#Stilgar had some moment that felt exactly like this

[kraken17]

Paul Atreides, circa 10191-10192 aprox.

[nyrasproblm]

Could you write a fic with lady jessica where she uses the voice on reader even though she knows that reader feels physical pain when the voice is used on her. like jessica uses it in an argument or something… fluff ending though!!! thank you!

Hey, hope you like 🤍

Broken trust

Reverend Mother Jessica Atreides x reader (fem fremen)

Word Count: 1,1K

Warning: angst, a little fluff at the end, use of the Voice on someone, they are two idiots here.

"I already told you what I think about this." you continued cleaning the stillsuits without looking at her.

Lady Jessica, now Reverend Mother Jessica, insisted to you about the prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib, but even though you were Fremen and followed Stilgar as your leader, you could not believe this prophecy. You and Jessica became close after a few weeks of her arriving at the sietch, you offered to teach her some basic things and she appreciated it. She liked having you around and seemed happy with your presence.

But as the weeks went by, their relationship also changed. You confided things to each other, you preferred to be alone in far corners rather than around people, you exchanged some subtle caresses, and you kissed when no one was around. At a certain point, you started lying together, not in a sexual way, of course, you were aware of the strange fetus your lover was carrying. But even so, you didn't change your mind about the prophecy. For you, it was all another ploy to oppress your people through fear and faith.

"I thought you trusted me after all this time, after everything we've been through together." she argued, hands holding her swollen belly.

"I trust you. I don't trust that prophecy, and I don't trust the Bene Gesserit either." you picked up another suit and started cleaning it, still not looking at her.

"I am a Bene Gesserit, the Reverend Mother." she continued.

"I chose to ignore that part." you started rubbing the suits harder.

She sighed loudly, contorting her face into a displeased expression. You continued cleaning the stillsuits while sitting on the floor. You hated arguing with Jessica, you once had a heated argument and she used the Voice on you in a moment of anger. You had never felt such severe pain in your entire life, your body twitched slightly and you fell to the floor, gasping for air. Jessica was horrified, she ran to you and held you in her arms, she kept mumbling apologies and swore she would never do that again.

"I thought you loved me." she started talking again.

"Don't start that again, don't try to manipulate me again!" you raised your angry face to her, stood up and pointed your finger at her. "You know I hate it when you start saying things like that."

"Don't point fingers." she said calmly and you rolled your eyes.

You turned around and began to gather the clean stillsuits in silence, when you finished picking them up you started walking away from her.

"Are you leaving again?" you heard her voice but kept walking. "For a Fremen you run away a lot from the things that bother you, you don't look anything like your people."

You immediately stopped in place and turned to her slowly.

"What did you say?"

"Please, let's talk properly." She took a few steps closer.

"You just insulted me, the worst of insults, and you want me to talk to you properly?" you glared at her. "Reverend Mother." you spat.

You breathed heavily, your nostrils slightly flared, your brow furrowed in anger. Jessica looked as serene as ever, her gaze softening toward you.

"You know how important this prophecy is to me-" she began.

"Exactly, it's important to you, but I know what it will do to my people, Jessica." you began. "Don't you take that into account? You and your son arrived and want to change everything, I endured everything in silence and remained by your side, but you say I don't love you."

You knew Jessica didn't love you, she loved Duke Leto, but you knew you occupied a part of her heart. You saw when she looked at you with affection and when she wanted to stay by your side.

"Stay by my side, please." she softened her voice.

"My opinion will remain the same. This matter is finished." you turned to leave again.

"Don't turn your back on me." she spoke sternly.

You continued to walk away from her.

"Get back here now!" she used the Voice and you immediately lost your breath.

The stillsuits fell to the floor and you practically slid closer to her, your body in silent agony. Your eyes widened as you tried to breathe. You managed to slowly catch your breath, grunting in the process. You saw her bending down next to you, careful of her pregnant belly, her eyes slightly wide. She tried to help you get up but you pushed her hands away and started to crawl away.

