2021-09-02 5:17:16 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

sigaloenta:

> mayasaura:

> > manicpixiedreamkiller:

> > > forgive me if i’m the only person this makes any sense to but i’m so confused about the popular theory for the locked tomb being that augustine doesn’t REMEMBER life pre resurrection because of the “thanks for confirming that” line. i immediately interpreted that as him saying he also thought his younger self would be horrified at his change of heart, but wasn’t totally sure because it was OVER 10,000 YEARS AGO and even these magic mystical corpse fuckers probably don’t have eidetic memories as one of their jod given superpowers. even if super good memory WAS part of being a lyctor, pre resurrection means pre lyctorhood, so obviously it’s he’s gonna remember it similarly to how a vampire would remember their mortal life, only even fuzzier because it’s fuckin ten thousand years instead of like 1-3 thousand like older vampires are usually portrayed.

> > > like i don’t think this at all implies that he’s literally an entirely different person with an entirely new personality OR that he can’t remember anything pre resurrection like most of the fandom seems to have just. decided is true. all that this line/exchange (“if the man you were before could hear you now blah blah blah””thanks for confirming that”) really tells us is that however augustine felt about the extinction event right after it happened is not how he feels about it by the time we have met him, but that john still feels the same rage he always did.

> > > also i could be wrong bc i don’t remember his exact phrasing, john might not even be referring to actual pre resurrection augustine here. john says he and alecto were the only on planet survivors of the extinction, so that means augustine and any other lyctors who lived pre resurrection werent around be to mad about said extinction before john resurrected them. if all he says is “the man you were before” then we really can’t say either way.

> > > anyway i’ve just seen literally every single blog that theorizes about the locked tomb going along with this theory that, to me at least, is kind of a really big extrapolation without much evidence.

> > What he says exactly is

> > > “Augustine,” he said, “if the man you were—the man you were before you died, before the Resurrection—could hear what you just said to me, he’d tear your throat out.”

> > > Augustine said, “Thanks for confirming that.” And he was silent.

> > But its not this quote that is what makes me think Augustine has no memories of who that person, the Augustine prior to the Resurrection, was. This quote is significant to me because it confirms that John knew his Lyctors, or at least the oldest of them, before the Resurrection. This is the first and only indication that he resurrected specific people whom he knew, and it’s surprising because Augustine has never indicated that he remembers pre-Resurrection society.

> > That’s the reason I think Augustine has no memories prior to his resurrection; because neither he nor Mercy ever once mentions the world that came before. John is obsessed with it, but he never reminisces about it with Augustine or Mercy. When they’re sloshed and nostalgic and talking about ‘the old days’ it’s about the space of time post-Ressurection and pre-Lyctor. When everyone is confronting John in the finale, John and Wake are the only ones to reference anything that happened before the Resurrection.

> > It’s not postitive proof that Mercy and Augustine don’t remember, but it’s compelling enough circumstantial evidence for me. If Augustine, John, and Mercy all remembered having experienced the end of the world together, I would expect Augustine or Mercy to mentioned the world they lost. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s meant to indicate that Mercy and Augustine are better at processing their grief than John is, and he’s the only one still running on nostalgia for their lost world. But given how Augustine and Mercy are about Alfred and Cristabel, I doubt it. No one on the Mithraeum ever learned to process grief.

> I also tend to think that Augustine and Mercymorn don’t remember the pre-Resurrection world, but one piece of counter evidence is the fact that they came up with the phrase “dios apate” to describe their plot against EJG, which is a deliberate allusion by the characters to the Iliad; the way they use it shows that at least one of them knew not just the phrase or even its literal meaning but the context of the story it comes from. As far as I can remember, EJG is the only character who has that allusive ability with pre-Resurrection references. Wake knows quotations, but only as artifacts, not as allusions with particular meaning. Even when Gideon quotes from Ruth, we don’t get the sense that she is consciously quoting, let alone that she or Harrow knows where the quotation comes from. But either Augustine or Mercymorn (or both) know the Iliad. Was Canaan House’s library originally filled with pre-Resurrection books?

> On the other hand: dios apate major is such an awesome and wickedly funny joke that no one could hold it against Muir for breaking her own “rules” about which characters know about what things in order to make it.