ok as we all read nona it’s important to remember that we KNOW what happened the last two books. we read them and we remember the events and we have got to trust our own minds. no matter what the new book tries to get us to believe do NOT let it gaslight u. not again
YES YES YES YES YES YES I DONT THINK NONA IS ALECTO EITHER LIKE HOW WOULD SHE??? THE SOUL IS STILL IN THE TOMB IT HASNT BEEN BROKEN, IT COULDNT HAVE BEEN BROKEN. NONA MUST BE THE CHILDREN AND THE EYES CAN BE POSSIBLY EXPAINED BY THE SHAPE OF HER HALLUCINATION. ok maybe not but it just makes sense ;_; (the only thing that confuses me is the language thing but wanna bet some children could speak different languages?)
yeah literally the language thing throws SUCH a wrench into my speculation I have no idea what that’s about. I think the eyes are explained by gideon- I think the body has gold eyes not because Alecto does, but bc Gideon does.
the only thing I can think of for the languages is if maybe Nona is both the children AND Alecto? like maybe if Alecto’s soul found it’s way to harrow via this insane emotional bond that harrow developed with all her turbo-necromancy power, like some kind of weird reverse-revenant. (and I think Alecto would know all those languages because I think she’s the soul of the ten billion aka earth’s resurrection beast)
rereading gtn and early on gideon (half) jokingly mentions wanting to be in a sexy calendar even before she has even left the ninth. does gideon cross days off on a calendar with bikini women on it? does she plan her escape days on a page that also has tits on it? she apparently wants (and knows shes hot enough) to be in a sexy calendar for other women lmao like shes that 4chan post that goes “im a chad but my problems mean i’m stuck with all you incels”
first of all yes I do think she was crossing off her days to escape on a titty calendar, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life
RIP gideon nav u were a chad cursed to live among nuns. u would’ve loved valancy and cyrus’s tasteful nude paintings
ok I’m really tired so this is more free word association than anything else but as long as we’re in the business of drawing parallels… who’s the father who’s the son and who’s the holy spirit. hard mode is not including jod
another silly little newspaper clipping for the Alecto-Was-a-Resurrection-Beast file, but the tradition of all the Lyctors’ last names being their cavalier’s name? John’s last name is Gaius. And like it means Earth and we assume it’s bc he’s from earth, which, yeah, but also if Alecto is the Earth’s resurrection beast then in a way he could be named after her
I’ve seen a lot of posts saying that kiriona is gideon who just can’t be bothered to care anymore, and I kind of agree but also I don’t think that’s quite it. I think nona tells us exactly what the situation is- kiriona is a gideon who is tremendously and hopelessly sad, and trying to cover it up with a flippant and cavalier (ha) attitude. kiriona is a gideon who’s lost harrowhark
thinking about all my TLT theories in light of new information in NTN like – I want to get a good grade in LOCKED TOMB, something both normal to want and possible to achieve
kiriona isn’t quite our gideon because she’s lost harrowhark. because harrowhark ate part of her soul. she’s got a hole where her heart should be because the rest of her is in harrow. she won’t be herself until she gets it back. gets harrow back
I’m apparently not done with Nona thoughts. But. I just think there’s something about how one part of Nona is about just people, small normal people, with mundane goals and dreams and tiny lives and the other part is the story about John destroying all of earth’s little lives. It’s such a nice piece of symmetry. To John all these lives stop mattering as he goes on, he just kills a bunch of people and then all of them and doesn’t really think much of it. But the Nona part of the narrative keeps telling us that these tiny lives are important, they matter, they’re there, not inconsequential things to be forgotten in the larger scheme. You have Nona who loves all of these people, who thinks it’s important to tell them “I love you” and you have Alecto who says: “Where did you put the people? Where did they go?” and I am wholly undone about it.
I think nona and alecto are mutually necessary sides of love. and the central tragedy of NtN (and of the universe’s backstory) is that john killed the thing that nona represented, he killed the earth and he killed the cows that might have watched the sunset, he killed every person’s small and beautiful life. he abandoned it and forgot it, but alecto never did. alecto is the remembering of it– the remembering and the revenge. at least I hope so
we’ve already had a harrowbod gideon, and while it is true that a simultaneous gideonbod harrow is the LAST thing that poor girl needs, what you have to understand is that I think it would be so funny
in a way, nona is harrow AND gideon AND alecto. i feel like nona is the childhood (in the case of gideon and harrow) and straight up LIFE (the collective life of the world, in the case of alecto) that was taken from each of them, one where she was loved and cared for and had adults in her life that did right by her. and just like them, that life was taken from her, but at least she got to have it and love it for six sweet months :’(
and this series keeps pulling this move where it gets us, as the audience, to dismiss a dead character as not being relevant to the plot, as their death being a tool by which the story moves forward with minor amounts of sadness, but THEN turning around and making us care about them utterly, so that their absence leaves a hole in the narrative that can’t be dismissed or forgotten. abigail, magnus, dulcinea, protesilaus, ortus, wake, cristabel.
and nona is just the same!! gideon and harrow had horrible childhoods, that’s the loss we initially dismiss. it’s a sad backstory and all, but we can move on. all those lives that god destroyed when he killed humanity, sad and atrocious of course, but its not like we knew them.
but that’s what nona is! the series is saying, these people deserved better, and they live in a world that took that away from them, and that’s no small loss. its not just a sad backstory anymore, its a hole left where nona should be
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
