I can see how they got away with not saying any Arabic terms in the last movie, but come on, are they really gonna ret-con the whole vocabulary of the setting to avoid upsetting some cracker groypers?

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      That’s a shallow reading. Herbert engaged very seriously with Islamic philosophy and the dynamics of colonialism; nothing about it was random. A white guy borrowing any elements from another culture is not sufficient to demonstrate orientalism, especially when he so obviously takes the side of the Future Arabs against Future Honkeys.

    • novibe
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      9 months ago

      Is that fair tho…? All culture is bastardised in the Dune universe. Western or Eastern. It shows such a distant future that anything that seems familiar upon closer inspection is truly alien.

      The Atreides are “Roman”, but they really are not right? The whole culture of Caladan for example is like a generic “utopian” bucolic Western European medieval vibe. It’s in itself a bastardisation of “western culture” no? Like an “occidentalist” view in a way.

        • novibe
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          9 months ago

          But that’s not the point in Dune. It’s about how human culture shifts and absorbs itself over time. How marginal cultures become central, and central cultures become marginal. That’s how I saw it at least.