#is pyrrha actually a necromancer???

[with-my-murder-flute]

Further adventures in TLT brainrot

(Like, hyuuge spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Go read them, then report back here for indoctrination.)

I've got a theory about the missing days between GTN and HTN, why Harrow instructs her future self to use blood on the sword, and how Blood of Eden ties into everything.

Two puzzle pieces that have been rotating in my brain nonstop since last September:

We Suffer saying they had thought Wake's mission to the Ninth House was a failure, "Until the posthumous contact a year ago."

Pyrrha saying, "Why the hell did John let her bring the kid’s body? He must have known that Blood of Eden would go apeshit the moment they saw it."

So here's my theory:

Wake hitched a ride to Canaan House with Harrow and Gideon, in the sword Gideon put so much effort into smuggling there. (I also have a theory about Wake and Gideon before that, but that's its own post.) Much plot happens, and Gideon's soul ends up in Harrow's body.

Wake has, I would argue, strong thanergetic ties to Gideon's body. She was the thing Wake died for; her survival killed Wake. They fell together, Wake dying, Gideon living. So going by Revenant 101 from HtN, one of the most sensible things Wake would go back to is... Gideon.

So, what if Wake, in the sword, suddenly goes, oh look! Gideon's body is empty! And she possesses Gideon's body. Gideon "wakes up", which Harrow would absolutely 100% know is not her. But Wake-in-Gideon goes and finds some form of communications device (maybe that Cytherea brought, since she warned BoE that the lyctor trials had been announced), and contacts Blood of Eden.

Blood of Eden that lost her twenty years ago, being contacted by someone who is the spitting image of Commander Wake, and was convincing enough that Blood of Eden came to the First House with some kind of transport vehicle.

In the time between Wake making that call, and the shuttle arriving, Harrow took her steps to keep Gideon partitioned in her brain, but she also orders her future self: Wipe [the sword] down with your arterial blood nightly. Coat the blade in the ash which regrows. Do not cut flesh with the naked blade. Do not cut bone with the naked blade. Even this may not prove enough. Treat the sword as your promised death, and act according to the first guideline.

What that says to me is: Harrow (and maybe Ianthe or Judith) worked to yank Wake out of Gideon's body, and stuff her back into the sword. When they split up, Harrow took the sword, and offered it blood on a regular basis, the way Abigail would when calling a spirit. Or maybe "offered" isn't the right word--she might have been forcibly binding Wake's soul to the blade to keep it out of Gideon, which fed some of Wake's enormous fury towards her. (Along with like. Years of Gideon telling her dead mother all about Harrow being a giant bitch to her.)

And then, I feel like it's practically textual that Wake begins haunting Harrow, then makes her sleepwalk in her first night at the Mithraeum and drive the sword into Cytherea's body, so that Cytherea and Pyrrha can have their little trysts.

But meanwhile Blood of Eden showed up and grabbed the three non-lyctors and Gideon's incorruptible body. Not Cytherea's, which was presumably easy to find; just Gideon's.

Blood of Eden aren't experts on weirdo zombie wizard shit, and their new captives probably weren't eager to share information. What if they just thought: this body was Wake, Wake was somehow alive in this body, but she isn't now, and if they only woke her up, they might get their leader back when they desperately needed her.

(Some of them might also have known about Wake's pregnancy, and have interest in Gideon as herself, since she is related to some of them. Thus Pash's extreme repugnance towards sitting in a truck with Prince Kiriona)

[sainamoonshine]

So the more I think about Palamedes during Gideon the Ninth, the more I realize how confused the poor dude must have felt. The first time we meet him, he’s telling Camilla about how all the energy signatures in Canaan house are wrong, and how he’s pretty sure he’s being deceived. He is talking about the house, yes, but probably the poor dude has been feeling like this about a fair few of the other characters, too!

We know he can’t feel Cytherea, who is a lyctor. He probably can vaguely feel that Pro is a corpse (I’m basing this off his abilities in Nona here btw, when Pyrrha asks him to find Gideon’s body in the cohort barracks.) or maybe he can’t, since this is necromancy done by a lyctor; in this case he might not be able to feel Pro either. Which, if this had been the only ‘problem’ with his fellow necromancers, he probably would have figured out faster than something was up.

BUT! Let’s examine the other people also present at Canaan House:

Teacher and the priests, whose energy signature must be WACK;

Harrow, whose energy feels like 200 people;

Whatever Gideon feels like with psychometry;

Known necromancer Coronabeth Tridentarius which doesn’t actually feel like a necromancer;

Etc etc.

My point is: homeboy seems to have come to the conclusion that his psychometry is lying to him all across the board, which slowed him down figuring Cytherea…

(Paired with his heartbreak of course, making him dumb and unwilling to examine her whole deal in more details.)

But I think that he WAS testing her when he offered her the cup of tea (according to the doctor sex short story, he knows she’s not big on tea). And he deffo knew something was up when she asked him to do that syphoning trial. Then Gideon brings him Pro’s head, and I firmly believe that is when he started to figure Cyth out. Because when they were all in her room and she had that coughing fit, he examined her. With his hands.

Right then he would have known that this is not Dulcinea. Because he touched Dulcie’s letters for years, he knows what SHE feels like. And here’s a second thing we know from the doctor sex short story: Dulcie has been living in the countryside on planet for years. When Teacher asks Palamedes about « dulcinea’s » condition, Pal’s analysis includes how breathing recycled air on Rho took ten years off her life. NOT a diagnosis that fits with the real Dulcie!

So I think at this point Pal definitely suspects that the other body along with Pro in the ashes they found might be her, but he doesn’t know for sure and desperately doesn’t want to jump to conclusions yet.

But when they find Ianthe in the lab, and he accidentally brushes up against the paint letters on the wall, well. They feel like Cytherea. So now he has all the pieces of the puzzle to realize who she is, and he just needs her final confirmation that Dulcie is truly dead before he goes apeshit.

