#john meta

[theriverbeyond]

how do we know in the books that john is indigenous? can you say more about how his indigeneity is important to his story?

hello! so there is a word of god post on race (doesn't mention John but mentions that Gideon is "mixed Maori"), BUT I frankly don't think word of god statements are worth any weight without actual in-text support (see: the "dumbledore is gay" situation). SO!

Specific evidence that John Gaius is Maori, as revealed in Nona the Ninth:

When he is listing his education, John mentions having gone to Dilworth School (John 20:8). Dilworth is an all boys boarding school in Auckland and accepts students based on financial need instead of academic or sporting achievements. Demographics appear to be about 70% low income Maori boys, indicating that it is highly likely that John is Maori

John reports that P- said he looked like a "Maori-TV pink panther" (John 15:23) when his eyes turned gold. Maori TV is a TV station that is focused primarily on Maori culture & language revitalization, with presumably all or mostly Maori hosts, and tbh I don't see why P- would say this unless John was himself Maori

John uses a te reo Māori phrase ("kia kaha, kia māia") (John 5:20) when he is saying goodbye to the corpses in the cryo lab before the power is shut off. Though it is possible he said this as a non-Maori kiwi, but in combination with the previous two points of evidence I think this all very strongly points to him being Maori

He also renames his daughter Kiriona Gaia, "Kiriona" being just literally the name "Gideon" in te reo Māori

TLT is not a series that hands you anything on a silver platter but to ME this is all pretty solid proof

Why is this relevant to The Locked Tomb?

In Nona the Ninth, we learn that before he completed apotheosis and ate the solar system, John was basically trying to save the earth from capitalism-caused climate change. Climate justice and the rights of indigenous people over their own land are deeply tied together, in the same way that climate catastrophe and capitalism/ imperialism/ colonialism are linked. disclaimer that this is NOT my area of study and others have definitely said it better; this is just the basic gist as I understand it, but on quick search I found some sources here and here if you want to do some reading.

TLT is not a series that hands you anything on a silver platter, but i don't think it is a stretch to see John as an indigenous man trying to save the earth and getting ignored and shut down at every turn by primarily western colonial powers (PanEuro, the USA) who declare him a terrorist and then as a reader thematically connecting that to the experience of indigenous climate activists IRL

there are absolutely TLT meta posts that have discussed this before me; tumblr search is nonfunctional and I have been looking for an hour and a half and cannot find anything specific even though i KNOW i reblogged multiple posts about this in the first few weeks following NTN's release. sad & I am sorry

I think that by the time the books take place, John is 10k years removed from the cultural context he grew up in, with the Nine Houses having become a genocidal colonial power in their own right (with more parallels to be made between John's forever war for the resources of literal life energy and like, oil wars), but I also think that John Gaius is a fictional character who can represent and symbolize multiple different things in service of telling a story. (not to mention the potential thematic parallels being made to how oppressed people sometimes are pressed into replicating the power dynamics of their oppressors and continuing the cycle--now that is a tumblr post i KNOW i read last year and definitely cannot find right now, once again sad & I am sorry)

How Radical Was John Gaius, Really is a forum thread that was locked by the moderators after 234534645674564 pages of heated debate

[dotthings]

Jensen gave some honest commentary about John at Purcon 9, during the JenMish panel. It was a really thoughtful answer. Jensen acknowledges John wasn’t “a model father” and John’s “lack of empathy” and “lack of parenting skill” while acknowledging John’s love for his family and the mitigating circumstances. And then he acknowledges John “shaped his sons into the weapons they needed to become.” Jensen was respectful, but make no mistake he full on is saying John turned his children into soldiers. Not because he was uncaring at the core. But the realities of the character are the realities and Jensen understands this.

Some fans who never will. They stick John on a pedestal and insult anyone who talks about this with complexity, even accused people of being delusional and not understanding canon. For…saying the things Jensen said here. (They’re the ones in denial of a complex situation in canon).

Meanwhile Jensen gets it.

Source: [X]

I will block anyone who tries to make drama over this post. Be grownups or dni.

But I think many fans have proved able to have this conversation and have had this conversation and Jensen’s thoughts expressed here are very in line with how I see it too. So feel free to reblog and add thoughts.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

I've been trying to find out when / where the headcanon that John and Harry are twins came from. I'm assuming it's connected to Sherlock's "It's never twins" comment, but other than that I'm at a loss. ;-)

Hey Lovely!

