Warning: This article contains spoilers for Frank Herbert’s Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune novels. The events of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two films are also referenced.

There’s an inherent fear in expectation, an implicit weight the word carries that can, at times, be overwhelming, all-consuming; it can, for some, be a blessing, a motivator, a benchmark toward which to strive, and it can, for others, be a burden, a curse, an ever-looming nimbus cloud through which one can’t see the light. The stresses of expectation—of responsibility, of what others rely on one for—are circumstantial and individual, but their shared impetus is the fear of failure, the mere thought of potentially letting someone—or something—down.

And in the context of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, ‘expectation’ is an omnipresent, if not always explicit, theme; protagonist Paul Atreides is constantly considering what’s expected of him, whether it be as a ducal heir readying a move to Arrakis or as the Kwisatz Haderach and eventual Padishah Emperor. Paul himself exists only because of a defiance of expectation, his mother, Lady Jessica, birthing a son at the request of her Duke as opposed to following the Bene Gesserit order. The broader world in which the Atreides reside is one of rigid systems and expectations, Paul’s understanding and exploitation of them leading to his rise—and eventual downfall—as a galactic theocratic leader.

The first three books of Herbert’s series are, today, regarded as a cautionary tale, a warning against the allure of charismatic individuals who claim to have the sole solution; the author himself concisely summarized his underlying point in 1979, stating “Beware of heroes, [it’s] much better [to] rely on your own judgment and your own mistakes.” And while Herbert’s efficacy in communicating his intended message has long been debated, the works themselves have demonstrably endured; whether it be the world, the characters, or the eternal themes, there’s something about Herbert’s novels that has resonated with several generations of readers, with Dune, today, still regarded as a seminal work in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.

And while Paul is plainly the initial Dune trilogy’s primary protagonist, it’s his sister, Alia, who’s arguably the series’s most compelling character, or at least its most tragic. Described by Herbert in the Dune appendices as the “Accursed One,” Alia is a deliberately strange and disquieting character, an individual whose singularity is both the essence of her being and the foundation of her struggle. She’s a character who is one with all except for herself, a young girl burdened by the infinite weight of a generational and divine expectation that she, herself, had no hand in choosing.

Dune, for decades, was described by many as an ‘unadaptable’ work given its inherent ambition and the endlessly strange, unabashedly non-mainstream nature of some of its concepts; visionary director Denis Villeneuve has largely disproved this notion with the success of both Dune: Part One (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), but he’s, to this point, largely avoided the inherent conundrum that comes with adapting a character described verbatim as “Alia-the-Strange-One.” Portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy, she appears briefly in Dune: Part Two, but not as a wisdom-spewing, knife-wielding toddler; she is, instead, a part of a prescient vision, telling Paul that she loves him while revealing their shared Harkonnen lineage. She also speaks to Lady Jessica from within her womb throughout the film, helping to ensure the prophecy’s manifestation and the commencement of the ‘Holy War’ despite never actually being born.

Deviations from the source material are inevitable in adaptation, especially in this instance, when the original text is so brazenly bizarre. And while the way in which Villeneuve approached Alia in Part Two is understandable given the circumstances, audiences still don’t really know how the character will be handled in Dune: Part Three, the epic conclusion to the auteur’s trilogy that is scheduled to be released on December 18, 2026; the character, again portrayed by Taylor-Joy, was featured prominently throughout the film’s first trailer, giving us our first genuine look into how the character will be executed in practice. While some of the imagery throughout the trailer is lifted directly from Herbert’s Dune Messiah book, Alia herself—almost by necessity—appears to be an amalgam of the character as she appears in Messiah and Children of Dune, perhaps suggesting that Villeneuve is condensing several novels’ worth of development into a single film; this isn’t surprising given the reality of the situation (this is, after all, the director’s final Dune movie), but it will be interesting to see the filmmaker can successfully communicate the tragedy of Alia and the unenviable inevitability of her situation into one film while simultaneously balancing a myriad of other events, characters, and themes.

And to effectively parse through the scant information we currently have regarding Alia in Dune: Part Three and speculate about her portrayal, we must first have a thorough understanding of the character as she appears in Herbert’s initial trilogy: she’s a tyrant who audiences can’t help but empathize with, a character encumbered by expectation, a product of an impossible situation and an individual whose calamitous fate was arguably determined even before her birth.

