Sarpedon is being slandered. Enough “God fucked that old man”. This is Empire propaganda. No, I put it to you that Sarpedon set out to fuck God. he knew exactly what he was doing. When every duplicitous slut betrayed God, Sarpedon was there. he wanted that divine ass. entered that forbidden tomb. became one flesh with his one end. etc.
Like there’s so much to John that’s erased if you paint him as a one-note villain, and I’m glad people are starting to see that. Saying that every single line in the flashbacks was a lie erases the grit of his confession; saying that he was evil from the start erases his sympathetic background (poor brown man); saying that he was just a crazy cultist erases the deliberate evocation of Māori history; saying he made Alecto out of a creepy psychosexual desire erases that their bond was forged from reciprocate childlike love. He is the man that became God—there’s a transformation, a corruption, a devolution, and the fact that people call him an unrepentant fascist is mind-boggling.
People honestly have such a ‘the Rugrats were dead all along’ reading of John Gaius. What’s a better story, that there isn’t a shred of decency in him, that the poor brown man was nefarious all along… or that all his friends who died trying to save him died for nothing; that the very same people who gave him a cape and eyeliner and dug up bodies for him and lied to the cops for him and negotiated for him were ultimately used and manipulated by him and died trying to bring him down? What’s a better story, a corruption arc, a descent, a moral katabasis, or fucking. Less Interesting Palpatine. Because it seems like some of the fans want Less Interesting Palpatine.
After reading some NtN discourse, which is all about Jod, like I get it but someone start discourse about the Angel or something so we have variety.
But anyway, there’s a context I feel is missing for the Jod discourse, and it’s, 1.There is a centuries long history of Māori healers who suddenly found themselves gifted with miraculous powers to heal. 2.New Zealand has a history of sending police and government forces to kill Māori healers.
Americans when they think of police raiding ‘cult’ compound are probably imagining Jonestown or those US full of guns fortified cults from TV and that is how Jod’s healing and the raids that lead to the meatwall and dead cops are being framed but from the Prophets of the 19th century, the invasion of Parihaka or the hunt for Te Kooti all the way to the Tūhoe Raids of 2007, NZ police when they surround and raid are there for colonial purpose. And the way the healing part of John’s story is explained, word spreading and travellers amassing, it could have come out of a textbook of Rātana or Te Māiharoa. In NZ, police being massed to raid a ‘cult’ lead by a Māori miracle healer, has different bagage from the US police surrounding a fundie cult in gun country.
After reading some NtN discourse, which is all about Jod, like I get it but someone start discourse about the Angel or something so we have variety.
But anyway, there’s a context I feel is missing for the Jod discourse, and it’s, 1.There is a centuries long history of Māori healers who suddenly found themselves gifted with miraculous powers to heal. 2.New Zealand has a history of sending police and government forces to kill Māori healers.
Americans when they think of police raiding ‘cult’ compound are probably imagining Jonestown or those US full of guns fortified cults from TV and that is how Jod’s healing and the raids that lead to the meatwall and dead cops are being framed but from the Prophets of the 19th century, the invasion of Parihaka or the hunt for Te Kooti all the way to the Tūhoe Raids of 2007, NZ police when they surround and raid are there for colonial purpose. And the way the healing part of John’s story is explained, word spreading and travellers amassing, it could have come out of a textbook of Rātana or Te Māiharoa. In NZ, police being massed to raid a ‘cult’ lead by a Māori miracle healer, has different bagage from the US police surrounding a fundie cult in gun country.
Thank you for putting this into words, OP — I kind of picked up on it my first time through Nona, but I felt that I lacked the background and the detailed knowledge to speak about it. You’ve given us all a lot to look into and educate ourselves upon. I’d like to add just one example from the text:
They lied and everyone swallowed their shit. Not only that, they looked at us and were like, We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we? Isn’t it time you guys stop being independent actors, aren’t you recognised by most nations as a cult? We’re all legally appointed officials here, except for the trillionaires. Did you know cows recognise one another?
“You fellas” is not pronounced “you fellows”.
To try to put it into perspective for American readers… To ears that have been in NZ for any length of time, this tale in Jod’s own words of how his enemies approached him sounds A LOT like a white American authority figure (a cop or an FBI agent) speaking AAVE mockingly, and threateningly, to a person of colour who is perceived to have transgressed. It’s a racial microaggression. Addressed to a Māori healer who — whatever he’d done to some cows in a country in which, let’s be real, plenty of cows are marked for slaughter every day — was in a long, long tradition of other healers and spiritual leaders persecuted by the colonial government.