Ahh, this is a good question... iirc the theory first percolated when people began deep-diving the official BBC John's blog, and in a reply to a "comment" made by Harry, John said "God Harry you're 36", and when one of the books confirmed John was 37 around ASIB/TRF. That post goes a bit more into my thoughts on why I believe they're twins, but essentially it boils down to Harry and John being literal mirrors of each other if they're twins.

The theory then expanded more when "twins" became a common theme in the series, leading to people to speculate about Janine/Moriarty as being twins or at least siblings, and then EVEN FURTHER that S5 will actually be a "twin series" which essentially will play out the "real S4" (I've personally backed off on this latter theory a lot over the years, but it's fun to think about), as many of us believe S4 is Fake / Unreliable Narrator / John's Alibi /Blog Theory / John's TAB (this one I DO still believe. I just can't reconcile with the OOC-ness of the entirety of S4. Occam's Razor, though, states that S4 was bad because it was... well, just shit writing LOL. But theorizing is funner).

But back to John and Harry, I am 100% in the Harry/John are twins camp, and even wrote a lengthy meta about Twin Theory and its relation to John ages ago. I love the idea of them being twins; in Harry, John LITERALLY sees himself which is why he has a hard time facing it in-canon (especially with regards to his sexuality [mentioned in this post]). It's never been explicitly confirmed on the show, but I know I and many others accept it as such, heh heh.

Anyway, check out those posts linked above, as they are old but generally explain my rather unchanged beliefs on the matter.

I hope those help, and let me know if you need anything else to rabbit-hole down! <3

Feel free, all, to add more if your memories are better than mine, LOL. Twin Theory was already A Thing™ when I entered fandom Pre-S3, so Fandom Olds may know more, please let us know. We all love fandom Rabbit Holes LOL.

[theleftpill]

 When people read him (incorrectly) as being in a romantic/sexual relationship with Sherlock Holmes, that bothers him because he feels misrecognized -- the same way some people might be upset by being misgendered.

Nailed it. I feel this personally - with people claiming characterisitics about me that are completely frivolous, and it's deeply offensive to be told your thinking and preferences by others who *don't know what's going on in your head*, so to be misgendered or missexualized must be exponentially worse. It's depressing to keep telling people "I'm [this]" and to be continually told you're wrong. I also completely and thoroughly believe that every single "I'm not gay!!!" statement of John's after S1 is a direct message to those fans who keep insisting otherwise.

Live and Let Live: How to Read Sherlock’s "Gay Jokes”

I want to take a moment to talk about something that has made a lot of fans uncomfortable with Sherlock.

Over and over on the show, John is shown insisting that he isn’t gay and/or isn’t in a romantic relationship with Sherlock.  And when this motif comes up, it tends to feel like a gag or a joke.  But what exactly are these repeated protestations really telling us?  

When we refer to these bits as “gay jokes”, it sounds like we mean “humor at the expense of gay people”.  This kind of humor has been accepted and unremarked upon on TV shows for decades – a character walks in with a limp wrist and a lisp, and the audience (or more likely, the laugh track) laughs, because gay people are (supposedly) inherently weird and funny.  

In my reading, that’s not what’s going on with Sherlock. 

Keep reading

[chaos-has-theories]

I know we talk about how John takes away the personhood of his disciples by renaming them, but - I do wonder if it isn't an inherent part of the resurrrection process. The first time he speaks Ulysses' and Titania's names out loud is also the first time he moves them. Gideon needs her soul to be reattached to her body, and she wakes up as Kiriona.

Names have power. We know this. John has been careful not to spill a single drop of blood in the last myriad. He has also, crucially, changed his last name. Arithmonyms are as unique to their bearers as their first names. The lyctors keep their first anmes private from an anyone but each other, and have all but forgotten their last names. The mere mention of the name Alecto makes John flinch, and Nona shatters her middle thoughts.

Abigail for my mothers. Pent for my people. Step two: analyse the soul. Understand its structure, its shape. Three syllables you did not even understand.

And Isis said unto Ra, "O my divine father, tell me thy name, for he who is able to pronounce his name liveth."

I wonder if Pyrrha remembers John's old name.

[katakaluptastrophy]

There's a lot going on with tea in Harrow the Ninth.

