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Birthright

Not done yet but I post for May 9th— May thy 9th chip and shatter ❤️

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[truestorymaybet0ld]

Not done yet but I post for May 9th— May thy 9th chip and shatter ❤️

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"I'll love you as long as I breathe" hits different when you realise Chani sees his breathing stop during the water of life scene

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He looks like a nice sweet lesbian

He’s beautiful 💥💥💥

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Definitely went into Dune Part 2 the first time like "OK, but wouldn't it be worth cutting forward to Paul in his twenties and swapping out Chalomet for Adam Driver, even if that also means substituting Zendaya so you have the dude who looks like he can do some damage?" and boy, was I wrong. Turns out a huge part of Paul's effectiveness in this film is the dissonance Chalomet creates between being a little dude and the intensity he musters. Especially when he goes full Lisan and reveals that he can take his voice to some properly guttural places.

Like, there's the bit where he says to the assembled Fremen (most of those we can see looking rather bigger and stronger than him) and "you think any of you would have a chance" and I'm like mate, you're pretty wee, but then he reaches for that lower pitch and... meep. Not I. Not a chance.

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as newspapers today dont tend to hire children, a modern day Tintin would run a clickbait YouTube channel, except the clickbait is 100% real every single time

he starts off as an irritating conservative pundit at 14, meets Chang then leaves the think tank paying him and launches his own independent channel and blows up shortly after. Chang helps with video editing and managing his socials and they often chat on video calls between adventures. Haddock, his foster dad, has absolutely no knowledge of his earlier videos.

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I can't stop staring at Feyd-Rautha's walk here and what it implies about his fight with Paul now that I'm able to stop just comparing it to Timothy's killer body work matching it (or vice versa).

Villeneuve takes the book canon, that the Harkonnens took the Atredies's morbid heirlooms of an oil painting of grandfather's death and the bull's head with his blood still dried on his horns to hang above the arena as trophies to the next level: making Feyd-Rautha the victorious young matador with the guards dressed as bull-minotaurs, circling to play banderillos and sink banderillas into the backs of the Atredies bull if it gets too close before the final faena has Feyd-Rautha pulling his opponent past him in the close, intimate passes that show off his athleticism and skill before his false blade is exchanged for the one that will be used for the killing blow and oh my god there are whole schools of thought on coming forward to meet your opponent vs waiting for them and killing with a single blow to the heart and honoring the fight and if anyone who knows how to make gifsets wants make one about this to I'd LOVE to rant more about the breakdown of these two fights and how Feyd is 1001% Matador Machismo but my point to all of this is:

Look at that Sand.

Look at his feet dig deep and kick it up as he strides out into the heart of that arena. Is it a rhythmic walk? Oh yes. Confident. Powerful. In the book this will be his 100th arena kill as he comes of age. This is his natural habitat. Where he learned his skills, for us to parallel with what we saw for Paul in Part 1.

This matters, because it's one of the main premises for why the Fremen are so Good At Fighting. When everyone is trained to fight with shields (stun then slow) and bulky armor, and on flat, solid ground with lots of cover, it's easy to be fast and silent and terrifyingly effective against them. Gurney Halleck is shown to be one of the best fighters in the franchise and the film makes a point of showing how his (recognizable) footsteps are not suited to move quickly, lightly, and with stability on sand like they are on solid ground.

Only... Bullfighting rings aren't sandy. They're fairly hardpacked. Earth for the bull and Matador to maneuver in quickly. There is a layer of albero traditionally layered on top, a chunky yellow clay dirt that serves aesthetics but also absorbs blood quickly. The idea the sand may not be white because... With Giedi Prime who knows?! Is Fantastic.

Paul Muad'Dib became the only Atredies to be recognized as Fremen, to see his father's dream of Desert Power recognized, to fight as Fedaykin, to be recognized as the Mahdi, the One Who Points The Way, and it is made clear to us from the opening words of a Child's History of Muad'Dib that Arrakis was his Home, and yet every major one-on-one duel he had from Jamis to Feyd-Rautha was on solid ground, giving him an advantage that made him respected as a fighter among the Fedaykin right away as part of his training.

