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Post Ptolemy's Gate ramble

So I just finished Ptolemy's Gate, thoughts are a bit all over the place and aside from mentioning the obvious I thought I'd dump some thoughts here.

Piper's apathy certainly shocked me. I know she's stressed running the council and she's got loads of organisation to do but oof she sure did come across as cold in her conversation with Kitty. Kitty has that kind of apathetic resignation of grief but it really felt like Piper had already put it behind her despite it only being two days before. Her boss that she worked for died horribly to save them all and she didn't even seem to share a quiet moment of grief with Kitty idk it just felt a little brutal 😅 I had an impression of her being really sweet so I was a bit taken aback.

One thing that really stood out to me was Nathaniel's apathy to the situation, I found it really interesting. I guess something could be said about it being the magician in him.

Nathaniel really has this duality to him, the obvious being Nat vs John Mandrake and of course Nat + Bartimaeus but in chapter 36 part ii something that caught my attention

'it was the feeling of consummate superiority, the delight of power weilded without peril. He danced beneath the night sky, smiting down his enemies.'

It already seems as if he's being elevated to something other- a martyr perhaps, except martyrs have causes and ideals, they do something because they have a strong belief in their justness. And Nathaniel:

'He felt aloof disconnected and alone. If his hatred for demons he had killed was dull and almost matter-of-fact, so was his sympathy for the people whose lives he saved.'

So he seems almost like an avenging angel, I love the religious imagery, especially because it seems to call back to Bartimaeus comparing his body to a holy mosque. But also divine rage is the driving force for an avenging angel and he's no longer even angry at the destruction caused.

'Pride spurred him on.' this almost makes him seem God-like?? His sole motivator is the pride of a deity, and I love that. But it's also just very true to him as a boy, pride spurred him on against Lovelace and against Duval and Whitwell.

When he's alone with Bartimaeus he's taken on this air of not being entirely human. He feels alone and solitary from everything including humaity. But when he rejoins Kitty, Piper and the rest of the magicians waiting for him he's reinvigorated - 'he felt a surge of joyful impatience - 'he would detroy Nouda, rescue the commoners and return to Kitty.' it seems as though he has to be surrounded by people to remind himself he's one of them. It could be seen as an effect of sharing a mind with Bartimaeus, but of course it could be Nathaniel's own human pride and his memories of being othered even as a child. Just gives the impression of this human / higher entity duality.

But also I partly got the impression that this hints to depression- I'm sure it's hardly out of the realm of possibility for Nat to have it. Though it's never stated I think several moments in the books make a good argument for it, including the above- just the numbness to everything. And I guess the sudden change in demeanor at 'surge of joyful impatience' can be read as hopefulness, but it reminded me of the saying that when people have decided to follow through on their s*icidal ideation they come across as happy and like a weight has been lifted from them. Nathaniel is impressively calm for someone who realises he's gravely injured. And while he can be seen as a martyr or hero for his final actions, the hollowness he felt at that moment gives it a more bitter edge.

I think it's made even more sad when compared to Anthony Lockwood, who has that same sense of pride - because he's trying to make his dead parents proud and because he's trying to hide the fact that he doesn't like himself very much. Nathaniel gives this same impression. And Lockwood at the end had reason to be proud, he uncovered a huge conspiracy, his agency became the most famous in London. And Nathaniel had reason to be proud; he's managing to wield the staff of his childhood hero, something he had dreamed of doing, he's had the bravery to unite with a spirit and he's going to take down the biggest threat to London.

But Lockwood gets something Nathaniel doesn't-

There's this subtle idea seen through Lucy's eyes that Lockwood's biggest achievement was fighting through his s*icidal ideation and discovering he has something to live for, even just seeing his friends again.

And Nathaniel just doesn't get that moment.

He sort of acknowledges that he doesn't have to be a powerful leader, that he doesn't need his colleagues approval, that he doesn't need to erase the fear the commoners have of him and other magicians, but without these things he doesn't know what to do with himself. He has no plan for the future, because even before he's injured the idea of a future doesn't seem to have much appeal to him. He already appears to have given up on trying to uncover who Nathaniel is, depite finally having the opportunity to. Like after everything- being beaten, the fear of his colleagues trying to harm him and burying himself in the John Mandrake persona to protect his sensitive side- he doesn't want to uncover the remnants of that boy because he's worried it'll be too difficult to put himself back together.

Or maybe he feels that he already has discovered who Nathaniel is, a deeply unhappy, hollow shell of a person, whose personality has been pulled in so many directions he no longer has a sense of self. He's been stripped back to the barest version of himself and found he doesn't even have the foundations upon which to rebuild himsef. Like discovering dry rot in your walls and you keep pulling and pulling bits of rotting wood away from the home until you've finally got it all, only to realise the house has come down around you- there's nothing left.