"My dear, please..." she began to speak and you turned your face to her, your eyes filled with tears that you knew you couldn't shed.

"Witch." you muttered and managed to get up, then got out of there as quickly as possible.

The days passed and you stayed as far away from Jessica as possible, she broke your trust by using the Voice on you again, even though she knew what it did to you.

You focused on completing your tasks and staying out of her eyes. The Fremen seemed increasingly devoted to the boy Paul, calling him Muad'dib, Lisan al-Gaib, Usul and the like. You just stayed away.

You were arranging some objects in the common area when you heard a light rustling of cloth behind you, you turned your face slightly and saw Jessica standing there. She looked the same as last time, a veil over her head, light tunic, tattoos on her face, and blue eyes like yours, made by the spice.

"Do you need something, Reverend Mother?" you asked as you focused back on your task.

"Please, we need to talk." her voice sounded fragile.

"Like last time?" you scoffed.

You remained silent, the sound of your movements as you cleaned were the only sounds present besides your breathing.

"I love you." the fragile voice was heard again. You froze your movements.

You stood up but remained with your back to her. You heard the footsteps approaching and you didn't have time to turn around, she held you tightly against her, her arms wrapped around you, her swollen belly pressing against your back.

"I love you." she whispered again. Faced with his silence, she spoke again. "Please, anything, say anything."

You let go of her arms gently and turned around, looking at her thin, fragile face.

"You have to be more careful with your belly." you said softly.

She took one of your hands and placed it on her stomach firmly, then placed her other hand on your cheek.

"I swear to you with my life, for everything I feel for you, that I will never use the Voice on you again." she whispered staring at you, her eyes looking straight into yours, blue on blue. "Forgive me."

You looked at her and sighed, then walked over and buried your face in the crook of her neck, smelling her sweet scent. She stroked his hair as she breathed a sigh of relief.

"I love you." she whispered again.

"I love you." you replied into the skin of her neck.

[mtsainthelens]

my thoughts on DUNE (2021)

let me start by saying that overall, I had a really good time. the beginning of the movie was an incredibly faithful adaptation, way better than I expected. they even got the bull.

the set and sound design were also fantastic right off the bat and it wasn’t just CGI’d to death either. the costume design was very precise and distinct, which is essential if you have such a large cast with so many different groups of people like dune does. the bene gesserit were instantly recognizable. hawat and piter had the same eyes, which was a subtle but super effective touch. the movie didn’t spare many details and it made for a very immersive experience. It was almost exactly as I pictured it.

I also have minimal complaints about the casting. Jason Momoa was a delight and for the brief time that we saw him, Oscar Isaac made a great Duke. I wasn’t expecting the changes to Kynes’ character, but I think it was the right choice and was true to what made Liet-Kynes great. Timothee Chalamet also gives a solid performance. I was originally pretty ruffled about that particular casting decision and still think a younger actor deserved a shot at the role, but Timothee’s weird brand of formality and androgyny makes him a pretty solid choice to play Paul. He makes that still-suit work.

There were very few cut scenes from the book, but I felt their loss. The greenhouse is absent, even though it was easily one of the most thematically important aspects of Dune. The dinner party is missing, which I can forgive. Yueh is barely in this movie. Sorry Yueh fangirls, you’ll get ‘em next time. The treachery among Leto’s inner circle is actually pretty understated - the distrust between Jessica and Hawat isn’t mentioned even once.

[Also, can I just say how not surprising it is that Hollywood had to tease the betrayal? The book tells us from the moment we meet him that Yueh is a traitor, but I’ll be damned if blockbusters don’t get their twist villain shoved in there. Damn you Disney. Damn you.]

