One year after Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One release in the US (international premiere fell on September 15, but, sure, it’s not Dune premiere anywhere till it’s Dune premiere in America)

I would like to remind the world that Virginia Madsen is and will remain the true successor to Atreides-Corrino Golden Lion Throne.

Sorry, Florence Pugh, but Virginia here plays in league of her own:

Peculiar fading-and-returning effect may be, as some commentators noted, an artifact of film digitization process. However, I prefer another explanation, the creative one: fading-and-reappearing moments foretoken future clash between Paul, Jessica, and Chani, on the one side, and Irulan along with Bene Gesserit, on the other side, for the definitive place in history.

And in the very end people’ll remember Dune, House Atreides, and Paulian Jihad as Irulan will have written all of it.

She, as the Narrator Empress, thus gets partial revenge for all cruelty she had suffered before succumbing to painful, somewhat masochistic love to Paul and his twin Abomination children.

For Paul’s decision to deny her sex, children, and all entrance in his privy chamber was, in my eyes, the second most disdainful he enacts in Dune.

To ask Historian Superior of the Imperium who will be remembered in Duniverse as wife, not as concubine, is verisimilar to asking whether Paul Atreides did write I Corinthian 13.

However, it doesn’t provide Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson any more ethical rights to retcon Dune canon events due to in-universe Dune (published in 1965) presentation as the book written, or at least heavily edited, by Irulan and not Frank Herbert. Theirs not to reason why it is not licentia poetica, but the steaming pile of talentless hackshit.