[sofipitch]

One thing that was really fun about Nona was it's commitment to unreliable narration as seen through a child. Nona is perceptive and clues in on a lot more than others want her to know, yet there are hints of shit going on that Nona doesn't really get. Like some of it becomes plot relevant so you do get answers but I'm talking about the stuff we don't get to see again, like what all Camilla and Palamedes' night missions entailed. If they are trying to save necromancers, did they? And where would they put the escapees? I still wonder why Pyrrha had the job she did and if that was also something important. The fact that Pyrrha was maybe fucking Cam and Pal off screen. Same with a lot of details about New Rho, why was the building Nona lived in so bad, why shouldn't you leave the house without a jacket and mask, etc etc. New Rho itself is a bleak wasteland where you can't buy a lot of food but who cares bc Nona doesn't like most food anyways. I'm OBSESSED with the way we find out BOE is burning necromancers alive is through children who are attending public executions, debating if they helped kill someone the same way you might debate if someone actually did a cartwheel. These are all things Nona takes for granted, as long as her loved ones are safe, they don't register as noteworthy, that's just how things are, right? I have so many questions but Nona can answer none of them but she can tell me if Noodle was a good boy today

[familyabolisher]

Do you think any of the frameworks you've developed for analyzing love in TLT could be applied to Pyrrha's relationship to cam/pal? Since Nona doesn't understand it well, it's hard for me to get a handle on how those characters relate to each other, but I was wondering where it might stand on what the series considers "perfect love," what the significance of its presence/ambiguity is, etc.

I’m really locked on to this idea of illegibility, actually, and the kind of work that gets done in Nona to problematise efforts to easily name, define, & categorise a relationship or set of relationships. I’m thinking of what Muir said here:

It’s a very strange household. And they are a found family, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in the last movement of the book Nona questions what that even means—their motives, what they all truly wanted out of each other, their pretenses: are they a family, or are they all just a psychosexual mess of roleplaying and bad meals? (The answer is yes.)

and like, her suggestion that ‘family’ can plausibly be collapsed into a ‘psychosexual mess of roleplaying’ and that the drive of Nona is less about asking whether Cam/Pal/Pyrrha/Nona ‘are’ a family as much as it’s about asking what it actually means to identify them as such; and particularly to identify them as such in a text which does very significant work elsewhere to identify ‘the family’ as a site of violence, a mechanism by which particular forms of violence can be enacted. I’m honing in on that ‘last movement of the book’ comment to say that, like—so, the two narratives in Nona (the ‘main’ narrative ie. Nona et al. on Lemuria, and the John narrative) are spliced together, right, so it makes sense to try and read them as though they’re in dialogue with one another, and the obvious entrypoint for doing so is the fact that they’re both working as an account of the ‘creation’ of Alecto; first through John literally creating her and then through Nona remembering his having done so and thus rebecoming what she had forgotten she was. What does it mean to ‘create’ Alecto?—what are the conditions that Alecto’s creation ushers in, what are the conditions that her creation does away with? The ‘last movement’ of the book is to ‘create’ Alecto for the second time—so, what does Alecto represent, and what about her ‘creation’ leads the text to ask what it means to describe something as a ‘family’ in the first place?

The reason I’m drawn to this reading of Cam/Pal/Pyrrha as like, ultimately illegible, incoherent in that we as audience cannot coherently put words to it and make sense of it in the language readily available to us, is because I think the text understands these processes of ordering, taxonomising, delineating, and categorising as tactics of fascism. This is a tension also at play in Lolita; Humbert ‘orders’ and constructs his narrative via the available tools of literary discourse and similarly constructs his ‘Lolita’ as a labyrinth of cultural references and taxonomies; but Dolores is a ‘Haze,’ Annabel Leigh is a ‘tangle of thorns,’ there exists a being who is able to remain indistinct and impenetrable in a narrative which enacts violence on her by trying to make taxonomical sense of her. Coherence and legibility are mechanisms of visibility; under fascism, to be easily made sense of can be dangerous. The first two books were all about coherence, legibility, interpellation, and the consequences of Living In A Society; what it means to ‘be’ or ‘become’ a cavalier, what the necromancer-cavalier relationship ‘means,’ what Lyctorhood ‘means,’ how these relations of hierarchised sexuality and the interpersonal relationships articulated within the normative language given to them exist to shore up conditions of imperialism. This question of ‘ordering’ goes right down to eg. enumeration (First, Second, Third, etc.) and pretty tightly contained and atomised cultural associations, and the fact that that enumeration can be traced back to Alecto—

D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children … There would be none of you, if not for her.

—which cribs this passage, from Lolita:

‘[…] for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad. In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

—very evenly ties together ideas of reproduction as imperial sustention figured in the language of sexual assault. The point is: as far as the empire is concerned, processes of ordering and taxonomising are equivocal to the mechanical maintenance of conditions of fascism.

Conversely, Nona is a text about when John’s precise demarcation of the world starts to fail and people have to make sense of themselves between the cracks; from Pyrrha as both failed cavalier and failed Lyctor to Cam and Palamedes and then Paul as if not ‘failed’ then at least a new ordering of necromancer/cavalier-ism to the Tower Princes as John’s kind of scrambling effort to rearticulate hegemony post-losing all but one of his Lyctors. Regarding how we are to read Cam/Pal/Pyrrha, I think it’s pretty clear that the text understands the obligations, normative assumptions and expectations, and material consequences of normative kinship relations identified as ‘family’ as part and parcel with the social ordering of a fascistic imperial hegemony; Kiriona, Alecto, and Harrow make up the three key points of contact for this reading, though it’s pretty diffuse across the whole work. We see kinship relations as structuring imperialist hierarchies and we understand the currency of those hierarchies to be death/abuse/sexual violence/totalised control, articulated most profoundly through Kiriona; we also see the destruction of social formations as part and parcel with conquest—

Palamedes said mildly, “You know we’re conversant with the concept of family in the Nine Houses, right?” Pash seemed genuinely surprised. “Why the hell would it matter to you? [...] You don’t give a fuck about families when you’re carving them up—”

—this of course being in keeping with the general conditions of mixed cultures, mixed languages, variances on kinship structures, refugees seemingly thrown together on Lemuria. The bolstering of the social articulations of the conquerors and denaturing of the social articulations of the conquered is rendered as a tactic of conquest; ‘family’ here is figured as a cudgel of imperialism.

