#FUCK JOHN GAIUS!!!!

[xoshepard]

he’s saying he didn’t want gideon to remember or for any of them to remember because they wouldn’t forgive themselves but it’s literally because he doesn’t want anyone to question him for 1) killing the entire population of the earth and then 2) making himself a fucking god

this guy really killed 10 billion people and only resurrected a few million and made them all worship him and forget what he did

he refuses to face consequences or even being questioned by people that used to be his partners- making them his “saints” and shit, like he talks about the “cult” thing as though his hand was forced and as though it was a front he put up to get publicity but literally all he wanted in the end was to be a fuckin cult leader and he made a whole world based on that

he is literally a manchild that got unspeakable power and used that power to do the worst shit possible i hate this guy so fucking much

[2impostors]

genesis 🌏

[nepenthean-sleep]

john gaius is an interesting character because he is a charismatic and nice and funny guy AND he is an indigenous man living in his homeland that has been colonized by a brutal imperial force for centuries AND he's an anticapitalist working hard to prevent climate change AND he's a biologist trying to save all of humanity and get everyone out alive, not just the elite with the means to pay for it AND he is an indigenous healer being targeted and hunted down by multiple colonial governments AND he is entrusted with the powers to save people by the spirit of the earth itself AND he kills everyone on the face of the planet to try and stop the trillionaires from leaving but fails AND he resurrects his colleagues and friends but wipes their memories AND he cannot forgive himself but also cannot let go of the very feeling that made him guilty to begin with AND he puts the soul of a planet and 10 billion people into a flesh-and-bone doll AND when she is furious at him (what they did to you and what they wrung from you and what shape they made you fill) and scaring the others he locks her away AND he's a masterful manipulator AND his actions towards the earth are a metaphor for sexual assault AND he based an entire society around violating other people's bodily autonomy AND he's committing genocide by killing all the other habitable planets AND he kills his closest friends a second time when they learn the truth about him AND he half-resurrects his own daughter to use as a weapon AND he's a neoliberal fascist and serial liar and in all his time searching for revenge, he still hasn't noticed that revenge is out for him instead

[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

[fortjester]

screenshot of a poll by @kobolde from may of 2023 that i took for tlt meme purposes and left to rot in the depths of my files for over a year lol

[future-crab]

A funny thing I've noticed about responses to the Locked Tomb is that most people I talk to agree that the memes and references are kind of hit or miss for them, but no one can agree on which are the hits and which are the misses.

I've seen someone whose taste and opinions I really respect say, "Look, not all of the memes in these books work for me and I think overall there are too many of them, but None House, Left Grief is fucking gold," and someone else whose taste and opinions I really respect say, "Look, I don't hate all the memes in these books, but None House, Left Grief is just unforgivable I hate it."

[croweofthebog]

oh so we’re all about subverting the chosen one trope until the chosen one nukes the earth and eats the solar system. i see how it is

[mercymornsimpathizer]

everyone wants to talk about how gideon must feel about pyrrha's relationship with nona, well I want to talk about how gideon must feel about john's relationship with harrow. like, you're trapped in the body of the girl you love and your long lost father is telling her how he wishes he were her dad, how if he had a daughter he would want it to be a girl like her. like, everyone loves harrow and no one loves you. fuck!!

[majorgammage]

Pyrrha says Gideon the First’s ORIGINAL name, here, change my mind:

Compare the G dash to the standard em dash above it…it’s longer and thicker, just like the placeholders in John’s speech. AND it’s followed by a comma, which isn’t standard if it’s just indicating interruption.

That’s G’s real name, and somehow not even Alecto can hear it…so what did John DO?

Audiobook folks, does this stand out in the audio version as much as it does visually??

[brungeons-and-bragons]

Me starting GTN after hearing about it from a friend: NEEEEEEED the bone lesbians to kiss

Me finishing NTN: love is all around me and god needs to die.

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

cytherea the first will drive me absolutely fucking bonkers if i let her. like, she knows that the cavalier system is fucked up. she knows that. but she's so willing to participate in it. she cradles gideon's head and pets her hair and tells her how awful it is that harrow is taking advantage of her, meanwile, they're performing a trial that cytherea asked them to do.

all of her compliments for gideon feed into the cavalier dynamic. gideon is strong, useful, helpful, marvelous, a thing apart, and cytherea wonders if harrow even knows what she has in her. she is never anything self-contained. she is a damn good cavalier, and even when cytherea pities her, even when she aches for her, even when she's angry on her behalf, she can never seem to find anything else to say about her.

and, see, the problem with cytherea is that she views herself that way, too. even knowing how toxic and unfair it is, ten thousand years can form a hell of a habit. she says herself, "i am a necromancer and i am a cavalier," and something about the way she interacts with john and the others tells me she's not just talking about loveday.

john says it himself. cytherea was the best of them. the kindest, the most willing, the most humane, overworked and underloved, and none of them noticed. the man she served and loved and worshipped as a god for ten thousand years didn't even notice that he was wearing her into the ground until it was too late to stop. and would he have stopped? i doubt it.

cytherea was sick. she was genuinely exhausted and physically weak and in pain all the time, forever, constantly, and that's how they talk about her. so yeah, no wonder she had a warped view of personal value and duty. that's how she was treated for ten thousand years. that's how she thought of herself. be kind, be helpful, be unbothered, be willing, be pleasant, be useful, be active, be happy, be strong, be strong, be strong.

is it any fucking wonder she snapped?

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

[mayasaura]

Do we ever think about how Gideon rejects Pyrrha's attention as a mother because it's a little late to come into her life and instead accepted John as a father? (even though she had some reasons to hate him)? sure, john gave her everything she wanted, but why is pyrrha different? I wish Pyrrha had a chance :((

I think the main difference is that Pyrrha did have a chance to do better by Gideon, and she fumbled it.

John gets dad status because he stepped up as her father as soon as he knew she existed. She knows he had his own blood-related reasons for launching a military expedition to recover her body, but it still must have meant a hell of a lot to her that he did. Vindication for all her childish hopes that maybe she was just lost, and not abandoned. See, Harrow? Her dad really would have come for her, if he had known.

Pyrrha proves the exact opposite. She did know, and it changed nothing. The whole time Gideon was growing up on the Ninth, telling herself there was someone out there looking for her, Pyrrha knew exactly where she was. She thought she must be dead, but she never actually checked. She never even tried to claim her body. It was an extremely complicated situation for Pyrrha, but from Gideon's perspective, that looks a hell of a lot like abandonment.

So yeah. John gets dad privileges despite being a fucked up bastard, because he's the fucked up bastard who went looking for her. Pyrrha watched her fall to the surface of the Ninth and quite literally left her there to rot.

[theriverbeyond]

john gaius is a dude who was so supremely awful that he managed to create a club of people who hated him out of all his friends

[beedreamscape]

"See here? Yeah, this is the part where I hurt you."

[twink-with-an-agenda]

These three make me absolutely loose my mind on a daily basis