That's obviously not true, otherwise, all of the hero characters wouldn't be Mentats by CH:D, to the point where you can just assume a main character is a Mentat (among everything else). Heck, even Paul Atreides starts out as almost a Mentat.

The flaw of Mentats is that, early on, they are only Mentats, much as the flaw of Ginaz swordmasters was that they were only swordmasters or Reverend Mothers were only Reverend Mothers, etc. As humans grow and improve through the Dune saga, they gain more capabilities. Herbert was all about the Renaissance Man rugged individualist idea, and that was the goal of the Bene Gesserit: "Grow up, humans!...That's their [the BG's] dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard."

I think you're both right in that the whole hero arc is breaking the stagnation of society split into play-it-safe extremes which are in themselves rather undesirable.

Nietzsche inspired Camus, Hesse, Jung, Mann, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kafka, Freud, Rilke, Strauss, Picasso and many others.

So he clearly had some interesting ideas to share. But yes it's a comic, so I don't expect it to do anything other than straw-man his views.

You completely misunderstand both me and the comic. The point is, as rainonmoon correctly points out, that most followers of Nietzsche are not really actually following Nietzsche.

Point of clarification: it's not straw-manning his views, but illustrating the ways his philosophy is commonly misunderstood because of the ways those ideas have been diluted in dissemination.

The problem is also that this idea is only expanded on in books 2 and beyond, and most people who just read Dune come off with the impression of it simply being a regular heroic story.

I just re-read Dune, and wouldn't say that is entirely accurate. There are multiple times that Mauddib sees terrible things in the future - jihads, death, loss. There is a terribly dark foreboding sense from these visions, but I get the sense that the terribleness is from Paul's actions/status as well as that of their enemy.

Spoilers inside.

I got the impression that Paul saw many possible futures where there was certainty of a bad outcome, and some possible futures with an unknown outcome, and that the path to the unknown outcomes all involved jihad and death. So, at least in the first novel, Paul felt compelled to pursue jihad in order to provide an uncertain future, as avoiding jihad would be worse.

It's been quite some time since I read beyond the first novel though.

Paul foresaw the Golden Path, but I don't think that was until after the jihad in the second book. That's why he went off to the desert isn't it? He took the path and was trapped by it.

Still spoilers.

My interpretation is that Paul didn’t take the golden path. He felt trapped into taking it, but when twins were born, he was freed of that obligation because it opened up a future he hadn’t foreseen.

I think you're right, he knew there was one but didn't peer into it for fear of being trapped by it. Seeing the future makes it absolute in Dune, hence Leto's bloodline development program with Siona.

I understand the terribleness of Paul's status derives from perfect future knowledge destroying his hope.

Imagine looking into your child's face and knowing the exact time and nature of his/her death. I think this is a big reason childhood diseases have the status of especially evil.