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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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