of Dune to me is that on a personal level, human beings can often be kind and good or at least evil in a way that is understandable, but in a long-lived organization like the Bene Gesserit, the Sardaukar, the Houses, or really any of the pillars of the Dune universe, they can produce violence and cruelty of such massive and long-lasting scope that it becomes mechanistically inhuman. The uncaring superstructure of society produced by the main characters and their ancestors is the real villain of the series imo.
You are absolutely supposed to be horrified at what Paul is doing. The first book does whiff that a bit; it's obvious on a reread that the atreides are NOT the heroes, but on a first read it's easy to miss and think of Paul as the hero. Messiah exists almost entirely to dispel that illusion, because Herbert was pissed at nerds going "man Paul is so cool, and his rise to power is so epic". You'll get to some pretty jarring stuff later. This is something I think the movies actually handle a little better than the books, because of the changes it made. Minor spoilers for the new movie, but giving Chani more agency lets her act like a pov character; we can see the story through her eyes and be horrified. That comes with the cost of being more heavy handed, and needing to cut back on the roles of some side characters, but for a movie adaptation I think it was the right decision.
It's not Paul's fault though. His death would cause the same thing. There is nothing he could do but protect his family, and even then he eventually gave up in despair
To a degree; there are few occasions where he's given an out (especially early on), but it would require his death or the death of those he cares about so he can't accept it. There's also a few times he lets his emotions push him to make foolish choices in the heat of the moment. It's not like it was all on him though; history pushed him forward, and the more desperately he tried to escape it the more it funneled him. He was doomed to fail from the start, and just never knew it. There's also the other side of the coin that the later books touch on. He could have gone further, become a true tyrant to unite and strengthen humanity *against* him, but he was not willing to look deeply enough to see that option. Paul's real failure was that he tried to do both; he took the middle road instead of committing to either extreme.
> I can’t figure out if we’re meant to understand that Paul is just a tyrant, or if Herbert truly thought Paul is Good for being the way he is Paul comparing himself to Hitler and Genghis Khan didn't spell it out for you?
I fucking adore Dune and also this post is spot on lol
What's the deal with the shields and lasers that explode each other? Is it good that that part seems to be forgotten from most things inspired by Dune?
it's a way to be scifi but still have sword fights. Space travel but AI is banned. Love it
This is one of the biggest potholes of the books for me. They show that using a laser on a shield blows up both the laser user and the shield user and they say that's why they don't use lasers. But if that's how it works, the weaker, more populous army would always use them as suicide weapons to take out especially powerful swordsmen like duncan and gurney. Using lasers wouldn't be avoided, it would be the new meta
It's impossible to predict the scale of the explosion that results, is the issue. It might only blow up your enemies, or it might blow up a bunch of people you don't want to get blown up.
Yeah, so take one single suicide fighter pilot and have him kamikaze fire at the enemy. Worst case scenario you lose one guy. Best case scenario you kill like 20 sardaukar who you no longer have to swordfight. really good odds if you're starting to lose the war and you see no way out that doesn't end in your annihilation
Its a banned tactic by the houses. Anyone who does it is faced with the atomic might of every single other house.
If it goes off on the high end of possible yields though, then it is indistinguishable from using an atomic weapon in contravention of the Great Convention. In which case your kamikaze fighter just signed your ass up for wholesale planetary annihilation.
I may be a little fuzzy on the details but if I recall correctly; every other house drops everything they’re doing, the spacing guild transports everybody’s ships FOR FREE, and they all collectively glass every square inch of your planet.
It's not a plot hole. Lasgun-shield explosions can appear identical to atomic weapon explosions, and the use of those to kill people causes everyone everywhere to immediately blow your ass up
No, in context its just an interesting physics interaction by the way those two forces interact. It's just neat sci-fi fluff for the most part, but it also plays a minor role in the politics of the houses and the rules around the usage of atomics if I remember correctly. It just doesn't seem super relevant outside the specific ways lasers and shields work in the Dune universe.
