#atn theories

[over-bi-the-wayside]

Unhinged tlt theories until I get Alecto news: day 3

Somewhere in the deep archives of the Sixth is a copy of the King James Bible. Specifically that one — no one’s quite sure who King James is, but the Bible is one of the greatest novels ever written, depicting metaphors. Every child studies it to learn metaphor — they’re pretty sure that Jesus is a metaphor for the Resurrection, and the apostles are the cavaliers. Maybe Jesus is a necromancer, they aren’t sure.

Of course, when Kiriona showed up, it turned into an academic disaster, every theory they ever had about Jesus is thrown into to flux, a generation of scholars are pissed to have to redo all of their projects, and suddenly maybe Jesus is a metaphor for the intense power held by the Tower Prince. But then what does that make the apostles? The houses? The cohort? They aren’t really sure.

John finds this entire situation hilarious and sends them a file box of Jesus Rock, pamphlets from other sects, and a different Bible. This is the greatest mystery of the millennia

[beguilingcorpse]

i hope alecto goes into so much detail regarding first and second gen lyctors and their relationships. i would read a whole book about just them. how did they all get along immediately post-resurrection? what inspired them to found each of their houses? how did it feel when the first pair ascended? what did augustine experience when he killed and ate his brother? why did mercy kill cristabel? what really happened with anastasia and samael? what about the ones we don't know much about - ulysses and titania, cyrus and valancy, casseiopeia and nigella? did the first generation even try to stop the second from ascending? how much did they each individually hate john? frankly i could watch a 20 season reality tv show about the 10,000 years the lyctors spent together on the mithraeum but barring that i will DEVOUR whatever tazmuir decides to give us about them in atn

[n1ghtwr1ter]

This is how it ends:

Gideon is going to take Alecto’s place as the soul of the Earth, because Alecto is long-dead and you can’t go home again. This will not involve her being Gideon anymore, mind you - the soul of a planet isn’t anything like a human being, because it is so large and contains so many multitudes. It contains concepts, like love and hate and forgiveness and mercy. It contains concepts like the freedom of the winds to blow, the mercy of the rains to soak the earth, the forgiveness of spring after a long and devastating winter. All of these, we have seen, Gideon also contains - and so the Earth will be Gideon, after a fashion. Hell, I suspect that the new citizens of Earth might even *name* it Gideon.

Gideon will be big and bright, full of promise and purpose. She will love the people who walk upon her ground, who ply her waters, who till her soil and coax new life from bare dirt. She will be a wonderful place to live - a new paradise, even, if you’re from the dead and dying Houses or the desperately struggling exoplanets. And in all the ways that matter, she will be Gideon.

And in all the ways that don’t matter, she won’t be Gideon anymore. They’re little ways, ways that will only matter to a very few, who will likely tell themselves that this is a good ending, this is the best thing for her, she always wanted freedom and what’s freer than being an entire planet? You can’t lock up a planet anywhere. They will tell themselves not to stand at her grave and weep. She isn’t there; she’s everywhere.

But you can’t kiss a planet. You can’t hold a planet. You can feel the whisper of the breeze through your hair, but it will never be her breath ghosting across your skin. You can feel the touch of the water all around you as you wade into the sea, but it will never be her arms embracing you. You tell yourself that you have no right to her, never did - especially not after how you treated her, especially not after what she did for you and, eventually, did for everyone - but you can’t help it: you miss her. It’s Gideon, and she belongs to everyone - but you miss your Gideon. And she is gone. You will never see her again.

It’s a very lovely and poetic ending and it’ll be a fitting end for the series but I hate it with every fiber of my being because god fucking dammit, those two kids deserved to be able to have their own lives, to learn how to be human beings together, to learn haltingly and with plenty of mess how to love each other in ways that did not rend or scourge. But I truly don’t think they will.

I know, I know, I’m a pessimist, what’s the evidence, etc.