He doesn't get this moment where he works through his trauma, where he realises he has a support system, where he realises he's loved. I don't know if Nathaniel ever really knew what it felt like to be loved. I don't think he did. Ptolemy's death was awful and heartbreaking but his short life was filled with affection. And Lockwood realises people do care about him, depite being told that no one does. It hurts so much that Nat felt isolated and alone his whole life, right up to the last minute. Potential love confessions aside, Nathaniel never got a chance to sit and bathe in the warmness of affection. Like Bartimaeus tells him, it's about 'being not doing.' Nathaniel never got to understand the importance of just being, of simply existing as himself or of being happy. He constantly had to be working on the next goal, the next plan, because if he stops working he'll be forced to sit with his thoughts and realise how unhappy he is. And the thought of that is just too much to bear, it's so much easier to give in.

The ending gave the impression of being very romantic, while sad. Nathaniel gets to be remembered as a hero and never has to confront the consequences of his actions with wars in Europe and America that he had a direct role in. Acknowledging his role and dealing with fallout are two very different mountains to climb. And I think that idea of dying like a hero perfectly appeals to Nathaniel's prideful tendencies, and maybe he views it that way to hide the fact it's a convenient way out of his unhappiness and confronting what he's done. It's quite interesting to see that after he's been stripped back to nothing and can't figure out who or what he wants to be if he gets the chance, he still has that vanity and arrogance to him- despite not really being good character traits, they're so authentically Nathaniel, he's been that way right from the start and it's nice little peak of the real him at the end, being so humanly flawed.

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If Ptolemy’s gate had an anime opening

(I’d like to draw it but i lack the skill and time at this moment so here’s just a description of how i see it)

London in the dawn.

Slowly there’s more and more people strolling the streets as there’s more and more light. Then we see Nathaniel walking determined not looking at anything around him, with his eyes fixed in front of him. It’s no longer London and what Nathaniel’s looking at is Gladstone’s staff.  Three figures walk in the opposite direction as him – Bartimaeus, Kitty and Ms. Lutyens – not looking at him, neither he looks at them. He leaves them behind and stops in front of the staff. Nathaniel raises his hand, closer to the staff, only few centimters from it.

That’s when the ground beneath his feet starts to crack.

There’s fear in his face, as he quickly turns around and reaches with his hand to the people that are already too far away. The ground breaks and he’s falling into the flames beneath him.

Suddenly two hands catch his outstretched hand in the very last moment. It’s Bartimaeus trying to pull him up, but not succeding. He’s using all his strength with his eyes closed. When he opens them, it’s not Nathaniel’s hand he’s holding, but Ptolemy’s.

Ptolemy gives him a mild smile as he’s slipping from his grip and falling into the flames. Ground restores itself asi f nothing happened and doesn’t let Bartimaeus follow him.

The scene changes. Egypt. Prague. London. People walk past Bartimaeus, nobody paying him any attention as he always stays the same, sitting at a place where ground devoured Ptolemy.  We only see him from behind, not seeing his face still fixed at the spot. That’s when someone comes closer and into his plane of sight and he looks up.    

It’s Kitty.

With a book in her hand she looks at him with her conspirative smile. She’s trying to give him the book – Ptolemy’s book – but is interrupted by commotion behind her. With a stoic look she looks at the wolfs trying to get to her through the crowd. Bartemaeus stands up and a wall of nothingness appears behind him and he disappears in it.

Kitty reaches with her hand but stops before touching the edge of a black wall that seems to be spreading. She hesitates. Wolfs are getting closer. With her face to the wolfs and her back to the void, she let’s herself fall in it.

She’s like a small drop in a vastness of ocean. With her eyes closed and holding the book on her chest she’s diving deeper and deeper. Innumerable small flares come from periphery and she absorbs them, slowly becomeing brighter and brighter. Soon there’s so many flares everything is white.

We can’t see into her face but there’s Kitty lying on the ground, dead, not far away there’s Nathaniel’s and Ptolemy‘s dead body, Nathaniel holding the staff with one hand and trying to reach Kitty with the other. A lion’s legs are walking between them. Lion  stops and we can finally see his head from the front, but the mane is obscuring his face. The lion disappears and instead there’s a lioness shedding a tear. Then the lioness is gone too and there’s only Bartimaeus as the egyptian boy with stone cold expression. And in his black eyes there’s a vastness of the universe.

