That is also a very good reason!
This has been happening with some old Disney cartoons as well I believe. And I think it's a good idea. Over the decades, media has seen jokes that were ALWAYS offensive but people said it's all ok because we all do it. And many minorities said nothing, because they were not taken seriously. 'C'mon, it's just a joke about your culture and history, take it easy.'
As someone who was bullied to the point that suicide was an option, I was always told I should be fine with the bullying because it was just a joke.... The people who are making the jokes DO NOT get to decide if it hurts people or not.
Now.... I also agree with you that there is also the other side of that coin where people take offense at just about anything, like I mentioned before. People who would get upset because a movie has the word Messiah in the title.
But I recently rewatched the first Police Academy movie. And the first Ghostbusters.... I grew up with these movies, and I also understand WHEN they were made. But a lot of the jokes in these movies would be considered not done by today's standard. And we should not bury that 3, 4, 5 or even 9 decades ago people had a different standard. We shouldn't bury history. But a warning saying that some jokes could be considered offensive because the movies was filmed in a different era..... Nah, I don't see an issue there.
There's an understandable wish for modern audiences to not have to deal with jokes that aren't funny anymore for very good reasons, or slurs that were once laughed off but aren't anymore, and so on. Only the viewer or reader can decide how far they're willing to put up with whatever the triggering content is.
For example...
I used to run a Yahoo group dedicated to reading and discussing time travel novels. One such novel that came up was
Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg. That book was published in 1969, and contains some material that is considered unacceptable nowadays for reasons of sexism and racial slurs. One woman in the group was so outraged that she declared she would not finish the book, it was trash, and Silverberg was an awful person.
I've met Robert Silverberg, and he is NOT an awful person. The reader was mistaking the attitudes of the characters for the RL viewpoint of the author. Silverberg was offended when I brought this up in a discussion in his email group, and I don't blame him. Jud and Sam might be sexist creeps at times, and Metaxas is an outright pervert by my standards, but that doesn't take away from the intriguing spin on time travel in the book, or the unusual ending (Silverberg related that he had to have a very firm conversation with his editors who kept trying to "fix" it; people who have read it will know what I mean).
Anyway, Up the Line was optioned a few years ago, which I consider good news. It doesn't mean it's definitely going to be made into a movie, but the possibility exists. And yes, there are things that would have to be changed because audiences from 55 years ago would have been okay with what current audiences would not be okay with. Some rewrites of a few scenes would be necessary, but fortunately that wouldn't affect the overall story one bit.
Now take a different situation: I'm a fan of several Britcoms, one of which is
Are You Being Served?. Certain jokes were considered okay when this show was first on, but wouldn't be acceptable now. And there's one episode that wasn't aired for a long time because it showed two men doing ballroom dancing. I would hope that modern audiences wouldn't care about that, as honestly it was nothing to be upset over. Just one man showing another one how to perform a particular dance, and I wouldn't consider any of it to be inappropriate.
And then there's a situation that came up a couple of months ago. I belong to a FB group dedicated to an old Canadian TV show called
The Beachcombers, that ran for 19 years, from the 1970s-1990s. It's about a community of people living in a small town on the west coast of British Columbia. For some reason I will never be able to fathom, CBC has never made this series available on DVD, and has left the fans to pine for our favorite episodes (no pun intended) since most of them aren't available
anywhere, or are hard to find.
One of them guest-starred Gordon Pinsent, in a memorable episode about a ghost. Some indigenous shaman beliefs are part of the plot. Someone managed to find this episode on YT, and a few weeks ago I was able to watch it again for the first time since the 1970s... and I was flabbergasted to see a warning slapped on it for "offensive content."
I suppose someone complained about the spiritual elements, and have no idea if it's the ghost part or the shamanism that's considered offensive. But given that one of the main actors in this episode (and a series regular) was an indigenous actor, I would have thought that if
he had considered the plotline offensive, he'd have spoken up about it and it would either have been changed or scrapped.
Never read the book. Is it big story like the first book? Maybe Messiah is being split into two and will be part 3 and 4.
As others have said, Messiah is the shortest one. It's very dense with political intrigue, as it begins 12 years after Dune, and we see how Paul's rulership of the Imperium has solidified. Arrakeen has become not only the capital of the Empire, but the centre of the religion of Mu'ad-Dib. Alia is basically the high priestess, and some of the Fedaykin are now priests instead of fighters. The whole jihad in which the Fremen/Atreides forces subjugated the Empire is glossed over in conversation, mentioning a few key events and Paul relates how many planets he's conquered, how many people have died, etc.
Dune Messiah is basically the story of a plot hatched among the Bene Gesserit, the Guild, the Tleilaxu, and Princess Irulan (she's never referred to as Empress Irulan, as she should be, given that she's the wife of the current emperor).
Irulan's part in all this is the most interesting, in my opinion. As far as the Bene Gesserit are concerned, she's failed at her assignment - to seduce Paul, get pregnant, and birth a Corrino heir to take the throne. They don't want Chani to be the mother of the next emperor, so Irulan's orders are to make sure that doesn't happen.
Frank Herbert wrote parts of Messiah and Children at the same time that he was writing Dune, and I've seen an earlier draft of Dune Messiah in which he killed Irulan off, as collateral damage when the plot against the Atreides is foiled.
Irulan isn't very likeable in this novel, but when the TV miniseries were done in 2000 and 2003, Julie Cox knocked it out of the park with her portrayal of this character. She completely changed my mind about Irulan, and I'm very glad that FH changed
his mind and let her survive.
As for Alia, she's about 16-17 years old in Dune Messiah. I can't think WTF Villeneuve has going on in his head about how he's written Jessica and Alia. It's absolutely beyond ridiculous.
