29 year old mad butch trans lesbian They/them. I'm back on tumblr because if I don't scream about this book series somewhere my head will explode. I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me, etc etc. Nona spoilers will be tagged as "ntn spoilers"
John Gaius, necrolord whatever, cringiest man alive, refuses to let the earth die. And not just in the literal sense of locking the earth’s soul in a barbie on ice, in subtler ways too.
The most obvious is the memes, John constantly references memes that are dated even to us, but are in universe from a culture that died ten thousand years ago!
Slightly more subtle is the years. Why does everyone in the Houses measure in earth years? It’s been ten THOUSAND years since anyone lived on the earth! But John keeps them as a unit of measurement.
Even more subtle is the language. In sci-fi and fantasy we’re all used to the idea of the translation for the reader, people don’t speak english in lord of the rings, or dune, but the dialogue is in english for us, the readers. Not in The Locked Tomb. In this series, they ARE speaking english. Modern, bog standard english, to the point where two people born thousands of years apart speak similar enough dialects that one can pose as the other (dulcie/cytheria).
Now, this could possibly fall under that standard sci-fi trope, EXCEPT!!!! In Nona The Ninth, we see the non-house humans! And they speak dozens of languages, like you’d expect after TEN THOUSAND YEARS of linguistic drift!
John is trying SO HARD to keep the earth alive that he’s forced a language to stagnate for, say it with me now, Ten Thousand Years, to the point where even completely new things with no equivalent in our world don’t even have new words, just repurposed old ones (flimsy, sonic).
John Gaius, the first necromancer, could resurrect the planet itself, and millions of people, but he couldn’t resurrect the culture. So, John, cryogenics researcher, tried to put the culture on ice, to keep it as close to the one he remembers as possible. And he still failed.
did u ever write the post abt violence and hatred being the most viable forms of intimacy in tlt bc like Ur Absolutely Right but i would love to read a fleshed-out take on that
i did not!! but let me try and collect some of my thoughts on this for you now. and i'll also try to be relatively succinct (god help me.)
i think what is so effective and brilliant about tlt is that it's dramatizing relationships with empire and the corrosive force of imperialism, but it dramatizes this, first and foremost, through its characters interpersonal relationships rather than centring itself on, say, a big geopolitical map.
one of the key ways it does this is through cavalierhood, which is the foundational relationship of the empire. it's john's relationship with his very first resurrection, with his "Adam," Alecto. it's the structure he has all of his lyctors enter into. it's a basis of relationships in every last of the nine houses. and, per mercymorn, it's a method of relations that is inherently zero-sum. ("You let us think we’d cracked it … You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer.")
on a macro-level, the empire is a zero-sum game. it's john demanding, explicitly or implicitly, that everyone sacrifice everything they have to him: to his thousand-year war machine, to his godhood. but it's also a method of relationships that has poisoned everyone from G1deon to Gideon. because all of them are engaged in the structure of cavalierhood. (and/or the societies that are powered by cavalierhood, to fold the general population of the nine houses into things.)
this is where the Old Lyctors become so fascinating to me, because they (under john's direction and approval) created cavalierhood (as the empire receives it; they didn't know what Alecto really was!) and then live through the rest of the empire. they are both the inciting moment and sort of the long transformation of what john's empire does to a person.
and it's also so clear that the creation of (imperfect) cavalierhood is a point of no return for that generation. it is the thing that irrevocably changes the way they can relate to each other, themselves, the empire itself. what was sold to them as an ascension was, in fact, a sort of moral/emotional fall (ha ha ha). a survey of these immensely fucked up wizard-shits under the cut:
(this is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but insert something here about how the lyctors are changed by being asked to literally commit murder. fancy, necromancy murder, but it's pretty functionally murder. something here about how that's a necessary step in being able to be the sort of agent of mass war and genocide that a lyctor is. or something about how this is a dramatization of how to be at the top of [or in any comfortable position in] any form of empire requires you to accept--or repress!-- that you are benefiting from/complicit with death/exploitation etc etc. all the basics.)
