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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34988 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?

I guess I'll throw my hat into this ring: to leave aside your specific examples, I suppose that it depends not only on the source material, but how to use its tropes. Maybe also other factors like how nerdy are the licensors and how memeable the IP can be.

Okay, I lied, I still had your specific examples in mind when I typed that sentence, but I'll use them to demonstrate my points in a way that can potentially generalize:

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness. I'd heard that the Lynch movie was an honest-but-failed attempt at adapting the book, I knew about Dune II and how it spawned Command & Conquer and the rest of the RTS genre, I knew about some of the concepts (albeit if only because they happened to be referenced in TV shows I watched, like Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy).

I finally read the original novel a couple years ago and it blew my mind. Before, I saw it as a sci-fi epic for those with more elitist (read: pretentious) tastes, but afterwards I got it, I thought it truly deserved its place as a sci-fi classic. Again, though, something about it isn't quite as "proletarian" as, say, Star Wars. It's a thick and dense novel (quite literally, even with my paperback copy being the recent-ish edition by Ace/Penguin and being reasonably-sized dimensionally), and it's also technically incomplete on its own (that "I consume your energy" quote I've seen thrown about here and on the old subreddit a few times? That's from Messiah, the sequel novel that was originally supposed to be part of the original novel). It's political in every sense of the word, and the "elitist" vibe I got from it is because its message can be easy to miss (Messiah reportedly came as a shock to fans of the original who now saw Paul recast into the role of a galactic asshole--Herbert's intended message of warning against hero worship was probably undermined by, again, needing to chop off Messiah's story into its own thing). Still, Dune can be boiled down into a classic and relatable story about an unlikely hero who is tarnished by the world around him, even when he changes things for the better. The problem may just come down to the investment energy requirements.

LOTR, which I admit to not really reading or wanting to experience, may seem at first glance to have similar challenges. Isn't that source material also huge, with a lot of stuff to digest? Well, yes, but that doesn't stop its fans. It may just be because Peter Jackson got an incredible amount of opportunity to adapt Tolkien's work in more managable chunks, and with somewhat more deft care than David Lynch could afford back in the 80's. I think one factor, though, is that the movies gave people things to point to, in the form of memorable scenes, quotes, and memes. Through gargantuan effort, LOTR was boiled down to its more essential elements, then transmitted memetically in a way that people could latch onto and get invested through. By contrast, Dune mostly had references to the more memorably-bonkers stuff from the Lynch film for years.

The other thing is the worlds of these, well, worlds, and how enticing they might be to explore. I think a big problem you had with your OP was phrasing: perhaps you meant to ask why Dune has so much potential that was kind-of squandered, versus LOTR which was handled generally-well but hasn't rippled beyond itself in quite the same way as Lynch Dune or Dune II. To which, I'd answer that Dune and LOTR have had vastly-different impacts on their respective genres, and while no LOTR thing has changed a medium quite like some Dune things have (again, outside of the Peter Jackson movies, possibly), LOTR doesn't need to further define other categories of works in its own image. Both settings, however, do have their fans who might love to explore those worlds. Any franchise has the potential to go bonanza like this if the cards are right.

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness.

I read the books in my early 20s and recently re-read the first 3 books in honor of the movie coming out and was immediately immersed. I completely agree with you that it deserves it's place as a classic.

I think the "problem" with adapting Dune and the reason that it has the reputation for esotericism that it does is that so much of the story and world-building happens "off screen" as it were. It happens in the little snippets of in-universe media that introduce each chapter, it happens in the footnotes about the empire's economy, and it happens in little vignettes were a piece of music will remind some character of an incident from their childhood. This works well when presented in the original format as an illustrated serial or as a bound book, but it presents challenges in adaptation. A classic example is the famous(infamous?) banquet towards the middle of the first book. For the those unfamiliar the book basically starts out as a spy thriller. The Atreides family (our protagonists) know they are being set up but not by whom or to what purpose. Paul Atreides is working the room at a state dinner trying to get a read on who the various factions are and who is plotting with whom. In prose it's a fairly important scene that establishes a couple of recurring themes, forshadows some of the main characters' future choices, and it advances the ongoing mystery plot by giving the audience some clues. However, if you were to do a straight translation of it to stage or film what you would get is basically 5 minutes of Paul making small-talk with a bunch of minor functionaries/side-characters while everyone else sips whine and looks pensive. It's just kind of hard to stage a scene where most of the action is happening in the form of internal monologues.