There are probably other details along those lines that I didn’t pick up. I wish we had more Locked Tomb readers in Aotearoa contributing to our conversations here — and when they do I wish we could amplify their voices more.
Re: your John post: I’m so fascinated by the moment when Cristabel kills herself in front of John to give him the final boost (psychological and practical) to figure out resurrection because when it WORKS and he figures it out, John’s immediate response is…to leave her lying dead on the floor because suddenly the urgency to save that one individual life evaporates in the face of everything he can now do.
There are later moments, like when the ship escapes, that are obviously pivotal in HIS mind, but it’s my sense that everything which happens after Cristabel’s (first) death is colored by that shift from “If I can just figure out how to bring ONE person back, I can bring EVERYONE back” to “Who cares if I can bring one person back? I can bring ANYONE I want back!”
And with THAT shift comes a shift in his own understanding of what morality looks like for someone with his power.
Sorry for the delay, I’ve been struggling with answering this one.
I agree, Cristabel’s suicide is an extremely important pivotal moment for John, if not THE pivotal moment, but I’m not sure I agree about exactly what his pivot was.
After Cristabel dies, when he’s holding her soul and through it sees Alecto, he doesn’t go straight to ‘I’m so powerful I can do anything now,’ and he doesn’t immediately set off the bombs or make himself god. He does a journey first through begging to become a vessel for that power, begging the soul of the Earth to tell him what to do. When he says that Alecto was incoherent and screaming, he follows up by saying “It wasn’t your fault.” He doesn’t blame her for it, but he resents that he wasn’t given guidance in that moment, that he was left with so much power and no idea what he was meant to do with it.
Something I feel carries a lot of weight in that scene for how little John dwells on it is that John was also suicidal. When he set up the nuclear threat, I don’t think he expected to survive the fallout if he followed through. When Cris told him she knew how to help him and then came back with a gun, John’s assumption was that she was going to kill him. And he was going to let her.
I find it difficult to analyze his immediate reaction to Cris’ death, choosing to focus on Alecto over Cristabel. For personal reasons, I’m incapable of judging someone for their immediate reaction to watching a loved one commit suicide. I just can’t. He had the power to bring her right back and he didn’t; it seems like there’s obviously something deeply wrong with that decision, but I can’t assume it was out of lack of care for Cristabel. Maybe it was representative of a shift in his priorities, it seems likely that you’re right and it was, but I can only credit that retroactively in how he processed having made the decision. Seeing something like that can just. Make you insane. Sometimes there is no 'why’ in what you do when you’re experiencing that kind of traumatic shock, and trying to find deeper meaning in it will only fuck you up beyond belief.
I’m pretty certain John was in shock, from the way he recounts it. From the moment he starts telling how Cristabel came back with the gun, he’s described as sounding 'as though he were underwater with the rest of everything’. His memory surrounding the immediate aftermath is fuzzy, he can’t remember details about what he did, if he took anything with him. He remembers some trivial-seeming sensory and visual details clearly, like how there was less blood than he expected on his clothes. He doesn’t remember what he did, when he left the scene of her death to find the rest of his friends under assault or dead. He thinks he just watched, but he isn’t sure. It feels weird, like he dreamed it. He remembers Augustine saying something in their final moments huddled together behind the barricade, but not what he said. He recalls holding Augustine and Mercy’s hands as they begged for his life, as they died in front of him, but he’s not sure how he got there. He was, in short, incredibly fucked up and about to die.
And that’s when he ended everything, and became god.
I’ve been thinking about that moment preceding all of it—about Cristabel and John and how pivotal their relationship was—for a while since you first sent this, and I think on some level John does realize how important it is. John was only Catholic by the furthest stretch of the definition, we find that out fairly early in the Verses. He was baptized at a christian rock concert he’d attended for the underage drinking. There’s no evidence the man ever set foot in a church prior to his apotheosis, and he goes on to construct a giant Catholic-themed space empire. Why would he do that? Why is that the blueprint he chose for his new world?
