#(not just because of gaius but)

[saiintofawe]

nona the ninth will always be one of the most beautiful and most painful books in the world to me because. it is about love in its every possible form. it's about the love you have for someone who takes care of you and the love you have for those you care for. it's about loving someone after seeing all their rough edges and ugly sides and choosing to love someone even if it hurts and even if you know it might doom you. it's about not choosing to love someone, but loving them anyway because sometimes it's not up to you to choose. it's about loving the dogs on the street and the stranger you met at the park and the child that never speaks to anyone in class. it's about loving the creases in someone's face when they laugh and the way their hips sway and how they can't stand still. it's about your love for the sea and the pang of grief at the tought that it is being poisoned. it's about the immense pain that comes with the loss of someone you loved. it's about bearing that loss, it's about letting that cut burn because its presence means that there was love. and that cannot be taken away. you have loved, you have been loved, and you always will. and the fact that it hurts and it ends doesn't erase the fact that at the end of the day, it's always love at the core of it all. in its every form and expression, by turning into rage, or kindness, or utterly destructive force, it all starts and ends in love. you can't remove that. you can't take loved away.

[technically-human]

Merthur AU except the crown prince of Camelot is weirdly pro-magic

[procrastinationaccount]

One fun thing about the first gen Lyctors is that John quite literally took away their childhoods. Not that they had great childhoods they'd cherish the memory of, I'd bet against that, but god, they have so little context to understand themselves. They came into life, Pygmalion style, adults and in love but not knowing why. If the younger lyctors ever tried to swap parental horror stories, they couldn't even take a stab. They toss around "brother" and "sister" and "son" with each other, but a very real way, John is the only father they've ever known.

[vaguely-concerned]

sometimes I think of all the on-the-surface warm, well-meaning but deeply ineffectual advice and attention john gives harrow through harrow the ninth (make some soup and get some sleep! get a hobby! don't be so hard on yourself! self care harrow! as long as I need take no actual responsibility in this relationship whatsoever I would have loved to be your dad!) set up against the stark truth that with his other hand he has been staging her attempted horrific murder again and again and again like a living nightmare on the logic that it will 'put her down or fix her'. and then I find that I wish there is a hell. a special hell where twitch streamers turned necromantic death emperors go

[pencildragons]

[rolls over to face you at the sleepover] bro do you think any of the lyctors ever used AD (alecto's dead) as a way to reference the passage of time and nearly gave john an honest to god heart attack because he thought they'd suddenly somehow remembered the christian calendar system. no hey wait stop pretending to be asleep this is important dude

[fatedroses]

he really just yoinked the coolest title ever and has one of my favorite themes v-v

[solarg0blin]

I redrew some Merlin characters to be more historically and culturally accurate! The text is their original names in a later Latin script, yoinked from a display in the Corinium Museum, Cirencester. (Sneaky edit to add: Y'all are incredibly welcome to use this in any way you want, I would love to see more of my home's culture being represented more accurately in media!!) (Also on Instagram)

Unlabelled version under the cut!!

[1driedpersimmon]

Time to go home Saffron 😌

[two-crows-in-a-trenchcoat]

the fact merlin openly said I'm a sorcerer in front of uther!??! like directly to him

and lived!??!!?!

a testament to Arthur being in love with him from the start ig

[sojourner-between-worlds]

I can't get over Gaius.

*spoilers below this point*

Like.

He has so. Much. Faith. that he doesn't even go straight home. He stops in the market. And not just at one place. He buys produce. Then he buys wine. Then he buys toys for his boys. Then he goes home.

And when he gets home, he still doesn't go directly to his child. He first goes to snuff out the candles on the alters to the Roman gods.

He didn't have to see to know. He simply believed.