- all of the parallels being established between Gideon and Alecto:

“The resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love,” how it’s Gideon’s sword now lying there when Harrow enters the tomb

The golden eyes

The healing abilities

The forgiveness

The love

The urge to be Harrow’s cavalier, and John’s

The anger

But also, I’m pretty sure Tamsyn said somewhere that all of the series is just cover for one simple, stupid joke. And what’s simpler and stupider than

I’m sure there’s a lot more evidence that I can’t remember just now - I’ll add it onto this post later like my little conspiracy board. I just can’t be arsed to look it up right now because thinking about it makes me want to die. But I’ve been very reluctantly working on this theory for months now and nothing I’ve seen has convinced me I’m wrong.

[beedreamscape]

My crack theory for ATN is that John will use Kiriona to preserve the sun (and the nine houses) by transferring the 'godhood' to her, which is why he didn't resurrect her in a regular body but in an immortal one, also why he's been flaunting her as his heir tower prince yadda yadda, so he can go fuck off and become mortal again and live the rest of his days on earth, frying that bacon Tamsyn talked about.

The tension of the book will either be him failing in doing that or succeeding and now they have the job to turn Kiriona mortal again.

With this also fulfilling the generational ructions she talks about.

If anything, John is crafty, and it'd be foolish of us to think he doesn't have a plan, what that plan is gonna try to achieve is where I fall flat, but we know the first step has been completed: the Tomb is open and Alecto is free (and if we consider those dreams are his actual connection to Alecto, he might've known about Harrow's soul swap and getting her back was also part of the plan).

[transbutchblues]

hello locked tomb fandom !

please tell me what you would like to see in the document i mentioned a few days ago, where i try to make an analysis of TLT and to write down every relevant information in the same document, to make it easier to create theories. for now i have written +20 pages, and my list of things to put in it is this :

• information about each House (planet, Lyctor, names, other thoughts).

• John + Alecto + the Lyctors (name meanings, main informations, pre-Res,…)

• a small analysis of the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar A Poe and all its parallels to John/Alecto

• House characters on which I have something to say (mostly about name meanings, from the name guides but also from my own brain + theories i’ve seen)

• BOE characters (name meanings and/or theories) + Blood of Eden itself

• Resurrection Beasts (status, appearance, which planet they might be)

• the River + the Tower + Hell/Beyond the River (layers of the River, stoma, whose souls are in Hell, what Hell is, the Tower ciphers, thoughts about the Tower and the devils)

• informations we have on all different variations of Lyctorhood (perfect lyctorhood, regular lyctorhood, imperfect lyctorhood with Gideon/Pyrrha and Harrow/Gideon, Grand Lysis) + other thoughts/comments on Lyctorhood

• comments on every chapter of GtN, HtN and NtN, with a color code to note on which re-read / after which books we can notice the meaning of a quote. not a summary of the chapters, i’m mostly re-writing all the annotations i put in my copies. this is probably what will take me the longest, i’m doing it for GtN right now and it’s exhausting

• for each chapter, which skull is represented.

• for each John chapter in NtN, the bible verse (+ the bible verse in the ARC)

(for some of these things i use posts made by users here, and if i still have the source i put it in the doc)

please tell me if you have any other ideas ! my hyperfixation is hyperfixating, i just think about TLT all the time

[robot-girl-bites]

A theory Ive not really seen in the fandom (though I could've just missed it) is why Alecto would have given John power over death if, in her own words, "I picked you to change". She was dying and she chose him to change things but she gave him power over death? It just seems off to me

But what if she didn't? What if John got the point of her gift Wrong. Power over thanergy and thalergy in general, power over death *and* life, the power to change things and help her

But the first thing he discovered his power on was the corpses he worked with, so he and the lyctors misinterpreted it as power over death solely, and that formed a framework that prevented them from realizing what the gift was

Alecto gave John the power to change things and heal, but he misunderstood and used it for destruction and death

The lyctors got the process wrong and became "half dead cannibals"

But in NtN, Palamedes and Camilla get the process right and become a proper lyctor

So maybe in AtN, Harrow can get Alecto's gift Right and Change things

We messed things up originally, but give us time... Please, just give us time. And we can Fix things

--

Would love to hear what other people think!

