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