Feyd-Rautha was the one Harkonnen who may have learned combat primarily or even exclusively with sand beneath his feet, and he died on Arrakis on the polished stone floors of a palatial residence, still trying to play by Matador rules.

thank u for coming to my Ted Talk

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Timothée Chalamet for Vogue China Plus (photography by Lee Wei Swee)

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"I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

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my heart calls for arrakis

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I want to talk about the loincloth scene

So the more times I watch Dune Pts 1 & 2 and the more I hear other people talk about it, the more I realize how much Denis Villeneuve has made every single scene incredibly intentional, if not layered with meaning from the books as well as other classic visual language.

And gang? I think we got distracted by Austin Butler's killer abs and radiating mad vibes the first time we saw this scene.

First, there is no other scene in either Dune movie that directly and explicitly sexualizes a character like this. It's a PG-13 franchise. Even the love scene between Timothy and Zendaya is very, very tamely framed by the standards of PG-13 MPA censors, and that includes the characters who are literally concubines by role in the books and films.

Okay, so we have a single piece of eye candy, what of it? Well, this isn't just a gratuitous scene, this is an establishing character scene. The first time we're introduced to a character that has been mentioned briefly but never seen on screen before. The first shots, images, or scenes, will cement the character and a lot of thing about them into our mind. And Feyd-Rautha? We don't start with a shot as a whole, or from a distance, or his face, or hands. We don't even do the traditionally feminine panning shots that objectifying women in an introduction like this would usually bring (think starting from the legs and working up).

No. We start zoomed in, on his stripped bare chest, as ceremonial paints are applied by hand by servants all over his torso. The very first place we see the paint applied is over his ribs where Paul will ultimately stab him and kill him, his most vulnerable spot. His breathing is fast, but controlled, and seems almost animalistic, which we're to expect given everything we have just heard about him from Irulan. He doesn't seem aroused though? If anything this feels like an animal under stress, forced to show its soft parts and stay still. (An animal, caught in a trap, waiting for a hunter, one might say?)

We could assume that he's stressed about the big day. It is his coming of age, there are thousands of people watching, etc. But we see him strut out there and OWN that arena. He's confident, delighted, even in a fight.

This is where the things changed from the book, and things maybe left out come in. Feyd-Rautha in the book (and Sting in the 1984 Dune) takes to the Arena in a leather battle thong, similar to what we see him wearing as he's being painted. But in the new movie when he fights he wears full battle armor. Is the eye candy outfit just a reference then? Or… did Villeneuve find a way to showcase exactly what kind of character Feyd-Rautha is in the book with his opening scene?

I think it's the latter. I'm certain of it now, because while I've noticed the strain he seemed to display while being painted, on my most recent watch I realized:

He only kills the two handmaids who were rubbing their hands all over him, then noticeably relaxes.

In one scene, Villeneuve shows us Feyd-Rautha: a character who has made his body into a weapon, but one he holds no true autonomy over. In the scenes that follow that day he wears severe black robes that cover him from half his neck all the way to the ground, leaving only half his hands exposed. It's in these robes both his uncle and then Margot Fenring manipulate him for their own purposes, with Margot explicitly sexually manipulating him with the Voice, and his uncle… well, Villeneuve has read the books, and I'm saying 'manipulative Feyd who has been abused his whole life' is meant to be canonically coded, not just that one weird kiss and the look of pure delight every time Feyd sees something happen to the Baron by someone else's hand.

On a lighter note to end, as always, Feyd's battle armor (both gladiatorial and desert) is less severe, and shows more of his throat and wrists and other vulnerable places, as well as the fight scenes being the only time he explicitly reaches out for physical contact (except that kiss with the Baron) and seems to receive it as well with great exuberance and abundance something something revealing more of yourself while fully armored my baby boy <3

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What are you afraid of? Worship, Gurney.

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Kwisatz Haderach

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Happy to share a new DUNE piece I painted! This is Feyd Rautha Harkonnen, the sadistic nephew of the Baron and heir to planet Arrakis. I saw the movie two weeks ago and its a solid 10 for me. The visuals and limited color palettes served the narrative to the smallest detail. The entire project also shows that we need MORE mature fantasy/sci fi on a smaller budget.Should I continue making these DUNE characters? Please let me know which character I should make next!