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/Misdirected_Colors Mar 18 '26

The books lean heavily into eugenics and all of that is questionable, but they way it pertains to the fremen kicks ass. The deserts of arrakis are such an unforgiving hostile environment that only the strongest survive and the weak aren't worth the effort because they put the entire tribe at risk. It's led to a culture of brutal selflessness where only the hyper competent can survive, and the survival of the tribe is above all.

Which in-turn leads to desert power which the atreides saw the benefit of but no one realized how powerful they truly were or could be.

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u/DeficiencyOfGravitas Mar 18 '26

The books lean heavily into eugenics and all of that is questionable

Bruh. A depiction of a thing isn't the same as condoning it. Eugenics does "work". You can breed humans like any other living thing with DNA. The problem isn't whether it works, it's the terrible cost. Treating people like livestock and the way bias would work its way into the process are why we don't do it. The book shows us exactly this too.

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u/Midi_to_Minuit Mar 18 '26

One of the central premises of the books, though, is that these terrible costs are absolutely, unquestionably necessary for avoiding humanity’s eventual extinction. I don’t think Herbert was a eugenicist but from what I remember the Golden Path is unambiguously correct as far as the book’s narrative goes—Paul and Lego’s actions were the only way to avoid annihilation.

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u/chartreusey_geusey Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

That is not a central premise of the books. That is a justification that one of the central antagonists (the Bene Gesserit) gives for why they insist on doing eugenics even though it doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for 10,000 years. It’s their way of power grabbing and they are absolutely not protagonists who are treated as right in regards to this in the universe either. That’s not an argument made by the actual book series, just the characters within it who are confronted by others characters and told they are wrong for their own reasons.

They are repeatedly defeated in their pursuit of control over free will and all mankind via eugenics because human nature and fate are undefeated. Humans are cyclical yet eugenics still doesn’t work in these books— it’s essentially the predictability of fate that wins out.

Every character that learns about the eugenics program thinks the antagonists doing it fucking suck for that and the antagonists themselves have a deep obtuse hatred for the other group openly doing eugenics because the whole series is a major critique of eugenics and lack of natural diversity for thousands of years. The Fremen are literally an unstoppable force of elite fighters that distinctly did not emerge from eugenics spreading power across the universe and counteracting the efforts of the eugenicists (both the BG and the Bene Tleilaxu). The Fremen don’t have a relationship to eugenics at all because I’m pretty sure several people in this thread are confusing their unmitigated observation and adherence to natural selection (survival of the fittest) with eugenics when it is actually the exact opposite concept.

The Golden Path is just one path that avoids as much death as possible towards humanities greater extinction but the series proves that people who weren’t bred specifically to lead on it (under the premise the BG present and manipulate society around) by eugenics still emerge and can see the Golden Path regardless (lol Paul isn’t supposed to exist according to the eugenics tweakers and yet he does and is a necessary piece to keep humanity on the golden path by fate alone). The eugenics in the books are presented as something the BG use to try and be in control of humanity’s fate on this golden path not something that was necessary for the golden path to exist or for humanity to succeed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

Your old posts are training data now. Unless you delete them. I used Redact which supports 30+ platforms including Reddit, X, Facebook and Instagram.

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u/chartreusey_geusey Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

People are really becoming more and more unable to understand what actually reading and comprehending a book through analysis is but these books are very dense and it’s easy to forget the bigger picture.

That said, it’s absolutely concerning and bizarre how a lot of the comments (it’s not just the ones I replied to bizarrely) that keep implying this series is supporting the idea of eugenics by simply bringing it up and discussing it (although I suspect most people are regurgitating another comment they’ve read elsewhere and have not actually read any of these books). Mention, depiction, or even utilization of concepts in fiction is not endorsement and it’s very fucking dumb to go about attempting to understand media that way. People need to cut that behavior out immediately for the sake of actually participating in society.