No, I'm with you. I think Herbert's point was not that Paul was bad -- we wanted him to succeed -- but how naturally seductive the idea of a messiah or superhero is to us. Characters even explicitly say that a real messiah is about the worst thing a people can get.

I think Dune Messiah (which is rather disappointing even outside of how marginalized Paul becomes after focusing so much on him) is more about how the artifice built up around him becomes evil and does just fine without his actual presence.

i think the original plan for Dune was that it would encompass the events of the first three novels, but there was some scope creep that prevented this. Therefore, the long-term impression/memory of Paul is probably a lot different than it would have been if the original Dune had contained all these events. It's a 'rise and fall' kind of thing and Herbert himself was mostly interested in the 'fall' part, philosophically.

> How is it possible that someone could have rooted for any character /other/ than Paul in the original Dune novel?

If I may, that you think that is an example of the problem. When you read _The Iron Dream_ (I realize now I gave the wrong title, but I can't edit my original comment, grr.), how can you not root for Feric Jaggar (Adolf Hitler)?

How can a German not root for Hitler, trying to restore Germany to greatness and hold back the tide of communism? (Let's not forget how the body count of Stalin and Mao run into the dozens of millions, as opposed to 'only' the 6 million or so of the Holocaust. The Nazis were right about one thing - Communism was awfully evil.)

> Or were we "supposed to" wash our hands of the book and leave saying "They were all scum"?

Maybe we should have! Sometimes no one is right. The Atreides are noble and everything, but their nobility consists pretty much of not murderously mistreating their slaves - I mean, serfs.

> Was someone seriously supposed to root for Duncan Idaho or the Mentats?

You could make a good case for Idaho, given how central he is to the later books.

> It's nice that Paul was depicted as being flawed in Dune Messiah, but his being an evil character does not follow from the original Dune, unless you take extreme care to see certain changes in his character (such as the aside about him being worried about spice equipment and ornithopters).

Paul is not cackling evil like the Baron. He is evil, even in _Dune_, like the Nuremberg Trials, an evil that is more passive than active - he knows how hideous the Jihad will be, he has seen all the futures. He knows what he is later told:

> "Very good, Stil." Paul glanced at the reels in Korba's hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. "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 -- "

Paul's evil is one of cowardice and a refusal to do the right thing. He knows all he has to do is die or vanish into the desert, or even just go into exile on Tupile (paying with the family atomics). But he selfishly tries to stay alive and stay with Chani, and the only path prescience reveals that does that is the one that also unleashes the Jihad and makes him Emperor.

(Note how deep his cowardice or selfishness runs; we see it again in _Children of Dune_, where Paul refuses to do the sandworm transformation even to save all humanity because he would lose his own humanity. Some hero!)