There’s some mildly interesting moments going on with the writing and line delivery. Timothee’s demeanor makes Paul’s lines feel more natural than they would from an actual 14 year old, but he also says to his mother “Are you good?”. I just thought that was funny. Momoa and Zendaya’s performances are also slightly off kilter because of how much they give the impression that they know about emails. Momoa in particular is just a little too casual. Duncan Idaho is one of the first characters we meet and he speaks in a really contemporary way, so there’s a bit of tonal whiplash when we meet the other characters. I think it’s a little more understandable for Dune fans who already know how formally everybody speaks, but my friend who didn’t read the book mentioned that it felt a little weird to her. I don’t know if this needs to be changed but I felt it was noticeable enough to comment.

My most serious complaint of DUNE (2021) was that it wasn’t a finished movie. I was seriously enjoying myself right up until I checked the time to find we only have 30 minutes left and Zendaya still hadn’t shown. To be clear, I think splitting book one into two parts WAS the right decision. I love the level of detail this part had and wouldn’t have liked to see the entire book crammed into two hours. But I shouldn’t have been surprised that the movie was about to end. There should have been ways to resolve Part One in a way that made it feel like it wasn’t just the first half of a larger story. It should have been able to stand on its own and come to an ending that made sense. I went to see it with my friend who hadn’t read the book and she ended up being really confused about what had just happened and especially what was up with the ending. Because the ending was rough.

Up until some of the very last scenes, some things were omitted, but nothing was really changed. The encounter with the Fremen is the start of canonical divergence. They cucked Jessica in this one, alright? Her and Stilgar’s first encounter was one of my favorite scenes in the book and the movie did it no justice whatsoever. It’s supposed to be such an establishing moment for her character and a testament to her abilities, but it falls really flat when she immediately starts trying to bargain with them to get off-planet. Why? I don’t know. Paul of all people corrects her, saying that they are meant to be among the Fremen. It’s a weird and arbitrary inversion of their relationship in that scene and I dislike it a lot. Another thing I dislike is that the fight with Jamis happens almost immediately after, while they’re still in the basin. Putting aside how impractical that is, the way the movie frames this is actually pretty abhorrent. Paul defeating Jamis is his entry into the Fremen society. He earns his way in through violence. There’s no funeral, if you were wondering. Jessica does not get in her “How does it feel to be a killer?” line. I truly don’t understand how 90% of the movie stayed so loyal to the book and the last 10% starts going blatantly against it.

So yeah, Dune was a great movie but not a finished one and the ending was a little off-kilter. I think once Part Two is out people will have a nice marathon-able sci-fi series to enjoy. In some ways it’s almost a perfect adaptation, in others it’s a little concerning. I think Part Two has the potential to be either really bad or really good and I worry about the lackluster way they’ve adapted the Fremen so far. I don’t think Zendaya is a particularly talented actor or a good fit for Chani, but I won’t break my eggs before they hatch.

Also, nobody clapped when it ended. Dune fans have their dignity about them.

[visualreverence]

Dune Genesis by Frank Herbert

(Image by John Schoenherr, text via: https://vasil.ludost.net/dunegenesis.pdf)

This essay was originally published in the July 1980 issue of Omni Magazine. It has never been reprinted, and most DUNE fans have not had the opportunity to read Frank Herbert's description of creating his masterpiece

Dune began with a concept whose mostly unfleshed images took shape across about six years of research and one and a half years of writing. The story was all in my head until it appeared on paper as I typed it out.

How did it evolve? I conceived of a long novel, the whole trilogy as one book about the messianic convulsions that periodically overtake us. Demagogues, fanatics, con-game artists, the innocent and the not-so-innocent bystanders-all were to have a part in the drama. This grows from my theory that superheroes are disastrous for humankind. Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.

Personal observation has convinced me that in the power area of politics/economics and in their logical consequence, war, people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it.

My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton. Both fitted themselves into the flamboyant Camelot pattern, consciously assuming bigger-than-life appearance. But the most casual observation reveals that neither was bigger than life. Each had our common human ailment-clay feet.

This, then, was one of my themes for Dune: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.

It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced-in a word, insane.

That was the beginning. Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.

It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous Systematic is a deadly word. Systems originate with human creators, with people who employ them. Systems take over and grind on and on. They are like a flood tide that picks up everything in its path. How do they originate?