Diegetically, as I said, Cam + Pal + Pyrrha + Nona’s social arrangement is not ‘normative,’ neither in the fact that others on Lemuria can make easy sense of it (and thus attempt to do so by referring to peripheralised and marginalised social relations ie. sex work) nor in the fact that they can coherently make sense of themselves via the imperial taxonomy (is Pyrrha a Lyctor greatest thread in the history of forums). Nor is it normative on our end; relative to the nuclear family structure, it’s the ‘wrong’ number of parents, the ‘wrong’ configurations of gender, the ‘wrong’ configurations of blood relation (Nona is a ‘child’ but not an ‘heir’ to anything and not a blood relation of either; Cam and Palamedes as ‘parents’ are blood-related), even the ‘wrong’ overall kinship relations—I put ‘child’ and ‘parents’ in quotations there precisely because I don’t think they’re conditions uncritically reified by the narrative as much as they’re discursive gestures made for the sake of being problematised. Is Nona their ‘child’ in a text where to be the ‘child’ of someone means to be what Kiriona is to John? Is this a ‘family’ when ‘family’ is the mechanic of imperial refortification? Again, like—what does it mean to call them a family at all?

‘Family’ is a label we deploy to give legibility to relations that we are otherwise struggling to make sense of. Setting aside Paul for the moment because I don’t quite know what to do with them and probably won’t have a Take that I can confidently commit to until after Alecto—I think the kind of difficulty that the text has in articulating exactly what Cam + Pal + Pyrrha ‘had’ between them that we see in that final scene is intentional, and I think it’s best understood left that way rather than wrangled into a taxonomy that the rest of the text is v determined to critically unpack. So to answer your question, I think the ambiguity is key—one overarching theme of the series is how people can love each other and articulate that love when the language available for them to do so carries obligations of disparate power, hierarchy, serves a particular purpose that we come to understand as ethically unconscionable; whether that love has to be made sense of within hierarchy, or contravene it, or try and stake a place outside of it. Cam + Palamedes + Pyrrha become the next stage of development in the unravelling of such a discourse; to try and make coherent sense of them could all too easily mean falling back on the language that the text works to identify as socially constructed and thus as limited, and thus imposing those limitations.

[meat-loving-meat]

Pyrrha Dve 🥺 we joke so often about how hot and confident she is, and about how she can pull anyone just by breathing. But we forget that she was trapped in the back of a brain for 10,000 years. She drank a bottle of bleach. Her necromancer just died. She (probably) remembers the pre-resurrection times. She goes out drinking and maybe gets laid, but crucially, she pretends to be more tired than she actually is the next morning. She drank a bottle of bleach apparently because she wanted to practice being tortured in the quick-healing body of a lyctor. She wants to move off planet with Camilla and Palamedes and Nona and teach them to farm on an out-of-the-way moon. She bought Nona a silly t-shirt with a sex joke on it. She drank a bottle of bleach and when she told Palamedes her reasoning, all he said was “bullshit”

[notedchampagne]

FUCKING HATEEEEEEEEEEEE FANDOM. like i love fandom but i HATE FANDOM. HARROWHARK IS NOT YOUR PATHETIC WET CAT SHE’S NOT A GREMLIN SHE’S NOT YOUR LITTLE MEOW MEOW. STOP IT RN. SHE’S AN INCREDIBLY CAPABLE NECROMANCER AND AN AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT PERSON WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE PUT IN AN INCREDIBLY TOUGH SITUATION. she’s fucking 18 y’all. she did what she could and do you know what? she did well for being completely out of her depth and EIGHTEEN GOD FUCJING DAMMIT. i hate it when characters get boiled down to one fandomable aspect of themselves especially in a fandom with such prolific writers and artists (that’s you!) it literally happens with every character. ianthe is not your cool suave boyfriend she’s a desperate young woman. pyrrha is not your dom mommy she’s just been put into a situation where she is surrounded by children. dulcie? guess what: she exists. gideon isn’t a golden retriever silly boy she’s a complex and capable person. gideon the first isn’t some angry dog he’s loyal to his brother that killed him twice over. paul is a cool and interesting character that i want to see more of. I FUCKING HATE THE FANDOMIZATION OF CHARACTERS JESUS CHRISTTTTTTTTTTT KILL ME NOWWW ACTUALLY GOINT INSANE. anyway rant over sorry i dont have any friends that have read tlt so i have to resort to going insane on anon

this was a fun surprise to receive. that aside i Do agree with you it seems very much like the nature of fandom to fall into stereotypes and tropes for characters because its easier to make content when there is a type of script to follow + its more effort to always dissect things and rebuild them for every au scenario. alas everything is always nicer when you can make your own little circle of people to discuss with

[theriverbeyond]

have you seen any breakdown of the political situation on New Rho (in New Rho? is the rest of the planet also populated? I think at one point someone says "down in Ur" but maybe there is an application of 2-dimensional direction terms to 3d space I havent yet thought of). Like who do they mean by militia, who is the government (who is the police?), is there any official house presence, what is the status of the barracks, who manned the spaceport, what power does BoE hold and how are they viewed in the population (Hot Sauce denounces them but who is her faction-that Pyrrha saw her with-then?) and do they know how splintered and farspread it is? what is the siege the blurb is speaking of, just the imperial emissaries showing up?

Also assuming the BoE wings are all named after different planetary settlements which seem in turn to be named after cities in the ancient near east (ur, merv, ctesiphon), why isnt new rho? but i might be misinterpreting this.

Also where does the Empire want non-House humanity to end up? They seem to be turning planets left and right with no endgoal. And how many settled planets might there be?

Sorry I'm dumping this all at you, I havent seen any worldbuilding discussion here on tumblr at all really so maybe you can redirect me somewhere.

Thankies, keep up the good work (posting)

I HAVE seen posts about the political situation on New Rho including analysis posts that were very interesting and I have utterly failed to tag them appropriately, I am sorry -- if anyone who sees this has links to that meta pls add on/reply to help anon!