[laurenttheninth]

there’s so much discussion happening around gideon and harrow for atn but i truly trust tazmuir to give us a narratively satisfying conclusion even if it fucking wrecks us forever

i think we need to talk about the two things we should actually fear re: atn which is

— alecto encounters the “free moustache rides” shirt and doesn’t recognize it (made worse if pyrrha and paul see this)

— one of the tridentarii dies and the other survives

[dammit-tazmuir]

I AM SHAKING but HELLO. Okay. Okay please ALSO consider...

All of this extra saying John can't die, UNLESS Alecto also dies.

"Spray and walk away" could imply either him not being around for the second run (if the death is permanent) OR that he wouldn't be responsible for the second. That he'd just live as a normal person instead of being God, maybe even a mortal one, or that he'd become an even truer Resurrection Beast than he already is and just... wander through the far reaches of space or something, leaving the new world to its own devices.

And "that's why I made the Tomb" followed first and foremost by what could be read as "so I can reliably die when I want to (just not before)."

And then compare THAT to...

Like it's pretty much guaranteed that neither Kiriona nor Ianthe fully know what he's thinking or what he wants, but if there's ANY truth to what he's told Kiriona...

And like, this man is experiencing new levels of rock bottom, with just how much he's personally lost all at once in the last six months + having been fighting and gradually losing this much for this whole myriad with next to nothing to actually show for it and his enemies closer to turning the tide than ever. But it isn't the first time he's been really, really low, either...

And I believe this one. If he'd SAID something like "if she'd just put a bullet in me then and there, I would have thanked her," I'd think he was being hyperbolic or straight up lying. But the fact that he doesn't quite say it here, that he's evasive about it, suggests it's genuine.

Of course we know what she did instead, and that discovery changed everything, at least for the time being. But he's never really been able to fix things, has he? Not in all this time.

He chose punishment of the wicked over protecting the masses and it didn't even work. He's never succeeded at finishing what he started with that. He's known since becoming God that the other RBs were out there, and then the reality was even worse than he anticipated. It still seems likely something really bad will happen if he so much as SETS FOOT in the perimeter of the system. Maybe not something that would actually kill him, but something much worse than just the pursuing RBs just moving toward it, for him to have parked for weeks at the edge (which would still draw them that direction) but not dared to actually cross the border.

He loves Alecto, he needs Alecto, but he fears so many things, and he puts her in a box. To the women we've left behind, does he have to drink to that? Forgiveness not so hard, nor anger so long, said over 9,000 years ago, and now there can be no forgiveness. ("For whom?" For a long time, he did not answer.) He's traveled the face of the universe and poisoned it to match his grief. Now the last of his old friends are gone, the very last lost long ago as far as he'd known, and now turned against him regardless. His partners are gone, and their blood is directly on his hands. Everyone he loved gone or fled. And he's never recovered, not really, not from any of it.

"If we weren't around, I don't know what he'd do." All his prospects now in two baby devotees, one of whom is his newly discovered and already dead adult daughter, who is her own person yet may also be tapped into the same mega-soul he shares with Alecto.

Has her existence changed things? Created a new option that never existed before, or the possibility for one he's willing to take a risk on? Is he trying to play Kiriona to fill that dying role so he doesn't have to after all, or trying to mold her into a true successor so he can leave finishing his work to her and finally be done with it himself? Or has nothing changed, except maybe that now Kiriona dies alongside him and Alecto too?

Whatever the case, it damn sure feels like he's ready to finally put the first draft dream to bed...

John has to die for a Second Resurrection

Okay, I just developed the most insane theory, but I'm sure I found out why John can't resurrect people anymore, (apparently not even his own daughter), but still dreams of The Great Cleaning. The key is to look at the first resurrection and the poem at the very beginning of Nona the Ninth. Warning: if I'm as right with my theory as I hope, it could tell a lot about Alecto the Ninth.

Thing is, and that is what brings me to this post, he obviously *wants* to do it in the future, as @thanergetic-hyperlinks pointed out here. If we look at the poem we'll see that indeed John implies a second resurrection. Let's put this first draft dream of mine to bed. This time will be the time we get it right.

He also mentions this opportunity (resurrection, new beginning) in his talk with Harrow, as if it was a possibility.