Edited to Elaborate

Yeah, it's a shame that amazing scene has been left out of both film adaptations, but at the same time, I don't know how you could include that in filmic form without going all Edgar Wright on Dune. And as you note, that's just one example of something that makes Dune difficult to process into other media.

Edgar Wright's Dune is an alternate history production i didn't know i needed.

Tfw you write out what you think is a really cool topic of discussion, but forget that nobody else lives inside your head but you, so you just expect everyone to connect all the dots the same way you did instead of explaining yourself properly, so you spend the whole time getting frustrated that nobody is engaging with it the way you expected.

When you include a line like "What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?" you really should reiterate your specific target. Especially since it was the only sentence you broke out of the paragraph, you basically made it the flashpoint of your post. People try to read left to right top to bottom, but our eyes are drawn to areas of uniqueness, I'd guess a lot of people read the last line first and, if they were like me, had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing on anything else you said after such a cosmetically ridiculous statement (because it does make sense under your stipulations, but your stipulations are kind of confusing.)

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Dragonball managed to produce FighterZ even though 90% of its licensed games are terrible.

Moreover, the license fits the game. Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

Yeah, I loved that game as a kid, but when I got my hands on the book, I felt it's a big missed opportunity. The Dune universe is full of these little details that are begging to be translated into game mechanics - you can only reliably use infantry to move your forces around, anything mechanized is getting eaten by worms, unless you airlift it in the last possible moment, etc... it would be a lot of work to get it right, but you could have so much rock-paper-scissors stuff built around that.

I suppose Dune II didn't necessarily stand out for its IP, yeah--the reason it's even called that is because the other Dune game of its time was a weird adventure game (albeit with strategic elements, weirdly), and aesthetically, Dune II doesn't quite fit with the visual style of the Lynch film (though Dune 2000 and Emperor would change that).

But that being said, I think Dune as an IP does give a cool enough world that makes people want to explore it--lord knows that that's probably why Brian Herbert continues to crank out Dune spinoffs.

Your mention of Dragon Ball does make me think: Gundam is an IP that arguably could be so much more, though it hasn't done too terribly--I think it's more that Gundam could use a bitchin' simulationist game along the lines of MechWarrior or Steel Battalion. The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past. Everything else is more fantastical, arcade-oriented fare like Dynasty Warriors Gundam or Gundam Versus, or RPG stuff like SD Gundam or Super Robot Wars. And all of that stuff is maybe a little too focused on referencing iconic moments from their source animes, rather than simply plopping you into the world of the Universal Century, After Colony, Cosmic Era, or Post-Disaster and letting you choose your story. The only other kind of game that Gundam has spawned that really sounds appealing is the Japan-only Gihren's Greed series of strategic games.

The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (for PS3) is very down-to-earth—it's quite easy to be sniped across the map by Gelgoogs or Guntanks in later levels (or by Acguys in earlier levels). I've also read that Zeonic Front (for PS2) is very tactical in the style of the first Rainbow Six game, though I haven't played it.

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.

I should quibble that, while Dune isn't as obviously bound into the DNA of sci-fi as LOTR is to fantasy, Dune still has left indelible marks on the genre as a whole. Besides the aforementioned Dune II and how it led to Command & Conquer, the books themselves and the ideas therein were practically ripped-off for a sci-fi/sci-fantasy franchise you might recognize: Warhammer 40,000.

40K has a lot of Dune's ideas: a powerful God-Emperor, technology reverted to a means rather as the be-all-end-all, the focus on humanity and its capabilities (albeit twisted and tinged, no doubt, by heavy-metal influences like 2000 AD), the freakish Navigators that space travel relies on...

40K also has that "profound human suffering" part down pat, albeit for different reasons (in 40K, the human race as a whole commits great evil against others and itself in order to have a fighting chance against Moorcock-influenced endless evil). 40K isn't quite as interested as being as deep as Dune (at least, depending on the writer). After all, it is a wargame franchise, meaning there must always be war (which is literally part of the game's tagline!), and one of the popular sayings from the universe is "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment." However, again, depending on the writer, the grand saga of the Imperium of Man can be about the human drive to survive and flourish, about how hope and unity can keep one strong in the face of evil.

The only other sci-fi franchise I can think of that uses some of the same tropes as 40K and also gestures broadly at the ideas of civilization, war, and stability is the other major sci-fi wargaming franchise from the 80's: BattleTech, the game and world created when Jordan Weisman picked up model kits/miniatures at a trade show and imagined a world not unlike the medieval, post-Roman-collapse world, but where giant anime robots replaced horses and knights and where kingdoms stretched across lightyears.

