#cittagazze

[his-dark-materials-trilogy]

Wow, these covers! Look at all the details!

[casualavocados]

Little grocery shops and bakeries stood between jewelers and bead-curtained doors opening into private houses, where wrought-iron balconies thick with flowers overhung the narrow pavement, and where the silence, being enclosed, was even more profound. The streets were leading downward, and before very long they opened out onto a broad avenue where more palm trees reached high into the air, the underside of their leaves glowing in the streetlights. On the other side of the avenue was the sea.

HIS DARK MATERIALS • Cittàgazze The Subtle Knife / Chapter 1: The Cat and the Hornbeam Trees

[letmeinimafairy]

A commission for @chlo-lita on labradorite, Lyra, Iorek and Pan looking at the city in the sky. Thank you again for prompting me to finally read these books!

[hellishfig]

thinking about how will was led to the world of cittagazze by a cat

he was led to the knife, and to lyra, by that cat

and his dæmon, kirjava, settled as a cat

because he loves cats, but also because a cat is what led him to love

[thedarkbk]

the spectres are the blueprint for those dementor bitches

[xmenitionexpedition]

laughing at how crowded cittagazze is this time of the year cuz all the adults are swarming to get to the tourist attraction that is lyra belacqua

[downthiscorridor]

right right right so gen z Will Parry will inevitably take a picture of Lyra or a selfie of them together on his phone at one point so that in the last moments of the show, he’ll be sitting on the bench in Oxford looking down at the picture knowing he’ll never see her again right right rig ght rightt

[the-silvertonguewitch]

I can’t remember if the show pointed this out specifically, but in the books, it’s explained that “Cittagàze”, the City of Magpies, is named after generations of knife bearers who made it their way of life to cut through worlds and help themselves to whatever they wanted there. “Magpies” is just another word for “thieves”. In the present story, it could refer as well to the daemons-stealing specters, or to all the kids helping themselves to whatever they want when there’s no adult around.

Little wonders, then, that the specters look like a dramatic metaphor for the consequences of living that way for too long. Do they have scholars in Cittagàze? Inventors? Writers? Schools and universities? Artists? Have they ever created or discovered anything by themselves? Have they ever achieved anything significant on their own? We’re not given a clear answer, but it’s an implied no, at least not since the Subtle Knife was created. This is in stark contrast to Lyra’s culturally rich Oxford, or to the more scientifically advanced Oxford that Will comes from. Cittagàze is an empty shell of the place it could’ve been, not just because it’s deserted, but because there’s no layers to it. No distinctive features or historical mark points (beyond the arrival of the specters), no defining or unique culture, no soul. It lives off of other worlds, it probably couldn’t stand on its own, it’s not “whole”, not a fully formed or independent world per say and more like what Lord Boreal defines it to be: a crossroad between worlds. Again, it’s a shell – and even that is damaged, being literally punctured and cut open from everywhere.

Comes Will. What Will consumes, he pays for.

He pays, not because there’ll be consequences if he doesn’t (there won’t), or because people might call him a thief (the pot calls the kettle black?), but because it’s the right thing to do.

It may be that part of the reason why the knife “chose” Will as its new bearer was because Will is, fundamentally, an honest person. If we go by Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, he’s obviously at stage 3. At twelve. And yet.

Yet.

When the knife passes to him, he still looses two fingers. Maybe Pullman wanted to play with the ritualistic mutilation trope. Or maybe it’s because in ancient times, theft was commonly punished by cutting off the offender’s finger(s), when it wasn’t the entire hand, or worse.

Sure enough, the first thing Will does after gaining the knife is to steal some clean clothes that aren’t stained with blood. Then, he steals the alethiometer for Lyra. These are pardonable thefts, even justified (especially in the case of the alethiometer). Still, on paper, technically, it is theft. Will has lost two fingers though. One for the clothes and one for the alethiometer. So everything’s paid for.