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mercyisms · 2 years

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And now, an initial scattering of thoughts on the following topics. Spoilers all the way through:

On Alecto, John, Humanity, and Love

On Pyrrha’s parental instincts and Nona’s honesty impulse

On Kiriona’s body and the Corpse Prince

On Lyctorhood, Paul, and Kiriona

And also on Lyctoral research and duties

But actually they’re almost all love.

Also, look, I’m just riffing. These thoughts are in no way tidy, but maybe they are fun, especially as jumping off points for later. On Alecto, John, Humanity, and Love

“John loved her. She was John’s cavalier. She loved John. For she so loved the world that she had given them John. For the world so loved John that she had been given. For John had so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.” (471)

“all the ones I touched, all the ones I loved… they stayed [incorruptible]” (76)

“I needed my loved ones to be something I could touch… needed them to be my hands… my fingers…” (435)

“And she’s scared to die. You’re afraid of so many things, but she’s only afraid to die.” (434)

“Pyrrha, he laid me down as an appeasement to them; he fed me as an appeasement to them; but he has never appeased me, and now all he has done was teach me how to die” (476)

Love! It’s all about love! It’s all, all, all about love. Before John grasped the soul, there’s a degree to which love is what powered his abilities. The Earth/Alecto loved John and he loved her and thus he was chosen. John’s love for “the only people he [needed]” preserves them. Love is a core ingredient to the magic happening in these books (see Paul in subsequent sections), and the element that gets misshapen in John’s pace of vengeance, in the lyctoral process. The Earth taught John how to love and John taught the Earth how to love in turn. (The trillionaires did not.) John loved and was loved by his friends. Somewhere in the multi-millennium quest for revenge, John has forgotten. Love has become warped. (See my post on violence and imperialism from a hundred years ago; it was also about love.) I think you have to thread this together with Mercymorn’s assertion that Alecto could never pretend to be human. (Curious still on Augustine’s claim that John made her worse!!) And contrast that against how, as Nona, Alecto very much did learn how to be human. Down to the minutiae. & that she was retaught love from Pyrrha and Cam and Palamedes and Hot Sauce. Which perhaps speaks to Mercymorn’s own awful personality, but also to whatever happened in those intervening years. How John forgot how to love, and his lyctors forgot how to love, and that changed Alecto in turn. Put that too, with John has only taught her how to die, has removed her last fear. Look, I’m just riffing here, I have no conclusion, but hey. Terrified for you Mr. Gaius. Terrified for the ways love mutates and permutates in these novels.

Pyrrha’s parental instincts / Nona’s honesty impulse

“a soft, guarded want; a hunger – a living desire to take the corpse [Kiriona] in her arms… To own, to squeeze, to cosset and destroy.”

“Did you think this was fun Pyrrha Dve? Did you this was lovely? Family. Blood. Together. Kiss, kiss. A Child’s game. You say nice words and everyone pretends they are the words you say. Here is a house. We ‘live in it. Worms slithering over each other… Did you like playing pretend? Did you like being mother and father? You should have given into your desires and eaten us. Chew and swallow. More Natural. Would have respected you for it…” (413)

“But I’ve loved you—in a better world I’d be able to say, ‘Like you were my own,’ but I don’t know what that would even mean anymore.” (420, Blaze it)

“If Wake had just asked me, I might’ve done it in the first place—died here, with her, for this…” (471)

If we were keeping a tally of how many times Pyrrha speaks in a parental or domestic register around Cam, Palamedes, and Nona, it would decimate her ass jokes counter. It really would. Pyrrha Dve wants to be a parent so bad. (“Why did you bring the [baby]?” @ Wake) It is wonderful and tragic. It also sets up that incredible moment in the end, where Alecto/Nona’s inclination to see and speak the truth becomes something nasty (something we might understand Augustine and Mercymorn, duplicitous sluts, fearing). Alecto unmasks something true and awful about Pyrrha, the brokenness, the remnants of lyctorhood, the way that process, and being an agent of the empire have warped her. Even her love for Wake is laced with violence, is entangled with mutual theft, destruction, and harm. (Is Alecto speaking a truth or simply a truth Pyrrha believes/fears about herself?) Pyrrha knows enough to know lyctorhood is not love, but she is embedded in its patterns, she is or fears herself to inextricable from its impulses. And yet when she dreams of an end, a happy ending, the fulfillment of the love that left her brokenhearted, she dreams of suicide, mutually assured destruction, martyrdom – it’s still a sort of lyctorhood, by another name. Is this compatible with something generative and regenerative? How does this live alongside the deep desire to foster something new? How does it consume it? It's also such a delicious twist in the “found family” trope, I wrote, and then Tamsyn went and said it explicitly: “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?” Well, exactly. How much can Pyrrha change? How much do Nona and Cam and Palamedes change her, really? Tamsyn Interlude It was exactly here that I looked up and saw the TorDotCom interview and particular where Tamsyn Muir says: “That’s the part I had fun with—what love, in its purest and most messed-up forms, looks like between these people. In a way Camilla, Palamedes, Pyrrha and Nona are love’s dress rehearsal for the last book. You have not begun to see the horrors of love.” God. (Whose love will be the most horrible? John’s? Alecto’s? Harrow’s? Cassiopeia’s?? As always, I want to eat it.) On Kiriona’s body and the Corpse Prince

“He’s made a revenant out of you.” (369)

“My father has made my body’s bones denser than titanium plex… My father has made my skin turn away bullets. I am the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. Don’t you get it? I am the Emperor’s construct.” (373)

“It was in Kiriona’s every movement—the bright, swift flexions of her arms, and the way she swung her legs, big and brash, and the weirdly easy, light grace which she moved her dead body. / Nona had never seen anyone so sad in her whole life. It made her nearly afraid to die.”

