When it comes to John, I have zero interest in condemning him. First of all, it’s boring. You mean destroying the world and lying to your friends about it is bad? Shocking. Groundbreaking character work.
Second of all, I’m just not all that comfortable with condemnation in general, not when it comes to whole-ass people. Actions, for sure. I am ready to wholeheartedly condemn pretty much every decision this man has ever made, but I’m only comfortable doing that with a side of compassion for the man himself. Tamsyn said once in an interview that some of the discussion she’s seen about Harrow is unintentionally very cruel to people with mental illnesses, and I feel similarly seeing a lot of the discussion around John. If I’m going to try to figure out where he’s coming from, why he did the things he did, and what he thought he was accomplishing by doing them, I’m not at all interested in coming at those questions with contempt or disgust.
To me, the main question when it comes to John is: What do you do when you feel that you’re unforgivable? That you’ve fucked up so completely no one will ever love you again, unless you lie and trick them into it? How do you deal with shame? And while part of the answer is definitely “Holy shit, not like that,” what I’m most interested in is: what should he have done instead? At what points in his narrative could he have changed his course? And at what point, if ever, did he become right about it being impossible for him to dial it back and turn around?
This is the best John post. I think that he is deeply fucked up and his inability to forgive is a huge part of it - anyone else or himself. His evasiveness comes from his inability to confront what he has done - to own up to it because doing to would be too big and too devastating. I think John is really an incredible portrait of a kind of righteous anger that has hollowed everything else out until even the love that once motivated it is gone.
Tbh? I don’t like Paul. I don’t want Paul. I understand that Paul serves an important narrative function and that Paul is the best possible ending for Camilla and Palamedes given their situation, personalities, and relationship. However what I really want is for Camilla and Palamedes to attend the ATN wedding as two individual humans and for Pal to be a lightweight who loses his tie in the garden fountain after three drinks and for Camilla to do exactly one shot with the group, keep Gideon from ripping the sleeves off her dress shirt, and absolutely kill it at lawn games during cocktail hour. Since this scenario is a wild tonal mismatch for the series and also Palamedes was already dead, this was unlikely to ever happen. However Paul is the final nail in the coffin for the theoretical existence of this scene and I can’t help but resent them for that
ok actually i’m putting this back in my queue with my original tags:
#I don’t think we as readers are supposed to welcome Paul. at least not without grieving Pal and Cam #Paul’s existence is both a horror and a triumph #however my concerns are much more petty and involve Camilla winning at cornhole #I can’t yet properly characterize Paul. would Paul lose their tie in the fountain??? would Paul win at cornhole?? #or does everything that made Pal and Cam individually delightful cancel out into a person who is mostly competent and boring. #they balanced each other out you see!!! so what happens now that they’re combined into one person!!!! #the locked tomb #nonasbirthday #nona the ninth spoilers #the locked tomb spoilers
More doodles from divine highness au. I imagine it would be neat if Harrow was groomed to be Kiriona’s advisor. She can rock the evil vizier aesthetic while trying and failing to babysit this spoiled oafish god-prince
ALT
ALT
