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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34402 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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?

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

I don't think that one has had clearly more franchise/influence success that LoTR, especially when one looks at their influence on science fiction and fantasy respectively.

However, I do think that there is an interesting contrast: Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer, partly because the easiest way to have a plausible and non-dated portrayal of the future is to leave a lot of details unfilled. Tolkien, meanwhile, often goes out of his way to fill his world with detail.

This does have the advantage that an adaptation of Dune can look like almost anything, and there are lots of details for imaginative creators to fill in, e.g. House Ordos (loads of houses in Dune, let's add a cool one), Lynch's uniforms for the Atredis, or Villeneuve's spaceships. Of course, you also get things like Lynch's Guild Navigators or Villeneuve's hilariously unsubtle understanding of the Voice, but that's the price of freedom.

Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer

Herbert, austere? Perhaps by modern standards but by the SF standards of the day he didn't hold a candle to most of the well-known writers, and not even close to Asimov.

I had a similar reaction at first (pages and pages of Jessica drinking a cup of coffee?) but on reflection, Harlequin5942 is right - there's not much depth to the Dune universe. He tells us a lot about Arrakis, but mostly in the form of the history of the Fremen as it relates to Paul and the Atreides family. I don't really remember much about the story and history of the planet when it wasn't all about the Fremen Tough Guys.

And he mentions a lot of things about the Empire and so forth, but we get more "and this happened way back, and so-and-so lives on this planet" but not a lot of deep world-building. So there is a lot of space for adaptations, particularly in relation to games, to go whatever way they like - keep the visuals, but you can pretty much have Planet of Whatever, New Order, Sect, Guild, Society or Tea Rooms of That, and inventing all the original characters you like, because why not, who says they can't exist?

LOTR is a lot different. You can't just pop up with "oh yeah we have this new set of Elves", not unless you are going to fit them in to existing canon, and even if you go "Well they're Avari, that's why they look like a cross between Kenyans Maasai and Samurai" you will have to do a lot of fast talking to get that one to fly 😁

That's where Rings of Power fell flat on its face - it tried to crowbar in DIVERSITÉ and ENNNCLÚSION while keeping as near to the look of the movies as Warner Studios lawyers would let them go, and with not even two lines of "Okay, so Dísa is the black Dwarven princess from one of the Eastern Houses, this is why she doesn't look like the Khazad-dum Dwarves" to prepare the ground. Oh, you noticed our one (1) black Elf and our one (1) black Dwarf and you want more than "this is the 21st century adaptation" to explain that? You racist bigot hater!

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