#the bene gesserit have… interesting priorities

[lucimiir]

Reverend Mother Mohiam:

[gcldcnhour]

she pauses, of course it wouldn't be that easy to get piter to follow her, to just simply trust. he does not know the universe as she does, cannot pinpoint the heartbeats of others to know the truth. he cannot do things simply, not in her company, not when he has a small semblance of equality. so he stumbles backwards, shouting and mumbling and it irritates huxley. why couldn't people just see! why couldn't they trust!

but then again, she has to remind herself, that they are not her. they do not know the things she does, does not feel them. they have the priority of self - she has the priority of the universe. "piter." she states simply, tempted to utilize the voice, to subdue him, to force his will. but she refrains, interested in where things turn, in what he chooses to do.

and then he's flat on his ass, gaze turned toward the sky, the small doorway of the tunnel casting a shadow against them. she's about to reprimand him as a mother does to a child, but stops herself at the mention of a vision, head cocked to the side studying him.

a few blonde strands have escaped her bonnet, wind blowing them across her face as she watches him. a vision, of vision of where he's injured, of where her sisters want him to disappear, where she is at his defense and it strikes her as odd. why would huxley act so openly against the bene gesserit. but she knows it means something - that its important. huxley has her own mission, and piter is essential to it. and though it may not seem like it...she knows that some of the sisters can be lead away from the true mission.

"are you willing then? to lead the way down the tunnel." she questions, a hand reaching out to him, offering to help him up, solidifying the promise that if this vision comes true she will defend him. because she won't admit it, but she needs him. "if i wanted you dead, you know i would have done it by now."

He follows her into the tunnel obediently, without a word. His attempts to bully her, in the beginning, showed a pleading and angry negative image of the docility he is so often required to show to power. A struggling and thrashing to set the scales right, or to set them at least to something less entirely shameful. Now that he has convinced himself that the bullying should stop, what’s left is that learned practice of compliance, and he offers it up to her.

Until she said the Harkonnens know nothing of the tunnel, with just that wording, and just that specific satisfaction, as if she is also sure somehow that they never will.

Until she tells him, a high-ranking Harkonnen agent who has made no specific promise of silence, to lead the way, immediately after that.

A keening note of self-preservation cuts through the enchantment of curiosity. Now he’s running back out of the tunnel. Now he’s shouting at her from the entrance.

“Are you planning to kill me!”

His unnatural eyes are wide with paranoia. The spice he took recently offers some measure of helpful, grounding calm, but it does no favors to his overall lucidity. The question comes out like a yelp.

“I don’t want to know about any secret you would kill me to keep hidden!” He’s pointing his finger at her. He’s talking over anything she might have started to say. “You witches take power in your own way, and you say that you do it for the good of all of us, and that’s okay! That’s fine! I never said you shouldn’t. I think I teased you a little, but I never got in your way or… don’t lead me in if I’m not allowed to come back out! You threaten my life and you endanger yourself, you hear! You think these little tunnels are special? Giedi Prime has -”

He moves to take another step backward, then falls on his rear with a cry of surprise and pain. For just a moment, present and future blended together vividly. His body refused to put weight on an injured foot, and down he went… but for an injury that hasn’t happened yet, and might not happen at all. He almost forgets Huxley entirely as he sits in the dirt, profoundly startled; haunted, even.

It’s a spice vision. He’s gotten them before, though rarely, and he’s grateful that he doesn’t have to fundamentally figure out what just happened to him. Because the content of the vision itself is enough to…

His foot isn’t currently injured, and the fall didn’t hurt him. Still, he surrenders to the new location and leans back to lay in the dirt, with his arms spread out slightly, one leg outstretched and the other bent with his foot on the ground and his knee in the air.

Part of this is a genuine weariness in the face of overwhelm and sudden horror. Part of it is drama to summon Huxley, and a deliberate choice to not simply call her over. He is capable of being convenient to others with the precision of a finely-tuned instrument. And he relies on shit like this to make up for that. It’s the scales. The all-important scales.

“I had a vision,” he says calmly, still looking up at the sky, when he hears the approach of Huxley-sounding footsteps, with the correct accompanying swish of a skirt.

“A spice vision. The future. A possible future. Not fixed. Not yet. I think it’s what will happen if I go through that door with you.”

He takes a steadying breath, in and out. It’s safe here. Lying in the dirt. And in the vision, it was so scary, and painful. Is it not wrong, to really savor the now? The soft dirt? The gentle sky?

“I couldn’t put weight on my foot,” he continues. “Someone did that, they didn’t… want me to be able to run. I think it was one of you w- I think it was one of you Bene Gesserit sisters. It was in service of their goals, anyway. And you were… I didn’t see you… most of the information I got about the future was pain… but you were worked up and shouting, you…”

Finally, he turns to look at her, and he isn’t accusing anymore, he’s curious, almost trusting -

“You were coming to my defense,” he says. “You were telling them to let me go, or not to hurt me. I didn’t… hear you so much as I felt what it felt like to me when I experience hearing you, in the future. I felt like… I was so scared, scared of, I don’t know, somebody else…. but I felt like if salvation could still find me through some crack or pinhole, it would find me through you. Like you were on my side. At least to the point of not wanting me dead. Which is an awful lot more than most people are ever on my side.”

He turns away from her, back to the sky.

“I don’t know if. I don’t know if I die in that scenario, or if you die for that matter. Or much about what’s even at stake for you; could be worse than a broken foot for all I know. But I do know that none of it’s going to happen if, right this moment, we pretend we never met each other, and I focus on the work that brought me here, and you do… whatever it is that you do.”

He turns to look at her again.

