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porfiria posted:Honestly the whole human potential angle of the book is so silly and of its time. You could be as smart as a computer if you just studied really, really hard! No, it's study hard and take transhumanist drugs.
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Feb 1, 2020 23:22
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Also the dude needed to stop trying to make Duncan Idaho happen. I think by the last books his relevance was he was immune to the antagonists magic gently caress powers or some poo poo. Like why is this nobody that never accomplished anything in thousands and thousands of years of clones still showing up in the future?
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Feb 4, 2020 15:35
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Book 4 is pretty much "The point". 3 is sort of an end and 4 is more of a coda. The entire goal of the politics and genetic engineering and the like was to create this super-human that could see a path for the continuation of humanity in the face of inevitable decline and extinction. That happens at the end of 3, and 4 is how he does it. Book 1 is Paul stepping up to the stage, and Book 2 is him rejecting the cost required to be that figure. 3 is his son inheriting the position, and 4 is completing the plan to save humanity. Everything after that is just sort of....more.
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Aug 2, 2020 03:14
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Jewmanji posted:I beg to disagree that the Bene Gesserit or the Tleilaxu were engineering a Kwisatz Haderach to altruistically save the universe. It was a Cold War arms race, except in this case the nuclear weapon became sentient and went rogue. Oh I never mentioned altruism. The Bene Gesserit simply wanted a truly prescient being, one under their control, to take the Golden Lion Throne. It doesn't change that the end goal *was* a truly prescient being that could guide humanity. The problem with that, of course, is that at the end of the process is a truly prescient being that you've designed to guide humanity. And how the hell could you ever expect to control someone like that? And of course the hilariously obvious answer is you don't. You don't for a second do even a single thing they can't see coming, and every aspect of your existence is controlled by them. And there's nothing you can do about it. And so Leto gets everything he needs, if not everything he wants, and everyone does exactly what they are supposed to, and humanity is saved from a death by apathy. And that's literally every single driving issue in Dune up to that point wrapped up. And the two books after that are, I don't know, "What if Space Nuns had gently caress powers and I got to write more about Duncan Idaho?", and the books after his death are "What if we made money?".
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Aug 2, 2020 11:59
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The answer is Duncan Idaho is his special OC DO NOT STEAL character. There is literally no reason he should be relevant after book two, and even that is pushing it, but he's right up there being super special to the very end. Why? gently caress if I know, he was basically irrelevant in life.
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Aug 3, 2020 08:47
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It helps to remind yourself that all helicopters work on the theory that the helicopter is too stupid to know it shouldn't work, and must be distracted from all times from realizing the unnatural state of it's existence, least it return to it's natural resting state of "lying at the bottom of a burning crater".
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Sep 9, 2020 05:11
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TheOmegaWalrus posted:The best part is Oscar Isaac basically saying, "gently caress Star Wars this is the new poo poo". I mean the central message of Dune is that humanity shouldn't be beholden to the idea of "Great men" to save them, and that our salvation comes from diversity and exploration. So, you know, sure. Why not? gently caress Star Wars.
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Sep 9, 2020 23:54
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The entire point is that it isn't. It's staid and boring and unimaginative and dying. That's quite literally the antagonist of the novels, the stagnation of human civilization, and trying to avoid it's inevitable extinction. And most everything is described in a fairly plain and not particular weird style. You get a little weirder with some of the technology, like the dragonfly ships and the navigators and such, but the average noble or soldier? There's absolutely nothing colorful or intriguing about how they look. If it looks cool you probably hosed up, because your main reaction should be.....well, why doesn't this all look cooler?
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Sep 10, 2020 07:47
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Arglebargle III posted:Lynch isn't Lucas. Yeah, and he has many other great qualities on top of that.
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Jan 18, 2021 07:26
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Yes, and yes. Good talk. I mean if you wanted to ask "are they true, period, outside the novel" there is a debate, but in the text? No, it's exactly what its sold as. I don't even know how you'd begin to make an argument that it isn't, the text certainly doesn't give you anything to work with. I mean like nothing, I don't even know how you try to devil's advocate it.