(cavalierhood is just tricking, in canaan house, a vulnerable half of your population to go along with it. and go along with it enthusiastically. alfred and cristabel throw themselves into cavalierhood with a passion; this doesn't make it any easier for augustine and mercymorn to live with.)
okay. Okay. but enough of this very 101 capitalism/imperialism. let's look at what some of those irrevocable changes are. let's look at how absolutely fucking terrible all the Old Lyctors are at relating to people after being imperial supersoldier wizards for millennia. (i'll also note that i have dmed @cristabel-oct extensively about this and may be filching some points from that esteemed brain.)
GIDEON (1) & PYRRHA
"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..."
per wake's letter, gideon and pyrrha, even as they embroil themselves in a explicitly traitorous love affair, are really enacting imperial logic. it governs their intimacy.
pyrrha is besotted by wake because she is "so utterly willing to burn for what they believed in," which i believe refers to gideon & the same logic that drew her into cavalierhood appears to be animating her affection towards wake
VERY intriguing to me that this letter suggests pyrrha & gideon kissed before her consumption & that the act itself was explicitly made into one sort of laced with passion/lust. cavalierhood is fetishized in every lyctor (and many present gen!) relationships, it's skewed into an act of love, whether it's cristabel and alfred's self-sacrificing martyrdom; or loveday and cytherea's (also martyrdom, but with a different flavour because that was more of a mutual agreement); to now pyrrha & gideon, who give it a different flavour.
which i bang on about bc it appears to be the only form of love they can go for, after that point. violence and intimacy are fused for them. love is enmeshed with the risk of death. pyrrha says "i want to kiss you before i am killed." & it's maybe the most telling that they can only find, or find their most perfect/appealing romantic other in their literal enemy.
CYTHEREA & GIDEON (2)
Cytherea's understanding of romance is also enmeshed with cavalierhood and Loveday's sacrifice.
@cristabel-oct has definitely written more eloquently about all of this, but Cytherea-as-Dulcinea's entire relationship with Gideon at Canaan house is laced with a predatory, fetishistic undertone. She admires Gideon for her butchness, for the ways she'll make a perfect cavalier (“I meant it,” she said earnestly. “You were wonderful. You would have made that little nun such a cavalier—I almost wish you’d been mine.”) by the way, it seems, that gideon resembles loveday, even if only loosely.
I think the most salient point here is that Cytherea, though she seeks to prevent further cavalierhood and take a stab at the empire itself, by the time she gets to Canaan house she's too irrevocably changed by imperial relations (which, notably, she was born into). especially on the level of the interpersonal. she discounts the humanity and ability of those who are infantile in years in comparison to her, but her love/lust is also fully warped by the loss of loveday, the memory of loveday, which over the years has eroded into an idealized and fetishized outline. she can reach for it, she can play pretend at it, but she can't enact it in a way that isn't laced with a predatory (and thus violent) impulse.
AUGUSTINE & MERCYMORN
aka my personal brainrot of choice.
why did i save my manifesto until the end? i have no idea. i think i'm a bit afraid i will just become an unhinged gargling sound, so read on at your own peril.
so augustine and mercymorn! augustine and mercymorn!
augustine and mercymorn who genuinely hate each other, but are also, i believe, genuinely attracted to each other. like: it didn't have to be a threesome. both times, it didn't have to be a threesome.
I mean, Augustine is the most repressed, I think, character in the Mithraeum. And he's up against Harrow, who has literally lobotomized parts of herself: "Augustine the First was the closest thing you had ever experienced to human plex. On the outside, he was perfectly painted... Yet there was nothing inside him but an equally easy contempt. It was as though ten thousand years had built up a shell and left a space at the centre. Nothing seemed to touch Augustine. He was effervescent and charming... But there was never any real emotion, or reaction, or opinion—his mouth said one thing, and his face could contort itself into any number of silly expressions, but those eyes were devoid of substance."
And yet the one point on which he's constantly animated? Mercymorn. The person who can still pull real emotion out of him? Mercymorn. The one relationship that gives him some life? Mercymorn.
Mercymorn is, I think, a touch more complex to wrangle. Augustine seems a touch more self-aware that he genuinely cares for Mercymorn than the other way around, but I think the connection undoubtedly one that moves in two directions.
Which is maybe kind of my whole point!! Cytherea is pantomiming a new cavalier relationship, but Augustine and Mercymorn (Pyrrha/Gideon/Wake) have found the space where something lateral and approaching mutuality can exist in this empire: in violence. That's the only place where one's intimacy, however nasty or cruel or downright bloody, is also able to be enacted with a form of equality.