[theriverbeyond]

John changing his homies' names and keeping those names secret is sooooo funny to me... remember how Mercymorn considered the (post-res) Lyctors' names to be sacred and secret and was really upset that John was just throwing her name around and he basically called her a silly billy and told her to get over it. All while he had erased the whole gang's original names via purging the ability to hear, know, or understand them

[g1deonthefirst]

i just think the fandom wastes a lot of breath litigating the morality of wake's plan to kill the baby she impregnated herself with and what that says about her as a mother. when we should be spending more time talking about how john manufactured a situation in which wake felt like her only way to stop 10,000 years of brutal imperialism, 10,000 years of children dying or being turned into soldiers or both, was to impregnate herself and kill the baby. and we should be talking about what that says about him as a father, since he's purposefully positioned himself as god-the-father.

[salty-we-never-got-mergana]

I know this sounds like a horrible thing to say but...I kinda hate Gauis.

Like seriously... it boggles my mind that the fics I've read with Morgana views this man in such a warm light when he not only gaslights her about her magic but blames her for the choices she tries to gain her own autonomy whilst he steals it from her by keeping her in the dark of her own magic.

Like he has the audacity to compare Morgana to Merlin? He's accepting of Merlin's magic and gives him the tools to learn and control his own magic meanwhile Morgana is not only kept in the dark but given no guidance...

And it's her own fault for choosing Morgause.

Honestly out of all the "good" characters I wished died, I wish it was Gaius. I hate that he survives the series.

They should have made him a Roman with loyalties to Lucius Tiberius and then he betrays Camelot reluctantly and then we can see that scene of Gwaine loosing his temper and lopping Gaius' head off. That would've been a joy to see.

Telling Merlin that he did the right thing by murdering his friend because she chose to use her magic wrong, never mind that nobody was helping her in the first place and she was on her own. Never mind that everyone decided to initially gaslight her.

No fucking accountability.

[direquail]

One of the many things I find funny and irritating is the slant of a lot of interpretations of Alecto's name (that it's about feminine rage)--on this here wlw internet in the year of our lord 2024, it's easily made to figure as rage against God, or rage against patriarchy, or religious oppression, and therefore an allusion to the idea that she's going to get her vengeance on John for betraying and oppressing her somehow, but like

John is the one who named her Alecto. He's the one who named her that. So, naming her "Alecto" is alluding to the embodiment of John's rage--their rage, since they are joined inseparably (John even explicitly says that when he first perceives her: "You wouldn't stop screaming. You were so scared. You were so goddamn mad").

He says of Alecto to Harrow, "In a very real way, you are [Alecto's] children". At a very surface level, Alecto is (depending on the text or tradition), one of the Furies--famously, in several surviving Greek tragedies, who punish Orestes for the crime of killing his mother. In fact, in Aeschylus' Oresteia, they declare that they are specifically bound to avenge matricide.

So the name "Alecto" alludes to the nature of John's mission and how he sees it.

It also implies that his divine rage, the rage that gives him power, the power that makes him divine, that he either represents or wants to represent, is feminine rage. He was chosen by Earth (which, Furies are sometimes the daughters of Gaia); he is her champion, however he's managed to fuck that up. Once the truth of that comes out, it becomes clear that all of his power comes from her.

And that's why you get statements from Tamsyn Muir like:

“[T]he God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to. Even he identifies himself as the God who became man and the man who became God. But the divine in the Locked Tomb is essentially feminine on multiple axes – I think Nona will illuminate that a little bit more."

So yes, he plays the role of Emperor and God and Teacher, with all of the things that implies. And I don't think it should be discounted. But he also is (and partly sees himself as) the chosen champion of a goddess, or what is for all intents & purposes for a human like him a goddess. He is her avenger, and while she sleeps, her avatar.

And I don't think we're meant to read him purely as a parasite who's taking advantage of her to gain power for himself, either. Or an oppressive, Kronos-like figure. Especially if you consider Palamedes' theory of the Grand Lysis, even if he was purely motivated by desire for power before (which I really doubt), there are parts of each in the other, now. What was clear and separate before is uncertain and interpenetrated. Is his rage his own, or hers? Is his mission of revenge his, or hers? If he wants power, is that his own selfishness, or her desire to survive?

And does it matter?

[1071png]

~🌄👑~

[vespula-acadica]

I so badly want to study the genetics of tlt universe