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Feb 17, 2021 20:35
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Xealot posted:"Is Leto right?" seems like a fair semantic debate, but yeah not really one Frank Herbert intended people to have, I'm sure. But who cares? Have the debate. Herbert was, in fact, a human author and not an omniscient worm-king with esoteric knowledge. Leto is also, explicitly, a foil for humanity at large. Vast swaths of what he says and does aren't intended to be correct or workable. Much of it is intended to be inflammatory, or to teach a lesson. So trying to figure out what he really believes and cares about at any given moment is....challenging. How do you truly narrow down the beliefs of someone playing a role if they never break character?
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Feb 17, 2021 23:48
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sean10mm posted:It also feels to me like both Leto and Thufir are past their primes and burned out on all the machiavellian poo poo but feel obligated to go through with it anyway. Like if this happened 10 years earlier they would have probably dunked on the Harkonnens. But that’s more my personal read on things than anything solid. The point is that Leto has been gunning for the big chair basically since birth. It's why he doesn't marry Jessica. He loves her, she loves him, but if he's unmarried there's always the chance he can be married into the imperial family. He's made his House probably the single strongest House in the universe......but it's not enough to fight the Emperor yet, which is so clearly what he is building towards. And so his House is marked for annihilation before it cant reach that point. He's not as good as he thinks he is, but don't mistake that for incompetence or even mediocrity. He has legitimately reached a point of being a threat to the throne, and that's why he needs to be stopped. His flaw is in thinking he could just do all this pretty openly and not face the consequences, not in not being good enough to do it. The point of even having this discussion in the movie thread is that it's all basically information you get in the first like 9 seconds of the story. Nobody in all of existence is blind to what is happening and what will happen, and everyone knows why it's happening too. The only one that doesn't see it is Paul, a child. It's part of the theme of stagnation and prescience. Everyone can see the path in front of them, nobody knows how to break free from it. Postorder Trollet89 posted:I get your point but he won't have to. The first book does warn us quite convincingly, even if it absolves Paul of some blame. To be fair to him he's like 15 when the story starts. And he's put in a position with almost no real choices for basic survival, let alone to take a moral stand. By the time he's in a position to do so, he's barely human and all his options suck. He may have had a privileged upbringing, but the overwhelming majority of his life was violence and torment. And also his second son had to become a giant dick monster for three thousand years. So, you know, I think he paid his dues. Mulva fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 7, 2021 |
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Sep 7, 2021 00:14
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"I can't believe they don't just <blank>" is explicitly the point of the entire loving setting. That's why they are stagnating. One of the signs that the Golden Path is starting to work is when all the various factions start doing all that poo poo. Building artificial navigators and using more advanced technology and all that other stuff. It's not a bug, it's a feature. You are supposed to think it's all kind of silly and broken [Also profoundly alien, even for the mid 60s] that they've replaced modern technology of 'our' [Again, mid 60s] time with super-humans. They'd rather build a giant fishman in a tank than use a loving computer. They are out there.
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Sep 19, 2021 21:59
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AlternateAccount posted:So we are just dismissing the failson novels where the Butlerian Jihad involved wars against Terminators? I mean it's the safe thing to do, yeah.
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Sep 19, 2021 23:11
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Hakkesshu posted:The Zendaya visions were a bit much but that’s what zero pussy does to a mf He's 15, give him a minute drat.
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Sep 23, 2021 07:51
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AnEdgelord posted:It should be noted that after God Emperor and its rants about how female armies could never become sadistic rapists like male armies, there is in fact a female army of sadistic rapists that becomes a huge plot point They are also descended from his army of women in particular. A thing he knew would happen. The God Emperor is always lying to you, except for when he isn't.