But to cover the rest of your points:

What is Ur?

Ur is mentioned twice that i can find, in ch 16: Ianthe says that the end has come to the "rebels of Ur", and a person in the crowd says "Ur is fighting".

EDIT: big thank you to @eskildit in replies: "There are four total references to Ur- Corona also says that Judith is in the Ur facility and Kiriona says that the 6th house is "parked outside the Ur system". Could be that Ur is the planet New Rho is located on. While we refer the nine houses as planets, canonically the houses are actually "installations" on each planet with quite small populations. New Rho alone, which is specifically stated to be just one city on a resettled planet, is 3x the size of the 6th house"

It may have been mentioned more times, but Kindle search is giving me the 2,320 times the letters "ur" were used next to each other so I'm ngl I cannot sift through that. Rather than being a city, though, I actually am assuming that Ur is another planet entirely! This is due to multi-planet SciFi in general treating entire planets like countries or even big cities. Like…. planets are huge. There are thousands of different cultures on a planet, but in SciFi planets are often like. One Big City. One Big Country, if you have a particularly ambitious worldbuilder. See: Star Wars, the Nine Houses themselves, etc. not saying that Ur cannot be on New Rho, just that I don't think it is because this is multi-planet Sci Fi.

The militia/civic government?

In chapter 6 a distinction is made between "the militia and the old civic govnerment". Following that, I think the civic government was probably installed by the Houses, as a ruling party that is friendly to them/House interests. I think the militia is a non-unified population of hired guns, that probably revolted at some point priot to the story. It does seem like at least some section of the militia is in power in most of the city, but I do not think there is one coherent government at the moment

Official house presence?

Yes, because there are official cohort barracks. I don't think they have much political leverage by the time NtN rolls around, though

Barrack status?

Under siege due to the people of New Rho hating them/political instability/possible militia revolt, doing badly otherwise because any and all necromancers are suffering from Blue Madness/RB proximity, as seen in ch 20 when Ianthe mentioned some of them were so poorly she had to put them down.

Space port?

I am assuming the civic government/House was originally in charge. unsure of who is in charge during NtN

What power does BOE hold?

Unclear. It seems like BOE itself is fractionated, with a lot of animosity held between different factions, and a lot of both animosity AND collaboration between different factions of BOE, the militia, the population, and the old civic government. It is a very decentralized resistance force, despite sharing a name. BOE do not appear to BE the official government, or BE the militia, though, but I would not be surprised if some groups had ties to one or both. It seems like they have influence both socially and politically but it is unclear what that power is... some factions have some amount of power. Over some parts. But!! it seems that during the events of NtN they had more power than in the past ("best hand they were ever delt", chapter 1)

How is BOE viewed by the population?

My guess is they have mixed reviews. I think a lot of people probably rely on them for resources/protection even if they don't like or fully trust them. I think a lot of people probably see them as extremists and wish they were less extreme (the liberals, u could say). Like Hot Sauce and the gang, a lot of people probably think they aren't radical enough and wish they would resist more, harder, differently. I think a lot of people probably deeply support them, either physically by being part of BOE or by providing resources/etc, or quietly because they are afraid of retaliation by the House or civil government. A lot of the population probably has opinions about BOE versus the militia, BOE verus House, BOE versus the civic government, based on their own interests/position/power. This is a really long answer that can boil down to "idk"

What is the siege?

I think the siege is the cohort being sieged into the barracks. I am guessing there was some sort of revolt in the local government, probably related to Blue Madness weakening the cohort, and they have pushed the cohort into the barracks. , as described in chapters 1 ("the cohort dies like anyone else under seige") and chapter 20 ("the barracks siege").

What group is Hot Sauce in if she denounced BOE?

Hot Sauce specifically calls BOE "fat cats" and "zombie lovers" in chapter 15, after noting that she, Honesty, and Born in the Morning, as well as Born in the Morning's father, are "active" in with an unnamed group at the park. It is unclear what group that is, if it has a name, or if it is organized in any capacity. From what little we know, it appears it is a group of people who are more radical than BOE, which I think is either ex-BOE members that were pushed out for their radial choices/beliefs, or civilians/other freedom fighters that aren't satisfied with what BOE is doing. But beyond that I have no idea

BOE wing names vs New Rho?

So BOE wings are named after historic Earth cities. Ctesiphon, Troia, Merv, Valencia (which is not historic to us, as it exists today, but WOULD be history in 10k years). They are named by BOE, likely to keep connection to Earth, just like BOE people-names. "New Rho", on the other hand, is likely named by the House. Rhodes is a place on the 7th house (see: 7th cavalier is the "Knight of Rhodes"), and I assumed that New Rho was like. The house naming shit. Like how New York is named after York in England, even though that area of land already had a name (Lenapehoking, I think?).

Specifically this difference is important because like, the House is a imperial colonizing force here, and they are naming things after their home system as a part of the imperial violence they are enacting. In As Yet Unsent, Judith notes that the non-house people call New Rho, "Lemuria" -- HOWEVER, in NtN chapter 17, the Angel mentions Lemuria twice in a way that is phrased like Lemuria is Somewhere else, and is Not the city they are in right now ("I was born on Lemuria", "there's still a facility on Lemuria") I am not sure what happened there, honestly. Perhaps an oopsie?

Where does the Empire want non house humanity to end up?

Unclear. Coronabeth notes in As Yet Unsent that even she (who has studied the war in-universe) has no idea what the real goal is. My guess is nowhere, because a forever-war has no end goal. It's a war for resources gained only by literal blood and death. Many analysis could be made about this as an allegory to to oil based forever-wars of today -- I read a few of them and as said before unfortunately failed to tag them, so if anyone has a link and can share with anon that would be awesome! But anyway, I do not think I am smart or learned enough to say a lot beyond this but, yeah. I think there is no end goal to the war besides meaningless revenge and the resources gained via murder, because that's the point. We could learn different in AtN tho! who knows

How many settled planets?