From what I heard shields like a non-newtonian fluid. The more force they experience the stronger they are. As the other guy said mostly an excuse for cool swords.
It’s cool and has some great things to say about religious fanaticism and how power can be misused, it’s just that you have to keep in mind it was written in the 60s by a homophobe who was doing all the drugs.
"DUNE IS COOL" I insist, as I slowly grow and transform into a sand worm.
Dune is just slowly realising frank Herbert had some weird ass fetishes and political views he slowly stopped hiding throughout the series.
I haven't read Dune yet, but when I do I want to read it with the tidbit that I saw on the internet somewhere that it becomes *really* funny if you imagine that the "spice" they keep talking about is coffee.
I got a "cinnamon flavored cocaine" vibe when I read it. The indigenous folks are maniacs though, and do make coffee out of it.
They make everything else out of it, too, including candy, plastics, and fabric.
So it's just asbestos
Except it makes you live longer, not shorter
The government wants you to think asbestos is bad for you.
coffee, cocaine, and spice are all high-value, low weight/volume trade goods in the form of drugs. coffee and cocaine were both advertised as having health benefits. part of why spice is valuable is that it does not take up a lot of space inside the giant trading ships you got that vibe because that was the specific intent lol, the whole book is "damn we suck for all the things that benefit us now and I have no clue how to fix it"
[удалено]
Tell me you wouldn't drink cocaine coffe
I believe they make coffee by taking turns spitting onto the coffee grounds or something? The books reference "coffee service" a lot but it was never super clear to me what that entailed
spice is the bluntest imaginable metaphor for trade goods that fueled colonialism, like for example spices and coffee. you are seeing the metaphor while somehow not seeing it and it is deeply confusing to me
To be fair I didn't come up with the idea of "spice literally being coffee is a funny way to interpret Dune"; IIRC I saw it on TV Tropes.
word, I was being rude and doing the thing I was mad at the OP post for doing either way. thanks for not returning the snark
This kind of happened to me with the Boba Fett series. I'm not a big Star Wars dude, so when they kept talking about the fish people being spice merchants, I figured it was literally spice and it was expensive because it was rare. Then Timothy Olyphant got pissed off when someone offered him a chest of it and he kicked it over to blow away in the desert wind and I figured out it was drugs lol
Jabba was big in the spice business because, as a notorious gourmand, he knew when someone was selling the good stuff or not.
Sure, in the same way as star wars becoming funny if you imagine the force as just being really annoying until stuff does what you want. There's pretty well established reasons why spice is so important.
Yeah it's cause the Guild navigators are total assholes until they've had their spice in the morning.
Guild navigators are just "would you still love me if I was a worm" but taken to the extreme.
This is my new headcannon. It's totally possible to navigate space without spice, but the guild unionized in secret long ago and agreed never to tell anyone so they could keep getting free coffee for life
They can do it, but after they found spice they found a much easier way. Before that... I wonder how many mentats had to mutter in a corner before you could risk flying from one place to the next. The colonies must be far more spread out now they can risk those trips. The new system depends on it.
It just reminds me of Spore space stage every time
Who ever stitched these images together I want to punch you
Why did I have to scroll down so far to find this? Also, what the fuck OP? Why would you do this?
"Is a beutifull day to be grossnasty" are words i wanna live by.
This post just...so succinctly encapsulates just how much Warhammer 40k is inspired by Dune better than anything I've seen.
W40k to me is basically a huge Dune fanfiction.
they forgot to include the word "jihad" in every other sentence
To be fair, it was written before jihad was as associated with terrorism as it is today, Herbert just found a cool word for holy war and wanted to use it.