Star Wars has also obviously ripped a shitload from Dune. There's also an intergalactic emperor, a main character with a biblical first name (Paul -> Luke), a large part of the original firm takes place on a desert planet, the whole medieval/futuristic combination etc. More listed here.

If one accepts the Castalia House thesis that D&D actually didn't borrow much at all from Tolkien and was more indebted to pre-LotR pulps, one might indeed make an argument that Dune is at least as important to scifi as a genre as LotR is to fantasy. Of course, that is a big if.

Fuck without rhythm!

And you won't

Extract

The sperm.

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.

Tbh after reading your other comments, this just reads to me like "Why is [thing I like] so much better than [thing I don't like]?". I hate the new LotR series just as much as anyone else, but I've never heard about the Dune video nor board games and even the current movie, while certainly not bad, is not even near the LotR film trilogy. Looking at review aggregators, wikipedia, etc., both the public and critics seem to agree with that as well. The board game has a small fandom with no larger impact. The Dune 2 RTS seems to be the only objectively culturally impactful piece of media following the Dune books themselves.

I don't dislike Lord of the Rings at all. I have read it four times. I'm rather disappointed by the trilogy next to Villeneuve's Dune, but only because I have high expectations for it. In fact, most Lord of the Rings media is underwhelming and forgettable. I tried a lot of Lord of the Rings media in the 90s and 2000s and most of it fell in that 3.5-6.5 range. It is so forgettable that (some) people disagreeing with me here didn't even know that Lord of the Rings branded media was being produced long before the movies. Compare that to most Dune media, which I have been very impressed by. Not because I prefer Dune, which I enjoy but have read half as many times, but because the media that is based on it is so consistently impressive by comparison to what Lord of the Rings has put out.

And while the board game is undoubtedly niche (as games that have been out of print since '84 tend to be), its impact upon board games is still huge. Unique, balanced faction powers are now common in board/strategy games.

Agree completely. The original LoTR movie trilogy alone trumps anything Dune has done.

Dune

Fertile

I'm sorry, what

By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?

Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.

I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.

They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.

You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.

What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.

I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.

Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

Yes, I'm surprised when people are surprised that new Star Wars stuff is rubbish. There hasn't be a truly great Star Wars film for 40 years (arguably longer) and the heyday of Star Wars franchised stuff was the 1990s, I think, with some great Lucas Arts games from that period.

Creative success is one of those highly unpredictable evolutionary processes whose outputs look better on average than they are, because we tend to forget the detritus.

There has been a bunch good EU content though. My assumption was that similar to marvel Disney would try to pick through the material and more or less loosely adopt the good stuff.

This seemed like such an easy (and already proven within the company) recipe for success that I couldn't really imagine massive failure. The property isn't super complex and the fans are not very needy. And yet..

I think that it's at least 10 years too late to create a fun expanded universe. Too much PC, too much safety-first writing. Even the Marvel stuff doesn't interest me, except at the margins where some really vivacious creativity sneaks in e.g. the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

I think I would have to go back at least 20 years to find any Star Wars creativity that I thought wasn't just good, but great. I mean, there are still good Bond films, but I haven't seen a great one since Goldeneye nearly 30 years ago.

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

I question the premise that Dune is more fertile than Lord of The Rings. That said I think I understand the question that you're getting at will attempt to engage...

Related to my post last week on "Inferential Distance" I feel like one of the major assumption/axioms where blue tribe culture differs from the red is in the assumption that something that is popular cannot be good or worthwhile or vice versa. There seems to be this assumption that good art is supposed to be esoteric and inaccessible to the general public because how else is one supposed to demonstrate their superior education, intellect, and understanding. At the risk of coming across as uncharitable, the image in my mind is that of an insufferable hipster sneering at "all that shit" that the normies like

Meanwhile feel like history has demonstrated the opposite. The mark of "a great artist" is not being esoteric, or being admired by one's contemporaries. Often just the opposite. Historically the thing that has set a great artist apart is the ability to convey deep/complex themes to as wide an audience as possible, and I think that that is the true answer to your question.

What does 'blue tribe' mean here? Scott's Blue Tribe was "liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated". Some of these people are esoteric hipsters, but many, many more of them enjoy popular media, like popular music/movies/tv/, than try to one-up each other over short films they saw at film festivals.

In this context it means being a "Weirdo" IE western industrialized and educated, while also ticking the boxes of a secular, urban, hipster type. IE most of Scott's bullet points.

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!