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Nat: well, thank you Kitty for reminding me the day i died and that it’s all my fault, i almost forgot

Kitty@nat: remember that one time you stormed into my workplace and dramatically kidnapped me to only help answer your existencial crisis questions and then we got roped into fake dating at a muscial that turned into a government coop cause I do

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also nathaniel breaking gladstone’s staff to save the people

the tool that was the reason the whole shitty empire was expanded upon and became the dystopia (or became worse) that nat and kitty had to survive in, the tool a despot/tyrant used to conquer others

perhaps theres some symbolism there

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People say that Asmira and Kitty are very similar, and sure there's a lot of superficial stuff, but really they're very opposite. Asmira's arc was all about going from following orders blindly to thinking for herself. Meanwhile, Kitty started out questioning everything then learned how to trust

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Fandom, we do not talk about Simpkin enough and so I am going to ramble about headcanons about him and tell you why I cry about him every sixteen minutes

Keep reading

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NEWS! I’m delighted to announce my next series: THE OUTLAWS SCARLETT AND BROWNE, coming out in the UK with @WalkerBooksUK @WalkerBooksYA @DHABooks Visit bit.ly/1nP7fn5 for more… 😃 #Scarlett&Browne https://www.instagram.com/p/Bzz0qQbAwc3/?igshid=1ruhzld11t8ct

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Parody of that reylo comic. It totally fits.

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I promise I’ll shut up about the Bartimaeus books after this, but this is my favorite POV switch of all time

(Bartimaeus’s POV:)

“But we haven’t time…”

I spoke gently to quiet him. “Just watch and listen.”

I didn’t show it, but I was worried myself now. The boy was right; we really had no time.

(Switching to Nathaniel’s POV:)

“But we haven’t time-” Nathaniel began.

“Just shut up and watch!” The fly was buzzing frantically around their prison. It sounded decidedly panicked. 

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Fandom posts might lead the casual observer to believe that Kitty and Nathaniel made the conscious decision to team up and save the world, but actually Nathaniel got interrupted in the middle of informally arresting her and they were roped into fake dating at a musical where the body jacking apocalypse started, so they were just like ‘I guess this is our lives now’

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Don’t give up.

I know sometimes we all laugh at Mandrake’s magician wannabe ways but I now give a shoutout that even though Nat took some time to get there, he is still a very very very admirable character! Go give his character arc some love! 😆

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Do you want to hear something ironic? Faquarl probably could have used Ptolemy’s Gate to get back to the other place.

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One of my favourite things about the Bartimaeus trilogy is that it’s entirely explicit that Mandrake gets a weird and slightly creepy post-mortem crush on Kitty Jones and makes her into this perfect idol in his mind and basically is over the moon in love with this version of her he imagines up and this whole business is definitively linked to his Mandrake persona and portrayed as not a good thing. It isn’t until he starts being Nathaniel again and less of an asshole, and when he starts realizing how shitty it was for him to barge into her life again, that his sort of creepy crush starts being much less creepy and something that’s actually about Kitty as a person.

Also the fact that his secret over the top idealized crush on Kitty was occurring at the exact same time that Bartimaeus was wearing her form whenever possible.

Also the fact that he was totally jealous about Bartimaeus apparently being loyal to her because what the hell Bartimaeus is his djinni!!!!

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Remember when we were talking about dark!Nat? Here you are… actually there might be more, because I like writing about him.

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Ok, so I feel like we don’t talk about this enough and I mean like. can we just. Nat made this scrying glass when he was like, 11. And it was the shittiest scrying glass in existence pretty much. But he made it. This thing was his 11 year old pride and joy. And then these commoners just come and steal it from him. Bart literally says it was like Nat took this as a personal offense. This bronze scrying glass with an annoyingly stubborn imp. Then fast-forward 2/3 years. Nat is extremely successful and is quickly climbing the ranks of the government. He has finally captured the last remaining member of the resistance. He is about to take her into government custody and end this once and for all. And then… she says she has a gift for him. From her jacket she extracts a shiny bronze disc. Nat is literally so excited that he’s finally found his scrying glass, a glorified piece of sheet metal he made when he was eleven, he doesn’t think, even for a second, that hey maybe this is a trick to get me distracted so kitty and her friend can escape. He is literally so focused on trying to catch this scrying glass that he doesn’t realize kitty and jakob escaping. All of this over a scrying glass. A freaking scrying glass. Wth Nat. Siriusly though, you guys have no idea how amusing I find this😂

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It’s interesting when you think about how Kitty would view Asmira’s mission in RoS. Kitty knows how corrupt and terrible government can be, especially when people - like her parents - follow it blindly. Asmira is basically doing that with Balkis. Even if Kitty and Asmira hit it off because they’re both strong, independent woman with similar personalities, I feel like that might be a point of disagreement.