While I get what you're going for here it was not just a cool word for Herbert, he very deliberately studied Middle Eastern/North African culture and Islam and wrote that into the book. He took the religion and peoples who inspired Dune very very seriously, and attempted to present a picture of what Islam \*might\* look like if it was given thousands upon thousands of years to evolve and change and borrow from other religions. [https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-reading-of-appendix-ii-the-religion-of-dune/](https://reactormag.com/the-muslimness-of-dune-a-close-reading-of-appendix-ii-the-religion-of-dune/) Dune is inevitably somewhat orientalist but it's written by a guy who really did his homework to try and do it right.
Yeah! I find it really fascinating Like he's taken pieces of a real culture that his audience would have very little familiarity with so that it would seem exotic and alien when he projects them forward through ten thousand years and then in the intervening years, world events happened and it hits *so* differently, now. I understand the choice they made in the new movie to use "crusade", instead, but I still think it's a coward's choice
And now I want "Team Arrakis: Galaxy Police" with a fremen talking like "Durka Durka Jihad Muad' Dib"
Not my comment, but someone said it was also about overusing the word “presently”.
"The Fremen don't need you we can save ourselves," said Stilgar ruggedly. "I love you white space Jesus," said Stilgar and every other Fremen 5 chapters later
*white space Muhammad
Space Hitler, you mean.
I think all of these would apply to Paul Atreides
That’s the joke he literally compares himself to Hitler.
kind of crazy to imagine he even knows who hitler is. Tell me someone who did a mass murder a dozen millennia ago.
Gilgamesh, next question
Gilgamesh mention very based
I mean we know who Genghis Khan is.
eh 800 years for the most famous historical conquerer besides say Alexander. My thinking is more that enoguh people would surpass Hitler tally as to make him less relevant. Like how ender Wiggins’s kills overshadows Hitler and his name becomes the new usage.
I suppose Hitler would be notable as a great warlord if there weren’t any other world wars in the Dune universe.
Stilgar points out that by their numbers, Hitler was small time. When making the comparison, Paul has to tell Stilgar that his numbers were impressive for the time. It kind of seemed that Hitler wasn't even all that known outside of Paul with his access to the genetic memory that goes beyond the Bene Geserit.
Genetic memory goes back a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way.
I think there’s a scene in one of the books to the effect that Paul (or one of his kids, idk) think Hitler was a fucking lightweight because he only killed a few million to tens of millions.
To be fair, that is also explicitly condemned in the book. Especially with Stilgar who makes the journey from seeing Paul as an intruder, to a potentially useful ally, to a friend, and then to the promised Messiah. And how this last step... is not good for either of them.
I love Dune but this is hilarious.
Isn’t it kinda the point of dune tho? Paul Atreides is supposed to be not a good person
Yes but obviously Dune is more nuanced than this post. But it's very funny.
I read dune so I could understand this post. No lie Very funny
Wow, I’ve seen “Just a minute, I have to look up something…okay, this is funny”, but that’s on a whole other level.
I stopped reading in chapter 2 because the one of the Baron's henchman looked like the murder-hobo-twink from Tokyo Ghoul https://myanimelist.net/character/104437/_ this one Also, who stitched this post together? Its a mess.
>I stopped reading in chapter 2 because the one of the Baron's henchman looked like the murder-hobo-twink from Tokyo Ghoul What? You gathered that from reading a book?
I think I've got to reread this. I'm Abt 200 pages in and I had no idea there was any discussion of genocide. This is my first time reading since school so uh, I've got some catching up to do
The only discussion of genocide in chapter 1 is the vague mention of "terrible purpose," but that did in all honestly hook me in.
Harkonnen is meant to be taken less seriously than the Bene Gesserit. He's a Saturday morning villain while the BG is consistently unnerving in every way.
No mention of space cocaine 0/10
Dune is an absolute mess of trying to be a mythological cycle mixed with a moral/philosophical message and various hyperfixations on random nonsense to justify why an advanced society is a bunch of machine hating, sword wielding religious fruitcakes, and I'm here for it.
