puns are automatically funny

Emrys* THEY/HE/SHE * 30+ * OG Tumblr Girlie, you have not seen what I have seen

[truthinadvertising]

I can pretty much guarantee what you'll get here is 90% The Locked Tomb content and 10% random bullshit. (*^.^*)(*^.^*)(*^.^*)

[i-want-to-do-as-the-beetles-do]

"You had never been given the option to play with dolls, but given hindsight, you could not see yourself ever volunteering to have done so."

Ok I know this has been said before but this is the least self aware thing Harrow, and possibly anyone in the series (John is stiff competition), has ever said. Harrow, you puppetted your dead parent's corpses around for 7 years! Your main hobby seems to be making constructs that do what you say! You've repeatedly placed yourself in au fixit fics where you can play out a version of your life where you have control and are less traumatized. For God's sake, you fell hopelessly in love with a giant Barbie the second you saw her and she instantly became your reason to live forever. I in fact think that if you'd grown up in a way that you'd been given a chance to play with barbies as a kid you might be a normal person

[a-drifting-boat]

Remembering the way Gideon is somewhat rude to Nona and Camilla defends Nona immediately, and then Crux tells Gideon that he wishes she were dead and calls her scum and an animal and literally nobody defends her.

[truthinadvertising]

And that apperantly same person who so quickly defended Nona lunges forward to help the man abusing her 😭😭😭

[a-drifting-boat]

Remembering the way Gideon is somewhat rude to Nona and Camilla defends Nona immediately, and then Crux tells Gideon that he wishes she were dead and calls her scum and an animal and literally nobody defends her.

[salithemage]

the way ozempic has finally made the fact that eating healthy and exercising doesn't necessarily make you thin well known and society's reaction to this is not "oh i guess being thin or fat doesn't actually show if you're healthy" but "oh i guess everyone should be on this drug"

[put-me-down-please]

I hate that this is infact how ozempic is viewed now because I watched, in real time, how my mothers diabetes got significantly better on ozempic, she didn't start it for weight loss, infact she started it before it even got big for weight loss, but all people can talk about is the weight loss on ozempic and not how good it is as a diabetes medication. Watching my mom find energy and happiness because for once a drug wasn't making her lethargic and miserable was wonderful, she was able to feel better, but then it was spouted as this miracle weight loss drug, and suddenly she just couldn't access it anymore at a good price. Not only has the ozempidemic made fatphobia normal in an already fatphobic society but it's making it harder to access for people who genuinely need it because it's seen as a luxury cosmetic drug.

[autismking]

im so serious we need to start a national movement to make closed captioned showtimes for every movie at every theater. like this is why i dont go to the theater much anymore bc i cant understand what they’re saying and it ruins the experience. GIVE ME CC SHOWTIMES!!!

[autismking]

and NOT those shitty cupholder cc machines i worked at a movie theater for 2 years those bitches NEVER work

[the-boring-distopia]

Harrowhark Nonagesimus would be soo good with computers if they were widespread in Dominicus. I will not hear out any "but she would be tech illiterate..." arguments. She is powered by spite and her imaginary corpse friend, she would learn C++ in two days if it meant being better than those who won't. She would love to ban Gideon off the tlt universe internet with a single fucking click, and she is willing to learn 10 programming languages just to do it in increasingly surreal and comical means. She would enjoy making the machine do exactly what she wants because she needs that extra bit of control, she would invent malware that summons skeletons in your room to spread the ninth house vibes across dominicus.

[truthinadvertising]

I'd argue that bone and construct magic pretty much is the Canon tlt version of programming and computer engineering so this 800% tracks. Imagine gideon having to very begrudgingly ask harrow how to convert a pdf tho

[the-zenith-calls]

My favorite scenes in the LotR books are the ones where Legolas has vital information and just decides it's not important to share.

Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??

Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??

Legolas please gain a sense of urgency

[necarion]

They should just bite the bullet and make a female James Bond. Hot, athletic, suave. She wears tuxedos with a somewhat feminine cut, drinks vodka martinis, drives sports cars, and goes by "James", because why not.