But how? And at this point, I can connect two points of which I always wondered how they fit together. The fact that John apparently wants to die ("Lie down beside you; die; and sleep the night") and the fact that he apparently plans to resurrect people (and houses) a second time. But I think I know found the answer.

To resurrect people for the first time (house population) he had to kill eight planets, Pluto and the sun. My point is, he obviously needed a whole fucking lot of thanergy (death energy to do that.) But that sun is gone, where will he get that thanergy this time? I would assume he can't just use random suns because it would produce a new wave of Resurrection Beasts (and because he would surely just do it, if he could.)

And he seemingly (as @dammit-tazmuir pointed out here) wants to kill Dominicus to start over. What else should he mean with "I'll kill the light"? He wants to sweep out his old solar system. But! The interesting thing about the Dominicus system is, that its death would create a great blossom of thanergy without creating any Resurrection Beasts that could become dangerous to him. Because he already controls it. He is the soul of the Dominicus system.

(Okay, I've seen the theory somewhere that in reality Alecto's energy holds Dominicus alive. But Alecto can't do necromancy so I think he is in any case the catalysator. The point is, that the Dominicus system depends on him.)

What would happen if God died? What he held together must fall apart. The solar system he powers would die. All people would die. It would create a gigantic mass of thanergy that he could use to build a new one. What he hasn't done so far because "the cost would be too great". Maybe because his friends were still alive? "When everyone we loved has gone or fled"

And yes, I see you say: "But John claimed he wasn't able to die."

But

It's John. (And it's even ome of his weird answers, where he not really declines something ("I can't die", "I did kill all those guys on purpose"), but merely implies the answer "I didn't get where I am by being able to die", "guys as careful as I don't have accidents")

He himself says in the poem that he will die.

Harrow (last one in the line of tomb keepers says that the tomb would house "the death of the lord")

And I'll go a step further. I think he really can't return to the Houses without dying. In the poem he returns to the Tomb and dies.

And I think it's his plan to do so. Return to the Houses, kill the system, make it clean. Create the big thanergy bloom that's needed for a restart. But... You'll now might say, what use could he have from doing that? He would be dead then!

But a) he doesn't need to stay dead forever, he only needs to do it for a few minutes, so the system can die. (As in HtN demonstrated maybe), and b) what happens to individuals that experience a sudden death in the TLT universe?

Dying would make him the Resurrection Beast of his own solar system.

[over-bi-the-wayside]

Creating absurd/ridiculous TLT theories until I get some ATN news: Day 2

So Crux was essentially Harrow’s third parent. He was the most trusted person to Pelemena and Priamhark. What if they were a polycule and it just never became relevant in the text, and Gideon just never found it more important than her hatred for Crux? Mortus could also fit that position

[beguilingcorpse]

when harrow is reading out the summons from the first house at the very beginning of gtn the letter says the following:

"The Emperor calls now for postulants to the position of Lyctor, heirs to the eight stalwarts who have served these ten thousand years: as many of them now lie waiting for the rivers to rise on the day they wake to their King, those lonely Guard remaining petition for their numbers to be renewed and their Lord above Lords to find eight new liegemen." (paperback p. 39)

which on first read sounds like pretty standard catholic-esque language about a second coming and New Life, etc etc, but upon reread it's like. hang on. "rivers to rise" sounds a lot like The River. the passage implies that the lyctors who have died fighting the resurrection beasts will be resurrected (again, for some of them) a la second coming.

are we going to see some more og lyctors in alecto????

[fleshymeatbag]

Do you guys think this will be part of ATN at all?

I'd love to know more about them.

