Alia opinions? I might have already asked this
Okay, you asked for it...
I'm gonna preface this by saying that (like with many Dune characters) prescience makes Alia an extremely difficult entity to talk about. She is, at the same time, a baby and an old woman, one person and many and nothing at all, a god and an empty vessel. This is what is touched on in the much quoted virgin harlot passage and underlines all of what I'm about to say.
This is also very long and rather stream-of-consciousness. I could write an entire dissertation on this topic
Isolation
I've talked before about the intense and widespread loneliness of the Duniverse and nowhere is it more prevalent than with Alia. She is, like Paul, a being for which there is no precedent, a member of a species of one, and yet, unlike Paul, her birth is not a blessing but a curse, and she is treated as such by almost everyone right from the very start.
Compare her to Paul, who is in the most similar situation, and you see the depth of her loneliness. Paul had sixteen years of relative normality, he was isolated but he had his parents and his mentors on Caladan. Paul grew up intensely loved and this shows in his robust sense of self, even as he's slowly strangled by his public persona. Even after his father died, Paul found genuine belonging in the Fremen which was magnified tenfold by his relationship with Chani. Paul is swimming in family, he is never not surrounded by people who support and uplift him.
Then we have Alia, who was born to a mother who would turn on her a few years later, seeing her as a mistake despite the fact that she was the one who made her so. She doesn't meet her father, the one person who may have loved her in a true and uncomplicated way. She is born on Arrakis, a planet which is not her own, into a culture which immediately fears and deifies her to the status of god-witch, branding her as an arm of her brother before she ever has the chance to be her own person. Alia is not Ateides the way that Paul is, neither is she Fremen the way that he was able to be. Equally, she is a reverend mother from birth, and yet she is never a Bene Gesserit, lacking the sisterhood to which Jessica returns. She has no place to call her own, no kin aside from her brother.
One more point of comparison is with Leto and Ghanima, who are preborn in the same way that she is. They are able to navigate the perils that undo their aunt because they have one another, operating almost as one entity throughout CoD, keeping each other away from the abyss that Alia falls down.
This may be contentious, but I think that a lot of the relationship people like to attribute to Paul and Alia is actually retroactively projected from Ghanima and Leto. It's been a year since my last Messiah reread but I don't see any compelling evidence that Paul is dedicated to her in the same way that she is to him. He seems to largely treat her as a tool and a comrade, not extending any of the devotion that he reserves largely for Chani. I'm not saying he doesn't love her at all, but I see no reason to believe they have a close and emotionally fulfilling relationship as most of their interactions seem to revolve around their empire. Im open to disagreement on this, but i think evidence for Paul's devotion to Alia matching hers to him is.... thin, to say the least. At the very least, he does not care for her like the child that she very much is. The power dynamic here is interesting and complex. Consider also, the scene in which Paul and Stilgar discuss her need for a 'mate', making her seem almost sub-human, and like a problem to be solved.
Look at it from this perspective. Alia has no-one. Her father is dead, her mother rejects her, the fremen see her as non-human, her brother is also her colleague, and she simply doesn't know anyone else. She dies without ever having a single friend to call her own, struggling to uphold a dynasty her brother left her with, even as he abandoned her (Paul himself being everything she has in the world, the thing by which she defines herself)
Paul is all that she has, and I think he uses this, not callously but practically. From her infancy, she dedicates her life to his cause because he is her mother/father/brother/husband all in one, and yet he doesn't bat an eye about abandoning her to clean up his mess after Chani, the only one he really cares about, is dead and he doesn't want to go on.
She also never has children of her own despite being married and the implication that this is something she might have liked, procreating/genstic legacy being a huge deal in the eugenicist philosophy of Dune, and this is because of the way she was born (the doing of her mother) and the position her brother puts her in.
The only character I can really compare her isolation to is Feyd-Rautha, and I think it's no coincidence that they are two characters who live and die under the thumb of the baron, striving for and failing to achieve true power, and any real legacy, because they are portrayed as lesser than the strong, stoic figures of Paul and Leto II (both of whom grew up with much more support).
Alia, even more than Paul, is a victim of her own mythologisation, which belies the true emptiness of her existence. She belongs nowhere. Not with the Atreides, the fremen, the bene gessirit. No-one loves her for who she is and this results in her lunging for the first available partner, Hayt, someone who is not human and who possesses the memories of a man who was implied to be attracted to her mother, someone who she much resembles, raising the question of whether it was love or something else that drove them together.
Then we have the complex subject of her possession by the Baron, someone who we know to be compelling to lonely children (Feyd) and destructive addicts (Piter). By this point she is so tormented that she agrees to his deal, anything to make the voices stop, and what follows has obvious grooming connotations, in which she is maneuvred as a sexual object for the gratification of someone who offered her peace and protection. (I could write essays on this alone but I'll leave it here for now.)
After her near overdose on spice, Alia confesses that all she ever wanted was to be loved, and yet what is there at her core to love? Who is she without all of this? The question has no answer because she never had a chance to be a real person and no-one ever saw her as such.
Substance metaphor
Dune is a story about drugs, this is undeniable, born out of psychedelia, it is at the heart of the story and almost all of the central characters are addicts, even if they are not treated as such most of the time. Alia is the main exception to this.
Her existence being result of substance use while she was in the womb, the relationship is already drawn very starkly. After this she grows up in an environment which gives her no choice but to become addicted to melange and it forms a central pillar of who she is, being thr thing that allows her to have any value to anyone around her (via her prescience).
In messiah we see her take a massive overdose of spice, something which is relatively rare in the duniverse, this kind of overindulgence drawing links to the users of semuta and to Piter De Vries, yet another character who lives and dies under the Baron's influence. It also shows the lengths to which she goes to be useful to her brother, to be valuable, because no-one ever values her for anything other than her prescience.
Following this, her downward spiral echoes an addiction narrative, with her becoming a cautionary tale for the younger members of her family as she burns up inside but keeps functioning, meaning that no-one ever really tries to help her, not even her own husband, who never seems to truly understand her. By the time that Leto II offers her help, her fate is long since sealed.
Tragedy
At the end of the dune saga, it seems to me that Alia's story is the saddest, and perhaps most tragic in the traditional definition, her fatal flaw being the desire to be loved.
We talk often of the choice that Paul may or may not have had in doing what he did, but I am struck by how many fewer choices Alia had. All her life, from being born as a weapon, to being left an empire and children that her brother didn't want to deal with, she made almost no choices for herself, save those that were self destructive, or giving herself to the first eligible man she meets.
Im not saying any of this to excuse her actions as ruler of the empire, but merely to contextualise them and ask what else she was going to do. One cannot be expected to ethically rule an empire founded on false godhood, especially when they have no real sense of self or base of genuine support.
It could be argued that I infantilise her, not acknowledging the fact that she is reborn and in possession of generations of ancestral memories, but I would point to her final moments, in which she seems to regress to a scared and childlike state, calling out for her mother, as evidence to the contrary.
Conclusion
This may be an unpopular opinion in this era of PaulAlia, but I see Alia's story as one of a person with immense potential, who is used by those around her and then abandoned or reviled by everyone who was supposed to love her. She's a sacrifice for the sins of her mother and brother, who kills herself to cleanse the Atreides of the essential weakness that comes with being human, and thus fallible. She is a lonely little girl living the life of a God and receives nothing but suffering for it in the end. She is not a real person, and as such, she ends up with nothing. Her castle was always built on sand.
