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Is Dune a white saviour story?

 No.

There's been some buzz around the internet around the recently launched film Dune, directed by Dennis Villeneuve. I've anticipated and been hungry for this movie for many years now. I'm a huge Dune fanboi, and the book by Frank Herbert, first published (as a series) back in 1965 is a seminal and highly important book to me, one I've read more times than I dare to count. We're talking 30+.

Some of that buzz has been about Dune being a white saviour story, where some priviledged white person comes into a native setting and saves them from their ignorance, starts a revolution and captures the princess. There's a lot of these stories thruogh history, and it glorifies the superiority of the white race or white culture, and is aiming to seem kind and ethical while at the same time being snotty and racist.

Dune is not that story. Without spoiling anything else about the story, in case you're new to the world of Frank Herbert, it's the opposite of that. There are plenty of hints of this throughout Dune (the first book), and made blatatly obvious in the second book, Dune Messiah.

The reason a lot of people might mistake the Dune as having this priviledged issue is that the movie is only the first half of the first book. But don't judge a book by its first half. It is not that story. It's the opposite.

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