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Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.
What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?
I question the premise that Dune is more fertile than Lord of The Rings. That said I think I understand the question that you're getting at will attempt to engage...
Related to my post last week on "Inferential Distance" I feel like one of the major assumption/axioms where blue tribe culture differs from the red is in the assumption that something that is popular cannot be good or worthwhile or vice versa. There seems to be this assumption that good art is supposed to be esoteric and inaccessible to the general public because how else is one supposed to demonstrate their superior education, intellect, and understanding. At the risk of coming across as uncharitable, the image in my mind is that of an insufferable hipster sneering at "all that shit" that the normies like
Meanwhile feel like history has demonstrated the opposite. The mark of "a great artist" is not being esoteric, or being admired by one's contemporaries. Often just the opposite. Historically the thing that has set a great artist apart is the ability to convey deep/complex themes to as wide an audience as possible, and I think that that is the true answer to your question.
What does 'blue tribe' mean here? Scott's Blue Tribe was "liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated". Some of these people are esoteric hipsters, but many, many more of them enjoy popular media, like popular music/movies/tv/, than try to one-up each other over short films they saw at film festivals.
In this context it means being a "Weirdo" IE western industrialized and educated, while also ticking the boxes of a secular, urban, hipster type. IE most of Scott's bullet points.
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