I'm not Cassandra, but I've been her sometimes

So what’s the consensus on the Richard III references (i.e. the Two Princes and the Tower Princes)? Because the most I can glean is “two doomed kids foolishly left in the care of a mad king” but if anyone knows of, like, specific quotes or plot points…?

as someone who loves richard iii an unreasonable amount, I will say that richard's real downfall isn't actually 'a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse' at all, but the scene almost at the end where he is alone with his dreams of all the people he has killed and betrayed along the way and finally admits to his own complete self-loathing:

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; And if I die, no soul will pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself?

and yes. I should very much like to see john gaius despair, actually :) the ghosts come to him in turn and all tell him some variation on 'despair and die', which like -- imagine all the dead lyctors getting to turn up and tell john to his face he fucking sucks after listing all his crimes. I Would Like To See It.

also if it turns out anything like the play we'll get the scene of the princes' mother going to a previous dethroned and widowed wrathful queen to learn how to curse the absolute shit out of the king, teaming up with the king's own mother (alecto as mother earth???) who also turns up to tell him he's always been the shame of her womb and that they'll never speak again lmao

(no really, this is what happens in richard iii after the princes die. who these women getting together to record the most epic diss track of all time would be in the locked tomb universe I leave up to the imagination, there's certainly several of them I'd trust to tear him to pieces sufficiently)

I’ve made these pages for a comic exercise like a year ago, maybe someday I’ll re-do it since I only really like the last panel

In the backstory chapters of Nona, there's a strong thread of racism running through what goes down and why, but it's all under the surface. Unacknowledged. John frames the injustice done to him in squarely economic terms, or about being fair, or he doesn't explain himself at all, and so there's always something in his story that rings false. A disconnect between the events and John's reaction to them. John clearly knows what it is, but he's still unwilling to overtly name the accomplice even after everyone else involved is dead. Why is that?

Well. Probably racism. One if its little tricks is how no one likes to hear about it, especially if it implicates their own communities. Talk about an instant way to lose a crowd. Or a scholarship. John was an indigenous student without a safety net. He spent his whole life making himself palatable to first Pākehā and then British institutions, in the hopes that by chasing success in education, he could lift himself out of poverty and make a difference in the world. That's what everyone tells you, right? Get yourself an education, and that's your ticket out. Survive the abuse, and you can make something of yourself.

John played that game perfectly. He worked his way up, he endured, he got his degrees, and in doing so he learned to frame things in the way people wanted to hear them. And how to avoid mentioning things that might be used against him.

None of it protected him, of course, that's the true bitch of it all. He was still put in his place as soon as he tried to use his investor's money to help people like him, and there was nothing he could do about it. The harder he fought to blow the whistle on them the worse things got, until he was stood in front of the government with all his evidence, and instead of considering a word he said, they threatened him with racialised violence. We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?

Ten thousand years later, he's still not ready to confront any of that. I got mad, he tells Harrow, as if that could possibly adequately explain what had happened. As if he'd even know where to begin explaining why.

imagine you pass god’s herculean trials & defeat one of his evil exes only for the reward to be living with his Portland polycule for the foreseeable future

Pyrrha

The first several chapters of HtN

Ianthe

Wake

Lyctors

Ortus

Protesilas

Kiriona

Tridentarii

Jod

(Part 1)

Can you imagine how obnoxiously involved John would have been if he, Gideon, and Harrow had ever shared space for any period of time? Gideon and Harrow are still in their "what are we?" stage, but he's acting like Gideon has just brought home her first long-term girlfriend. A script so alien to both of them it's more bewildering than invasive.

#so girls when's the wedding? kidding kidding! #but just so you know I do make a mean wedding speech #Harrow I hope you know I would be proud to consider you family #not that I don't already of course and it doesn't have to change anything but you know I would be proud to have you for a daughter #or a daughter in law 👀 perhaps #not that I mean to push you! #you're both young! take your time!

@armchair-factotum I can picture it so clearly. She would! And then—because she's Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who has never been normal about anything in her life—she would reverse uno the shovel talk back on God.

My lord, you are her father. I know better than anyone what that means, for I have known her as I know myself, and I have known the harm that even a well-intentioned parent can do. You may be God while I am only myself, but I swear to you, Teacher, on that life we both hold dear: I shall find a way to cause you to regret it, should you ever cause any harm to come to Gideon Nav.

Of course John would just laugh it off and toast to keeping one another honest like she was playing along with his bit—he's getting a good grade at bonding with the kids!—Meanwhile Harrow is so fucking serious about this. Fuck you, God, Griddle was hers first. Gideon is under her protection, too, and her claim has primacy.

Thinking again about John’s whole “I’m just a normal guy” routine as not (just) an excuse or a misdirection or a lie but as a desperate plea for someone, anyone, to recognize that he did not ask to become this

Yes, he did terrible things. Yes, someone with that much power cannot afford to make mistakes. Yes, he hurt his friends and he killed innocent people and he tore apart the solar system on his quest for revenge.

But also. He was just a scientist. The world was big and scary and so many bad things were happening and he was working on a project to maybe solve one of them. He wanted to help. He wanted to fix things. He wanted to save people. And the universe gave him the power to do so, only now instead of a science project he has genuine magic powers, only he doesn’t know how they work, and most people don’t believe him and won’t let him help, and the people that do believe him either want him dead or want to use those powers for terrible things, and sure maybe their plans aren’t the most ethical but they’re a step in the vague direction of a solution, and maybe if John goes along with it long enough he’ll have a chance to figure something out, only now everything is happening so fast and everything is falling apart and his friends are dead and he loses control for just a second and then everything he has ever known is gone.