No idea! Thousands. Hundreds of thousands? Hundreds? Unsure! 10k years is a long time, and there are a lot of planets out there in the fantasy universe that could be habitable. EDIT ty @eskildit, unclear how many planets were settled over the course of the Empire, but there are three settled planets by the timeline of NtN: ""Everyone was crammed on one of three planets now, and they all agreed that this planet was easily the worst", from chapter 2

-

Thanks for sending this!! I really enjoyed answering it, and I hope it helped -- sorry if I missed any. Ask more any time!!

[frontlinebicepsoftheninth]

so i went through and think i found every single title John is ever called throughout the series. i counted sixty-four in total and they follow patterns to a degree, patterns i'm sure someone well versed in classics would be able to draw references to but as far as i can break it down it seems like he gets called a variety of names mixed and matched from these:

- role titles: teacher, master, prince, king, lord, emperor, god, creator, resurrector (interestingly he's never just called "prince," that one always has an adjective attached)

plus

- adjectives: undying, everlasting, resurrecting, holy, divine, kindly, gentle, all-giving

or as the "[role] of":

- locations and events: the nine houses, the nine resurrections, the nine renewals, the house of the first

- people and concepts: dead kings, necromancers, saints, death, resurrection, the unstilled mandible, the sharpest edge

there are also several combative titles only used to describe his relationship with death:

- ransomer, vindicator, scourge

others present him as first and also as physically higher than something:

- first, first among, above, above death, over the river

lastly there are a few that are just any combination of two roles like "[role] our [role]" or "[role] the [role]", as well as two where the pattern is "the [role 1] who became [role 2] and the [role 2] who became [role 1]".

overall i think this is really effective characterization of not only john but the people referring to him, depending on what title they use. Teacher seems to use the most flowery and complex titles and multiple in a row, Harrow says "lord" most often, BOE just calls him by his full name, Ianthe says "god," etc. and a lot of worldbuilding detail is actually revealed from some of them.

full list below the cut (let me know if i'm missing any)!

John

J. G.

E. J. G.

John Gaius

Gaius

Teacher

Master

King

Lord

Emperor

God

Creator

Resurrector

Resurrection

Holy Prince

Most Holy Lord

Prince Undying

King Undying

Lord Undying

Emperor Undying

King Everlasting

King of Necromancers

King over the River

Lord over the River

Resurrector of Saints

Resurrecting Prince

Resurrecting King

Kindly Master

Kindly Emperor

Kindly Lord

Kindly Prince

Kindly Prince of Death

Prince of Death

Ransomer of Death

Scourge of Death

Vindicator of Death

First among Necromancers

Necromancer Divine

Adept Divine

Emperor Divine

Lyctor Divinely Ordained

Necrolord Prime

Necrolord Highest

God the Emperor

God of Dead Kings

God of the Unstilled Mandible

God of the Nine Houses

Lord of the Nine Houses

Emperor of the Nine Houses

Emperor of the Nine Resurrections

King of the Nine Renewals

Lord of the House of the First

Lord of Resurrection

Lord of the Sharpest Edge

Lord above Lords

Lord our Kindly God

Emperor our Lord

Emperor All-Giving

Gentle Emperor

The Emperor who became God and the God who became Emperor

The Man who became God and the God who became Man

First Reborn

God above Death

His Celestial Kindliness

Emperor John Gaius

BONUS (from Pyrrha): Mad bastard

[nonasemporium]

John and Colorism

John is Māori. He is a man of color, and he is coming from a society where he was racialized. Specifically, at least as a general consensus, his "faceclaim" in a sense is Taika Waititi.

Anyway, without getting into every facet of how I think the series and fandom engages with and addresses men of color, because that scope starts getting out of this specific topic and into a different one, I want to state that I think the relationship John has to both Alecto and to G1deon actually further represents themes of colorism.

John makes himself God. He makes himself god and to him that becomes some strange performance of western civilization roman empire 2.0 space imperialism planet consumption speedrun mixed w New Catholocism or whatever, but where there's a PERFORMANCE of equality where there actually isn't. Just like I argue John not ONLY makes new classes with necromancers and cavaliers (I'm not even getting into everything else with this), but ALSO he did not in fact shatter gender oppression, he just shifted it and patted himself on the ass for it.

YES it is queernormative and as a queer man himself, it makes sense this would be important to him, just like it makes sense for it to be important to him that race manifest very differently (go pretty unacknowledged really*) across his New Roman Empire in Space. But he has his own limits and biases and I would argue both colorism and misogyny are present for him.

He chose to make Alecto the way he did. And he had all of his own reasons for it, but surely it can also be noted how linked those reasons can be to both colorism and misogyny as well. I know he made her a specific barbie that had specific history to him, but does this barbie and his choice in her also highlight his priorities, just as blatantly as his choice of empire?

I need Alecto to come out so I can finalize some of these concepts, but it is still colorism for a man of color, especially one wounded by rejection (as we see in Nona) to see power in dominating a white woman. To see a SUBVERSION in the act of it. I think John sees a lot of things as subversion without seriously considering the levels he's actually engaging in. I think John is shallow.

Which brings me also to G1deon and Pyrrha. I think John had some concepts around their dynamics, their relationship, in their interactions that was in these same lines. I think John saw G1deon a specific way, I think he passively compared himself (including how he discusses it in Nona, again), I think the way he engaged with G1deon did not show solidarity or equality (G1deon was also an engineer!) but showed presumed superiority on John's end. Also he made G1deon how he did before he crafted his 10,000 year old weird empire. If I could put it into words more eloquently, I would, but I feel like John saw triumph in G1deon being Pyrrha's necromancer and I also think he then delegated him to "attack dog" for himself (as we see in Harrow the Ninth especially!!!)

I genuinely think 100% that regardless of if G1deon is racialized as black (I think he is personally), he is meant to be darker and racialized more than John was. And I think John subconsciously compares that! I think it is instead further evidence towards a narrative on colorism, including the way he's separate from Mercymorn and Augustine through HtN.

This is without getting into Pyrrha as a cop.

*I actually don't know if I should say "unacknowledged" here, because the cavs being almost always darker than their necromancers seems really notable.