Also, because this is incredibly important to Bond for some reason, she needs to be an incredibly predatory, womanizing lesbian. Some perfectly happy married straight woman needs to become gay by the end of the movie.

We live in the future, and we can admit that all of the cool things that a Male James Bond can do are things a Female James Bond can do. But at all costs, we need to avoid making this thing feel "woke" of self-aware. If Female Bond is not exactly as toxic and awesome as any of the male ones, we will have failed, and might as well be making another franchise.

[truthinadvertising]

For real literally just write a normal James bond movie and cast a lady instead. Change literally nothing. Don't even tell the writers your going to cast a woman, it'll pollute the sample so to speak. You can change he/him to she/her real easy when everyone shows up to shoot but nothing else

[beguilingcorpse]

we talk far too little about augustine canonically giving ianthe cooking lessons aboard the mithraeum. like hell’s kitchen except you almost have to feel bad for gordon ramsay

[katakaluptastrophy]

I went—not overseas, but by public transport—to Corpus to hear Tamsyn Muir speak.

The bad news: Alecto is not finished. It will hopefully come out "soon" and will likely be fast tracked with few ARCs when it's finished.

The news you may take differently depending on your preferences: It is not being split.

The good news: It is not all written in Ye Olde Alecto speak (it sounds like Harrow's POV will be fairly major, but there will apparently be several narrators).

A slightly random selection of things I frantically scribbled down:

The protagonists of TLT would make an "absolutely shit" D&D party ("Palamedes and Camilla would be fine")

We could have had horse plinko and begone thot, but for the anti-meme ministrations of her editor. She would love an edition that puts all of the memes back in.

On Catholic imagery and lesbianism: "you ain't seen nothing yet"

"Harrow is now a believer without a church"

She said that while John and Alecto's relationship is not meant to be a 1:1 analogue to Humbert Humbert and Lolita, there is the idea of a man fashioning (something he thinks is) a girl into a perfect partner (the question of whether that is a sexual partner apparently may be relevant to ATN)

She does not have a favourite House and would just be a regular person in the world of TLT (though she would last about 0.5 seconds)

The tension between the Houses' ostensible gender equality and the misogyny that still persists is apparently also relevant to ATN. "John has set out to make a society on values he holds dear and cherishes and in some ways he has done really well... And in some way he has fucked it up beyond comprehension" (Maybe not an exact quote. My auditory processing is questionable.)

The backstory in NTN was planned right from the beginning

Lyctors "are not truly human any more. They've crystallised themselves" and "They have lost themselves and the only thing they've been able to hold on to is what other people make of them". She said she would have liked to make the Lyctors more alien but had to balance that with them being relatable narratively.

She is dying to read TLT fanfiction once she finishes the series.

[unexpectedbaggageinitemarea]

Tamsyn Muir Oxford Speaker Event

hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D

Key takeaways

Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that

Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)

Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame

Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda

Q&A: Alecto when?

(putting this first because I know you want to know!)

Alecto is not yet finished

Reason why:

Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)

Floralinda took longer than expected

Muir also suffered from health issues

Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.

Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies

And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!

Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series

TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts

George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion

Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing

She spent around 3 years publishing short stories

Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel

Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now

Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.

Muir wouldn’t do anything differently

We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript

Advice for aspiring authors

Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are

Work in the industry

There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.

Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)

Basically, getting successful requires having good connections

Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series

Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford

Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.

Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.

In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players

This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…

…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series

There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV

Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?

Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence

This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books

Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader

Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!

A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything

POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series

A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’

She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s

Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)

The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it

Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person

POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style

There will be different POVs

Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?

Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person

She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

And this is another videogame inspiration

She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…

The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series

Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain

This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book

It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto

Muir is using memory as horror

The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real

She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic

Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series

Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT

She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons

She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn

She also wanted a magic system to be gross!

TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”

Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?

Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula

Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced

For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom

She wanted the story to be about two young women

Gideon was originally a cop/fireman

For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake

Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot

Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?

Absolutely not!

Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine

There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out

Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series

Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction

She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example

For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi

Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space

The genre merging created publishing problems

Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth

We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune

Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?

Not really.

Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences

An example is A. K. Markwood

Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)

Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series

Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.

Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing

Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)

Mr Bones’ Wild Ride

Emperish meme

Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)

Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN

And many more

Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore

Writing process for short stories vs books

Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)

With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot

Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills

Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new

Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series

Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN

GtN and HtN are the question arcs

NtN and AtN are the answering arcs

Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story

Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series

Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?

All epics want you do to is die gloriously

You can do anything after that

Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series

The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.

There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.

The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.

This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero

Add lesbian to anything

Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games

Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow

“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir

Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’

Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda

Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?

Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back

Take a sin, take a virtue

All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’

Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general

Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?

It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic

And also very fun!

Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?

In the TLT universe: Valancy!

In the real world: Saint Barbara

This sparked some light-hearted banter

Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series

Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight

Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol

She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life

Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role

Also Biblical names

Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona

Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names

Umineko inspiration

Lolita and the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.

Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery

Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.

There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people

Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.

Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.

They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there

Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth

Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work

Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?

This question had Muir wriggling in delight

The answer to this is addressed in Alecto

Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?

Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.

Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series

Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love

Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh

Link to Lolita

It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently

Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas

And, it’s not necessarily negative

Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)

They had to eat each other

Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?

Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?

HtN spoilers!!

John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?

John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back

Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers

BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John

Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?

Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader

But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?

The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular

Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?

0.5 seconds

Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier

Nor is she particularly aligned with any House

Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend

(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

‘Payback for Malory Towers’

A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher

Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.

Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child

She was a highly prolific reader as a child!

Obviously Animorphs

Weird Kiwi fantasy stories

Margaret Margey

She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books

Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)

Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)

Q&A: Warhammer inspiration

Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.

She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work

Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?

Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!

There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add

For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…

Muir wants to go back to videogames

But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold

Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python

A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited

Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))

[anthraxofeffervescence]

The core conceit of Lord of the Rings is pretty funny. You are a twenty three year old in a suburb of Maine. The little bracelet in your grandpa’s attic has an inscription on it that is the password to the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. It is up to you to walk to the only hydraulic press in the world, located in Arizona, before the FBI finds the bracelet, kills you, and enslaves the suburb of Maine you currently live in

[nitghowl1600]

Just because I watched the extended trilogy recently: Frodo and the Hobbits didn't initially set out for Mordor. They were supposed to bring it to Gandalf and at most head to Rivendale.

so it's more like, some 23 year old and his 3 buddies went to a responsible authority with diverse representation to hand over the bracelet in the safest place they could probably go. Only to realize none of these guys know what to do and even if they did they keep arguing who's the most responsible to do it, so the 23 year old is like "well I had it the whole time and I never launched a missle. So I guess I'm the most responsible" and ends up becoming the main agent on the case. Frodo and team really embodying not the chosen one just the one who was there.

[naberiusternt]

i understand why people don't like john but personally i need him to be a centralish character in book 4 because I DONT UNDERSTAND HIM YET. why does kiriona seem to have some level of affection for him, having witnessed him gaslight/groom harrow for nine months? obviously she's desperate for parental connection of any kind but does that really override everything else? what the hell is their relationship like? what the hell was his relationship with ALECTO like for the two centuries before she got refridgerated? i NEED him to meet paul and i NEED him to have a huge sad argument with pyrrha and i do think there will be some measure of forgiveness for him, and after that happens i think it's okay if he dissolves in acid or whatever

[oh-jod-dammit]

I can certainly offer some speculation on a lot! (<- Delusional John Enjoyer who's convinced they do mostly Get Him but ssshh...)

To start, we've gotta look at the fact that every single person who's ever gotten to know John as a person loves him, and more than that, never stops loving him. The singular maybe-exception to this that we've met is Ianthe, who we're still unsure about, but even she seems to be kind of a mix of "playing along for the perks/vantage point" + "trying to keep him from becoming even more of a threat" + "genuinely looking out for him not as a king but as a person to some extent," imo. The only person who loved him who's expressed uncertainty about that later is Pyrrha saying "then again, I'm not sure about John period", and that's still only doubt. Cytherea is offended when Pal thinks she hates him; she's loved that man for ten thousand years. The day they die, Augustine still wants John to be a better man, and Mercy tells Augustine "you never loved him as much as I did."