“I also know that if I do follow you down that tunnel… well, it’s not a trap you were setting for me, and you don’t even want me dead. So I apologize for yelling at you like that, my dear.”

[onewomancitadel]

The Dune series is actually an interesting question of misogynistic writing because... I think it's a whole lot more complicated at first glance than it seems (its homophobia is probably more cut-and-dry, even with the lesbianism Leto II accepts amongst his Fish Speakers - Duncan Idaho objects to it, and presumably this is the more 'moral' position). I actually think the writing of a lot of his female characters, even his tragic ones, is very humanistic, even when there are some weirder and stranger ideas he's exploring - actually because of that. His artistic ideas clearly take priority to the point that I think it overcomes even some of the finer regressive points or intimations of such. Further, there really is very little sexual violence in the books. Duncan Idaho is a womaniser, but women desire him. The 2021 adaptation of the first half of Dune actually made a sexual threat to Jessica more explicit. The rape of an enslaved boy by the Baron, who looks like Feyd Rautha, happens offscreen and is implied. It's monstrous, of course, and decidedly homophobic in its implications - for the bare fact of making it more prominent when the sexual violence against women isn't, I think. But that aside, we do have examples of lovemaking offscreen in Dune (which is easier to achieve in writing than film) and the contrast of that to, say, Irulan wanting an heir.

So often it is said that sexual violence is 'realistic', but healthy sexual relationships are, by virtue, apparently not - the inclusion of them doesn't enter the conversation. I think that I would rather take a series largely absent of sexual violence than I would something which comes with graphic sex scenes. At the very least, I would prefer that sexual violence is balanced by positive depictions of sex - people can critique a gore-a-thon, I think it's fair to critique the overuse of sexual violence. (E.g. if we had a scene of Jessica and Leto making love, I would have been more alright with the book change otherwise made - which actually also minimises Jessica trying to use sexuality as control, which was not ideal in the book but definitely different in activity/tone. Why is it okay to insert the threat of sexual violence against women when I think it's evident they're trying to 'fix' gender/sexuality/race problems with Dune?)

I know this isn't a popular camp for the 'old sci-fi is universally regressive' crowd, and I think having been an avid sci-fi reader in general means I've read some reaaaaally bad stuff, but I think that Dune is a great example of where his actual ideas are not necessarily held back in realisation of his female characters. Jessica's ambition (later retconned to love, for thematic reasons in relation to Leto II, methinks) and her interference in creating the kwisatz haderach is an enormous choice which has enormous impact on the world of Dune, and similarly her carrying Alia is a major narrative event. It's not something she's shuffled off to the side for - but she's also not just the womb-bearer, she's actually more than that, and it's related to, and transgressive of, the Bene Gesserit politicking. She's probably my second favourite character in the books. Mother, yes, but leagues more than that. Even Alia's tragedy is not something that happens to her because she's female, it's because she's an Abomination; her monstrousness is not something that is just the hysteria of being female.

Let alone the fact that both Paul and Leto II actually transcend gender in some way, in ways which are honestly really interesting and if not better than a lot of male characters now lol.

So when I think about ideas which transcend misogyny, or good writing which can transcend misogyny even with issues in the work, Dune is an example in my head.

[nitewrighter]

Irulan is so weird to me because she's Shaddam's heir, right? Her mom deliberately had only daughters, and had them all trained by the Bene Gesserit, to try to put a Bene Gesserit on the throne, yeah? And that would be Irulan, since primogeniture is very much a thing in the Dune universe (Duniverse)! But somehow she never gives me the sense that she was ever taught to rule, at least not as much as, say, Paul was taught to be a Duke

It's literally so wild because like... you absolutely fall in love with her voice and the way she introduces each chapter and fleshes out the universe and how there's all this grand royal drama amidst the whole bunch of geopolitical space fuckery going on. But like once she's actually in the story, virtually everyone who interacts with her is like, "Oh god why do I have to deal with you." Like Gaius Helen Mohiam is like, "Well you're in love with Paul (nice clown shoes) and therefore I can't actually trust you to hold the Sisterhood's interests as your highest priority so... whatever. Later." And then in Children of Dune it's like... Jessica's like, "I have to make sure that House Corrino doesn't go for a power grab!" and it's like "Oh! So are you going to team up with Irulan? Who is from House Corrino and your literal daughter-in-law?" and it's like, "I'm sorry did you just imply Irulan is relevant? Don't be ridiculous. I'm going to Salusa Secundis to usurp Wencisia as Farad'n's mom."

[number63liveblogs]

Children of Dune, part 3

Duncan Idaho had put his mentat awareness to the question of why Jessica returned at this time, evaluating the problem in the human-computer fashion which was his gift. He said she returned to take over the twins for the Sisterhood.

But mentats might be wrong, if the information they have is incomplete or false. The only thing I could see Jessica looking for in the Bene Gesserit is companionship, and people who understand her, and considering that she was the mother to an emperor there are things that even they won’t understand. And from what we saw of her, seeking out people like that was never one of her priorities. And if she wanted another Reverend Mother to help shoulder that burden she could have come back to Alia at any point.

Speaking of Alia, either she isn’t aware that some of the people she has in her head are trying to take over, or the twins are wrong about what’s bothering her. Looking at it from her point of view it didn’t look like there was anyone else but her, but that was just one chapter so I can’t be sure.

It’ll be interesting to see if Jessica will be a stabilizing influence on Alia or not. They each might be an additional reminder of losing Paul, as the last time they saw he was still alive, and the suspicion that Alia has for Jessica could be an additional stressor.

On the other hand, she’s someone with an outsider’s view, and someone that Alia could perhaps listen to if she needs to hear some harsh truths.