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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 mostly agree with everyone. Your estimation of Dune versus Lord of the Rings seems way, way off to me.
That said, I think you are still observing something. Dune, even today, is a wildly alien setting. I have no clue how alien Lord of the Rings was when it came out, but today after decades of copy cats and the whole fantasy genre being a tentpole of nerd culture, it's bog standard. This makes Dune infinitely more niche. Both works are profoundly fertile IMHO, but LotR has had people tilling it's fields for 60 years now. It's just about used up. Dune on the other hand, has remained comparatively impenetrable. Relatively few artist have dredged anything out of it's pages, much less successfully, compared to LotR. And there is ample thematic depth to explore in that regard.
That said, we are no longer a culture that seems to comprehend themes. Watch the 40 hours of documentary footage about Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson cared deeply about maintaining the vision and themes that Tolkien infused into his works. I know people argue about how well he did. But at least he wasn't actively striving to shit all over it, "update it for a modern audience" or "fix Lord of the Rings.". I'm so fucking starved for sincerity and integrity in my culture these days, rewatching LotR almost brought a tear to my eye it was so beautiful.
The themes of Dune are more complicated and nebulous. The first book is a traditional hero's journey. Or is it? The sequels really have you questioning what young Paul Atreides wrought. The series as a whole takes place on a massive timeline. I question the capacity of our culture making apparatus to grok what Dune is really about. It asks questions like "What makes for a stable civilization, and at what costs?" And "Can I be so good at fucking that my sexcraft is considered a bioweapon?"
Frankly I'm shocked I haven't seen more Dune porn parodies. Or maybe they wouldn't even need to be parodies, just straight up porn adaptation.
Regardless, the Dune universe always seemed like a post-singularity world of profound human suffering. It was about as opposite to Iain Banks vision in the Culture novels as could possibly be. Instead of machines granting humans endless lives of luxury, they had been extirpated utterly and completely, and instead humans were beat into the tasks of machines, often losing their humanity in the process. I don't know if Herbert intended these depictions of humans "accomplishing anything" to be aspirational, but the horrifically deformed and caged Navigators or the drug addicted Mentats always squicked me out. It's never been done justice, and I don't expect it to. I can only give David Lynch credit for at least making a movie as weird as the books were, even if it got goofy as fuck in places with the source material.
So what do you think makes Dune so much more alien? It can't simply be cultural. Western fantasy, at least as an aesthetic, has certainly found fans in Asia. Is it the focus on politics and big, weird ideas like transhumanism? Is it the focus on the macro scale compared to LotR, which made it less character focused but better lent to the strategy games that I ended up having to talk to so much about?
What makes Dune so alien is that the people aren't people anymore. I mean, a few are remotely relatable. Duncan Idaho, as he comes and goes throughout the story, is probably the most relatable. But everyone else has weird alien brains, acting on strange neo-singularity logic in a world that takes what we know of the human condition and pushes it to it's breaking point.
Yet there is no struggle in this. The world of Dune is so habituated to this strange alien condition, it's taken totally for granted. It's a society that regularly wrings the humanity out of children from birth so that they can serve the functions various machines used to, and nobody cares. It's a wildly fascinating, alien setting. But it's so distantly removed from our present understanding of the human condition, it can only resonate weakly with an audience in that way. It's main draw is it's sheer alienness.
So you have these two settings. One (LotR) is defined by good versus evil, overcoming bleak odds for the sake of home and hearth, and hope. The other (Dune) is about stretching the parameters of the human condition until things are no longer recognizably human. It's easy to make a game, or a movie, or artwork or song about the first. To do the second one, and do it proper, takes a skill and imagination I have not yet seen. Oh there have been serviceable Dune products. A board game, video games, movies, that ape the aesthetic or literal plot points of Dune. And the aesthetic is important. But I've never, ever, seen the themes of Dune accurately portrayed or grappled with in any follow on media.
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