And then looking at him as a person, it's like... This isn't a egotistical asshole who enjoys hoarding power. This isn't a cunning mastermind expertly manipulating everyone with beautiful blatant lies. This is a soggy shelter dog barely keeping himself from shaking with separation anxiety. This is "@[everyone] are you mad at me?" incarnate.

This is a guy who isn't even a good liar and has basically trained himself to operate on Fae Rules to get around that, and even then he's like 2 seconds from spilling his guts at all times and slips so much. One of the perks of the First House is rarely being made to explain and he's really really banking on that, because he'll do shit like admit there were nine Resurrection Beasts or casually reference the time he committed physical cannibalism. He keeps secrets (mostly) and gives a lot of selective and technical truths, and the way he presents those truths can be intentionally very misleading; he hella controls the narrative in that way. But it's still fascinating that most of the times he outright lies, and doesn't end up confessing 5 minutes later, he's also lying to himself.

And looking back at the Gospel of John chapters, yeah, that tracks. So much could have been avoided if he'd listened to M— or anyone else who was far more suspicious, but John was so convinced that if they just kept Playing By The Rules then things would work out, that everyone else would eventually have to Play By The Rules, too. This motherfucker still hadn't even broken his NDAs by the time of the cow wall and we don't actually have any evidence he ever did. (Personally I've become so enamored by the theory that this is why he doesn't give any details of their work in the rambling, even, that he's still adhering to that just like he's still binding himself to how he promised M— "not as long as there's breath in my body", because if there's one thing John Gaius has never failed to do it's double down, lmao.)

The most fascinating part of the John chapters to me too is how much you can glean from everything he doesn't say, and everything he only barely alludes to or almost says. He never directly mentions racism, homophobia or biphobia, discrimination toward polyamory, or anything of the sort, and you know those were factors in everything.

He mentions a kill fee on the project super offhand, which says they were working on commission with promise of better pay upon completion that they never got. He says when he was 7, all his nana had were some of his mum's old toys, and from that alone and how he talks about Barbie after, we can glean that he was living with his nana from 7 onward, that he doesn't really mention his mum otherwise (was she dead or did she abandon him? which would be worse?) and never once mentions a dad, and that his nana likely couldn't afford any new toys. He says as a kid he was taught the Southern Cross was the anchor of a ship—Te Punga—and still likes that better, but he says Southern Cross first as an adult, showing how Christianity has been forced upon him and his Māori upbringing suppressed. He says the nun brought P—'s gun, he thought she was there to kill him, he didn't have Ulysses or Titania stop her. "I guess I almost— I was feeling pretty bad, you know? I was feeling pretty shaken." We know he genuinely hoped she'd just kill him at that point because he doesn't quite say it, because he backs out.

He lists his schools in the first paragraph of the book as nothing but rattled names and a vague description on the last one. Holy fucking shit the amount of storytelling in that one short list. "Overseas to Corpus" would be either Oxford or Cambridge, with all the prestige and elitism and bigotry involved there. Auckland and Otago both apparently(?) have good medical programs from different angles, but Otago also has a reputation as a party school, and there are so many themes of addiction and mentions of alcohol and drugs throughout. Dilworth is a boarding school that... (1) has scholarships for underprivileged families, supporting the 'his nana couldn't afford more' idea; (2) is Anglican, aka John wasn't even raised Catholic, the Catholicism is so fiercely inspired by Cristabel specifically; (3) "doesn't require" students to be practicing but does require them to study all the religious parts of the curriculum and participate in all the events and conform to strict rules and uniforms etc; and (4) was a real life horror story with an absurd number of sexual abuse and general teacher misconduct cases for about 50 years, from the 1970s up until around 2018.