I meant more in comparison to the average speculative fiction writer, and I meant mainly in terms of leaving out world-building details.

One thing that many popular fictions have in common is that engaging with them feels more like discovering than like inventing. For example, I can pose to myself and others the question of what Sherlock Holmes' childhood was like. Sherlock Holmes is fictional so any speculation that I or others do about his childhood is invention. But the fiction is so rich that one can enter into it, basing one's speculations on the known written material and the less effable "spirit" of the work, and it feels as if one were researching the history of an actual human being. Similarly, one can for example discuss with others what the relationships between Lovecraft's various invented fictional entities are, or speculate about the nature of Tom Bombadil, or write an essay about the motivations of the Bene Gesserit. The fictional universe is rich enough that it easily supports adding new creation to it because it has established a certain consistency and coherence of logic, flavor, and spirit so that one can pick up where the original creator(s) left off. It holds together. The boundary between what is acceptably part of the universe and what violates its nature is of course blurry and no two people view it in exactly the same way, but nonetheless pretty much everyone feels that there is some kind of difference between new creations that are more consistent with the fictional universe and creations that are less consistent with it.

20 years ago, it was LotR getting the Hollywood treatment while Dune was the flagship for an existing player's first forays into the miniseries format. How the tables have turned! Though Frank Herbert's Dune was well-received, probably because it occupied a sweet spot between passion projects and big budgets.

I'd say good media is the intersection of a decent premise and an artistic vision. Since we're talking about adaptations of famous works, the premise is already met. Then it's up to the director/producer/etc. to make a cohesive piece of art rather than a checklist. I know that's kind of a cop-out, but...that's the key. Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

There's a whole other argument I want to make about market share, deconstruction vs. reconstruction, and postmodernism, but tonight is not the night.

Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

Is is frankly astonishing to me how expensive some movies are and how few people are responsible for the artistic vision, even if it is a committee. It's even more astonishing if it's just left up to one producer. How is this kind of trust formed at all?

There's a hidden assumption in your astonishment that spreading the responsibility to more people would make movie production safer from a financial perspective. Is there a reason to believe that?

Hmmm. I guess I don't have a solid explanation for why committees are safer. My vibe is that committees operate by consensus and this means individual weirdnesses get sanded down in the process, thusly ensuring the outcome is more firmly within bounds.

That's great in manufacturing or engineering, it's often detrimental in art and entertainment.

Indeed, some works shine thanks to the Auteur Theory.

At least in the very recent era of these IPs you can look at it like this: The people making Dune were trying to adapt the book of Dune. The people making the new Lord of the Rings show were trying to write their own prequel they made up and couldn't include anything from the Silmarillion.

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

This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.

Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...

Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.

Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?

Aside from generally being unpleasant and mischaracterizing my post, I'm not sure what your point is.

Are you mad that I'm not listing more fun Dune media? That I'm not getting further into the weeds? Or do you think that talking about another game that you have already described as fun and unique somehow disproves my point about Dune having disproportionately better media than Lord of the Rings?

What do I have to argue against, even if I wanted to? You say that Dune II is mostly generic with its ships and units, as if that is somehow a strike against the idea. But a couple of other people already made the point that the ability to fill in the gaps and details of Frank Herbert's universe is one of the things it has going for it when creating media.

Are they wrong? Maybe. Feel free to make that argument. It could be interesting, but you haven't actually made it yet.

Instead you seem to think you have proven some point when all you have done is attack me, state some facts about Dune games, and declared that I am "wrecked" because of my "grand-sounding theory."

If you step out of your weird fanboy-rage for a second, you'll see that I don't actually have a theory at all. I have three statements, only two of which are at all controversial. One is the assertion that some media inspires higher-quality derivatives than others (even if the media itself is not necessarily higher quality). This is a hypothesis. It has none of the characteristics of a theory because it is currently a blank page. A thesis statement looking for a body.

My second assertion was that Dune has inspired quite a lot of high-quality media. This was an illustration of the hypothesis. Because abstracts without concrete examples don't get engagement.

My final assertion, the one that seems to have filled you with such weird, fanboyish rage, is that Lord of the Rings has a much lower average level of quality. This is also part of the illustration for comparison and contrast. This isn't a theory. Now, I'm not going to say that I don't understand why the statement is controversial, and I'd be happy if people were disagreeing in a way that even broached the thesis statement, but again, you aren't doing it. You haven't even actually engaged with the concept.