A Figure of Tragedy: Alia in the Dune Novels

Long before she was known as “Hawt, the Fish Monster” and “Coan-Teen, the female death-spirit who walks without feet,” Alia was but a fetus in her mother’s womb, a victim of a prenatal awakening brought on by Lady Jessica’s changing of the Water of Life as she became the Fremen Reverend Mother. Jessica did not disclose her pregnancy before taking the right, her unborn child thus gaining access to ancestral memory alongside her (in addition to pre-birth consciousness). This put Alia at extreme risk of becoming what the Bene Gesserit described as “Abomination,” a person who could not control the voices and memories within their mind and, thus, ultimately succumbs to possession.

When Alia is born in the second half of the original Dune novel, she’s a truly singular individual, a baby with access to eons-worth of memories and information. As she ages into a toddler, her status as a child with knowledge, experiences, and ability that no youngling could reasonably have disturbs the Fremen around her; her strangeness discomforts them, with Chani at one point telling Paul that the Fremen “women [were] fearful because a child little more than an infant talks… of things that only an adult should know,” even asking Lady Jessica to “exorcise the demon in her daughter.” Described by her mother as “a daughter who at birth knew everything that I knew… and more,” Alia is initially made a pariah by the Fremen, her alien nature terrifying those around her despite Alia herself having no say in her singularity.

And herein lies the tragedy of the character: she was set up for failure, forced, from even before birth, to play a game she could not reasonably win. She’s, at first, feared by those around her for something she did not choose, nor could she control; she, as a child, describes herself as a “freak” and a “cosmic accident,” in one of the most heart-wrenching portions of the original Dune novel describing her prenatal awakening as “frigthen[ing] . . . I tried to escape, but there was no way to escape.” When Jessica tells her daughter that it was a “wonder” that she was able to “accept” the conditions, Alia responds, “I couldn’t do anything else! I didn’t know how to reject or hide my consciousness… or shut it off… everything just happened… everything.”

A child, born with the weight and knowledge of the universe on her shoulders, and shunned because of it. And what makes this situation, this existence, perhaps all the more tragic is that it was perhaps preferable to what was to come; with the help of Harah (a Fremen woman whom Paul becomes responsible for after killing her husband in battle), the Fremen start to accept—and ultimately embrace—Alia, with Chani saying that the group begins “to accept the miracle of her status.” She cements herself as not only an integral part of Paul’s regime, but as almost an extension of the Lisan al-Gaib himself, with her actions at the end of the first Dune novel, as a toddler killing the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen with a gom jabbar before slaying additional Harkonnen and Sardaukar soldiers with a knife. She ends the book by “killing enemy wounded” on the battlefield and “marking their bodies for the water-recovery teams,” described by Paul as a “good Fremen child” for doing so.

Alia has grown into a figure of extreme political, religious, and militaristic renown across the Empire when the story recommences 12 years later in Dune Messiah, an “object of fearful veneration for the superstitious masses” whom followers refer to as “St. Alia of the Knife.” She is a linchpin in the house of cards that her brother has built, a “demi-goddess whose special charge is to protect the tribes through her powers of violence,” a “virgin-harlot—witty, vulgar, cruel, as destructive in her whims as a coriolis storm.”

And it’s in Messiah that both Alia and Paul start to consider the weight of their actions, the impact they’ve made on the galaxy; they do so in different ways, but their relationship with each other, their intrinsic bond, allows them to communicate and weigh these thoughts, at times, without speaking. Paul, though a tyrant, is, to Alia, the only person who has ever come close to an equal, the only person who shares a similar struggle; this not only refers to their shared ancestral memory and prescience, but their galactic standing as icons, as deified figures, as physical embodiments of a cause. Alia, at one point in Messiah, considers this, thinking to herself, “she and her brother could not be people. They had to be something more.” Their relationship, thus, is simultaneously crucial and unspoken, their kinship a pillar on which the entire Empire resides; near the end of Messiah, a supplementary character describes the siblings as “one person back to back, one being half male and half female.”

Messiah is truly where the tragedy of Alia starts to unfold in earnest; she’s, at this point, a teenager who is not only burdened by the near-infinite knowledge permeating her mind, but she’s also a galactic demi-goddess, a person who has to be more than human. Though she certainly played a role in Paul’s jihad and is, in no way, exonerated of blame for her actions, there’s an inherent level of empathy because this was a role she was born into, an expectation she didn’t ask for; and what makes it all the more tragic is that she didn’t want any of this. What she truly wanted was normalcy, a luxury that was taken from her before birth; in a Messiah sequence that perhaps perfectly epitomizes Alia’s struggle and tragedy, she states, “If only I could burn this thing out of me! I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to be able to laugh. But I’m sister to an Emperor who’s worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared. I don’t want to be part of history. I just wanted to be loved… and to love.”