Incidentally. "A girl in my high school once told me I had pretty eyes." :') Dilworth is an all-boys school. There are several ways you 'could' reconcile that, but I think we know which one it is. (It was a teacher.) And uh... The fact that he was 'chuffed up over that until I was like 30' would. also give some context to how he treats Harrow. He's treated her more like a daughter and potential successor than anything, barring the flippant response to 'what does it mean to love God' (a joke in line with both his and Gideon's sense of humor in general tbh) and the J + H in the sand (way more unsettling and concerning; there's still room to Hope that's the worst it ever gets but hhhhh). But it tracks that he's both so pointedly careful around her and still doesn't see anything too sus about what he does do. Annnd then we have to consider soul permeability and the fact that, he's objectively not even wrong to project Alecto onto Harrow, Harrow is part-Alecto, just like he's part-Alecto and Harrow is part-Gideon and so-on. These four are spiritually tied together in such a complicated ass pile. It's so, so messy.

And then there's Alecto herself, who in her own words chose him "for John had loved the world." Because out of 11 billion people, his love and fierce passion to save her and her children resonated with her the most. (And then she made him Worse, both for all the horrors that being put into that position entirely without his consent or any instructions put him through and because Alecto's love is so vast and unconditional that it loops around into detachment and a general indifference toward death. Dead things feed new living things; as long as she herself continues so will life as a whole. And "I've found the problem with being the death man is you stop giving much of a fuck.")

There's the way John will do quadruple backflips to try to avoid ever having anyone be mad at him but will also shoulder 100% of any blame before he'll put it on anyone he loves. He'll do it to a point of making everything worse by refusing to share any burden. He tells us M— was the one spearheading pushing for more time to work out maternity, but emphasizes they all stood by her. He separately tells us that taking so long on maternity was given as one of the big reasons the project got shut down. And he never, ever even slightly blames M—. Earth's power fucked him up so badly. It wrecked his health. He went from sleeping like a baby to not sleeping at all. It's implied ("I'd stopped sleeping, and I was barely eating" and "I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten food" in the same chapter) that he was compelled like Nona to eat non-food.

"Guys as careful as me don't have accidents" IS THE LIE; that's him owning it after the fact because P— made it so emphatically clear to him he isn't allowed to have accidents (alongside a lifetime of academia and a bunch of other trauma telling him the same), so he has to convince himself any horrible thing that happens is still workable in the grand scheme, nothing is ever 'too' far outside his control, what kind of God would he be if he has no idea what he's doing? But yeah, what's actually described is he panicked at the gunshots, at the first time he'd ever seen people murdered in front of him, and at the first time he ever felt a thanergy bloom, and her power responded to that by dropping "everyone with a gun" indiscriminately, which totals around 100 people and he openly admits included his own followers and innocent civilians who had nothing to do with anything. This is the first time he's ever killed other humans, and he'd felt guilty as hell about the cow wall that was made to protect him and his friends. Later, during the apocalypse, he says it was taking a hell of a lot of effort not to ice everyone just to get some peace and quiet, but that was effort he was continuously putting in, supporting that no he didn't want to solve all his problems with murder and he was in constant danger of losing control (again).

Yet he never, ever, ever puts an ounce of blame on Alecto for a single thing that happened. When he says how she just kept screaming, Harrow-as-Alecto asks, "I was?", he goes off-script from the dream to reassure her, "It wasn't your fault."

---

But he does still know Alecto is terrifying, and it's also unsettling and concerning that some of the first things Alecto does upon waking are casually swat Ianthe (a Lyctor!) across the room like a bug and then hurt Harrow while not at all understanding how. He gets upset when Mercy and Augustine call her a monster, but he admits the same to Harrow in private. And it's not that there's anything inherently wrong with her nature, she is nature, and Nona shows us how nurture can change her for the better too, and he failed to give her that; but in one of Alecto's brief moments of lucidity through Nona, she's more upset about being made to play pretend than about him trying to eat her. Should have just eaten her, more natural, would have respected that.

It's 100% his fault she's like this (even if when you go back farther it's also 100% her fault that he's like this and was ever in a position to become like this; no amount of anything else that happened to him would have ever resulted in All This without her giving him that power). He knows that it is. But he also knows what she's capable of, and how much she fucked him up before he ever had any input.

And hey I think a lot about Teacher's "It's coming for you, Reverend Daughter! Oh, it's coming for you! And once it's got you, once that rock is rolled away, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace again! The king is dead! Long live the king!" I think about how Canaan's master was the Master "for whom even the River will part" versus the River parting unbidden for Harrow at the end of the Dream.