I think so much of it is spelled out in "Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop … but my bones will rest easy next to your bones."
The too passionately is as a key as my bones will rest easy next to your bones. It has been a passion. It's been a passion in the only way they know how to enact. It's been a passion because they've repressed so much of their ability to love (be it familial or romantic) when they repressed the entirety of Alfred and Cristabel, and so this is, really, the only register they have left.
But what kind of drives me to jump into a potential blackhole about Augustine and Mercymorn in particular is that this nasty, hateful relationship almost loops around again and becomes redemptive.
“The Nine Houses are gone,” echoed Mercy. “It is over … it is done. We always planned for a mass evacuation … but I had my moment … and I took it. I took it, Augustine. And now I will die, and face the River.”
“No,” said Augustine.
“Augustine, you promised me that after we did it we would go somewhere and drop into the nearest sun—”
(Augustine, you promised me does something feral to my brain but:)
A millennia of being imperial agents sours all of the remaining lyctors, and they all turn on John in their own ways. but Mercymorn is much closer to Cytherea, is perhaps a more well-planned out re-do of Cytherea's Canaan House schemes (my post on those here), in terms of her fantasies. She wants to kill John, kill the empire, avenge Cristabel, and then kill herself. She wants to, as Augustine will point out, replicate the suicide pact that cemented these relationships all the way back at the start of the empire.
What Augustine wants to hold her too, instead, is breaking that pattern. Is some sort of atonement.
“Bad luck,” said Augustine. “It’s done—as you chose to stain your hands so mine could be clean, you’re going to have to put up with the fact that you picked the wrong man to enter into a suicide pact with. I hate ’em. Cristabel might have undone all my good work with Alfred, but here comes the reckoning. We’re going to go round up the ships—everyone who’s left—sue for peace as best we can—get the Edenites on side. And then we’ll find a place to fulfil the old promise … Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood; it won’t be for us, but it will be for those who have been spared. Babies always get born. Houses always get built. And flowers will die on necromancy’s grave.”
Augustine. Evil anti-imperial king. lmao. But he, you know, he gets it. Augustine is the only one with a sense of how to get out of this entire way of relations: and it's to destroy the empire, yes, but to do so in a manner that still allows those who are innocent-enough to rebuild. A home not paid for with blood! A place where they can have another go. Try and find a new, different way of relations. And he would hold Mercy to this. He insists on doing it with her. He insists on an action that might not wash them clean, but would be a valiant effort, would be, given their options, the right thing. He insists on making her better.
So you know!! There is a redemptive force in this intimacy too. Or a desire to harness it towards redemption, even if they don't believe they can be absolved. There is, perhaps, a way out of, or something more to, this strange blend of lust and anger and hatred they've been engaged in for a lifetime... alas!! They don't even get to make a go at it.
IN CONCLUSION
I hope this rambling tour through the old lyctors kind of illustrates what I'm getting at when I say violence is the only viable form of intimacy. I don't necessarily believe that, you know, good or moral or even healthy relationships need to be entirely mutual (esp not in fiction), but I think what the book is doing is showing... the rot of the empire and its structures through the way these interpersonal relationships and governed and corrupted, through the way that the only satisfying form of equality is... in violence, in constant and vicious struggle.
like, if you love in terms of the empire (cavalierhood) a la cytherea, you end up with something exploitative, demanding, and/or fetishistic. and if you try to seek something else without unpacking empire, while still very much being its agent (perhaps even it’s number 1 through 3 agents! ahem: gideon, pyrrha, augustine, mercymorn), your only space to set more equal terms is in a space of explicit violence. etc.
and this extends to the new generation of necromancers and cavaliers too! harrow and her contemporaries! they inherit a structure that is poisoned. i think there are endless good pieces on how perfect cavalierhood is not a happy ending for harrow and gideon, how even cam and palamedes (who have a very amicable relationship) are entrenched in a deep imbalance that has a very steep and unfair emotional price. (i think, too, about how jody is so stunned and dismissive by the lack of extreme and rigid hierarchy in as yet unsent.) that's cavalierhood and so that's empire. that's its logic, baby.