It's "overwhelming" and "too much" for Harrow, yet John regularly summons her to sit alone with him and drink it.

You did not understand why anyone ate these biscuits or drank this tea.

In the scene where John gets Harrow to admit what her parents did to create her - nobody has to know! - the entire exchange is framed around descriptions of how much John is enjoying drinking his tea and eating his biscuits, and descriptions of how much Harrow does not want to consume them at all and yet feels unable to do anything else. She understands herself as "required to drink it."

When John tells Harrow about the Tomb and the Body, we again get multiple descriptions of his enjoyment of drinking tea. Harrow is having a much less enjoyable experience: "you had not known you were shaking until God himself reached out to still your wrist, so that you mightn’t spill your tea over your knees." He asks her if she likes poetry or biscuits, and she makes it clear she isn't interested in either. He insists she eats two biscuits, and begins to recite the Poe poem associated with Humbert Humbert's first victim to her by way of reminiscing about who he buried in the Tomb.

In moments where Harrow tries to assert her own agency, tea is there too. When she tells John about the Saint of Duty and Cytherea's body, her tea is "stubbornly undrunk" and John's biscuit crumbles into his tea. John is drinking tea when Gideon finds him interrogating Wake, and when the game is up and Mercymorn and Augustine turn on him, they both smoke and tap the ash from the cigarette out into John's empty mug.

Conversely, we see John drinking coffee by himself in the Mithraeum kitchen when he's not interacting with anyone. Harrow is also offered coffee by Abigail Pent, and "accepted a cup, mainly to warm her hands." Despite Abigail being another powerful figure of whom Harrow feels wary, there's no sense of compulsion or discomfort in this offered drink (despite it otherwise being a situation of gentle compulsion). Harrow feels able to accept it on her own terms. Which brings it roughly in line with how Harrow feels about physical touch from both John and Abigail as well.

But Katakaluptastrophy, you might be saying, sometimes the tea is just tea! Yes, but sometimes the author was a secondary school teacher in the UK, where this is a popular video for explaining the concept of consent to teenagers:

[beholdthelastparagraph]

Thinking about how Palamedes tells Pash that they "are conversant with the concept of family in the Houses" in Nona....because, like, are they? Are they really?

Palamedes calls his own mother by her full name or job title more than he calls her 'mother'. Their relationship is COLLEGIAL at best. The Sixth raise their children in some kind of communal academic system, from what we can see in canon. Meanwhile, on the Second, it's all about that sweet sweet military command structure. On the Seventh, your parents literally try to pass super cancer onto you, and probably die of it themselves before you reach puberty. The Eighth is a monastic order where EVERYONE calls each other 'brother' or 'sister', regardless of family relationship. From everything we hear, the Tridentarius' parents are fucked-up in some way. The Ninth is....the Ninth, and on the Fourth, parents just tend to be dead.

So, like, are they really 'conversant with the idea of family'? Everything about the system John has set up discourages real family relationships. There is no socially acceptable way to share a family name with your spouse, parent, or sibling - the arithmonyms encourage you to identify with your HOUSE, not your family, and every time characters share an arithmonym, that is considered 'weird' (see the Tridentarii). John's system demands allegiance to the EMPIRE, not any individual family units.

This dissolution of family has the side effect of also dissolving (unjust) gendered roles, but it is also VERY effective at creating the existential, deep loneliness that so many of these characters experience and that John's system then uses to fuel their loyalty to him as God. It's this dissolution of family that creates the codependent structures you see in so many cav-necro relationships (Cam and Pal above all else), because WHERE ELSE but in this (fundamentally militaristic) relationship that was originally intended to serve the Empire could you find the closeness family often provides.

And, like, every time characters prioritise their chosen or blood family over the values of the Empire, it's transgressive. Any relationship that emphasises the individual - as a spouse, friend, lover, sibling, child, parent - over the 'imperial role' of cav, necro, soldier, or servant, is transgressive in the world of TLT. Magnus and Abigail are transgressive for that. Gideon and Harrow are. Even the Tridentarii have something going on that seems to go against imperial power structures, even if it's a different kind of fucked-up. Cam and Pal are such a complex case because they DO earnestly love each other outside of their role as necro and cav, but are so fundamentally alienated from healthy relationship dynamics because of their absurd upbringing that they immediately become *like that*, to the point of doing ye olde soul-merger. Still - they fundamentally hold allegiance to each other as family of some sort, whether romantic or platonic.

