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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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!