Middle-earth according to Mordor - The Lord of the Rings retold

Regarding XBMC / Plex and Emacs / xemacs, instead of a fork it looks like it's more of adding feature X that the original devs didn't want (not being derogatory here, it's substantial work). I'm sure that they merge in new code continuously and the codebases haven't diverged so much as to be independent. It doesn't look much like a fork in that sense.

I'd argue that KHTML is fairly dead. No one really uses Konqueror (I worked for a shop that developed a KDE based distro and even there everyone used Firefox / Chrome), which is probably KHTML's largest user apart from some internal KDE stuff. Hell, even Konqueror has had webkit mode since about a year ago. Qt supports webkit. Tons of other browsers, mobile and otherwise, use webkit.

I see the same downward trend for Debian, from being all over the place to being reduced to mostly a server distro. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is coming up with its own server version with pre-made virtualization images and stuff.

So, maybe the "weaker" forks just didn't die fast? Of course, this whole idea isn't a law or anything and I can't expect it to apply to everything, but that's the general trend I see anyway.

Also, I guess another thing I could claim is selection bias: You've probably never even heard of most of the forks that died. Of course, I don't have the data to prove it either.

Funny but I assume that the different character groups are species and not races of one species. Species tend to have specific traits that define them.

I mean do episodes of Star Trek go 'this is Bob, the sentient space nebula - he has two kids and likes to drink with his friends at the weekend' ?

LoTR no doubt does have some collectivist/nationalist/whaterverist trappings, but I find it completely unfair the way people call Tolkien racist by juxtaposing some modern and inanalagous ethnicity debate onto his fictional world.

And Aragorn is noble and powerful and should be followed unquestioningly because he's distantly descended from royalty.

And Denethor is crazy and wrong because he has the audacity to disagree with Aragorn despite not having royal blood.

And elves are all naturally good and pure by nature of their race — to the point where they are basically immune to Sauron's corruption.

And orcs are their inherently evil cousin race. There is not a single good orc in the whole world. You can feel OK about killing them with impunity.

The only race that seems to actually have any moral subtlety is the Maiar, who can be good or evil with no obvious genetic reason. (I mean, they're still inherently superior beings, but they can at least be evil.)

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.

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!)