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Oct 13, 2021 05:35
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FBS posted:please don't try to film God Emperor tia I mostly think the first three books are the main 'point'. It's basically noble origin story, and then every work after taking more and more off the shine of it. Great, you've raised an army of religious zealots. Problem: You've raised an army of religious zealots. Ok, now you are in charge of all humanity. Enjoy knowing, with metaphysical certainty, the cost of what it takes to keep those ravening assholes alive in perpetuity. No wonder our boy dips. And then Children, where the cost finally is paid. Paul's journey ends with his children having to take up the horror of what prescience demands to keep humanity alive. His legacy is the jihad, and the God-Emperor. Who will never, ever die and be released from his suffering. Four is just playing that out, and it's interesting but a bit messier. It works as a character study of Leto II, but it's a bit weaker in the margins. And then vast swaths of the next two books are just "These evil women are subduing us with their powerful gently caress muscles, but we've cloned an Idaho that dicks so good it controls them.". And it's like.....I think you ran out of anything interesting to say a few books back bud. e: In my heart though? While I know 4 on wouldn't make good movies I would love to see someone try. Mulva fucked around with this message at 08:19 on May 6, 2023 |
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May 6, 2023 08:16
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Arglebargle III posted:The Atreides situation in Book 1 suggests that the spice workers could demand almost anything and get it. But they don't. Nobody but the Fremen really knows where spice comes from, specifically. So all the workers could do is say "we aren't going to mine anymore". At which point you are killed and new workers are brought in. It's not hard, the work itself wants to kill you as is. You need an entire House supporting you to stay alive. The planet itself is brutally inhospitable. Your revolt could be put down simply by doing nothing. The Houses, society at large, generally isn't redlining spice. They have reserves in case of war or other hardship, the second you stop spice production they go to that and then they murder you. What Paul does is different. It's not "We won't work", it's explaining what spice actually is and how he can eliminate it forever. It's an order of magnitude more threatening. Workers, you kill and replace. Their society hasn't really bothered to come up with an alternative to spice on a large scale. If it just stopped, they'd lose everything. The general apathy of the setting is such that nobody really stopped to consider where the most important thing in the universe actually came from. You get spice from the sands of Dune, and it doesn't seem to run out, and that's that. Keep on keeping on.
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Jul 1, 2023 20:57
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Jewmanji posted:Four thousand years of stagnation to destroy the woke mind virus. No. Four thousand years of stagnation to create the woke mind virus.
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Dec 14, 2023 01:26
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Arglebargle III posted:The luddites had a point Yes they did. Capital absolutely was using machines to push out more expensive skilled labor, and to drive unskilled labor to death in the name of the greatest amount of profits at the least cost. That is a totally valid point. Where they hosed up was destroying machines and not capitalists.
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Dec 15, 2023 19:13
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Aurubin posted:Yes these are all the in-universe reasons, but Dune and Dune Messiah were all THEMES vis a vis oil, the environment, imperialism, religion, etc. Just doesn't seem to be a consensus on what God-Emperor is trying to say. Or I'm stupid. The thesis statement is that the world of Dune found itself in a conflict around increasing technological development and the effect this had on their culture, and they radically turned away from it. Now depending on whose notes you believe and what the intent was going forward? We can debate exactly what that was. In general we can envision it as emotionless machine logic dictating how things should be. People devaluing their own humanity and needs in the face of an abstract ideal of functional perfection [Not like big evil robot people, ha ha, that would be stupid Kevin]. The idea that thinking machines train people to think like machines, would be the bottom line. The response to this is the total reordering of all human society, the rejection of most higher forms of technology, a new era of religious cooperation [Which is how you get something called "The Orange Catholic Bible" referencing the majority of Earth religions], and an embrace of the nascent genetic alteration movement. Many of the figures around at that time were the great powers of the "Modern" Dune