She's my favorite character ever (except tbh it doesn't even feel fair to rank her as "a character", she feels almost like a religion to me). And it's very much the Love but also yeah the... the EVERYTHING, the facets, the desire to know more.
If I can add some more things?
I feel like she's always "detached", in a way; some forms of her just make it more obvious than others. But not in the sense that she doesn't care, but that she's too big, and she loves everything, always. Muir has described Nona as "my character who doesn't give a fuck" and I absolutely see it.
She doesn't see death as a bad thing, in any of her forms, except when she fears her own death in roughly our time. She exists in cosmic time, on a cosmic scale. Death is natural. Plants and fungi get eaten. Predators kill to eat. Rot feeds new life. Her death is different, because her death is the end of all, not part of the cycle of rebirth, but within that cycle, why WOULD she care? Hers is a love that values the forest but will not mourn for the trees—at least, originally.
Even as Nona, she has a few favorites now, but everyone else? She loves the wartorn city. She loves its pollution. She laments how hard it is being happy when no one else is, not in that it's hard to keep her spirits up, but like it's a burden putting up with how no one else understands when they could and should be happy with her. She sees a body lying near the street and idly wonders if the person is dead, with no particular feelings about that. She never worries for or even really acknowledges the fear and stress of all these refugees. "Do you love?" "Yes!—No?—Yes? I don't know what it means! I say it, and I don't know what it means. Did I ever know what it meant?" And she does love. We feel it in every breath. But does she love in the same ways as anyone else? Does she love in the ways they want to be loved? What does it mean to them? She doesn't know.
And then it's fascinating to compare and contrast her with John, and how the proximity and later fusion of their souls changes them both. She chose him, in her own words, "for John had loved the world." And yeah, a guy that's pushed himself to get three tertiary degrees and spearhead a top secret project by his thirties trying to both save people and more importantly hit "pause" on a lot of humanity to buy her time for other experts to help her heal? Yeah! That sure sounds like a guy with a passion for saving the world to me!
And then she starts pouring power into him, and he never gets a choice in the matter. He gradually learns to control and make choices about how to use her power actively, and sometimes he makes really bad choices. Sometimes he heals everyone who comes to him free of charge while his friends have to force him to take breaks for food and sleep. But sometimes he loses control, her power responds to his emotions to destructive effect, and some things happen completely passively. He's made her vessel entirely without his consent, with no way to opt out, and the closest thing to a single instruction he'll ever get is that her first miracle through him is preventing the corpses he'd gotten most attached to from rotting. If she'd chosen anything else, changed the starting point he had to work from, it would have set him down an entirely different path. But why would she have ever chosen anything else, when she was only ever afraid to die?
And then? "I've found the problem with being the death man is you stop giving much of a fuck." She chose him for his love and doing so absolutely made him worse.
John's love, by contrast, has always been more intense, focused, specific. He is (unfortunately for everyone) generally very likeable to be around but he keeps his inner circle very small, latches on to a few specific favorites. And he takes it to such extremes—everything he's ever let go of has claw marks on it—but without her power behind it he wouldn't be worse than overly clingy. (I don't think his obsession would even get to mundane stalker territory, either, because without her power and the shield it gives him from consequences he's too much of a people pleaser and sad wet cat. He'd pathetically beg someone to come back and then go write angsty poetry about it.) Like there are distinctly unhealthy tendencies but it's not inherently awful, and with a little work it could have been wonderful. For a human.
But not for a planet. Not for God. She picked one favorite on her own and it started all this, and now even outside of putting her in a meat suit and forcing her to play pretend, just tying his soul to hers also made her worse.
She's protective of Harrow. She cares. And one of the first things she does upon waking is hurt Harrow, and she feels no sympathy for that pain, and only questions why Harrow isn't happy. She doesn't understand at all. ("It's coming for you, Reverend Daughter. Oh, it's coming for you.")
They both still primarily experience love the ways they always did, but the ways the other's has bled into them has made both of them so much worse.
It's not her name that unravels Nona. Kiriona says "Alecto, Annabel, I don't care, whatever her name is" a solid minute or so before. The knowledge she cannot exist as Nona while knowing is "John loves Alecto."
And as angry and hurt and cold as she is, she's switched off in the middle of "I still love y" and ~9800 years later wakes up with the "you" still on her lips.
She's the softest purest warmest thing in existence and also the sharpest harshest and coldest. She's Nature, all at once nurturing and cruel. She's every cool breeze and violent hurricane, she's love and violence and peace and war. She's every human's mother and she's in ways John's and Pal/Cam/Pyrrha's daughter. Creator and creation, protector and in need of protection.
Not to vindicate Barbie, but in the most literal way, She's Everything.
I'm so, so excited to see more of her, to see even more sides of her. I'm terrified. I love her. I hope she's allowed to die and I hope it's in a way that does create new life and new hope for all her children.
Also as lighter sillier things I love that in the single fully-Alecto PoV chapter it uses it/she/they pronouns for itself. Because it's a rock and does see itself as a rock first, before it fully remembers it's also been made more feminine, even though she was always aligned toward femininity too.
And I honestly love that at least as Nona she's a total airhead. I love the whole "she IS everything so she absolutely cannot be arsed to LEARN about things." And I so hope Alecto like... in DnD terms, has a Wisdom of 200 (yes two hundred) and an Intelligence of 3. I need her to be. as dumb as a rock. Because she's. It's. It's a rock.
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