[haphazardlyannotated]

#and on a spiritual level I think nona is 'would you still love me if I was a worm'#she can't take care of herself#she's not useful#but they love her#they would love her no matter who or what she turned out to be#and isn't that unconditional love the heart of the question#maybe the worm with problems was the worm we still loved all along#the locked tomb#ntn spoilers#nona the ninth

(tags via @mayasaura)

On today’s episode of “The Alectopause is Slowly Driving Me to Insanity”

I had the genuine, only partially joking, thought today: “what if the strangely numerous amount of worm references and metaphors are leading up to a ‘would you still love me if I was a worm’ joke”

[fkapommel]

I believe that it is thematically necessary for griddlehark full lyctorhood, or on Harrowhark Christ

Together, Harrow and Gideon complete the symbolism of Christ. You have the obvious Christographic imagery in the start and end of Gideon's life: she is a "virgin" birth, a genetic product of God without any sexual interaction between her mother and father; she was concieved in order to die, specifically to be sacrificed to save the souls - in a literal and metaphorical sense - of the innocent, i.e. non-necros; and she died ultimately by her own choice, dying with the use of pentrative weapons.

But Harrow is literally the "child of man" - she is the cumulation of a generation, not one but many, the many made one. Harrow resembles young Jesus debating and educating the priests of the Temple, already knowing more about the arts of the spirit, of life and death, than his teachers as an infant. Both are prodigies of their craft. She is literally and figurarively carrying her cross all of HtN, the sword physically resembles a cross and is a burden of both her and Gideon's sins. And Harrow, in her soup making era, pulled off the Eucharist, transforming Mithraeum family dinner night into sacrifical, (not metaphysical) cannibalism night. Though both G & H have lain entombed and miraculously resurected, it was Harrow that descended into Hell to interact with the dead (more on this when ATN reveals what she did in Hell).

In one way, this creates friction, a literary rivalry, between the two characters. Who is more Jesus-like? Who is more central to the narrative? I argue that its in merging them that we see a clearer narrative reflection of the scriptural material of both the physical book series and the religio-imperalist model Jod based his empire on. This meta-textual symbolism HAS to be incorporated within the narrative itself given the device of lyctohood, wherein two souls literally meld to become inseperable and indistinguishable. By becoming full lyctors (and seperately i suspect that theyll become perfect lyctor numero dos), the Christographic symbolism embodied by both Gideon and Harrow will become literal and plot relevant, and solidify their lyctorhood not just as a narrative goalpost, a "hell yea" moment for the reader, or a completion of the main narrative conflict of their constant division. Their merging via the Eightfold Path will be semi-prophetic and imbued with religious significance as they both represent a halved Christ.

Gideon and Harrow HAVE to become full/perfect lyctors not just to release the symphonic tension of their constant coming togethers and going aparts, but to complete the image of a divided messiah.

Tldr: yes gideon is jesus, but harrow is jesus too and together they make Double Jesus. Jesus pt. 2 WILL become canon via full or perfect lyctorization!!!

Edit: I do NOT think ATN will /end/ with lyctor!griddlehark; thats just not in character for either of them, nor would that provide a morally satisfying end that is in contrast to Jod's ethos. I believe they will uncover the process and either temporarily inhabit full/perfect lyctorhood, find a way to balance their soul melange equally, or sever their soul bond completely (worst option!) Them uncovering the truth to lyctorhood, however, is necessary to resolve (meta)narrative tension.

[nonas-third-tantrum]

i know there’s an actual reason why alecto is alecto the ninth however i like to pretend it is also because she and anastasia got gay married

[summergoodwife]

Thinking about how our current understanding is that Pyrrha and John are the last ones around who know Alecto from before.

And I keep wondering: what would Mercy and Augustine be feeling now if they had survived? What would Cytherea be feeling? How would they interact with her? They hated her so much, we know at least that Mercy and Augustine were the two who pushed hardest for her entombment, but 10,000 years have passed, and as hard as they all try to pretend that radical emotion renewal begins at the point of soul absorption, they have changed. Cytherea seemed to imply that she was planning to wake Alecto using Gideon. Sure, it seems that was about using her rather than becoming her friend.

But just how much can someone use Alecto before coming to the inevitable conclusion that her rage is justified? That she isn't a monster, or that her monstrosity doesn't make her lesser than humans? I feel like this is what soul permeability, as described in "The Unwanted Guest," was about. You can't choose to be unaffected by someone. To a very real extent, you can't choose how they affect you.

Maybe God's lyctors would find themselves, 10,000 years later, much closer to the monster than to the man. Who knows if this would breed forgiveness, further hatred, or something else entirely?