[iamanoccasionaldoodler]

Hey, so, in Nona the Ninth Pyrrha says that during the time they were developing the telepathy trial, they kept replacing Gideon 1s spinal fluid, which, gross, but okay. But THEN Pyrrha says that the only other team they had come check the trial were Mercymorn and Cristabel because "Cristabel was the only one who didn't mind getting trepanned on the regular."

It's unclear whether the necromancer or the cavalier is the one with the compromised brain in the current context, because Cam and Pal share a brain, but it makes sense for it to be the cavalier. The cavalier, after all, is the one whose brain is being necromantically affected. Which raises the question: why were they draining GIDEONS brain??? I'd assumed that John called it Pyrrha's trial because she designed the bone monster (it seems like something she'd do) but this implies that, actually, SHE was the one reading Gideon's mind.

To put it lightly: what. Was Pyrrha also a necromancer? Is that why she survived Lyctorhood when the other cavs didn't? It does kind of make sense, because the Necro/cav dynamic hadn't really been invented yet, and the odds of the Lyctoral pairs being perfectly Necro/non-necro when we now know a lot of the pairings came from the pre-resurrection era do seem a little slim.

The problem with this, of course, is that obviously NOW Pyrrha can't do necromancy, but was that somehow a consequence of the Lyctoral process? Did Gideon 1 eat her necromancy? What the fuck is going on?

[grand-eclipse]

Paul and perfect Lyctorhood

I’m wondering where Alecto will go with the concept of Lyctorhood, but based on what has been revealed so far in Nona, I’m convinced that Paul is the only exmaple of the creation of a perfect lyctor. Now, I know that we have John and Alecto as an example of lyctorhood done right, where both necromancer and cavalier survive the process. But, to be honest, I am wondering if how much of the survival of Alecto as John’s cavalier comes down to the fact that she herself is the planet Earth. She’s not human. She curses the fact that she has a human form. The cavaliers that were consumed to achieve lyctorhood were human. Which makes me wonder how much of lyctorhood is actually achievable by two humans - ie, necromancer and cavalier who are not anthropomorphized planets. When Mercymorn and Augustine attempt to kill John, I’m not sure if they were aware exactly what Alecto was, something far greater than a simple human. Which makes sense; they’re livid that Alecto survived the process when Alfred and Crystabel didn’t, when John said nothing as all of their cavalier died and were consumed. Pyrrha is an interesting case since she seemed to survive without anyone’s knowledge, but she seems to be unique, and I wonder how much we’ll learn about how she could have survived.

Now, this is where I think that Paul becomes the manifestation of perfect lyctorhood. John, for all that he is god, is pursued relentlessly by the Resurrection Beasts for his crime (of, you know, genocide of an entire solar system). The lyctors are also pursued, but the case of Number Seven suggests a level of sentience to them that implies that they may be attacking lyctors for the sin of an imperfect lyctorhood, killing and consuming their cavaliers. Paul is interesting, because they are the lyctorhood oath taken to its perfect conclusion - one flesh, one end. Palamedes did not consume a dead Camilla. Camilla, instead hosts Palamedes, who has no body, and their body changes. Camilla and Palamedes do not exist as seperate entities and one is not consumed for the sake of the other. They have achieved their one end by becoming one flesh - the death of Camilla and Palamedes and the birth of Paul. The process as shown in Gideon and Harrow is an uneven one; the death of the cavalier for the immortality of the necromancer. But for Palamedes and Camilla, they have both died so Paul can live, an equal sacrifice for a joint existance, piecing themselves together to become whole. Honestly, I really can’t wait for Alecto cause I really want to know where Muir is going with the idea of lyctorhood, specifically through the lens of Alecto, who is such a unique case. 

[lemon-natalia]

Nona the Ninth Reaction - Chapter 3

wow okay good for this random teacher lady who’s looking out for Nona & trying to get her to go to school and prevent her from getting pimped, even if the reader knows that's not actually what’s happening 

Nona being so ‘knobbly and undergrown’ that she looks fourteen also sounds very much like Harrow. 

NOODLE THE DOG HAS APPEARED!

oh wow Hot Sauce is not the kind of joke character i had been expecting from that name - she’s only fourteen but has clearly been in some kind of conflict at some point

oooh and the school dynamics here, especially how Nona perceives them, are very interesting. lots of negotiating who can and can’t be in certain social groups for certain reasons, thats very true to life for children and teenagers 

and again there’s this repeated emphasis on Nona having to be careful not to cut herself - she clearly does have some form of necromantic power in terms of healing, but can’t seem to actually use it??

and there’s a parade of cars/tanks(?) called ‘the Convoy’ that seems to go through the city - the political situation in this city keeps getting weirder and more complex 

Okay what the fuck, people are burning necromancers alive in cages?? no wonder Cam, Pal, Pyrrha, and Nona are being so careful. and also these poor kids living in a city where this is their normal 

‘I watched Nona eat a pebble’ WHAT is Nona’s digestive system made of

Varun the Eater?? is that the name given to the weird blue eldritch thing in the sky? 

‘feel fantastically, wonderfully lucky, luckier than anyone else who had ever had the pleasure of being born’ uhh enjoy it while it lasts Nona, because i am very doubtful it will. also great to have a protagonist who is actually happy with their life for once

[vaguely-concerned]

-another layer of 'ow ah ouch' to everything pyrrha says about lyctorhood in nona the ninth is that she and g1deon may very well have been the first necro-cav duo to have done it fully mutually consensually, eyes open. it's heavily implied mercy and augustine had their hands forced by cristabel and alfred and wouldn't have done it otherwise ("I have built a myriad on the idea that I could have talked him out of it, given five minutes"), and they're the first and second saints... g1deon's the third. he and pyrrha presumably saw what it did to mercy and augustine, and they still decided to go through with it.

I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU

imagine the extra weight over the years in knowing you chose this. at least augustine can cling to that desperate fantasy world where he did stop alfred in time, but pyrrha and g1deon thought they knew exactly what they were doing. they thought it was love. john let them think that was love.