I think about how John would have seen Harrow's golden eyes during the three days before the lobotomy. How Harrow specifically avoids looking at her reflection but we saw Ianthe's fresh eyes and we saw Harrow's erratic eyes during Epiparados. I think about how "sometimes you caught him looking at you as if he was searching for something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for, it was not what your parents had done." I think about "for a moment, you thought he could see her too, that he beheld you both, but it was a trick of the eye," and I wonder if it was. I think about how her power reacted to his emotions when he was most afraid for his life.

So when Gideon says, "Hold on! You told that bastard to beat up Harrow?" and John says, "I was trying to save her"... Yeah I don't remotely think that was all he was trying to do, but I do believe him.

(Harrow about to be caught in the universe's worst custody battle.)

---

(Obligatory mention here just because soooooo many people miss it so Just In Case: There is no such thing as Perfect Lyctorhood, either, or if there is it's Paul. Mercy and Augustine were just 100% wrong about the way he lied. They used the wrong formula and got part of the right answer. NtN went into excruciating detail showing us that isn't what happened. There was no thought to preserve her, she was just too big to eat, and he damn sure didn't do things "slower, more methodical"; he was under very literally and by a wide margin the single greatest amount of duress any human being in this universe has ever been under. I won't go too in detail on all that but just worth including!)

---

And then there's... what does he want?

Well, he's told us, repeatedly, both directly and indirectly.

"Empty's just another word for clean. / Let's put this first-draft dream of mine to bed. / In the appointed hour / I'll pull up your sheets. I'll kill the light; / Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night. / This time will be the time we get it right."

She’d been taught to love the Emperor, who ten thousand years ago had given them all release from a death that none of them had deserved, and to view the Tomb as symbol of his victory and his demise.

"And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Necrolord Prime—and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right."

"If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That’s what we’ve been using it for, in any case. That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross."

"we found out the price for our sin. The monstrous retribution. To be chased for our crime to the ends of the universe, to have our deed stain our very faces and follow after us like a foul smell. She died after that first terrible assault."

"and I have regretted it for nearly ten thousand years. I love you so much, Mercy; I will love you three until the end of time, until there is nothing left of me but the remnant atoms of the God and man who loved you."

"There can be no forgiveness for those who walked away. Just as there can be no forgiveness for me." [...] "But that's the grace of it, Harrow. If I’m God, I can start over. The flood, you know? You can wash things clean. That’s all the end of Earth was … making things clean. It gets dirty again, you clean it again. Like those old power-washing ads. Spray and walk away, right?" [...] "It is the death of God … it is the apocalypse … because it’s my self-preservation in a box."

Magnus tells us common House teaching is that ghosts wait in the River "for our Lord's touch on the day of a second Resurrection."

And I'd argue as relevant...

She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail, save Magnus.

And of course

"Exactly the same thing he’s doing right now, without trying to hide it. Drowning his sorrows in whatever or whoever comes to hand"

John's been suicidal the whole damn time and wants death just as badly as every other OG Lyctor. He put Alecto in the Tomb partly because he couldn't die as long as she was safe, not to ensure his immortality but to force himself to keep enduring it until his work was done. And that work involves still hunting the escape ships (probably not just their descendants but at least some of the literal same guys who left, a few ships still stuck between time in the 'chrono well' until the external signal guides them out), but the ultimate end goal is to do a total reset. That might involve literal time manipulation, literally turning back / rewriting time, or might 'just' be a more magical nuclear option to start over, but the heart of the goal is the same.

He has the universe's worst ever moral OCD and he cannot accept his own moral failings, he "needs" to "fix" things, even if that would destroy everything else and everything good that's happened since then, even if the turning back time method would be the only way to literally Take Loved Away. Everything is stained, weighted down, garbage, stained, stained, stained and he needs to make it Clean. There can be no forgiveness, the can be no acceptance of something so heinous, no moving on, the only option is to make things right, no matter how much more he fucks up in the process, because he'll just fix that in the end too so it won't Really Matter, right? Right???

And it's so telling too that he framed the apocalypse, made it common teaching, that it was a death "none of them had deserved", rather than any kind of cautionary tale to try to keep them in line or anything else.

