Dune

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

I know I am.

The Dune universe is font from which one can drink forever and never run dry.

And I still think God Emperor is horrifically underrated by most...

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

It took me years to even begin to understand that book. Some of the people I've referred to in earlier posts seem to think that God Emperor is the best of the series, and they love Leto II.

Well, it's helpful that they explained a bunch of things about the book I hadn't understood before, but I don't agree with their assessment of how good it is.

Underrated? I guess so, given that some of the things I hate about it are things other fans like. But so much of it just consists of puny little humans cowering before Leto, daring to voice their puny little opinions, and praying that he won't have them killed... or else it's basically Leto talking to himself.

So it would seem that I really don't understand it at all, since the reader is supposed to at least understand a little of where Leto is coming from.

I'll have to see if any of my old posts from Dunenovels.com are still around. I remember having some stuff to say on this issue way back a few years ago...

Well, you can't claim Leto was heroic, exactly - in many senses, he was the bad guy.  He really was, for all the reasons you cite, notwithstanding his heroic sacrifice for a heroic purpose (and you'll recall that as events built when he was nine, he saw exactly what he was going to miss in possible futures.)

God Emperor is the story of the end of the loneliest person who ever lived --- if you look at it on that level, that to a certain extent, like Steven Crane's story The Open Boat, it was boring on purpose -which is about the faintest of praise possible, I admit- you have to grant that Herbert had something there.  I've enjoyed it far more on rereadings since I realized that.

It was certainly a far more carefully-crafted work with greater dramatic unity than Messiah or Children, which, for all their virtues were sloppy messes in which he frequently contradicted the far superior original.  (On that level, the two reverend mother novels that followed were better works, too - they suffered from a lack of iconic, dominating characters, and nothing nearly so important being at stake, but they had consistency and dramatic unity, and were good yarns.  They couldn't compete with the previous four, with BIG characters and THE FATE OF HUMANITY in the balance, yes, but taken on their own merits, were quite good.)

[Buster's Uncle]

And hey!  You'll like this; I just thought of yet another way the prequels are impossible and just plain wrong.

So, the version of the Baron who possessed Alia was the ancestral memory of the Baron as of the moment of the conception of Jessica, and no later, of course.  At that age, already a dangerous, calculating, man with a "basso rumble" of a voice, a man of overwhelming appetites who compelled her into sleeping with (politically inexpedient) men he found attractive, and into eating until she was getting fat, despite a reverend mother's metabolic control.

This is supposed to be the same man as the crude bungler of the 'prequels' who only got fat later because Mohiam gave him a wasting disease while he raped her?

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

Yeah, they really dumbed-down the Bene Gesserit. Mohiam had two girls, but killed the first one because of some vague feeling, and the second was Jessica. I suppose they were going for irony there...

FH made it very clear that the Baron deliberately chose to be the way he was because he knew others would find it offensive, and he enjoyed offending people.

That was Moneo's interpretation 3,000 years later, yes, and it's probably valid as far as it goes - a self-justification the Baron used on finding himself so hugely fat he needed suspensors to walk.  I don't buy that he chose to be handicapped-fat just to troll IRL, no.

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

The Baron was, at the very least, unapologetically self-indulgent, and he did not become as we first see him because the Bene Gesserit caused it.

Notwithstanding the thrill-seeking as a disembodied ghost possessing his killer -and he had access to Alia's recent memories, or they couldn't have interacted in real time, so he did know that, and the bad acts he coerced were no doubt partly for revenge- the Baron was more than a perverted sensualist with a mad-dog killer streak.  He was more dangerous than that, and smarter, playing a long game by the age he was during Dune.  Remember the meeting with Count Fafnir?  His internal reaction to a threat was excitement, to hope Shaddam was dumb enough to do it, so he could beat his breast before the Lansraad, placing HIMSELF upon the throne in his own lifetime, crying all the time how he was wronged.

...He was doing it all just to make freakin' spoiled FEYD emperor someday...

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

Dang. 

Fenring.  On Gedi Prime.  His wife was laying Feyd because Bene Gesseret stuff, and he was passing on some imperial pressure about the handling of the Dune/destroy Leto caper.

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

Yes.

Anyway, the Baron was playing a long game, and the single worst thing about movie and miniseries alike is that they seriously underestimated him.  And what's an adventure fiction with a crappy villain?

(If Wonder Woman had better villains, she'd be a movie star long before this - Linda Carter made it three years on TV with no good villains but Nazis in the first season.)

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

Hmm.  Of course the Ixians would have exterminated the entire human race if not for Leto II...