-...do you think mercymorn and augustine begged john for the same thing harrow did, after? Please, undo what I've done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you ever again. (Also one of my all time favorite Harrow moments where she gets to ask the question they aren't allowed to for ten thousand years: How dare you ask me to live with it?) did he comfort them? tell them he's so incredibly sorry, but he needs them?

at least pyrrha’s understanding of how the process works does corroborate his claim that he can’t extract a cavalier’s soul from their necromancer's after the lyctorhood is complete without destroying both souls, which I guess makes for the one thing he isn’t totally lying about lol. though while referencing their own situation paul tells ianthe there's still hope for her and naberius, a duo where the soul absorption did seem to complete, which suggests another layer here john might not know about (out of lack of interest?) or doesn't want anyone else to find out about.

actually let's reexamine some things from the Gideon the Ninth epilogue now in light of Nona I'm on a roll here:

-[God] said, "I know you became a Lyctor under duress."

"Some may call it duress," said Harrow.

"You aren't the first," said the Emperor.

screaming. howling. clawing at him like a wild animal. the two people who have loved you the most, and you stood by and watched as this happened to them, as you engineered it to happen to them, you've seen up close what it did to them, and now you're repeating the process with new children a myriad later without a blush. you suck so bad john I have no words fhksajfhsa.

-"I have three teachers for you. And a whole universe for you to hold on to, for just a little while longer."

a) oh yeah just wait for those three teachers they're a real barrel of laughs they probably won't even try to repeatedly murder you or anything lmao and b) what's that supposed to mean john. 'for just a little while longer'. why does it only have to be a little while longer. as far as I can tell you're no closer to the fullness of your revenge than ever. does it have anything to do with 'good morning, annabel' and 'it gets dirty, you clean it again'?

So, the universe was ending. Good. At least if she failed here, she would no longer have to be beholden to anybody.

could this also be some kind of foreshadowing? from the dialogue on page here harrow's conclusion that the universe is, for sure, ending is not necessarily a natural conclusion (john only speaks of the empire slowly dying) so like... does pre-lobotomy harrow know something we don't? or is it just that she's the saddest person anyone's ever seen pre-nona seeing gideon? (most heartbreaking shade of drift compatability discovered :') )

-He said presently, "Most of my Lyctors have been destroyed by a war I thought best to fight slowly, through attrition. I have lost my Hands -- not just to death. The loneliness of deep space takes its toll on anyone, and the necrosaints have all put up with it for longer than anybody should ever be asked to bear anything. That's why I wanted only those who had discovered the cost, and were willing to pay it in the full knowledge of what it would entail."

so... in the same way g1deon and pyrrha decided to pay that price willingly, then. I am 100% calling bullshit on him here, though, because if any of that had been his real intentions he would have taken at least a modicum of time and energy to write ANYTHING to that effect in the invitations haha. but I think he does recognize in some way that mercy and augustine are burning out under the ten thousand years he's asked of them, like cytherea just did, and maybe mistakenly thinks g1deon is handling it better, because his and pyrrha's decision seemed more informed/less coerced? loveday always knew it was her life or cytherea's, after all, that wasn't ever a real choice either. huh.

-god, harrow literally states all her (frankly very modest and doable) goals and needs to him -- to return to the ninth at least once, to find her cavalier's body, and to figure out what happened to the other survivors of canaan house -- and once she is incapable of remembering them........ he does fucking NOTHING to remind her or help her follow up on any of them fhsdkajfhasdkj I am losing it! at least there is the delicious irony that he could have saved himself a massive headache if he had helped her with any of these, so his own fecklessness and narcissism is its own punishment in this case I suppose lmao

-another observation: harrow is not as deferential or worshipful towards God in this epilogue as she will be in HtN or beyond. she's angry with him! she's kind of sharp and a bit rude, even! she seems more to feel begrudgingly beholden to him because fair enough he is god I guess than to emotionally buy into it as sacred service. I wonder how she'll think of him after nona the ninth, now that she knows him so much better and has more of herself too -- ironically my sense from their last scene in nona the ninth is that her worship of him seems to have all but disappeared, but she loves him more, despite uh the everything of him, in all his awfulness. not in that she doesn't recognize him for what he is or that she wants his approval anymore, she's grown so far past him already, but I do think there's still love there. 'I still love you' is the real power he has, I guess

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 29 of Nona the Ninth

There's a First skull on this chapter, but there's no one in it who's associated with the First, I guess unless you want to count Pyrrha and/or Kiriona, but neither of them have big speaking parts here

So Paul can do necromancy just fine, and doesn't seem to be affected by Varun the Eater at all. I guess this is because Camilla's body used to belong to a non-necromancer?

Honestly, why didn't John decide that the Lyctors should wind up in the cavalier's body instead of the necromancers? The pros are that their final body, that they'll have for all of eternity, is not made out wet noodles and can wield a sword that's not a rapier, and also they will be immune to the resurrection beasts' madness aura, and I don't think there are any cons, really. Ianthe could do necromancy from Babs' body just fine, so I don't think that would be an issue. It does mean that Ianthe would spend eternity looking like Babs, but that's ok, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Ianthe

I just realized that they totally abandoned Babs' body in the tunnels and it's probably going to get eaten by a Herald. Poor Babs, first Ianthe disrespected him by doing his hair wrong, and now he doesn't even get a funeral. He was kind of a dick, but I'm not sure he deserves all the desecration his body has been through

I guess because it seems like We Suffer is staying behind to hold off the Heralds and let the truck escape? This wasn't made super clear

So there is a messenger, and two parts of a message, and Aim is one of the parts. So is she three separate entities? She is sometimes saying "I" and sometimes saying "we" and the first "I" refers to the messenger, but Aim is the name of one of the messages. I don't know who "us" refers to in "when the message was passed to us" because previously the messenger was singular. And we have a new name Emma Sen, which doesn't seem to follow any of the naming conventions we've seen so far, though it does have some letters in common with "messenger". And I'm curious what it means for the message to be "too simple for human beings like us to understand". She hopes Nona will hear it, so maybe it is intended for planets? I guess this will probably get resolved in the next book, since there's not much time left in this one

