#this so evidently an unfinished thought but like. this is also tumblr. whateverrr

[wickershells]

Forever intrigued by the portrayal of animals in media, how and if and why they are used as a conveyance of themes… the fremen + muad’dib, desert mouse, that can make its own water and is thus respected, ribbed and teased lovingly; Paul, fedaykin in fremen company, names himself after the same meek mouse — Paul, Lisan al-Gaib, holds his knife in the baron’s throat and coldly remarks that he “dies like an animal”. Ants, later, crawl up into his ear — make a feast of him, turn him into an emblem of the gluttonous (oppressive) cycle he propagated, through blood, in blood. Head of a Great House, now nothing more than animal feed, reduced to the “primitivity” of desert he believed inferior, worthy only in subject to him. (Paul, his grandson, will wander blind into the same world-desert, and what is expected to be made of him? To be swallowed whole by God: “‘There will be a worm for Muad’Dib,’ they said. And they began the chant for those committed to the desert, the ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: ‘Mother of sand, father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage.’” Messiah, ch. 24)

Rabban insisting that the fremen are not human, but rather rats, which is to say animal, which is to say lesser than [Harkonnen, Atreides, coloniser]; Shai-hulud, revered, regarded on high: a force more powerful than human, creator of Dune’s spice. The legacy of the Atreides empire comes in the form of sandworm hybridity — a futile conquering of that which you have already destroyed, a stalling of the inevitable loss to come. Animal as companion (indigenous respect) vs animal as dominion (colonial violence)