All of this encapsulates the stuff of high drama, of entertainment-and I'm in the entertainment business first. It's all right to include a pot of message, but that's not the key ingredient of wide readership. Yes, there are analogs in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places, whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

But that was only the beginning.

While this concept was still fresh in my mind, I went to Florence, Oregon, to write a magazine article about a US Department of Agriculture project there. The USDA was seeking ways to control coastal (and other) sand dunes. I had already written several pieces about ecological matters, but my superhero concept filled me with a concern that ecology might be the next banner for demagogues and would-be-heroes, for the power seekers and others ready to find an adrenaline high in the launching of a new crusade.

Our society, after all, operates on guilt, which often serves only to obscure its real workings and to prevent obvious solutions. An adrenaline high can be just as addictive as any other kind of high.

Ecology encompasses a real concern, however, and the Florence project fed my interest in how we inflict ourselves upon our planet. I could begin to see the shape of a global problem, no part of it separated from any other-social ecology, political ecology, economic ecology. It's an open-ended list.

Even after all of the research and writing, I find fresh nuances in religions, psychoanalytic theories, linguistics, economics, philosophy, plant research, soil chemistry, and the metalanguages of pheromones. A new field of study rises out of this like a spirit rising from a witch's cauldron: the psychology of planetary societies.

Out of all this came a profound reevaluation of my original concepts. In the beginning I was just as ready as anyone to fall into step, to seek out the guilty and to punish the sinners, even to become a leader. Nothing, I felt, would give me more gratification than riding the steed of yellow journalism into crusade, doing the book that would right the old wrongs.

Reevaluation raised haunting questions. I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability.

Reevaluation taught me caution. I approached the problem with trepidation. Certainly, by the loosest of our standards there were plenty of visible targets, a plethora of blind fanaticism and guilty opportunism at which to aim painful barbs.

But how did we get this way? What makes a Nixon? What part do the meek play in creating the powerful? If a leader cannot admit mistakes, these mistakes will be hidden. Who says our leaders must be perfect? Where do they learn this?

Enter the fugue. In music, the fugue is usually based on a single theme that is played many different ways. Sometimes there are free voices that do fanciful dances around the interplay. There can be secondary themes and contrasts in harmony, rhythm, and melody. From the moment when a single voice introduces the primary theme, however, the whole is woven into a single fabric.

What were my instruments in this ecological fugue? Images, conflicts, things that turn upon themselves and become something quite different, myth figures and strange creatures from the depths of our common heritage, products of our technological evolution, our human desires, and our human fears.

You can imagine my surprise to learn that John Schoenherr, one of the world's most foremost wildlife artists and illustrators, had been living in my head with the same images. People find it difficult to believe that John and I had no consultations prior to his painting of the Dune illustrations. I assure you that the paintings were a wonderful surprise to me.

The Sardaukar appear like the weathered stones of Dune. The Baron's paunch could absorb a world. The ornithopters are insects preying on the land. The sandworms are Earth shipworms grown monstrous. Stilgar glares out at us with the menace of a warlock.

What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape.

As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul's gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."

Each limiting descriptive step you take drives your vision outward into a larger universe which is contained in still a larger universe ad infinitum, and in the smaller universes ad infinitum. No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.

But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.

The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions- all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.

Do you want an absolute prediction? Then you want only today, and you reject tomorrow. You are the ultimate conservative. You are trying to hold back movement in an infinitely changing universe. The verb to be does make idiots of us all.

Of course there are other themes and fugal interplays in Dune and throughout the trilogy. Dune Messiah performs a classic inversion of the theme. Children of Dune expands the number of themes interplaying. I refuse, however, to provide further answers to this complex mixture. That fits the pattern of the fugue. You find your own solutions. Don't look to me as your leader.

Caution is indeed indicated, but not the terror that prevents all movement. Hang loose. And when someone asks whether you're starting a new cult, do what I do: Run like hell.