can you imagine chuckling at none pizza with left beef and then living through the death of humanity and resurrecting a chunk of it and becoming a god figure to the new society you create and then 10,000 years later referencing it in conversation to a horribly traumatized teenager who has no possible frame of reference for this ancient meme that no one else alive has ever heard of
Also, kind of incredible that this single image is in some ways the most expansive look at the universe of the story that we’ve been given up to this point
Oh and to be clear: in my mind this is BY FAR the creepiest cover yet. The skeletal set decoration is somehow MUCH more sinister when the central figure isn’t wearing skull make-up, and when it’s less obvious why they’re there. If there isn’t necessarily a bone witch involved, it puts much more emphasis on the fact that the skeletons were once Actual People, perhaps even quite recently. Big “Nona is the eye of the storm” energy, either because she was too powerful to be affected by it—or because she is its source.
[leaning over the back of my chair at a mid-range burger chain] so anyway bestie john’s subsumption of his lyctors’ personal identities is empire writ small. think of harrow and ianthe offering each other the comfort of using each other’s surnames
—
and knowing it’s a comfort
knowing how deeply harrow has always thought of herself as ninth, how much she sees herself as not just of her house but synonymous with it. knowing how ianthe shares a name with her sister—something rare and unique, as per the gt9 extra materials—around whom her life has always revolved.
and john takes that away from them! unless they are talking to each other in private, they are no longer Nonagesiums and Tridentarius, but the First. he has taken away their association with others and replaced it with association to him.
for his other lyctors, it’s been like this long enough that their names are forgotten!
cytherea wanted to be called ‘cytherea loveday’, but john wouldn’t even let her have that memorial to the grief she suffered in his name. to him she could only be cytherea the first. it’s mercymorn who asks him to honour cytherea’s wishes, after her death:
there’s just something about how cytherea’s choice in name, harrow and ianthe’s given names. these things that memorialize love and community and culture and family, and john takes them away and redefines them in terms of their association to him
and the disdain is even more apparent when applied to his enemies. awake remembrace of these valiant dead is even more obviously than ‘nonagesimus’ or ‘tridentarius’ a name that very directly represents a link to an extinct culture (very possibly extinct because of john)
he at first refuses to say it, calls it “genuinely sad, bordering on very funny”, then abjectively mocks it! wake’s name is explicitly a connection to a long-dead, near-totally extinct cultural tradition, and he entertains himself stomping all over it!
not to mention alecto: alecto, a name john also denies, a name he refuses to even speak. it’s her “real name” but he “buried it with her”
he instead calls her ‘annabel lee’, a totally passive figure that exists to be loved and mourned with no agency in her own story. a name that quite literally renders her inanimate. ‘annie laurie’ is less egregious, but it’s a love ballad. he’s defining her not by what she did (or what he did to her) but by his own emotional attachment and pain.
note that alecto was also the first one he called First. it comes full circle. he took her name and replaced it with her relation to him (“my Adam”) and now he’s done this to everyone around him
john devours everyone’s identity: he replaces them with his own, with how they are defined in relation to him, their opposition to him or subservience to him or his affection for them. harrow cannot be nonagesimus aboard the mithraeum because that would mean acknowledging that she is ninth more than she is john’s servant. cytherea cannot be loveday because that would acknowledge that the grief of what she did at his demand is greater and more powerful than her devotion. he must come first. he must always be at the center.
this is what empire does: it renders externalities internal. it creates new definitions of the periphery by erasing all meaning about it that doesn’t relate it directly back to the core. and john does all this too, only interpersonally, on a human level.
[i sip my milkshake for a weirdly long amount of time until im just making gross sucking sounds through a straw] so yeah fuck that guy
If Nona woke up six months ago in her body, and the book takes place over the span of a week… then how could Nona be having a birthday party? She hasn’t been alive for a whole year yet!!!
- she remembers her birthday (but nothing else)
- faster solar orbit on whatever planet she’s on
- she just learned what a birthday party is and decided she wanted one (valid)
Do y’all realise that, for the Cytherea switcharoo to have worked, either:
A) Pal, Cam and Dulcie are too into the Aesthetic of an oldey-time exchange of letters to have ever changed mediums;
B) Dulcie was purposefully sticking to letters to create a safe distance between herself and Pal, considering Dulcinea, unlike other Sevens we know, it’s not an actual predator;
C) The futurist high-tech expansionist empire doesn’t even have fucking Facetime.
Bro, they don’t even have modern photography.
Gideon was expecting to find lithographs of Pelleamena in the box Harrow had hidden in the back of her closet, and assumes the photo of the original disciples in the Second’s laboratory was either a lithograph or a polymer photo, both etching techniques used to make stone or metal printing plates of images.
Even considering how out of touch the Ninth House is, I’m willing to bet the space empire does not have facetime.
Friend, these are such, such good notes, and so I hope you’ll enjoy this gif I have been DYING to use.
WHAT??? :O
Thank you
But… But… They have titty mags! How in the name of sanity can they have titty mags without photos?
They have photos, just not modern silver-gelitan photophraphs, or digital photography. They have lithographs and photogravure(polymer photos)instead! Photogravureis essentially like modern photography, in the use of film negatives to capture images, but it’s much slower and more labor intensive.
It can be used to create high-quality reproductions of images using photosensitive gelatin and acid copperplate etching, like this 1883 photogravure of French author Victor Hugo:
The etched copper plate works like a printing press, perfect for magazines. The image is infinitely replicable, so long as the printing plate isn’t damaged.
Lithography is a printing process also using images created by acid etched stone or metal plates, but differs in the printing method. There are lithograph photos, but the process is generally used (at least in our world!) to make art prints.
I definitely overstated the case in my tags. It’s not really that they NEVER developed a method for preserving images at all, it’s that the photography they do have is so labor intensive that only professional artists with specialized equipment would have access to it. I’m betting that the process to capture the image and create the negatives is similarly 19th century; meaning there would be no quick or casual photography, and few unposed pictures. Posed nudes, yes; battlefield documentaries, probably not so much.
this is the first time im doing this in a very long time and it’s because for the life of me i cannot think of anything more gut-busting than gideon at a hooter’s
She went to the bathroom and filled up a glass of water from the tap, and she left it next to Harrow, then hesitated hard. How to re-hydrate? Was she meant to– wash her mouth, or something? Did she need to clean off the tusks of dried blood at each nostril?
ALT
