2022-09-25 3:06:36 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

inktog:

> Some people seem confused about the John dreams, so I wanted to spell out what I think is happening.

> In the dreams, there are two characters: he and she. While he is obviously John, she is somehow both Harrow and Alecto. When he directly addresses her—as you—he seems to be talking to the planet Earth, to Alecto. The only way out was to dump the population on an exoplanet, he says. It was about giving you breathing room, you know? But when he names her, her name is Harrowhark. She, for her part, speaks very little, but in the last dream she speaks blatantly as Harrow: “Teacher, what does it mean for a child of the Ninth to love God?”

> The dreams are in a River bubble. This is pretty obvious: the bubble parts at end of the last dream, and she—Harrow—walks in the direction of the tower. How exactly they both end up in a bubble remains to be seen, but this isn’t a first for Harrow; the Canaan House bubble in HTN happened while she was dreaming or unconscious.

> In the last dream, he asks, “Do you remember what happens now?” And she says, “Yes. Through her, I’ve seen it.” She’s talking about the Resurrection and the Eightfold Word, but if we retroactively apply this lens to the dreams—to his account of the extinction event—it resolves the contradiction of her. Harrow is seeing, learning, through Alecto’s eyes. More specifically, they have swapped dreams (just as they have swapped bodies): Nona dreams of Gideon’s forgiveness, and Harrow dreams of crawling with John through the wreckage of the planet he destroyed only yesterday.

> In the dream bubbles—in 2011—little pockets of pseudo-reality within the maddening horror and nonsensical spacetime of the Furthest Ring, the dead and dreaming reenact old memories; at least once, a character (Aranea) pretends to be someone else (AG) for the sake of a reenactment. Likewise, Harrow and John are acting out one of Alecto’s memories. They sometimes break character to talk as their present-day selves, but they are otherwise passive observers in this dream-memory. Thus, John’s account is not (as I’ve seen some people claim) filtered through a myriad of self-denial. This isn’t the John from HTN with a perfect lie ten thousand years in the making. It’s John in the wake of his very recent omnicide, scrambling to explain himself to Alecto.

> Direct dialogue in the dreams usually forgoes quotation marks. But sometimes it uses them, including but not limited to: every time he calls her Harrowhark or Harrow, every time she calls him Lord or Teacher, and the entirety of the final dream. We can infer that quotation marks are used when, and only when, the speaker breaks character. This clears up some things. Like how Then they were gone…lost it time to me forever (past John) becomes “They are still out there. There can be no forgiveness” (present John). However, we’ve reintroduced an old problem.

> In the dream, he says, “This is the part where I hurt you. Are you ready?” (With quotation marks.) In the dream, he says, “Do you remember what you said to me once I had done it? When we stood here together?” (With quotation marks.) In the dream, he calls her “beloved” and “love” (With quotation marks.) In the dream, he makes a pothook—J—then the finned spine of E. He wipes that E clean, and replaces it with A. He wipes that clean, and he draws the prison bars of H. This J and H he bars around with an uneven heart. John—our John, present-day John—is conflating his old love with his new student. Harrow plays along, and in doing so gains answers from him.

> In the dreams, she says, “I still love you.” (With quotation marks.)

whoa, this is a crazy analysis and I completely agree, this was definitely the sense I got from the John chapters but this clears up a lot of it.

I love also the implication of the parallel between Alecto’s dream-memory and Harrow’s dream-memory (pool scene). Both are scenes surrounded by saltwater, where the necromancer confesses the atrocities responsible for granting them their power. Both times, the cavalier/listener is the only survivor of that atrocity, and both times they forgive the necromancer (a forgiveness that later means their death).

Obviously it’s not the same scene, primarily because John is excusing atrocities he could have stopped, whereas Harrowhark is consumed by guilt for a thing she was the result of, but played no part in. But I think it makes sense that the John chapters show up every time Nona sleeps, but when she wakes up, she’s dreamed of Gideon in the pool. It’s the same memory in so many ways