Alia was never afforded the opportunity to be normal; she, in her own words, had to be something more. She could never develop her own desires or aspirations, as these were determined for her before birth; she could never mold her own personality because thousands of ego-memories were constantly competing for her attention. She must operate as a political and religious icon despite having no genuine desire to do so, knowing that abandoning these roles would “[bring] down destruction upon them all.” It’s these underlying notions that make her relationship with Hayt/Duncan Idaho, though spotty in execution, all the more meaningful in concept: it’s something that she wants. Though their introduction comes as a result of a conspiracy, the love Alia comes to feel for Idaho is not something expected of her, nor is it a responsibility; it’s, instead, just a human reaction, one of the few Alia is permitted to determine for herself.

The character’s tragic fate comes in Children of Dune, when the unmanageable weight she had carried throughout her entire life finally causes her to crumble. Still burdened by her previous struggles, Alia is now the Regent of the Empire and a caretaker for Paul’s young twins; the added weight to her already impossible situation becomes too much to bear, causing her to become what the Bene Gesserit feared she would be since birth—Abomination—as she succumbs to the ego-memory of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. She begins to scheme against her family and grows more overt in her tyranny while under Harkonnen’s possession, her story concluding in self-sacrifice when she, in a brief moment of clarity, throws herself from a window to end the madness. This comes after a truly devastating exchange between Alia and Lady Jessica in which she, now a grown woman tasked with leading an Empire, again becomes a vulnerable child so desperately seeking the help and guidance she needed throughout her entire life: “Don’t you know who I am?,” she asks Jessica as she fights for control, “Why’re you all looking at me that way? Mother, make them stop it.”

Alia, though akin to Paul in that she deserves scrutiny for her actions, is ultimately one of the Dune characters most deserving of audience empathy because of her general lack of autonomy and agency; her eternal struggle, her role within the Empire, and her life were effectively determined for her the moment her mother consumed the Water of Life. She ascended from outcast to quasi-deity in the blink of an eye, a character whom people went from avoiding to revering. She lived in constant subservience to expectation, occupying roles given to her despite not wanting any of them. She was burdened with singularity when all she wanted was normalcy. She ran from the inevitable until it caught up to her, making her fate all the more devastating despite the reader knowing its certainty from the moment of her introduction.

Adapting Alia

Dune: Part Three will be our proper introduction to Villeneuve’s rendition of Alia, as the character, again, appears only briefly in Part Two. The director largely omitted Alia from the story despite her being integral to the original text, leaving her in utero throughout the entire film while making her and Lady Jessica much more overtly antagonistic figures; whereas Paul carries himself as equal to the Fremen throughout much of the movie and explicitly tries to avoid the manifestation of the prophecy, Jessica—at the behest of a prenatally conscious Alia—helps to ensure its manifestation, the child urging her mother to manipulate the Fremen into accepting Paul as a prophet.

This was a rather creative means through which to adapt Alia, and it’s certainly more palatable to mainstream audiences than an introspective murderous toddler; that said, some of the character’s inherent strangeness—and the early struggle it created—was lost by not having her be physically born in Part Two. Alia is strange, unabashedly so; this is crucial to understanding the tragic nature of her character. Her differences, her singularity, initially make her a leper among the Fremen, who then go on to idolize her; she goes from a demon within their eyes to a God in almost an instant. The dichotomy in how they perceive her is stark, but the point is that she’s never viewed as human; by physically eliminating her from the story thus far, you eliminate the self-doubt sown into her by her initial perception, thus compromising her tragedy.

Dune: Part Three is set to pick up 17 years after the conclusion of Part Two, and we can, thus, assume that we won’t be seeing a significant portion of Alia’s early childhood; this isn’t to say, however, that the inherent tragedy of her story will be wholly lost. Villeneuve, if he chooses, can still convey her tragic nature through her interactions with others; Taylor-Joy has already indicated that the character is going to be a source of fear and discomfort for some followers, stating during a recent appearance on The Today Show that “a lot of people find her really creepy, except for her brother.”

And Alia’s relationship with Paul appears to be a pillar of Part Three—as it very much should be; Alia is seen standing opposite her brother as he leads a Fremen war chant in the debut trailer, and Taylor-Joy told the audience at the trailer premiere event that “the one thing that she really feels most strongly about is her love and devotion to her brother, because that is the only person who has ever made her feel like she makes sense. He’s understood her from before she was even born, and she will do anything for him, to various degrees of insanity.” Their kinship and shared struggle are, again, integral to who they are as characters; Alia loves her brother and would demonstrably do anything for him, but it’s her standing as almost an extension of him—a status she didn’t ask for that comes with expectations she doesn’t want—that underscores her lack of agency and tragedy as a character.