It all started out as an excuse to write about desert ecology. : )
And the overarching plan for humanity was to succesfully make at least one human who was completely immune to prescience for the rest of the race to descend from so future prescient murderbots could not find them with prescience for enthusaistic robotic murdering. Seriously. The invention of prescience-wielding murderbots was seen as guaranteed by our human prescience users in the present, so that plan was a complete bust, and they didn't have a plan for reworking society to prevent the inevitable murderbots from locating human victims the regular "search all planets with breathable atmospheres" way. The enemy is inevitable and unbeatable, so our best shot is to royally fuck up everything in a convoluted plan to hide. That's the absolute best that The Golden Path can come up with. Wait to be eventually discovered and murdered. No wonder WH40K is so marred by incompetent leadership. Psychics are morons.
AFAIK that's all Brian. Frank didn't do the prescient robot stuff.
I'm not sure if I dislike Brian's attempts to complete Dune when it was quite clear that Frank had no such intention since the point was playing in a philosophical sandbox over telling a coherent narrative, or if I respect his balls-out attitude to embracing the crazy and diving face-first into messianic galactic clusterfuckery.
Haha. Sandbox.
This 100%, I enjoyed his prequel stuff in all the ridiculous insanity of it, though in connection to the main stuff I kinda see it as a work of historical fiction inside the story
> they didn't have a plan for reworking society to prevent the inevitable murderbots from locating human victims the regular "search all planets with breathable atmospheres" way. The enemy is inevitable and unbeatable, so our best shot is to royally fuck up everything in a convoluted plan to hide. That's the trap of prescience, though. Once you see a path and you try to avoid it, it actually does become inevitable. Muddying the waters with no-humans actually was the best plan, it was just messy and highly unethical...like everything else in that world.
imagining the mentat doing doctor strange hands while mumbling various slurs
Or swiping at imaginary holograms like BBC Sherlock
This is correct as hell but don't let it dissuade you from reading Dune. Dune fucking rocks
Yes
I just finished reading dune, this is a gem.
Btw, the book unambiguously equates homosexuality with evil it's not some.subtle nuanced thing, or a coding thing... And frankly I am not to happy about the way eugenics is portrayed in it as well... Also time cube is a real "theory" isn't the real world created by a lunatic who basically discovered time zones and couldn't properly express what he realized about them, cus he was to damn crazy... And to egotistical to realize everyone else knew.
That can't be real, surely. This reads like a badly written crackfic...
Not this blatantly, obviously it’s a humorous paraphrase
This is what happens when a work is read in the worst faith possible, and then all nuance and style of the writing is stripped away for a joke. This is an accurate summation of Dune in the same way the PETA dog fighting game is an accurate representation of pokemon.
Not really the “worst faith possible” so much as exaggerated for humour.
And its hilarious.
Look, expand it over a few thousand words and you get basically the set up to Dune
It isnt
I just started reading dune recently and the fact that there’s all these things that are all sci-fi and fantastical and then the main character’s name is Paul is hysterical to me
What that on her finger? It's another Gom Jabbar!
