YMMV / Dune Messiah

• Ass Pull:
  • The previous book established that an unborn child became pre-born as a consequence of their mother taking the Water of Life, which exposed their unprepared conscience to the resultante barrage of ego-memories. In this book, it turns out that ingesting enormous amounts of regular spice also creates pre-born people, even although this makes absolutely no sense next to the previous explanation, and Paul even wonders whether it was solely his genetic bloodline which caused his children to turn out like that, which would be even more incoherent.
  • The climactic moment where Paul overcomes Scytale by somehow seeing through the newborn Leto II's eyes. This ability, aside from not having been previously hinted to exist nor ever used again afterwards, is not well explained within the saga's context either: it seems to be explicitly not related to prescience, and rather resembles telepathy, which had been stated to be unmastered yet in the Dune universe (with the Bene Gesserit mental link being the closest to it).
• Contested Sequel: A foreword by Brian Herbert notes that when the book was first published, many fans of the first Dune were up in arms over their beloved Paul Atreides being reduced to an ineffectual schlub with the blood of billions on his hands, not realizing that his father had always intended to take the story in this direction and had even included some hints in the first book toward it. It's become downplayed with the release of his further books in the series as we can now see it as just a small part of the whole saga.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The stone burner (a variant of the atomics, which can blind the persons exposed to it) is often referred as the Dune-fandom version of Brain Bleach, through reactions in the vein of "where can I find a stone burner?".
  • Farok has three arms.^note A running joke based on a consistency error in Herbert's writing: Farok is initially described as being one-armed due to being wounded in the Jihad when introduced, but a later sentence mentions his two hands. This has caused people to jokingly state he originally had three arms and is now bitter that he has been reduced to a two-armed disfigured freak.
• Narm: Paul describing Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan to an unaware Stilgar. It's intended to show the pure scope of horror that Paul's Jihad has vastly eclipsed their own, but some people find it darkly amusing how Paul's describing Hitler's 6 million as "pretty good for the time" and Stilgar's unimpressed reaction instead makes it seem like he's bragging.
• Signature Scene: One of the most cited scenes is in the book is where Paul compares his death toll to Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.
• Squick: The splitting disease that Otheym contracts. The skin on his face is splitting open, disfiguring him with crisscross scars and damaging the muscles on the left side of his face.

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