[cryptotheism]

Monk nailing a sign to an arch carved from natural stone that says "No more gay shit in the ossuary"

[giddy-gone]

imagine begging god to resurrect your dead girlfriend and he's like "not only am i not gonna do that but also you have to come live on my swinger boat now"

[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.

[familyabolisher]

Regarding what I said about reading the two narratives in Nona on the assumption that they interact with one another, I also think it’s significant that the primary narrative of Nona is set on a planet which has two names—New Rho and Lemuria—one of which is indigenous and the other of which is colonially given, and that discursive weight is applied to the use of one or the other; from As Yet Unsent:

The princess says they all fought at Lemuria and have set opinions. (It won't help at this stage, but Lemuria is their term for New Rho.)

Here Judith gives primacy to the colonial name (‘their term’ is Lemuria but there is no equivalent ‘our term’—New Rho is implicitly presented as a ‘correct’ answer, the colonial epistemology trumps the colonised). & similarly in Nona, the only person who refers to it as New Rho rather than Lemuria is Ianthe (perhaps significantly, she does so during the broadcast—a way of exerting authority through naming, something that recurs throughout the series); to do so is to assert a relationship of rulership over the land. Whilst colonised regions having both settler and indigenous names and the use of one or the other being communicative of a particular relationship to the region in question & its recognised sovereignty is a condition consistent across settled land (cf. land acknowledgements), I can’t help but think here of Aotearoa and New Zealand as the respectively indigenous & colonial names for the land in question as a specific and deliberate comparison that Muir was trying to draw with Lemuria vs New Rho, considering that Nona’s secondary narrative is set in near enough contemporary Aotearoa/NZ. I don’t think Lemuria is supposed to be 1:1 analogous to Aotearoa/NZ—rather, I think we’re supposed to use this as a starting-point to consider how the two narratives of Alectofication (of the Earth and Nona, respectively) ought can be read alongside one another. In two settings placated and now governed by imperialism and its social structuring in which our protagonists are uneasily and precariously positioned, there exists a looming and apparently unstoppable threat (climate collapse, Varun the Eater) and a narrative shaped by the certainty that it will conclude with Alecto’s arrival (John’s retroactive storytelling, the countdown to the Tomb being opened). 

I point this out because—as we learn in Harrow—Alecto is a kind of shorthand for any and all sorts of hierarchies of power that make the conditions specific to John’s empire possible. John and Alecto are the ‘first’ necromancer/cavalier pair, the model upon which the rest (including the early Lyctors) were built; Alecto is at other times, depending on the demands of the narrative, a wife, a bride, a mother, a daughter, a ‘companion, guide, friend,’ and, obviously, a doll. She’s Annabel Lee, Annie Laurie, Dolores Haze, Lolita the First, a barrage of nuclear bombs wiping out the entire Earth, and a rape metaphor—she’s a compendium of subject positions and literary figures that all converge at the point of being, essentially, a dead-undead body (not so dead that you aren’t still malleable in your subjectivity but dead enough that you can’t be agentive) and placated, contained nuclear waste.

We can obviously read the John narrative in Nona as the series of events creating the conditions by which Alecto—and therefore John’s empire—came into being; we can then read the primary narrative in Nona as the threat of Alecto (which is to say, the social fabric of John’s empire) imposing itself on a set of relations that are trying to break free of it (ie. Cam, Palamedes, Pyrrha, Nona—more expansively, anyone outside of the empire who lives under its thumb). The arrival of Kiriona makes inevitable the fact of Nona being Alecto by eliminating the only other person she could possibly be (ie. the only other character we know to have gold eyes is Gideon, the narrative held the possibility of her being Gideon over our heads up until Kiriona showed up and obviously proved that wrong) and also acts as something of a harbinger of what Alecto represents; as Alecto, the state of ‘being Alecto,’ becomes inevitable, so too comes this narrative-dominant reminder of what these subject positions represented by ‘being Alecto’ are and mean and do. 

This is obviously bolstered by the fact that what eventually causes Nona to ‘remember’—and thus become Alecto again—is the reminder of her relationship to John, that he ‘loves’ and ‘needs’ her; like, literally just, being returned to the subject position she occupied relative to the person who held power over her, who in turn becomes a synecdoche for the governing bodies of imperial rule that sustain the hierarchised systems of power in question. To be ‘loved’ and ‘needed’ by John means to re-become cavalier, bride, wife, mother, daughter, object of literary artifice. 

And, like, we see this question of an inevitable articulation of subjectivity effectively strangling people’s attempts to relate to one another outside of it in this scene, immediately after Pyrrha attempts to name Nona as Alecto:

The grip on Nona’s wrist was firm and gentle and totally normal—how many times had Pyrrha grasped her wrist, before crossing a road, or helping her stand, or twirling her around to songs on the radio? But from some hole in the back of Nona’s cupboard behind a fake plank of wood in Nona’s brain, her voice said roughly: “Don’t touch me.” Pyrrha dropped her wrist, and Nona’s voice went on and on: “Did you think this was fun, Pyrrha Dve? Did you think 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...”