era. The Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Corrino Empire starts around then, everything. All of it right in this moment. So highly advanced human computers, psychically gifted ship navigators, women who can control their own biology and the wills of others, genetic engineers so advanced they have effectively eliminated death. Oooh. Ahhh. So what's the problem? The problem is it's ten thousand years after that point and humanity has taken not one step forward. The same people are running the same race for no particular reason. Humanity is dying. Slowly, but it's dying. It's dying because it can't actually be bothered to live. The story of Dune is a lot of people being told exactly what is going to happen to them, and being completely incapable of doing anything about it. Humanity has stopped advancing, and it's killing them. So how do you change that? There's the fictional answer of "A giant penis monster", an adversary so far beyond the norm that people can not just acquiesce and accept it. They are forced to fight back, and he pushes them to fight in all the ways that make them strong enough to thrive. Non-fictionally, what the hell is Herbert going for: Letting the innate human drive for exploration and self-development die is the end for a culture, and for humanity in general. People need to constantly push themselves to engage in new things and explore new places, or they risk being trapped in dogmatic loops and a choking status quo. The age of thinking machines was wrong because it robbed humanity of that passion through unfeeling logic, but the age that followed was wrong because it put itself in a bubble and never ventured out again. Insomuch as we see the step after that, it's the evolution of all these forces that endured in stasis for thousands of years, and how they deal with what comes next. But, well, he died before that was about to really kick off so nobody can actually say what the point would have been.
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Mar 4, 2024 07:51
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Cimber posted:Mind you, i haven't read the other books, but how exactly is that going to work? The Fremen are great warriors on Arrakis, yeah, but once they are off their native soil how well are things going to go for them? They don't have the home dune advantage after all. 67 billion dead. So, it's going to go really loving well for them. Amazingly enough when you are stuck on a planet the people from space can just infinitely gently caress with you forever and you can do nothing about it. All space travel goes through the guild, who needs spice, and Paul controls the spice. So nobody gets to meaningfully attack Paul. Not in a straight fight, anyway.
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Mar 6, 2024 04:19
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Steve Yun posted:I don’t remember most of the book, so maybe I’m missing something but I think both Fenrings exist to show that there’s a breeding program and that the Bennies have backup plans for Paul, and so it was not essential to have both There's the bit in the end where all Paul's grand plans come down to Count Fenring making a conscious decision not to kill Paul, which he could totally do at any time. It's another part of taking apart the monomyth. Forget prescience and super-human abilities, at the end of the day Paul wins because a lot of people did a lot of things to support him. Fenring sees in Paul himself, another person at the whims of this vast breeding program....and when called on to kill him just goes "No". It's a neat little moment. Is it required? No, you get to the same general place in the end. Taking out a bunch of little moments does noticeably leave a weaker story though.
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Mar 10, 2024 06:09
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And if you think Leto II is wrong, his punishment is to live forever as a series of worms. Christ in the son's lovely books he doesn't even get to have most of the worms killed. It's just sort of "Yeah, I'm a immortal god-monster in the form of many giant worms, and I will never cease to be. Peace!".
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Mar 11, 2024 17:56
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Bugblatter posted:Speculation that Chani will be leading the fremen who appose Paul in Denis' Messiah seems on point. I mean there's two paths there. 1. Infantilize her and the Fremen. It was the evil white child that made us do all that genocide, he tricked us with cultural appropriation and overwhelming twink energy! We just want to stay in our caves and drink our own rear end water. 2. Acknowledge the truth that her way of life was dead the second the majority of her people saw a chance for change, and that she can never win. Not because of Paul, but because the majority of the Fremen actively want her to fail. So she's either an idiot or a failure. I don't know that that is much of a step up from blandly content except for the whole "No kids" thing. Guess it gives her more to do. All destined for failure, but certainly more.
