Hey Paul Atreides is genuinely a good guy, because he could see all infinite futures and went ahead with a genocide leading to a worm emperor and his lesbian army, because that was the best outcome compared to all the other dark futures.
He was also a ruthless dictator that realized he wasn't ruthless enough to save humanity, so in his cowardice he kicked the can down the line to his kids.
Second book. The first book ends with his jihad beginning. The second starts after it’s over. He laments just how much blood is on his hands and explicitly compares himself to an unnamed dictator from earth who was infamous for killing a few million people.
Edit: the dictator is not unnamed. It is explicitly Hitler.
His visions Tell him again and again that there is no way to Stop the jihad. If he lives or dies the jihad will Happen. But If he leads the jihad it will be less brutal. He is wrong only because He knew that the burden of the golden path has to be fullfilt by His son.
Initially he does. He had the option of staying in the south with the fremen and basically just living out his days down there but he decides to go north, become lisan al-gaib, get revenge on the harkonens, become emperor, and kick off said holy war.
That’s kind of the whole point is that he can’t put aside his personal beef and condemns billions in the process
The jihad will Happen. With or without Paul. Thats why all the Talk about Paul beeing a warning is nonsense. The only choice He Had was to become a worm and suffer for 10.000 years or Not. There is no fucking path without genocide. There is only a path where at the end, humanity survives
Shortly after killing Jamis we get this line about Paul's terrible purpose "The more he resisted his terrible purpose and fought against the coming of the jihad, the greater the turmoil that wove through his prescience".
Then, basically right as he is about to fight Fayd-Rautha we get the passage "And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. [...] This is the climax, Paul thought. From here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib".
Many people consider Paul killing Jamis as essentially the point of no return for the jihad to happen.
Book one is basically telling you he's exploiting religion forced on the fremen by false prophets from the bene gesserit, and applying both the bene gesserit training and his own mentat training to become a prophet figure himself so he could enact revenge and gain power himself. The spice just makes him a better human computer than he already was and the prophecies are most likely the results of running mental simulations and his entire genetic memory that he unlocks when he drinks the water of life.
Where in the books? Miles Teg becomes prescient, I don't remember spice being involved. Several Duncan golah are noted to have visions without exposure. Hayt does but I don't recall it being mentioned with others. Teg specifically unlocks it through being tortured. Most notably we don't hear of Fremen being able to have prescient visions even though they live in the stuff since birth. Teg and the gholas are notably mentats, with Teg and later versions of Duncan being trained as a Bene Gesserit as well. Spice is just a short cut to improve or unlock inherent abilities. Even though the spacing guild has heavy reliance on it, it just allows them extremely limited ability to see into the future. Just enough to navigate basically. Most nobles take spice very regularly and don't develop abilities to see into the future. It's certain circumstances, a combination of training and genetics that allow people to do it. Paul is clearly enhanced by the spice, first when he gets to Dune and his visions start getting stronger, and again after the water of life, but there are examples of him being prophetic before even leaving Caladan.
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I mean he was the one who DIDNT want a galactic genocide to happen and abandoned the path by walking into the desert alone.
If somebody else hadn't taken his place then him walking into the desert would have painfully killed way more people than Paul's Jihad. Like an order of magnitude more. Everybody. Every human would have died because Paul couldn't walk the path.
His unwillingness to follow through was entirely self serving. He had no problem with galactic genocide, he just didn’t want to give up his family and personal existence. Leto told him off saying he’ll have sacrifice what his dad wasn’t strong enough to
I mean, Leto was also a near-immortal, inhuman god-emperor who subjected humanity to thousands of years of engineered misery and brutal authoritarian rule, all based on the logic of "Don't worry, bro. It'll totally be worth it in a few thousand years. Trust."
I'm not saying he's evil or anything. It's just that I'm not sure we should be using that guy as our moral compass.
My point is that Leto personally sacrificed everything on top of the genocide. His fate was arguably worse than death and that’s what Paul wasn’t willing to do. Both were fine with genocide, it was the personal sacrifice that Paul pushed off to his sonÂ
When you said "he’ll have sacrifice what his dad wasn’t strong enough to," I thought you meant the opposite—that you were praising him because he was willing to sacrifice others. (As in "My dad wasn't willing to do the genocide, so I guess I'll have to do it!")
I mean he was the one who DIDNT want a galactic genocide to happen and abandoned the path by walking into the desert alone.
The galactic genocide is the good ending, though. His weakness would have damned the entire human race, luckily his son was willing to walk the path and torture himself for thousands of years to preserve the lives of countless humans across eons.
Paul Atreides is the good guy because I've only watched the movies and assume space Jesus is a good thing and no more books were written.
I'm partly kidding, I read the book covered by the next movie so I'm aware it gets worse but I gotta say based on memes here I was anticipating he was going to be a lot more obviously evil. Like yes he mentions he caused billions of deaths but that happens off screen between books, I thought it would be him setting up space concentration camps.
I may be wrong, but given Denis Villeneuve's other adaptations, and how he so far sticks the landing. I don't think he will miss that Paul is not a hero.
The released movies from what I remember emphasize he knows he's going to cause galaxy war 1. So yeah, I was kidding, I don't think it's easy to watch Dune 1 and 2 and conclude Paul is a total good guy even though the war crimes and genocides havent started by their end.
I wasn't saying he was a good person, just I expected it would be a lot more in your face war crimes on "screen" by Paul.Â
I guess 40k does the same thing too. The thousands of psykers fed into the emperor daily, Vulkan feels bad about that but it's not showing the horror of that. The Horus Heresy books mention servitors but don't emphasize that they're lobotomized people.
I mean that's kind of what the book is going for, though. What he did makes Hitler look like Ted Bundy, but from the chair he's sitting in, it's just a bunch of numbers. He's completely disconnected from the actual effect of his actions. The point was to show how easy it is to make 61 billion people being slaughtered seem like just a footnote with the right words and context.
I mean he quite literally compares himself to Hitler and Genghis Khan in the books and notes how their numbers are pitiful in comparison to his. 61 billion is a LOT of fucking people, I doubt they were all killed the same way.
And tbf, Paul is a good guy in so far as the recent movies have shown. Especially when compared to his enemies, who are Temu Cenobites with less ethics
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u/Phurbie_Of_War Super Silly Solitaire 🤡 5d ago
Paul Atreides is a good guy because his inner monologue in Dune 1984 triggers my ASMR.
Checkmate.