He has to fulfill his promise to M—, there's still breath in his body and they're still out there. He has to fulfill his promise to Harrow and probably countless others he's given the same reassurance: he'll make things right in the end for everyone. He has to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing forever no matter how absolutely miserable he is because eventually, surely, he'll get the ends that justify his means and Then everything will be Fine. And once everything is fine for everyone else, he can finally allow himself to die.

In fact, it's better in a way if this universe sucks! If there's nothing worth preserving! That way he's sure not to hesitate when the time comes! "When everyone we loved has gone or fled, that's morning." And, hey, he just lost all his old remaining loved ones and also all the bones of dead friends he'd been hoarding and his home of the past 9800 years and all the possessions aboard it all in one night. Sounds like morning!

Except now he has Harrow, who he sees so much of himself in and who Alecto also seems to have chosen somehow. Now he has Gideon, his own flesh and blood, also tied into this soul melange. Now Blood of Eden is becoming more of a proper threat than they were ever supposed to and took out 18,000 troops in one attack and only seem to be getting more effective and bolder. Now the devils are spreading and the River is fucked up more than usual and The Tower Has Reactivated and The Tower Wants John Gaius. Now Alecto is awake again and he's the most unstable he's been in millennia.

Also:

Ianthe's... "John loves Alecto—John needs Alecto! Without that piece of goddamned fridge meat, he’s nothing—and we need to keep him that way!" and "He gets her back, you don’t know what he’ll become!"

So yeah,,, I'm scared!

---

And despite being scared I look at all the characters who so miserably love this man and resent him so much and experience so much pain because of him and how it hurts so much more because they can't stop loving him and I'm like... man I get it.

He's someone who still cares so much in spite of everything. Who, in fucking theory, is still driven by "noble" intentions, to do right by other people, to fix his mistakes, to make the world a better place. He is this sad and gentle and nurturing person. He is overflowing with love just as much as Alecto and they're both worse for experiencing the ways the other experiences love. He struggles to lie nearly as much as she does, he still hates and fears change, he is so so so willing to hurt people and has done so on an unfathomable scale for unfathomably long, but he doesn't "want" to, he convinces himself he "has" to and hides away from any direct fighting and pretends that makes his own hands any cleaner. He's so afraid of absolutely everything. Of being powerless again. Of losing the people he loves because no amount of time will ever be Enough. Of failing to see his plans through and leaving the universe like this, of his actions actually being permanent and irrevocable.

He is a sopping wet shaky shelter dog with enough repressed rage to try to fight the sun anyway even though he'll cry the whole time, given enough power to call himself God and absolutely no one to meaningfully provide any kinds of checks or balances for 10,000 years.

He sucks so so so so badly and I love him with my whole entire soul.

---

So yeah! I can absolutely see Kiriona also getting to know him and realize that, and learning or inferring any of the legitimate basis for "I was trying to save her", and being willing to give him a chance.

Along with being one of the first people in her entire life to openly want her around, not just tolerate her, not just be nice to her, but to want to claim and uplift her. No one's ever said "This is my friend who I love! Look how great she is! Please spend time with me!" Cam and Pal were so kind but they acted like she was annoying or embarrassing or tolerable. So in John's case it's "look at my daughter" but it's not even just craving the parental bond; the closest thing she's ever had to that kind of attention period was Harrow praising her for 5 seconds before she died and Cytherea who is for all intents and purposes her murderer. So there's that!

---

And yeah I do ALSO desperately want to see more of their dynamic up close and want to know more of what his relationship with Alecto was like and neeeeed to see him meet Paul, who is arguably the MOST antithetical character to him in the entire series... We need More...

(I also need Paul to reconsider the last name Sext purely so it can do psychic damage to John and Pyrrha and nobody else in existence, but you know, lmao.)

[reimanticism]

have a corona

[peniswizard69]

Nona the Ninth says important things like "even in the cruelest most broken world love can still matter" and "righteous fury is still fury and can be so destructive" and "mass suicide cancelled I forgot there was a dog"

[oh-jod-dammit]

Do you guys ever think about how Wake must have had awareness in the sword? How Harrow says even in GtN that she always hated that thing and felt like it was judging her, and how at the beginning of HtN it physically burns Harrow to touch it directly?