You are so mad that you think that you can somehow knock down my "grand-sounding theory" without even engaging it. You can't. Even if you were to somehow prove that I am totally wrong and Lord of the Rings has much higher quality media, that still wouldn't disprove my hypothesis. Because that would just fit the hypothesis in the opposite direction.

I didn't use the word prove, so I don't understand why you are once again attributing words to me to mischaracterize what I wrote. Is this intellectual dishonesty or just poor reading comprehension?

Edit: Oh, you think I "accidentally" admitted that this is unfalsifiable. Just poor reading comprehension, then.

More comments

So could your question be rephrased as "why do Dune-licensed games have more impactful/genre-defining mechanics than LotR-licensed games"?

No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)

I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.

E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?

None. They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Star Wars starts off with "desert planet" but then leaves that behind for the basic "rayguns and rockets" plot (and none the worse for it).

Dune is Morocco IN SPAAAACE and the Fremen are Berbers IN SPAAACE and he is a lot more pretentious than Lucas about it all. Both of them are planetary fantasies, but Herbert is all "deep environmentalism philosophy man" and Lucas was "and then pow! zap! space battles! stormtroopers! smugglers in starships! the good guys win!" so he's a lot more fun.

They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

It also lifts a lot of plot and characterization from a specific Kurosawa movie. Mostly changed for the better but the parallel is very transparent.

I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings adaptations are less inspiring than Dune's unless you are ignoring the Peter Jackson trilogy entirely. Those are some of the most culturally significant films in recent memory. Not a month goes by where I don't hear someone quoting Gandalf, sharing a meme about the One Ring (this is one I encountered last week), comparing their political opponents to orcs, or otherwise referencing them. While Dune has also had a significant impact, this influence went under the radar for many people until the recent movie release.

For what it's worth, I had never heard of the board game until now despite having read all 6 of Frank Herbert's books and most of the Dune Encyclopedia. Most people I talk to about Dune know it has something to do with a desert, spice, and sandworms, but I am far more likely in my experience to find someone able to recite Théoden's speech at the Pelennor Fields from memory than I am someone who can recall the Litany Against Fear. If you are only looking at the most recent adaptations and comparing the Denis Villeneuve film to the Rings of Power show, then of course Dune wins hands down, but that hardly seems fair.

If your question was more narrowly focused on Dune II and the Dune board game being genre-defining as compared to LOTR strategy games and board games, then I'd wager that due to Dune's lesser cultural significance than LOTR and somewhat freer IP, developers were more willing to take risks and innovate than they would have with the Tolkien Estate breathing down their backs. Looking at the source material, it's clear that Tolkien left a lot more to work with than Herbert, so if it were a true free-for-all I'd bet on some Silmarillion adaptation wiping the floor with the best Dune has to offer (though if someone other than Brian Herbert wrote a proper Butlerian Jihad story that might stand a chance).

LOTR's MMO was one of the best MMOs. For things outside of the movies, which LOTR still easily claims the better of them, Dune's universe is a bit more interesting when it comes to speculation. Middle Earth has a history. Dune has stuff. Its easy to create any sort of war or resource game (Age of Empire or Settlers of Catan IN DUNE)

Define "stuff."

Thousands of theoretical houses governing planets who could be at war with each other for any made up reason.

I mean, hell, you could make a strategy game depicting the Jihad as it happens between the original book and Messiah. Have two campaigns; one where you play as the Imperial house and work your way up to eventually meet face-to-face with Emperor Paul himself, and one where you're fighting for a band of houses trying to survive the wave of galactic murder Paul's ascension to the throne has unleashed.

That could be a fun 1P game, but RTS Dune is just low hanging fruit. You can be the Atriedes, the Harkkonnens, the Corrinos, etc.

It is not obvious to me that "a Dune video game created the RTS genre" and "there was a Dune board game so popular people played it decades after it was out of print" is sufficient to conclude "Dune had a stronger showing" than Lord of the Rings in terms of cultural inspiration.

The influence Tolkien's worldbuilding and method of storytelling on fantasy as a genre seems difficult to understate. Not just on directly LotR inspired works but across a range of intellectual properties and media types. This is not to say Dune wasn't influential or inspirational but it does not really compare, to my mind.

But this is just vague handwaving. I'm not arguing the popularity of Lord of the Rings or its cultural impact. I'm talking about the impact, in turn, of the licensed media that followed.

Lord of the Rings, as a book series, is hugely impactful on the culture. Lord of the Rings the multimedia franchise is, on average, middling and most of it will be forgotten. Dune, on the other hand, has been less impactful overall. Yet, despite having far less adaptations and licensed media (before the most recent movie. I'm not young and free enough to keep up with everything that is coming out now), what exists is both of a much higher average quality and often hugely impactful on their own mediums.

