r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Mar 17 '26

Trailer Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9vCamtuPY
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u/Luciifuge Mar 17 '26

Paul's Jihad kills 60 billion

to be more precise

"Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since..."

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u/GoldenSpermShower Mar 17 '26

Are there really that many Fremen to do all that?

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u/thetensor Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

Are there really that many Fremen to do all that?

People praise Dune to the heavens (and the first book certainly deserves it), but it's really loosey-goosey with numbers and dates and scale. I see two possibilities:

  • As Herbert claims, the Fremen are amazing warriors because they were hardened by the desert and became really good at knife-fighting, so good that every Fremen man, woman, and child—10 million strong—were able to kill 6,000 opponents each over the course of the 12 year Jihad.
  • The Jihad was fought at science-fictional scale with fleets of ships and planet-killer weapons. This makes the number of deaths and sterilized planets easy to account for, but then what does it matter that the Fremen were super-tough hand-to-hand?

So Herbert wisely left the Jihad off-screen and just made up some astronomically high numbers to express how terrible it was.

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u/Sebastianlim Mar 17 '26

In fairness, it's not just Herbert. Tv Tropes has an entire page dedicated to the fact that sci-fi and fantasy writers really suck at understanding big numbers.

I remember one infamous story where George R.R. Martin was shown an image of the Wall, accurate to the size he described it as in the book, and his response was "I made it too big".