“I’ll be his cavalier. I’m the First. Hell, I’m his child and heir… [John] said me with my blood could do it [kill Alecto] – said me with my blood, I was the only one…” (468-9)

“It didn’t feel good… Fuck… Why didn’t it feel good?” (473)

God. Obsessed with this. Obsessed with John inadvertently bringing new life into the world in the most literal way (procreation), if via the most unique procreative attempts perhaps ever conceived, but then fixing it immediately to a perfect/dead (synonyms here, within John’s empire) body. If it feels like a riff on lyctorhood, well of course it is: “The final expression of the art of the Nine Houses” is not in fact lyctorhood, a living soldier, but a dead and sentient weapon. Gideon! Every step of her life has brought her deeper and deeper into the logics of the empire. She has been promoted at the cost of her life, two times over. I’m intrigued by the joining, here, of Gideon’s sadness and deadness with a lightness of being, a weightlessness. I am sympathetic and enamoured with Tamsyn Muir for fulfilling Gideon’s own desires for love, parental love in particular, self-knowledge, and revenge and how it isn’t fulfilling, how it’s used to turn her into a very literal tool, yet another sacrifice. (Love, here, is still warped.) The pivot towards a blood-right, a birthright, the idea that somehow Gideon’s blood gives her power and purpose is such a chef’s kiss rendering of some of the unpleasant logics John is using to mobilize Gideon, and the ways those promises are empty, deceitful, and isolating.

On Lyctorhood, Paul, and Kiriona

“I think a true Lyctorhood is a mutual death… A true Grand Lysis, rather than the Petty Lysis of the megatheorem” (291)

“… but the soul longs for the body, Nona. Even a fucked-up soul…. even a soul that’s been changed forever. It takes a lot to acclimate a soul to a body it wasn’t born in, if that original body’s around for it to miss.” (355)

“It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right… we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water… thinking it was space.” (420) Possibly one of the most beautiful lines in this whole book.

“So there was another way, Sextus, after all,” [Ianthe-in-Naberius] murmured… “But there are more worlds than this. Come with us. We are the love that is perfected by death—but even death will be no more; death can also die.” (424)

In my liveblogging, I almost completely bypassed Paul, because I don’t know how to talk about them without the aforementioned context. I’m not sure how I feel about Paul! How I feel about a mutual death being an answer, a better if imperfect method of lyctorhood. There’s something very compelling about trying to trace a distinction, if any, between martyrdom and sacrifice and not stopping (Pyrrha, Camilla) and choosing to stop, to let go, and if that choice to stop facilitates a different kind of rebirth or the production of new life. (See earlier liveblogged comments of Camilla-in-happiness and Camilla-in-grief.) Is there something to Camilla’s moment of finally letting go? Of losing herself alongside instead of on behalf of Palamedes and fostering, together, something new. Obviously, I’m cribbing language that encompasses biological reproduction, but this motion is hardly exclusively biological. Tamsyn’s TorDotCom interview frames this as rebirth. I think the Locked Tomb shows us a whole host of ways we can or cannot care for each other, in different generative way, and a real host of parents who try to abort, weaponize, or destroy new life at any terms, all in service of loftier goals. Paul reframes this. It seems, I admit, a little neat, a little vague, but I’ve perked up at the idea of it. (And if/how Paul is sustained?) And the way Paul begins to shift us from consumptive traditional lyctorhood (Ianthe, etc.) or the further weaponization (awful word I know but) of younger generations (Gideon, by way of all her parents). And in a dead kingdom, new life – free, new life, life acted in service to mutual love – is so scarce, the shift is one to keep an eye on. edit: See Tamsyn explicitly calling John’s empire a deliberate, static society focused on a singular purpose! (I know, I’m redundant here!)

Lyctoral Research and Duties This is me simply collecting the quotes of what each lyctor did in terms of research and combat because… I love these terrible war criminals, I suppose.

“It’s a shit version of Mercymorn’s old entropy trap,” said Pyrrha. “Not half as good.” (356) Mercymorn stays winning. I remain obsessed with the that Pyrrha “trepanned Cris, who loved it” Dve and Mercymorn “yelling, screaming, throwing up” Nolastname were apparently very close collaborators

“Anastasia’s tripod principle. Body plus thalergy, but no soul, is basically a very weird vegetable.” (362)

“… would’ve taken Cassiopeia and Cyrus and Ulysses and Cytherea just to keep [Ianthe] in hand…” Notably, all of the lyctors who were not even on the board to begin with, when Ianthe ascended. (362) Obsessed, of course, with Cytherea mentoring Ianthe though.

“We’d need a Lyctor to lead it away…preferably with two other Lyctors to engage it in the River… You want Cyrus, Augustine, Cassiopeia… You want Gideon the First and Gideon the First is dead.” We are inclined to believe Cyrus is the bait and Cyrus and Augustine are the ones engaging in the river, based on speciality.

“You can’t spoof this. Cass and Mercy and I worked on cell thanergy.” Girlpower. Girlbosses. Girls-I-Love. You co-publish that ethically dubious paper, I love you.

#nona the ninth #ntnspoilers #nona spoilers #the locked tomb #alecto the first #m: tlt meta #m: nona liveblogging

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