my favorite favorite part about harrow the ninth is the whole time gideons hitting you over the head with fucking louis de pointe du lac ass narration. saying shit like “ianthe snaked her wretched hands into the recesses of your unknowable soul” left and right. and then she comes back and she’s like “FUCK YOU FUCKING BITCH FUCK!”
Got a kofi to draw what I want so I decided to do a comic! I always really loved this scene from Nona the Ninth for some reason (I love Wake) and so here’s an interpretation of it. I challenged myself to only take the same time on it as I would a single page kofi (tho I still went over a bit) so it’s more painterly than usual, but it was a cool thing to try and do :>
i have no clue but I hope the saints in tlt work the same way they do in catholicism I hope there’s teenagers praying to gideon the first like “saint of duty, please give me fortitude while I try to do my homework this evening”. the saint of duty can’t hear you, kid, the saint of duty is trying to murder a nun today
so…John’s planning on pulling the plug on the world, right? Like that’s what he’s doing here?
I’ve just been turning these bits of ntn over and over in my head and tbh I can’t stop thinking about the description of 10,000 years of civilization as a first draft. John’s first resurrection didn’t quite end up how he wanted – closest friends all dead, turned traitor, or both, fighting a war on multiple fronts, his only allies the corpse of his accidental bastard daughter and a twenty-something princess with cannibalistic tendencies whom he canonized as part of a failed attempt to revitalize his polycule– but hey, it doesn’t matter, because he can just start over. All of NTN he’s in this depression spiral; he’s falling apart, he’s having orgy parties with his senior staff, he’s got at least part of his subconscious camped out in the comatose mind of a half-dead nineteen year old he tried to have murdered, treating it like a confessional booth; because right there, in the background of his mind through all of this, is the off switch. He can have his breakdown, and then just…let Alecto out. Erase it all, start fresh, and this time he’s got one attempt under his belt, he’s got notes for what to do differently, and so let it all fall to shit! Nobody else is gonna remember any of this anyway. Two worlds, now, that only John will remember. Maybe three, later; maybe four, what’s to stop him from redoing it over and over til it’s just right?
The issue with that, of course, is there’s really no way to treat the world like this and still care about it in the way other people do. You’d lose your ability to be affected by life’s events after a couple reboots and then what’s there to get emotionally invested in? When you’ve turned a person off and back on two, three, four times and you know you’ll probably do it again the next time something happens you don’t quite vibe with, how can you possibly look at them as a real person? Are they a real person, if they only know what you want them to know and do what you want them to do? And once you reach that point, once people aren’t people but project components for you to edit, what are you even bothering with all this for??
John started down this path because he so loved the world; what happens when he reduces the world to something he can no longer afford to love?
Might as well pull that plug for good, yeah?
Anyway. I’m fascinated by the way John’s shitty mental state is dooming the world and it’s everyone else’s bad luck. The rest of the cast is out there fighting for their lives and he’s like *sigh* let’s try that again. take two, everyone!
my take on the programming for mercymorn’s 24 minute funeral:
00:00 to 00:30: greetings and hellos.
00:31 to 1:00: viewing of the body.
01:01 to 02:30: gideon’s funeral speech. he can say whatever he’d like, but it cannot be longer than a minute and a half.
02:45 to 05:00: john’s funeral speech. pre-written; time is allowed for 25 seconds of free-styling at the end.
05:15 to 08:34: the playing of landslide by fleetwood mac. mercy hated this song, and hated every time john tried to play pre-resurrection music for the gang; she included it in her funeral so that john can never listen to it again without being reminded of said funeral and her continuing deadness.
09:00 to 12:00: cremation and mourning. if augustine doesn’t cry, someone is required to pinch his arm until he does.
12:01 to 20:00: the afterparty. mercy has calculated exactly how much alcohol is required to get each attendant perfectly wasted, and requires beverages to be consumed at intervals specific to each individual to fulfill this. limes MUST be cut prior.
20:01 to 20:45: john’s drunken teary speech. not pre-written, but gideon is required to cut him off at the 45 second mark
20:46 to 22:30: attendants must go beyond wasted and into blackout territory.
22:31 to 23:30: augustine’s speech. not pre-written; john is required to cut him off at the 1 minute mark
do you suppose john asked kiriona if she and ianthe were being safe too? or is that concern reserved for harrow?
i do realize there’s a common denominator here but every time i try to imagine john having The Talk with ianthe i get a mental anti-virus software pop-up telling me the page i’m trying to view has been blocked for my own safety
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