Which, I think, is why it's so perfect and messed-up and appropriate that Juno Zeta, Palamedes' literal mother, spends the last few minutes of her son's earthly existence as an individual quizzing We Suffer about her family structure. Rather than. Y'know. Talking to her son. Who is about to eradicate himself as an individual within the one relationship that ever transgressed that enforced, non-familial distance.

Camilla, meanwhile, does not let her fathers watch her death/ascension at all.

[dricacchi]

some arthur lester design ideas and doodles

[pencildragons]

rotating john gaius in my head and how he is both a coloniser and a victim of colonisation and how, when presented with the opportunity to rebuild all of society from the ground-up, chose not to model it after his own oppressed culture, but instead after an aesthetic VERY CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH WHITE SUPREMACY (neoclassicism), and how his daughter is the only thing in his entire, expansive empire that he named in his language in ten thousand years, and how he perpetuates the cycle he himself was a victim of. tearing my hair out tazmuir WHEN I GET YOU

[lovesigilss]

i have bpd and i 100% thinks he has it! if you want to ask me about my headcanon and how bpd is etc i can totally write about this!! ❤️

i see so many interesting armchair diagnosis for john constantine i wish people expanded on it more. character studies that explore his mental health are my life force

[consultingfujoshi]

ohhhh outie irving's thing goes so much deeper than I could have imagined. it was pretty obvious that he chose to become severed to try to use his innie self to communicate with and learn more about the severed floor and he's been doing all those paintings in the hopes his memory of the testing floor will bleed through to his innie, but this episode implies he's part of a much bigger conspiracy than just that.

irving is not some lone vigilante as I expected him to be. he's working with at least one other person to try to communicate with innies and spread knowledge of the goings on at lumon using his place as a plant on the severance floor. perhaps even the same people that helped petey become reintegrated.

he knows he's being watched and makes anonymous calls a ways from his home. he immediately had a cover story when milchick turned up like he was expecting to be questioned. he doesn't want to reveal that his innie woke up on the outside and is trying to figure out exactly how much lumon knows, and refuses to reveal his own hand before this. he tells milchick to tell him what all this is about so he can get a better grasp on how much he needs to lie about. he IMMEDIATELY distrusts milchick's motivations.

he has no idea what just happened and why, only that there's a chance all the work he's been doing on the outside has finally started paying off and he can't risk undoing all that progress by accidentally admitting to something. for all he knows his innie put this all in motion himself. he doesn't know it's part of a completely unrelated plan with his coworkers to break out. so he lies and pretends nothing happened because admitting his innie broke out might also fuck up the rest of whatever he's planning/working on. he's protecting both of his selves from a company he very clearly now is working to undermine.

he made sure to get home quickly after waking up at burt's (i still need to know how that played out, thanks!) so it looked as if he'd been there the whole time. the gears are immediately turning wrt his innie going to burt. he's trying to figure out how that guy fits into all this. maybe he's even going to approach burt thinking he's a co-conspirator on the outside and try to enlist him. I wonder how he will react when he finds out that's not the case at all and their connection is much more individual and personal than that. when he finds out his innie almost sacrificed all the work he's been doing the past three years because he fell in love and got his heart broken by this guy. I wonder if he'll ever find out.

AND WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH BURT FOLLOWING IRV AROUND. WHAT KIND OF SOULMATE MAGNETIC FORCES RED STRING OF FATE SHIT ARE THESE TWO ON!!!!!

[griddleharkbrainrot]