I don't think John relates to Alecto primarily as a woman, that's just one of the stories he tells himself. She isn't a woman, not really, and John knows that better than anyone. She's a place. She's a planet. She didn't stop being a planet when John constructed her a body out of blood, and bone, and earth. That moment also didn't create her as a person. She was already a person.

I've mentioned whakapapa before, in the context of tangata whenua. Something I haven't gone into is that whakapapa includes the land. The mountains, the rivers, the forests. They are people. I don't mean that figuratively; for example, the New Zealand government has finally agreed to legally acknowledge the personhood of Taranaki Maunga.

Alecto and John have a very complicated and multifacted relationship, but I think one face of it that many people may not realise is that the relationship has existed in some form for all of John's life. Alecto is his ancestor, as surely as Anastasia is Harrow's.

i’ve been taking ample notes while reading TLT to make it make sense, and i often go back to reference these notes, but the thing is that i am fucking bad at taking notes so it just looks like this

this one is the best note out of all of them tho

Can you imagine how obnoxiously involved John would have been if he, Gideon, and Harrow had ever shared space for any period of time? Gideon and Harrow are still in their "what are we?" stage, but he's acting like Gideon has just brought home her first long-term girlfriend. A script so alien to both of them it's more bewildering than invasive.

#so girls when's the wedding? kidding kidding! #but just so you know I do make a mean wedding speech #Harrow I hope you know I would be proud to consider you family #not that I don't already of course and it doesn't have to change anything but you know I would be proud to have you for a daughter #or a daughter in law 👀 perhaps #not that I mean to push you! #you're both young! take your time!

Can you imagine how obnoxiously involved John would have been if he, Gideon, and Harrow had ever shared space for any period of time? Gideon and Harrow are still in their "what are we?" stage, but he's acting like Gideon has just brought home her first long-term girlfriend. A script so alien to both of them it's more bewildering than invasive.

I'm sooo curious if John's philosophy of forgiveness extends to Alecto. I want to know if Alecto has ever apologized to him for what she did, changing him without explanation and without his consent. He makes excuses for her to Harrow (it's not your fault)(you were so scared) so I'm sure he would have brushed it off if she did. But I want to know if she ever tried.

What would John do if he were offered a sincere apology? Would he even recognize one if he saw it?

Especially bc it's impossible to lie to Alecto, even when you're lying to yourself. she must know he's repressing it, his hurt and his anger. that he's always made excuses for her and never really forgiven her. That's why Nona asked Hot Sauce to forgive her so she could know what it felt like

I was thinking about how we don't actually know how Pyrrha died. Just that by her own telling, she "was killed," and that she was the first cavalier to die outside Cristabel and Alfred's suicide pact.

Before Nona came out, I suspected Gideon the First must have killed her, probably with her consent. That seems unlikely to me now, with everything we've learned about them in Nona.

Also before Nona came out, I came to the conclusion that the lyctors demanded John kill Alecto following a "great attack" on Canaan House and the revelation of what a Resurrection Beast is. Based on Mercymorn's assumption that Alecto was a freak who would attack her on sight, I also highly suspected that Alecto either participated in or perpetrated the attack on Canaan House, thus proving herself beyond a shadow of a doubt to be untamed and dangerous in a way that not even John could talk his way out of.

I just recently noticed a detail in Nona the Ninth that might slot all this together like puzzle pieces:

Pyrrha has seen something very like Nona's tantrums before, and that memory scares her. Enough that she avoids even thinking about it.

I think Alecto may have killed Pyrrha.

But let's say she did. One of the reasons Alecto was locked in the Tomb was because she killed Pyrrha. Why did she do it? Well, because, as Nona would put it, she had a tantrum. Why did she have a tantrum?

When the lyctors first came to John asking about what they called lyctorhood, Alecto didn't understand what they were asking for. She didn't know it would be so close to what John had done to her. I have a feeling she figured it out pretty damn quickly once she saw what Mercy, Cris, Alfred, and Augustine had done. And she completely lost her shit.

Of course Pyrrha would be the one to step in, that's just who she is. And that's why Gideon the First was the third Saint to ascend to lyctorhood.

Wait this would explain so much about the way Alecto is talked about, and the lies built up around both her and the Resurrection Beasts.

When Nona had her tantrum, she first eliminated the trigger using the power of extreme violence, and then moved on to any compounding unpleasant stimuli.

In this case, the trigger is Mercymorn and Augustine, freshly traumatized by their ascension. From their perspective, Alecto would have snapped and tried to beat them to death, on what was already the worst day of their lives, for no fucking reason. Maybe the shock of killing Pyrrha snapped her out of it, maybe John had to show up—oh so sadly too late to do anything for the deceased, of course—and talk her down. Either way, John has a lot of explaining to do.

Now, of course John can't tell them Alecto's enraged fugue was triggered by being violently reminded of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. That has just now become a secret he would kill everyone in this room to protect. So what does he tell them?

Oh, yeah, that was because uhhhhhh ...... you know how she's sort of not human? They're called Resurrection Beasts, and they're all gonna just do that when they see you now. Yeah, there are eight more of them. Yeah, it's because you've become crimes against nature they instinctively seek out and destroy. Sorry.

And then he just kept building on that bit of improv for the next ten thousand years.

why did he kinda fujo out here

Imagine Harrow's Gideon-filter was cranked just a widdle bit too high and she got seizures every time she looked at Jod

Awkward.

Lyctor? I hardly know her!

I painted Jod and his duplicitous sluts in the style of Byzantine art!! I believe we are approaching my annual reread of the series... ✨⚔️💀⚔️✨

Closeups and print link under the cut!