Just shrugging that off is simply being obtuse and ignoring the actual subject.

I think there's two different things being claimed.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise better than the stuff produced for LOTR? Possibly. If you mean Rings of Power oh hell yeah.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise more influential? Again, maybe, but I think it's more in the "niche sphere where people really really care about the RTS genre" and not "general game-playing public". I haven't played any of the LOTR games and I remember back when they were issuing board games under the licence, but I've heard about them and seen them advertised. I honestly don't remember seeing anything for Dune media.

What you said at the end there - that there’s Dune related media that’s “hugely” impactful isnt clear at all. I can’t think of any.

Dune has produced one bad movie and one good movie.

LOTR has hugely influenced fantasy, music, video games and mich more. Dune has nothing much

I'd say Dune's resulted in some bangin' music.

Before clicking the link, my guess was this.

Then maybe that is where I'm misunderstanding what you're asking. I was thinking of the two works in terms of their broad cultural impact, not of just the impact of their licensed multimedia. In that case I think there is a case to be made for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy of films but that's about it innovation wise. I have enjoyed a lot of the Lord of the Rings games but I don't think they did anything particularly innovative, certainly not compared to what Dune seems to have done (I haven't played it myself).

On the one hand, I'd say this actually must be my fault in writing clearly because almost everyone is responding with a focus on the books themselves rather than the larger multimedia franchises.

On the other hand, I am mostly getting a lot of tears about how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better and posters didn't even know that the board game existed so how impactful could it be? All without even engaging the question. High decouplers? Yeah, okay.

Are we forgetting Peter Jackson's LotR movies? They were far more impactful and frankly better than any Dune movie.

Also, LotR basically spawned the fantasy genre. Even within the LotR franchise, there are countless books that spun off from the main series.

To be fair, the Dune RTS game was a genre-defining phenomenon.

But I agree with the overall sentiment!

I thought about that, but the Dune RTS was genre-defining in large part because of when it came out. It was easier for a game to stand out in those days.

LOTR also has a legendary board game, many popular video games, etc. So I'm not really sure what exactly you're trying to say is the advantage of Dune here.

I didn't ask about number. I asked about quality. Sure, Lord of the Rings has a great board game. Some of the video games are even pretty decent. But I'm talking about percentage of hits here. Lord of the Rings, for all of its numbers and popularity, is comparatively underwhelming when you compare the average quality of what it gets in comparison to Dune. Sure, War of the Ring is considered a classic, but what about Lord of the Rings that came before it? Or the Lord of the Rings TCG? Etcetera.

I mean if it's about quality and not numbers, one single classic board game (War of the Ring as you said) is enough. The others before it don't matter.

I will grant that Dune 2 is a legendary RTS and LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy, but I contend that has little to do with the IP. They simply were making the right game at the right time, and had few to no competitors. By the time you had LOTR games being made (which I remind you are actually pretty good in many cases), there was a thriving games industry and the genres were pretty well established. I contend that something like BfME 2 is as good as Dune 2, it just was later on and so it didn't have the same impact. The IP didn't cause that.

I think the one IP based aspect of the RTS template that easily could have converged towards very different designs is the focus on in-map resource extraction and economy. You can't make a Dune game without harvesters, but you can easily make a strategy game without actively managed economy units and harassing thereof. And many successful RTS's from this century have abandoned this aspect.

I wasn't even particularly looking for Dune-related insights, but this is definitely an interesting point. Thank you.

LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy

Not quite, but there was a very influential adventure game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

Presumably that's why, in Red Dwarf, as their generic adventure game, they hint at a LOTR game:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fYAlB1Kxayc

Of course the others before it matter. It's an infinite monkeys on typewriters scenario. If you give enough people opportunities to make a game based on Lord of the Rings, one of them eventually is likely to be good.

And sure, on a technical level, Battle for Middle Earth is the more polished, later game. But that is sidestepping the most difficult part in creating, which is creating something new and dynamic. It is easy to make a similar game in hindsight, once it has already been done. And you are simply wrong when you say that there was no opportunity to make Tolkien-branded games while they were making Dune games. That just isn't true. They were making games. They even attempted a strategy game before Dune II. It is just forgettable.

We're going to have to agree to disagree. I think you are wrong on all points, I'm sure you think the same of me. If we can't agree on the basic axioms we're dealing with, then of course our conclusions will differ.

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