I’m currently thinking about how John and Co. refused to call Alecto by her name. They named her fury and vengeance but could not acknowledge what made her thus. They call her Annie Laurie, reducing her to her looks, those so inhuman and frightening yet beautiful all the same. John gave her the name Annabel Lee, naming her existence as a tragedy in that she was his love lost. In both instances the literary references reduce the woman mentioned to nothing but set dressing for the man of the story and it truly betrays John’s thoughts on Alecto for as much as he claimed to love her, he sees her only as the stepping stone for his own story. “For John so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.” And that is the crux of the matter, John had loved the world but she is not the world, she is its fury. John wanted her to be calm beaches and lapping waves, he wanted a wife, sister, mother, and daughter all in one, but instead, he got 7 million silenced voices crying out in agony, furious at the injustice done to them. I think subconsciously he understood that when he named her Alecto, fury of wrath from Greek Mythology. But even if he had called her Gaia she would still be furious, for was it not Gaia who gave her children the scythe to kill her husband? Was it not Gaia who roared and shrieked to the depths of Tartarus when her children were torn from her arms? The first bearer of prophecy was forged from the grief and rage of an anguished mother; the earth has always been furious. John’s fatal flaw was that he could not comprehend that the rage was for him. He who promised love and safety but cut and stripped her soul stole her children and butchered her corpse. John could never truly comprehend that what he deemed his perfect creation could resent him the way she did. He took her away and reforged her into something she could never be. John denies the resentment Alecto feels for him and we can see this reflected in how he refers to her. John is the sort of man who thinks that if he sees a woman as nothing but her looks, he can make her lesser. To him, she is Annie Laurie of beautiful bust and a personality nonexistent; To him, she is Annabel Lee, a woman so pure and lovely that the angels stole her away from him. Subconsciously, the lyctors have adopted this as well, calling her these names out of fear and not realizing the implications of what they are doing. Even in writing, she is A.L. to them because somewhere deep down they know that to name her wrath is to invite it and invoke it. John believed that if he could compress the Earth into a beautiful shell then he could control it. The Earth has been around for far longer than he could ever truly comprehend, and she is furious.

For @commanderbabygirl thoughts?

I did not realize just how many opinions I had on this until I started typing

[tanis-zed]

Sudden brain blast over morning coffee:

John Gaius, necrolord whatever, cringiest man alive, refuses to let the earth die. And not just in the literal sense of locking the earth’s soul in a barbie on ice, in subtler ways too.

The most obvious is the memes, John constantly references memes that are dated even to us, but are in universe from a culture that died ten thousand years ago!

Slightly more subtle is the years. Why does everyone in the Houses measure in earth years? It’s been ten THOUSAND years since anyone lived on the earth! But John keeps them as a unit of measurement.

Even more subtle is the language. In sci-fi and fantasy we’re all used to the idea of the translation for the reader, people don’t speak english in lord of the rings, or dune, but the dialogue is in english for us, the readers. Not in The Locked Tomb. In this series, they ARE speaking english. Modern, bog standard english, to the point where two people born thousands of years apart speak similar enough dialects that one can pose as the other (dulcie/cytheria).

Now, this could possibly fall under that standard sci-fi trope, EXCEPT!!!! In Nona The Ninth, we see the non-house humans! And they speak dozens of languages, like you’d expect after TEN THOUSAND YEARS of linguistic drift!

John is trying SO HARD to keep the earth alive that he’s forced a language to stagnate for, say it with me now, Ten Thousand Years, to the point where even completely new things with no equivalent in our world don’t even have new words, just repurposed old ones (flimsy, sonic).

John Gaius, the first necromancer, could resurrect the planet itself, and millions of people, but he couldn’t resurrect the culture. So, John, cryogenics researcher, tried to put the culture on ice, to keep it as close to the one he remembers as possible. And he still failed.

[nessahero]

The Cases in Chronological Order

Took me quite some time, research, cross cheching, correction and nerves, but here we are 😘

[wake-up-marionette-boy]

GUYS I THINK I JUST FIGURED IT OUT

This line of Friends in Low Places indicates that Cesare died during a holiday (talk about adding insult to injury lmao). Until the latest episode I had assumed it would be either Christmas or Halloween since those are the ones most commonly referred to with the term “hallowed”. But assuming he dies the night of the flashback, it looks more like this takes place in the middle of summer.

So I decided to look up what old holidays were observed during summertime and GUESS WHAT I FOUND

☆ CHRISTMAS IN JUNE!!!!!! ☆

[ilovejohnwinchester]

Thinking about early days on the road before John started leaving Sam with Dean and was still going around and talking to hunters trying to learn everything he could. Imagine you’re some hunter and you get a call that the new guy in town wants to meet at the roadhouse and talk demons or werewolves or witches or whatever, then he shows up with a 4-year-old and a baby. He’s real serious and writes down everything you say in his journal but he also has to get up halfway through to sing and bounce a cranky baby to sleep on his shoulder while the kid stares at you with a mouth full of French fries. No wonder every hunter in John’s generation seems to remember Dean and Sam whether Dean and Sam know them or not.