John wasn’t Catholic, but Cristabel was. She was a nun, she was the only person he allowed into the room with him during his breakdown, and he addresses her as 'Sister’. She killed herself in front of him. She’s the reason he learned how to perceive the soul, and she was the first soul he ever touched. Did he lean so heavily on the Catholic theme in honor of her, or to spite her, or both? Or did she push the theme herself? We know she invented the oath “One flesh, one end,” and we know she was the one behind forcing the invention of lyctorhood. In her first life, we know she was the one who most enthusiastically framed John as a religious figure, even before he formed the cult. How much influence did Cristabel have in the structure and formation of the Empire? How deep an impression did she leave on the culture, and on John?
what do you think all of this looks like for an average citizen of the Houses. like. God is just some guy to all of us humble readers now but to the majority of House folks he’s still. yknow. he’s God. and over the course of about a year or two he’s put out a call for new saints, prominent members of literally every house died or disappeared, two teenage girls including the Reverend Daughter of the creepy backwoods bone cult ascended to immortality, the older saints died, the sun went out for a second, the entire Sixth House picked up and left (????), God announced that oh, by the by, he actually has a teenage daughter now, don’t worry about it and also he started fucking his way through the entire Cohort because he’s so so sad. what do you do with that last one especially. you get a letter from your friend on the front lines expecting to hear about the hardships of imperial conquest or whatever and instead they’ve written you a lurid description of how they learned firsthand that God does not like foreplay.
i’m sure spending all day drawing this little dress up doll of god was definitely a good use of my time on earth and definitely what tamsyn muir knew was going to happen and intended.
It’s endlessly funny to me, that so many people read Nona the Ninth - a book where a group of indigenous people from a small nation in the southern hemisphere spend years trying to build a communal plan, begging anyone to take collective action, reaching out again and again for as many people to get on board as possible, only to be stymied again and again by the individually and structurally powerful, who simply didn’t care (and couldn’t care due to the incentive structures imposed by power) and just wanted to preserve their own power/lives at the expense of everyone else, only for one of their number to be singled out and given immense universe-altering power by a magical entity, which of course led to disaster and the collapse of their original goals because, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely and will magnify even the most minor human foibles - and came away thinking ah yes, the point is that John as an individual is ontologically evil.
John Gaius sitting by himself in the command room of the Mithraeum at 1 a.m. of the station’s day cycle, wearing his little crown of baby bones, feet propped on the console, singing Take Me Home, Country Roads.
We know just enough about each house and its founders that I think there might be some threads to pull at in terms of what different house titles say about the house intends of its leadership, or some other interesting observation – in some cases, not a lot, but I’d say enough that there’s enough for me to play with and gnaw on like a naughty cat who should not be chewing embroidery thread.
re: The Second - sorry for hijacking this but I reread As Yet Unsent lately and I had Feelings about it
I had the impression that the Second House were THE leaders of the Cohort. Judith’s father is not just “an” admiral; he’s “Fleet Admiral” which I think implies he leads the entire Empire fleet. (By contrast, Sarpedon is ‘Admiral Sarpedon’ only; plus Ianthe talks about Judith possibly being ransomed to her father in NtN like he’d be such a big deal that every Blood of Eden cell probably knows who he is and that’s why they bothered keeping Judith alive). Judith
joins the Cohort and goes through the ranks like everyone else, but from As Yet
Unset it’s clear she’s being groomed for command and possibly fast-tracked
through the ranks – it doesn’t seem to be a question of if, but when.
Wild
assumption on inheritance: we know the Ninth is odd in being led by an unbroken
line of descendants. Because of this, I think it’s likely that the Second heirship
isn’t automatically granted through bloodline, and relatives / apprentices can
be adopted into the ruling family (see how Abigail and Magnus don’t have
children but aren’t stressed about producing necromantic heirs because they
have other relatives). I’m guessing this because John’s Empire seems to be run
on nepotism but not necessarily bloodlines, and because while being somebody’s
kids can probably get you pretty high up in their military hierarchy, they
wouldn’t actually give the top spot to someone who isn’t deserving. Also the vaguely
Latin-ish vibe to the House names reminds me of how widespread adoption was among
the Romans, often of adults for political purposes. Also Judith is extremely
dutiful and driven – most of it is just how she is, but I think she has a chip on
her shoulders about having to prove she is worth of the role of future leader
of the military House (and by implication the Cohort).
my single stupidest headcanon is that john accidentally conned himself into having a chastity kink, solely because he made up some total bs on the spot that he couldn’t finish because he was Into That, to prevent anyone from being able to procure his dna, forgetting that he then had to immediately commit to the bit for, uhhh……thousands of years.
I literally cannot say whether I think we got a hot john moment at any point in the book without having to block myself. Listen I knew there was a 50/50 chance he was Like That since day one I decided to live my life on the edge and I don’t regret it!! Rip to the thirstposting era and flowers will die on its grave etc etc snap back to reality whoops there goes gravity etc
When he killed 500 police officers and pretended it was an accident… extremely hot apocalypse cult shit
I thought he was at his sexiest when he smashed his own ribs.
thinking deeply abt Sarpeadon reacting to a handshake from John as if he was being branded. wondering how he would react to a handjob. or perhaps even a b–