Pash made a joke! I think she is learning how to be funny from Pyrrha. I think someone should write an AU where Pyrrha is married to Wake and is Pash's cool aunt, I think that would be fun. Maybe G1deon can be in there somewhere too

I wonder if she still thinks it would be super romantic for Harrow to eat her soul and is jealous of Paul now or something

Ok, but I'm pretty sure you're going to the Ninth to kill John and as we all know that will explode the sun and etc., etc., so I'm not sure that's actually true

I like how she talked to Juno Zeta for five minutes and she learned the names of all her family members and now is someone she has to say goodbye to

Interesting and sad that Paul refers to Palamedes and Camilla as "they" and not like, "we"

Gideon is just pissed that there isn't anyone she can call "Sex Pal" any longer. I wonder if they picked that name specifically because it would be hard for Gideon to come up with a funny variation of it

If We Suffer is staying behind, I wonder what Paul has planned here

Or do they just mean that she will die soon, and they will see her ghost in the River?

Since the next chapter is the last John chapter, I guess this means that Nona passes out after they enter the River

[harrowharks-iliac-crest]

Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity

Sorry, you know I had to do it.

Characters

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-

Wake deserves an honourable mention, at least, because through her we get a bit of an insight into how Revenants work, as well as how the Blood of Eden work. I wonder, was it just her who talked to the Lyctors? Did she have to hide their involvement from her fellow Edenites? To pull off Deus Apate, Mercymorn said it took them five hundred years of planning. How old was Wake? Surely an operation of this magnitude couldn't just be a few Lyctors and Wake - the Blood of Eden have existed since shortly after the Resurrection, presumably some information must have been passed down families of sorts.

Wake, as we met her, was a revenant. A spirit of the dead. She attached herself to the sword, to Harrow, and Cytherea's body. Harrow could interact with her in the River bubble. Wake's revenant can attach herself to things that were meaningful in her life. Presumably, she could go back to the Blood of Eden as a revenant, and plot with them. In the Glossary, it says:

On Wake's death, Blood of Eden withdrew somewhat out of the eye of the Houses to regroup, but were enlivened by the reappearance of their legendary commander in the form of a revenant.

So revenants can move, if they are strong enough, between bodies and objects. Could you talk to the revenant without a necromancer, though? Is this what Eden are keeping Judith for - is that how she knew that the Mithraeum had been infiltrated? (Oh wait, she "met" Mercymorn, she was barely present but still able to recognise a Lyctor.)

Does she need a dead body of someone she kn...

... Gideon. Could she be using Gideon's body? Who was it who got them to take Gideon? Camilla - it says so in As Yet Unsent. Why did Camilla suggest it?

There are other explanations of course. Let's not dwell on it too much.

Instead, let's talk for a second about who she was. She was a commander, who brought some order into their chaos. She was a fierce fighter, and a passionate lover, if she managed to seduce both Gideon and Pyrrha. She was someone who would have been perfectly happy killing a baby, even one she grew in her own womb. She saw pregnancy as nothing but an inconvenience. She was someone who was willing to die for this plan, and still managed to keep the baby alive. It's unclear whether she ever had any kinds of feelings towards baby Gideon, aside from calling her Bomb, and Payload. The baby was only ever a means to an end, and should have died upon arrival at the Ninth. It's not clear whether these feelings, or lack thereof, are just a front.

She wanted Harrow to die, so that she could inhabit Harrow's corpse. Kids not dying doesn't seem high in her priorities.

She managed to plot involving basically every Lyctor. It's said in As Yet Unsent that Eden has had House spies for millennia; were all Lyctors involved with them at some point? All the ones we've met were - Mercy, Augustine, Gideon, Cytherea. Were their cavaliers involved in that?

Actually, let's talk about Cytherea, because I wanna say things.

>> Next: Cytherea

[frociaggine]

Spinning the Concept of Paul in my mind. The Conception of Paul. Basically: do we know for certain that none of the original Lyctors ever considered pulling a Paul, and ended up rejecting it as a viable alternative?

Palamedes and Camilla seem to think they have stumbled on something unheard of. Ianthe absolutely never considered an alternative; but the again, she followed the instructions she had been given and didn’t think about it much after that. On the other hand, we know the original Lyctors were researching immortality for 200 years, and were doing soul fusions on the regular (Teacher, etc). I think there’s actually a good chance they DID stumble on the same theory that Palamedes considered, and didn’t go through with it because they perceived it as the worse alternative.

Or: “It takes a very specific kind of codependency to do that kind of mutual death.”

When Palamedes and Camilla came together to create Paul, it was an ultimate act. They didn’t expect to retain any individual awareness, even after death — for all intents and purposes, they both ceased to exist the moment Paul was born. Compare that to traditional Lyctorhood, which kills the cavalier to fuel the necromancer’s power, but the necromancer retains their individuality: yes, the cavalier dies, but when doing a soul fusion like Paul is… both cavalier and necromancer die.

To someone like Palamedes, dying together to create something new is preferable to killing Camilla and living on. From what we know of the original Lyctor/cavaliers dynamics, I think some of them, maybe all, would’ve found it the worse alternative, not necessarily an improvement like Palamedes did.

(Of course, there’s also the possibility that yes, actually, Palamedes and Camilla were the first ones ever to consider a soul fusion as a Lyctorhood alternative. tbh, I thought that a month ago. But the more navel-gazing theorising I do, the less plausible it seems to me that Palamedes, who’s scary smart but also 20 years old, would’ve figured in a few weeks in Canaan House something that eluded many brilliant minds collaborating on that same research for decades, many of them also brilliant necromancers.

Some of the things Palamedes says to Cytherea in their confrontation in GtN IMO don’t match up with what we know of Lyctoral abilities, so I’m inclined to believe he doesn’t know everything rather than taking everything he says as face value. Maybe Paul is one of these things, maybe they’re not. I don’t think Pyrrha’s reaction in NtN is necessarily telling, especially not in front of a BoE audience and through Nona’s confused POV, but I think any future interactions she has with Paul will make it clearer).