October 2023

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miraweave:

liesmyth:

Sometimes tumblr recommends me post about how actually Cytherea went on a serial killing spree as an act of mercy and defiance against a cruel god and she was actually doing the morally correct thing and she cannot be blamed, et cetera… boring tbh

Every time that happens I’m like, she’s an unrepentant mass murderer actually. I’m sorry we have read two completely different versions of these books but the one I read is way sexier. She’s grieving and heartbroken and righteous in her anger but also she’s an evil murdering bitch just so we’re clear. She HAS AGENCY and she chose to FUCK SHIT UP. This is very hot of her.

The other thing I think is completely fascinating about her character is how even in the middle of her unhinged mass murder revenge plot, she’s STILL so caught up in John’s orbit that the thought that the other people around her wouldn’t make the same decision doesn’t even cross her mind. Like she spends a bunch of time around these people watching them and their relationships and doesn’t even consider the possibility that they wouldn’t all kill their loved ones to ascend.


Like there’s that bit in Nona where We Suffer says she eliminated a bunch of potential lyctors, but she very much did not. Like, she did a bunch of murders but she failed to kill Ianthe, quite possibly the only one of the 15 other people there who would have willingly gone though the process. Hell, her involvement at Canaan House actually directly resulted in there being MORE lyctors than there would have been otherwise, because Harrowhark almost certainly would not have done it if not for Gideon sacrificing herself to save her from Cyth. But she watched all of her friends kill their loved ones for John so she can’t even imagine that Isaac was never going to kill Jeannemary or Palamedes was never going to kill Camilla, and so on. She probably could have convinced half of these people to JOIN her given the actions they all take later on, but even knee deep in her revenge plot she’s still so devoted to John that she just cannot imagine that these other people, who have never met him, wouldn’t be similarly devoted.


Absolutely incredible characterization, I love her so much.

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greyborn2:

There are so so so many little things that pile up to make me find John Gaius such a damn fascinating (and favourite) character but I think my favourite little thing has got to be how desperately, viscerally, he wants love and forgiveness but also how I wholeheartedly believe that if he told someone all his sins and they did forgive and accept and love him that he both wouldn’t be able to accept it for a second AND would probably see that person as awful for accepting him. He both wants total forgiveness and love and DOES NOT believe he deserves it in the slightest. I think, anyways.

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future-crab:

Trying to break down that one part of htn like. There’s three characters in the scene: God, a teenage nun, and God’s dead daughter (who is currently sharing a body with the nun and is also kind of the nun’s girlfriend? They didn’t really get a chance to define the relationship before the whole dying thing). God doesn’t know his daughter ever existed. The nun has forgotten that she ever existed. The audience does know she existed, but they don’t know she’s present in this scene. The daughter knows that she exists and is here but doesn’t know that she is at all related to God.

And then God looks the nun in the eye and says “If I ever had a daughter, I’d want her to be like you,” and no one involved has enough information to know how fucked up a statement that is.

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mayasaura:

John said G1deon made a pact with someone to protect him, someone John didn’t have the power to overrule. Maybe that’s Alecto, or maybe it’s Pyrrha, or maybe it’s bullshit.

But wouldn’t it be funny if it was John’s nana? Ten thousand years ago, she told G— to look after her boy. You know how he is.

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mayasaura:

Guys. The cows were about how if people don’t like you or don’t want to listen to you, they’ll decontextualise your actions and use them to discredit you in any situation. How doing one (1) memorable bad thing can be held against you forever. The cows are about looking a council of world leaders in the eyes, telling them we’re all being robbed of our futures by megacorporations, showing them the receipts and numbers and photographic evidence, and being told none of your arguments matter actually because you’re The Cow Guy.

The cows are about how people don’t forgive, not really.

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would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!

z3ncat:

liesmyth:

Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote

#earth conception of race doesn’t impact any character in the series except the canonically brown main antagonist

By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).

I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.

[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]

Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It’s not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards… these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.

John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.

Tags from @liesmyth:

#on a more hashtag meta level

#John is why I’m personally uneasy about any analysis of the series that tries to interpret TLT through racial allegory lenses

#especially when it’s weaponised for discourse purposes

#You can write meta about John’s war crimes without comparing him to white imperialism

#Or you can go ahead and do that anyway but I highkey disagree that it’s a fitting metaphor or in any way deliberate on Tamsyn’s part

#and I think the implications are unfortunate to say the least

#That said I AM extremely interested in the ways John relates to the culture he left behind

#and why he made the choices he did when it came the moment to reshape humanity’s cultural consciousness after the Resurrection

#but that’s on a character level!

#I don’t think we can apply twenty-first-century social / identity labels to the series as a whole

#especially a series where the author says ‘I imagine X character as Y but it doesn’t raelly matter’

#and it doesn’t influence the canon directly in any way

#SORRY THIS IS LONG!

#anonymous #ask #elle tlt posting #ejg #tlt thoughts