as of the end of htn, none of the characters have unpacked imperialism. (think about how at the end of gtn palamedes is baffled that a lyctor could 'hate' the emperor; harrow also loves john throughout htn.) and so what's so compelling abt tlt is that... the work of unpacking imperialism is rendered extremely juicy and compelling, is rendered one of the crucial conflicts that the main relationship must overcome to have a, I think, satisfying ending. i think there's a reason gideon/harrow are the most explicitly power imbalanced at the start of the series. it's a journey of how they get out of there; which, because of this very clever construction, requires them to reckon with imperialism itself.
so, in sum: in many ways, the imbalance and the violence is just cavalierhood. but since cavalierhood is the foundational sediment of this universe, it's empire. and like what a gift. not to get too idk into it, but i think [gestures hands nebulously] we talk a big game about art helping us understand complex methods of relationships and i really do think that muir has set up a world where thinking through these relationships and through cavalierhood is a really satisfying way to try and, in parallel, think through how imperialism works in our real world and a launching point for imagining alternatives (however otherworldly), if you like.
i am sure this was only mildly coherent, but!! those are some of my thoughts on violence and intimacy in tlt. i hope that somewhat satisfies and thank you so much for asking and prompting me to put some of this on the page!!
In light of recent fic adventures, I am currently contemplating our favorite cavs and how they got their jobs:
Marta: Signed up for a life of military service, was pressured into cavalierhood by the General's very repressed and horny daughter - was put in a position where it would have been incredibly hard to say no to authority without repercussions for a career she'd been working toward for her entire life
Babs: Cradle cavalier - literally born and bred for it
Jeannemary: Was the first non-necromancer born in her family and inherited the title directly from a dead parent
Magnus: Married into it, which makes him a controversial and, frankly, brave figure everywhere beyond the Fifth house - though, on some level, he was brought up for such a life. The queer cavalier!
Protesilaus: Was granted cavaliership as a reward after selling himself to the military-industrial complex and doing a very good job at murder. Spent so much of his life in combat that subjugating himself for a necromancer is literally his version of a relaxing retirement.
Colum: Born into the role, genetically modified and/or selected specifically to suit his unborn necromancer, spent his whole life waiting for someone to serve
Gideon: Indentured servant, coerced into the role through deceit and bribery, has never had any agency
And then there's CAM!
Cam wasn't born into the role, didn't inherit the title, and doesn't have any special genetic predisposition demanding her participation in the system! Cam was under some pressure regarding military service but seemingly could have chosen to work in data without any repercussions... by her own admission! Cam wasn't groomed or coerced, except perhaps by societal norms and popular culture!
Camilla Hect woke up one day and said, "When I grow up, I would like to sell my soul to the president," and it turns out she didn't even HAVE to grow up first!
She is just insane, and that is why she's my favorite.
You can say what you want about John Gaius, but he single-handedly killed every terf on the planet in the space of a few seconds, and I think that makes him a trans ally even if you don't headcanon him as trans himself.
quite often i wonder how the reverend parents' marriage survived aiglamene. you can't tell me pelleamena didn't wonder. priamhark was for sure fucking mortus though
very funny that of all the power-imbalanced locked tomb relationships it seems like the only character who stopped and thought, maybe due to the present dynamics i should tread carefully and prevent myself from taking advantage of this person (even if unintentionally), was dulcie. bummer for palamedes who i think was very down to be treaded on.
something i love about mercy is that when you meet her the first time it's like. jesus christ what is her problem. and then you spend some time with john and the others and at some point you go ohhh. no yeah she's the only one reacting normally to this situation actually.
personally i think m—'s nun shot herself infront of john half to help him and half because m— kept fumbling her even though she was sending texts like this
cristabel let mercymorn trepan her on the regular. i am definitely not a mercybel truther but if mercybel was an unrequited thing and i was in m—'s nun's shoes i know i would be eating my own organs, you know?
constantly thinking abt how the cavalier's soul is left to puppet the necromancers body as a defense mechanism but is essentially just nothing but muscle memory, you are trained to be a swordhand and are ultimately reduced to a swordhand; to quote a sermon on cavaliers and necromancers—Those who hold the sword must hold it for the necromancer.
↑ the mortal soul of cristabel oct, endlessly burning within the chest of mercymorn the first, waiting for the next wave of fucked up body horror bees to arrive
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