Oh oh oh. These are pleasing developments.

Richard G 1 Minute

Oh oh oh. These are pleasing developments.

Stan Spencer

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14 thoughts on “Oh oh oh. These are pleasing developments.”

  3. And it still took a White Western Man who gave 0 fucks about women to be able to tell the space Arabs how to be fanatical killbots and squeeze the Empire, only to have their apocalypse vision of paradise be railroaded by Western notions of ||| balance |||.

    There is no world-cure to be found in the Dune series, just good ruminating.

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  4. Kyrinn S. Eis to say nothing about Herbert’s little homilies on teh gays and their military applications.

    Yeah, it’s a total White Saviour story and really there’s nobody better to play Paul than Peter o’Toole – curse our fixed chronology!

    …unless we decide the Atreides are black (and why not?). But the Harkonnens. They’re German through and through. Do you think you’d have to go CG to have Trump play the Baron, or could he be persuaded to take time out of his busy schedule?

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  6. Richard G​ I think you (and we) are sort of in a bubble there. I don’t think 40K had any purchase in the mind of the general public, nor particularly even the minds of nongamer genre fans. I don’t think they’ve got to worry about a niche of a niche.

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  9. …the more I think about it, the more I think Lynch’s version got it 80-90% right – the scene with the Guild Navigator is perfect. And that was made absolutely in the shadow of Star Wars.

    …as a teen, having read the book first, my biggest disappointment with the film was the ornithopters. Now I think it tries to do too many things at once.

    If I were a billionaire French auteur I’d make a trilogy:

    – Dune

    – Lawrence of Arabia

    – Declare

    using the same sets and actors, with enough specific callouts between the three of them to trigger debate about whether they’re supposed to be seen literally in continuity or if they’re like adjacent worlds or what.

    Then I’d do a whole Expanded Universe thing with Freya Stark and ibn Battuta.

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  10. I feel it’s better to go with an original story, while liberally drawing inspiration. I mean, look at The Chronicles of Riddick. Maybe it’s not high art or anything, but it did a good job of going with something and sticking with it.

    So, instead of yet another Dune adaption, a heavily Dune inspired original story could be unencumbered by the details of Dune itself.

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  11. Isaac Kuo I guess I’ve already written my inspired by Dune setting – it turns out to be a mix of Apocalypse Now and reality TV, set in formerly Russian Turkestan.

    But there’s a certain appealing aridity (sorry) to Herbert’s book, that I find I can’t emulate. Dune seems like it’s this big mishmash of Star Wars type empire and living computer men and mining/prison colony blues and desert martial artists and decadent gladiatorial antics but it’s got a really strong artistic theme tying it all together – it’s not gonzo at all. That’s why I would want to do a Dune adaptation (and why I don’t like most of the ones that exist) – for its consistency, which is not at all easy to pull off.

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  13. “But there’s a certain appealing aridity (sorry) to Herbert’s book, that I find I can’t emulate.”

    Okay, I get that.

    My own attitude draws inspiration from Riddick…it’s okay to not be the best thing ever.

    As for the direction I’d go in for something Dune inspired…well, I like a couple other things that took inspiration from Dune – Nausicaa and Five Star Stories. But I actually haven’t seen much of either (just the Nausicaa movie and FSS OVA). So it’s more my impressions of them that I’m going with. Which is just fine and peachy for inspiration.

    But it’s not in my nature to really go for the whole “savior” trope. The contrarian in me wants to subvert the trope. The whole Missionaria Protectiva thing could have been a good setup to subvert the trope – that Paul and Jessica utilize it simply to escape and…that’s it. The Fremen are then left to figure out for themselves what to do next.

    The message – sometimes it’s okay just to survive. You don’t have to get revenge. You don’t have to emerge victorious into something better than before. Sometimes, it’s enough of a victory just to escape.

    Dune is a story where various uber-competent factions and even individuals are able to put together multi-generational plans and pit them against each other. There’s a grand sense of scale and superhuman ability there. But…it’s something that no longer resonates with my sensibilities. I was more naive when I was young. But now all I see is an unending history of very serious very smart folks who nevertheless bungle things time and time again in foreign entanglements. I’d rather have something with the opposite message of Dune – something which shows how it’s all complicated.

    Perhaps there’s a different way to present a sense of epic scale by embracing that complexity. To present a grand scheme from the outset, but then it gets ground into endless complications before getting very far into it (think, the ambitious Wolfowitz doctrine, where we were supposed to be greeted as liberators and the entire Middle East was supposed to fall like dominoes after a quick victory in Iraq into a free market worshiping paradise).

    Maybe the Big Guys don’t have their stuff together. They’re just big. Being among the biggest just gives them a bigger buffer to recover from mistakes than the littler guys. So, it’s not so much that the Big Guys have underestimated the not-Fremen. It’s that they just didn’t understand them at all. There’s different sects of Fremen and they don’t like each other, and a lot of that was purposeful by design (invaders like to exploit and reinforce splits in order to divide and conquer).

    The message – Umm…okay, this may be a little bit pointed. Different sects at each other’s throats, making things complicated after an initially easy invasion?

    But the optimist and idealist in me can’t abide with Rick-and-Morty nihilism where everyone’s either an asshole or a loser or both. I need there to be idealists who are truly struggling for what’s right also. This feels very un-Dune-like, though…

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  14. Isaac Kuo​ I think Herbert definitely subverts the savior trope already. Messiah’s are bad is explicitly stated in the first book, and Dune Messiah goes on further demonstrate that point in case it was missed.

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