the guy with the plastic bag

no joke that's exactly how being attracted to men or male characters functions for me as a butch lesbian like 100% of the time. i have zero interest in dating dudes, but pointing at a fictional man i think is cool or hot and going "what if this guy was a lesbian instead?" is the only thing keeping me sane in the crushing absence of any kind of true butch representation. even when i don't say it outloud for fear of upsetting the delicate constitutions of my non-lesbian followers, i'm always thinking it... what if my favorite Just Some Guy was an equally butch Just Some Girl...

the first book does nothing to answer this question and it's the only one i've read so far, so almost all my information is based on what i've encountered while doing my piter research (ie lazy googling) but here's what i know about it:

from what i gather, the bene tleilax (or tleilaxu for short) are a race of genetically modified humans who use their knowledge of genetic engineering to provide various, uhhh... let's say "ethically questionable" products and services, to those with the wealth and moral flexibility to afford them.

among their catalogue of products are mentats, or "twisted" mentats to be specific, referring to the way the bene tleilax shape or "twist" their mentats' characteristics to suit the customers' preferences.

piter is one of these mentats, twisted by the bene tleilax and sold to the baron.

beyond that the information starts getting weird and conflicting. most sources i've found say the bene tleilax twist their mentats into being amoral so they can more effectively carry out even the cruelest orders... but apparently it was also implied at some point that twisted mentats might actually just be people who were rejected from regular mentat schools for naturally being amoral dicks, meaning the "twisted" label could just be some sort of marketing ploy by the tleilaxu.

in the prequels the process of creating twisted mentats is very much not a hoax, explicitly including things like cloning and torture if i remember correctly... but any time the prequels are mentioned it's followed by someone saying "the prequels aren't even canon, they weren't written by frank herbert!" and indeed, it seems ol' frank's original books lean more towards the idea of mentats as rejected students re-trained by the tleilaxu, as the first book describes the planet of tleilax simply as a "renegade training center for mentats."

so what did the bene tleilax do to piter? i don't know. all the information about it seems to be either extremely minimal or debatable in its canonicity. if i ever manage to read all the books i guess then i'll know what i do and do not personally consider canon, but right now i'm having a Goddamn Time just frothing at the mouth about all the questions i have...

i mean if piter is a mentat school reject, at what age was he rejected and why? and how did he end up in the hands of the bene tleilax? being sold like a product doesn't exactly sound like the kind of situation one enters into willingly... so was he taken? given to them by his parents? and if the tleilaxu really do "twist" mentats to suit the buyer's preferences, what did that entail for piter? did it include his looks, his personality? what exactly were the baron's preferences regarding piter? and amidst all these questions, i start remembering details like the baron repeatedly calling piter an "it" at one point and i just—

this is why i used the bene tleilax question as the hypothetical piter stan's point of obsession in my other post. this one fucking question unfolds like a cursed scroll into an infinite litany of more questions, each of them feeling extremely significant to piter's story, yet seemingly having no clear-cut answer... there's just so much to think about here, and it's all so utterly and exquisitely sad.