Like—suddenly they’re a family of worms wanting to eat one another and pretending at conciliatory familial relations (‘psychosexual roleplaying’ thanks Tamsyn) in order to make sense of that desire! & articulating this is terrifying and shameful for Nona, but it’s what Alecto is, it’s what Alecto knows, and it’s what has to characterise this, like, tapering of the narrative towards Alecto’s arrival.

Which ofc goes back to my original point—no making taxonomical sense of social relations, the world has progressed beyond the need for making taxonomical sense of social relations.

[gideonisms]

ianthe is that deep. To me

[gideonisms]

well and it's interesting to have a character who is like, the exact person who can be successful under the conditions that 10k years of imperial tradition have set up. And that person is deeply unpleasant, completely without remorse, and ultimately still kind of useless in the grand scheme of things. Ianthe wants to be remembered so attempts to be the best at the game of using and discarding and manipulating people only to discover that in the upper echelons of the society john has created, those qualities don't make her remarkable at all. the main remarkable thing about her is that she never pretends to be sorry for anything. why should she? everyone else is doing the exact same things. is it better because they're a little sad about it?

[familyabolisher]

the thing about people on this website though is that they're adamant that they don't think of themselves as superior to people who can't manage a job or education, or to people who are intellectually disabled; they just think of themselves as superior to people who like works geared towards a younger demographic or don't articulate their ideas clearly or lack "reading comprehension" and "media literacy" or or or

[apelyon]

hey was it ever addressed how John knew what G1deon looked like when he kicked Wake out of that ship.

[apelyon]

like if nothing else, the fact that tamsyn muir is writing sci-fi while being very cognizant of its tropes and history should tell us all we need to know. the most famous example of a series (that I can think of) with an overlap in themes would be dune.

John maps pretty well onto Paul (those names? hello??), both granted power beyond contest, both step into a role of savior/messiah, and both fail utterly. tlt is continuing a tradition in sci-fi that interrogates cults of personality, of putting faith in (and giving power to) one person, and the expectation of being saved.

[apelyon]

I don't know when or where we sailed past believing John is a sympathetic and compelling villainous character to believing his victim larp but i would like for us to go back. please.

[carys-the-ninth]

Who was putting up all the caution tape around Canaan House. Was that a last minute addition pre-lyctoral trials or were the skeletons dutifully keeping track of which wings crossed the threshold from 'decrepit' to 'condemned'

[daydreamsinthemoonlight]

[carys-the-ninth]

Sixth House stepping in as self designated OSHA

[mercyisms]

hello anon and apologies for promptly dropping off of the face of the earth after promising to reply to this. in the interest of trying to be useful, i’m going to dash something off-the-cuff, but i hope it helps! i think this idea is already routinely demonstrable in the text, but tamsyn muir was also kind enough to explicitly spell some of this out in this lovely interview: “That said, the God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to.” one of the ways this is dramatized in the text is, y'know, john shoving some of the earth’s soul into a barbie. pygmalion the earth into perhaps the most iconic form of white femininity. it’s a move that may be complicated by details such as a) john’s indigeneity and b) the queerness implicated in john preferring barbie to any of his more ‘masculine’ toys, but there’s a lot to interrogate here on how john’s proximity to systemic oppression (across various lines) is retained and the ways in which they’re replicated despite his intentions, or the ways they come through even when certain axes of oppression (gender, race) operate differently in the nine houses than on contemporary earth, or what john prioritizes above altering these systems. so on one hand, thinking about john’s affinity to tall blondes might lead you there. however, because the 6ft tall blonde is not just alecto but is, in fact, an enduring role, now you can open up some more questions. for me, these questions might look like: what is the relationship between this role and john and john’s empire?

Keep reading

[apelyon]

reminder: my cat is very beautiful and special

[sophelstien]

Tridentarii anthem

[amygdalae]

Beach episode at the monastery... everyones putting sunscreen on eachothers tonsures

[ghostghostman]

To the mercy call

[apelyon]

john himself being the most mundane white collar evil a person can be is such a good choice. literally the manifestation of social murder, he gets to sit with his tablet and be this unthreatening office worker and yet he's wholly responsible for the horrors. his hands are never dirty because he made them other people. sicko. i love him.

[apelyon]

do you think the oversight body tried to intervene when Palamades took Camilla as his cavalier. warden we need her for the hotty brigade. think of the inbreeding.

[sophelstien]

Yeah there's just something about John forcing the earth into the body of a woman and then having her serve under him that seems hmmm patriarchal to me. For some reason

[sophelstien]

afaa (assigned female at apocalypse)