A rather reductive way to further adapt the character would be to continue down the path of overt antagonism. Alia pushes for the prophecy’s manifestation in Part Two and urges her brother to embrace his status as a prophet despite his own wishes, with Paul ultimately doing so by the end of the film; Dune: Part Three, if faithful to Dune Messiah, figures to see Paul consider the weight of his actions and question whether his ‘Holy War’ was truly justified. To further position Alia as a proponent of the war and/or blind fanatic of her brother would be rather simplistic and disloyal to her character, as she, like Paul, begins to question the entire complex they’ve built by the time Messiah rolls around; she, at one point in the book, states that there’s been “enough butchery going on under the Atreides banner,” later in the work showing that she’s not a completely unempathetic individual by expressing that she feels grief and guilt when people die as a result of their cause.

This isn’t to say that Alia should be presented as altruistic or morally angelic, as she plainly isn’t—but she also isn’t overtly evil. She’s complex; she’s executed abhorrent acts, but did she ever have a choice? She was born the daughter of a mother who prenatally passed to her overwhelming ancestral memory and the sister of a tyrannical theocrat; she was almost immediately thrust into a role of galactic veneration, never really having the opportunity to find who she was as an individual before being celebrated as a deity. To relegate her to a foil on Paul’s road to perceived redemption would not only be a gargantuan missed opportunity but a fundamental betrayal of her character.

One would like to assume, despite her usage in Part Two, that Villeneuve understands the weight and tragedy of Alia as an individual as opposed to strictly an accessory to Paul. And given the fact that the director missed out on some of her characterization by largely omitting her from his Dune adaptation, it will be interesting to see if he visits Children of Dune for additional inspiration as he adapts Dune Messiah; fans have long speculated that elements of Children of Dune would be worked into Villeneuve’s third Dune film given the length (or lack thereof) of Messiah and some of the events of Dune: Part Two, and this belief, thus far, has some credence. Villeneuve, at the aforementioned trailer premiere event, stated that Dune: Part Three is “inspired” by Dune Messiah as opposed to a direct adaptation, perhaps implying that there’s going to be some (necessary) deviation from the text; the additions to the cast also indicate that some of the new characters will be more in line with their Children of Dune ages as opposed to their Dune Messiah ages, suggesting that there could be some overt Children influence in Dune: Part Three.

The recently released character posters perhaps suggest that some of Alia’s characterization will be borrowed from Children of Dune, particularly with regard to her status as an Abomination; her poster shows her covered in blood and screaming at something off-screen, that something perhaps residing within her mind. Having Alia experience a mental struggle—particularly with Vladimir Harkonnen à la Children of Dune—would be an incredibly effective way to communicate her singularity and hardship while also garnering empathy from the audience; it would also make for a cinematically compelling scene and would lead to the return of Stellan Skarsgård as the Baron, and one can never have enough Stellan Skarsgård. This could reasonably be the road down which Villeneuve is headed, as in addition to the concept of “Abomination” being mentioned in Dune: Part Two, Taylor-Joy has already used the word in reference to her character.

There’s been much talk about Alia since the premiere of the Dune: Part Three trailer, and for good reason, as she’s one of the most compelling characters in the entire series; she’s a victim of circumstance, a child who was given boundless knowledge, ability, and expectation, and inevitably crumbled under the infinite weight. She’s not a hero nor villain, a god nor demon; she doesn’t fit into any binaries, because binaries are far too restrictive when describing a character wholly singular. She’s many things to many people, but could never truly be herself; she’s a Reverend Mother, a war hero, and a demi-goddess who was never given a chance to be human, which is all she ever really wanted to be.

She’s a figure of tragedy, a child born with knowledge she didn’t ask for and divine expectations she didn’t want, her entire life and inevitable fate effectively determined even before she was born. She did what she could when alive—she fought, she loved, she endured for as long as she could—but the reality of her singularity ultimately claimed her. This is Alia, and with Villeneuve and Taylor-Joy involved, she has the potential to be a truly memorable sci-fi cinema character; effectively conveying her tragedy as a “cosmic accident,” as a doomed individual in a hopeless situation, is paramount in making her truly resonate, and only time will tell if this is the version of the character who ultimately appears on screen.