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Mar 13, 2024 18:41
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Cognac McCarthy posted:they could easily make it her stated goal to free her people from Paul's influence so they'll be free to focus on continuing work instead of pursuing a galactic war that she doesn't really care about and which the audience has already been primed to see as bad. His influence of giving them everything they ever wanted for the first time in ten thousand years? Good luck to her selling that one.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:25
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Cognac McCarthy posted:His influence of entangling them in a global crusade that goes far beyond (and eventually counteracts) their goal of becoming free. They are the single most important planet in the empire. There is no "beyond" Dune. It's fate is the fate of humanity. They fight everyone or they aren't free, period. Paul there, no Paul there. Irrelevant. quote:The books are explicitly about the Fremen being used as a tool in a galactic power struggle and having their culture destroyed as a result. The books are clear that the Fremen have wants out of the Jihad. Titles, land, wealth. Paul has to provide those things, or they won't follow him. Their culture is being destroyed primarily because they want to destroy their culture. They want a better life. And they get it. Good for them! quote:As we know, characters in movies never have goals that seem difficult or impossible to achieve. Furthermore, Oh that's fine, it's just that when you compare and contrast character states "Boring" to "Stupid" isn't a great jump.
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Mar 13, 2024 20:15
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Cognac McCarthy posted:And by the end it's presented as a cultural tragedy. Almost as bad as the tens of billions of people they killed when you think about it. Shageletic posted:Why are you making being flawed and struggling with the inconsistencies of one's viewpoints a bad thing. Oh it can be. Just not here.
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Mar 13, 2024 21:34
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Schwarzwald posted:why not? Time, and the inability of the movies to have enough of it.
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Mar 13, 2024 22:36
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Nah I'm pretty sure everyone that knows about the prequels agrees there's no greater punishment than letting you sit there and think about the prequels some more.
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Mar 21, 2024 01:39
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Schwarzwald posted:Someone interrogating the premises of a story isn't a "bit." It is kinda stupid though, because it doesn't go anywhere. See, here: "What if he's wrong?". Then he's wrong. Guess it just sort of worked out lucky that every major issue he ever truly faced had his incorrect psychic visions give him the correct answer, and the only hardships he ever faced being when he didn't face the reality of his powers. Turns out he didn't really have perfect psychic powers at all and none of that mattered! Weird story I guess. Or "What if he just saw the future he wanted to see and made it happen, and it's not the one true future?". Well then you get to the plot of the fifth book, where a character believes that Paul and Leto never actually saw possibilities, they just created the future with their visions, locking humanity into the one path they saw. And that Leto, immortal god emperor that he is, is still doing that and the remnants of his psyche must be wiped out to truly give humanity freedom. And the answer to that is is....it's irrelevant in anything but a philosophical sense? It's like debating free will versus determinism. They both lead to exactly the same place, why do you give a poo poo? And that's it. That's all you can get to by rejecting the premise that the story is being honest with you about what they can do. And now we've done it.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:10
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Anonymous Zebra posted:This is honestly the reason why I hate the sequels (and the Lynch movie) because people insert the later bullshit into the first book without realizing it was never there. Herbert has talked about writing bits that would go on to be Messiah and Children before Dune came out. The ideas in question, Messiah as counter-point to the largely straightforward "heroic" narrative of Dune were always there. Indeed, the Jihad never happens in Dune. There are no consequences in Dune, the last bit of the story is Jessica telling Chani that history will call them wives. That's it. Paul has defeated his enemies, his house is in order, for the moment all is well. It's only in later works that we really see what the downside is, the cost. It's not the focus of Dune. Oh there's talk about how he's going to loose the Fremen, and how people will look back to the gentle ways of the Sardaukar, but then we continue into him carving up the galaxy for his friends and loved ones. Reassuring Chani that she's loved, looking out for his people, stuff like that. You have to, as you say, look into the future works to truly call it a warning about raising a person to be a Messiah. Dune itself is pure victory, with only the lightest rumblings in the background that it's going to go bad. How the little bit about Pardot Kynes ends with it talking about how Dune was "afflicted" with a Hero is probably my favorite. It's not the focus though. It's not the message, it's not the tone it sets. That's the work as a whole, not that one novel.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:44
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