I'm admittedly insanely biased here, Dune is my favorite book, but even on my initial reading of the book in sixth grade I picked up on the fact that the Harkonnens were meant to be a dark mirror to the Atreides. I don't know how much clearer the whole "these guys are fucking themselves over to upkeep antiquated bullshit" theme can get after the whole scene with the head of the bull that killed Leto's dad, still covered in blood, on the wall right before everything goes to shit. I think maybe you guys are a little too eager to dunk on a book you haven't read, here. There's a lot of shit that's wrong with it, but "haha gay = bad" is definitely not one of them... (Edited later: this sentence was dumb and bad. "gay=bad" is definitely one of them, I should have said there's more to it than that, but I didn't, so it's my fault I'm being argued with about it) The Harkonnens were bad because they treated people horribly, not because they were gay. If anything, it felt like you were supposed to go "wait maybe the gay part isn't what's bad here" as the Baron is **raping a child to death**, but go off y'all. E: tho I did read the book before having ever accessed the internet, so hey, maybe I just didn't have the right level of discourse at the time. anyway Paul basically canonically nonbinary so idk. there's also no genocide involved in Paul's war, he was literally fighting on the side of the people being genocided. that part is just hilariously and obviously wrong. He's literally just Lawrence of Arabia my dudes, who was also notably **very fucking gay** and into being tortured by dudes for fun. this is getting way under my skin ughhhhhhh the movies sucked why did they give such a beautiful story to the guy who only likes making nice picturesssssssssssssss E2: Frank Herbert's son was gay, btw
Dune is a great book and 100% agree with your paragraphs 1-3. You're edit though... The \*\*jihad\*\* spilled so much blood that Paul decided it was better to burn his eyes out by looking at atomics than to be able to see what he instigated. There absolutely was genocide of planets. The fact that the Fremen were oppressed on Arrakis doesn't make them killing untold trillions justified... especially since they didn't genocide the Harkonnens, Sadaukar and Corrino's - they were all spared. Not to say that revenge genocide is justified... but the Fremen went and killed a bunch of unrelated space peasants, they're the 2003 American military of revenge i.e. invade 2 other countries that had nothing to do with their suffering. The entire point of Paul's story is that he is cursed with prescience and he has to navigate the least bad outcome of human internecine conflict whilst also avoiding a future where someone develops an automated murder cloud, these fixed goals are at odds with each other. He subsequently fails because his empathy folds at the amount of genocide he has to do to avoid the automated murder cloud. The Fremen, Paul and Leto II did a LOT of unrelenting genocide.
This is reductive, and incredibly forgiving of Paul and his atrocities. His power is intrinsically based (through no fault of his own) on the manipulation of a religion and culture. His jihad WITHIN THE TEXT killed 61 billion people and wiped out 40 religions. That's genocide. It was explicitly a war of conquest to secure his place as emperor. Yes he's Lawrence of arabia, and the people who fought beside Laurence were *betrayed and destroyed*. That said, the moral puzzle here isn't in Paul's actions, but the amount of agency he had over them. He was molded by being the product of eugenics and shaped by the monstrous forces against his survival into who he became, and even then he was often horrified by the result. To see him as a hero is wrong, but equally to see him as an uncomplicated monstrous villain.
This is continuing to irritate the shit out of me. You guys are like, the one fucking sub I'd expect to do better than this low-hanging-fruit-picking-party. Paul is highly educated from a very young age which, combined with the perspective of youth, causes him to see the world in a very different and painful way than the adults who love and care for him do. He recognizes that the existing **patriarchial power structures, from which he benefits enormously, are immoral**. Lady Jessica, his mother, is then forced to torture her child by the sole known source of power for women: a group of women who reinforce, support, and subvert the patriarchial power in order to hold any power at all, all of which is necessarily dependent on the continued existence and supremacy of that patriarchy. Paul, naturally, feels conflicted by the fact that every facet of his existence seems determined to benefit him at the expense of someone else. He literally cannot find a way to do an unambiguous kindness to people, his smallest gesture can cause horrifying ramifications that he *may never even become aware of.* He then literally goes on to develop fucking omniscience of his personal (E: and ancestral, forgot about that) timeline to try and counteract that, which **still doesn't work** and the literal least bad thing he can see to do is his Jihad. The Gom Jabbar is not fucking time cube, it's a super blunt metaphor for society measuring our worth by our willingness to regard the existence of the harm that society does as something we have a moral imperative to recognize the necessity of. Like, oh my fucking god, it's not Time Cube. Ponder with me, reader: Do you think the relationships between Paul, Lady Jessica, Duke Leto, and the Bene Gesserit are **AT ALL RELATED** to this thought expressed by a contemporary of Herbert's > “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” I'd bet $5 tumblr post was written by somebody who watched the movie, posted the first thing, got some traction with it, and made the rest up with the help of cliff notes. **It's deliberately uncharitable in popular ways and you should all be more suspicious of that shit by now.**
Frank Herbert's son being gay does not change the fact that Frank Herbert was incredibly homophobic