Do you think about how it didn't burn Harrow, as far as we can tell, while fighting Cytherea? As if Wake was willing to tolerate her long enough to fight a more ancient threat, someone she likely personally blamed for screwing her over as much as Mercy and Augustine did. Or perhaps, in part or full, because it wasn't only Harrow wielding it right then...

"I'm not even here, I'm basically a hallucination caused by your brain chemistry trying to absorb mine" Gideon insists, but even though Harrow does hallucinate it still was Gideon's "brain chemistry" or whatever you wanna call it, and she later remembers what she said in those moments. "Marry a moron, then die. I get the urge." But with or without that...

All I'm saying is the Wake in the River surely wouldn't have been more aware of the body and spirit outside than Abigail of all people; only Dulcie could tell it was being piloted. And the Wake possessing Cyth's body? Well, she couldn't have known they were being eavesdropped on, could she.

All I'm saying is that the sword was never anything but a source of comfort and power for Gideon. All I'm saying is that when Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead coldly talks about how miserable her pregnancy was and how she called that thing "Bomb", she was saying that to the Necrolord Prime, and to the Lyctors she resented. It was meant to be venomous. It was meant to upset them.

I do not believe pregnancy inherently creates a sense of parental love; the mix of hormones and what society tells us it's supposed to be like contributes for many people, but not nearly everyone. I definitely think Wake's pregnancy was a purely grueling experience, and I do not think she developed any fondness or attachment for the baby that would have dared risk compromising her mission. I think she very much did divert oxygen to the "payload" on the off chance anyone else could have finished the job, now or later.

But I also think Gideon was her first thanergetic link, by blood and investment in the mission, before Gideon got old enough to be assigned a sword that Wake moved into instead. I think there must have been a reason she chose to haunt an object rather than continuing to haunt her young child. (Edit with a correction/addition by @asthedeathoflight that deserves to be in the main post here.)

(Wherein, she gets to be closer to Gideon AND have the chance to get out at all, which I do think is a big selling point given she might have otherwise been stuck there for ages. But. The only reason she'd have a thanergetic link to the sword still IS that it's Gideon's...)

And I think if she was aware enough to judge Harrow, she was aware enough to watch Gideon grow up.

I think about her watching her spitting image defy this bullshit system at every turn, growing up giving that nasty little bone witch a constant run for her money. About the times early on when Gideon straight up died, wondering if Wake could tell, if she could put two and two together and realize she'd inadvertently created an immortal weapon against the King Undying. I wonder how much she reminded Wake of Pash, and of her younger self. I wonder, assuming her consciousness was mostly limited around the sword, if she knew how often Gideon visited her niche, or about chatting up the skeletons in the field, or if she only got glimpses during training and later when Gideon would keep her sword close.

I don't think she knew most of what happened at Canaan House. I do wonder if her time at Canaan House had anything to do with John saying he couldn't sense Cytherea's body on the Mithraem, because I do believe he would have tried to discreetly deal with that sooner if he could, even though it's really weird if he actually couldn't. But I think she went into the trunk, and the next thing she knew outside was being grabbed by Camilla and Harrow. I imagine she was a little horrified by watching Gideon tell Harrow "the entire point of me is you", but I don't think she could blame her, under the circumstances, for doing anything she could to stop Cytherea and protect the people she cared about, even if her taste in one of them was bad.

I think about how she saw Gideon's eyes in Harrow's body after shooting Mercy, lowered the gun slowly, and left her alone with only a "Goodbye."

I'm not sure "love" would be the the right word, but I think, at least for much of her life, Wake must have developed some pride in Gideon. And maybe it's not the wrong word, either. Maybe, in a strange and distant and tragic and bittersweet-at-best way, Gideon's mom did on some level love her. At the very least, I'm confident Gideon's mom was proud of a lot of what she'd achieved, and had hopes for her future.

And the only meaningful glimpse of her Gideon ever got was Wake spitting at people she hated how little that baby had meant to her.