#i love you alecto

[khadgarbignaturals]

say what you will abt elden ring but this is peak female character design

[nonasbirthday]

If you were going to make a character that was the soul of planet earth in a human body you might think to make her motherly. Wise. Forgiving. Mother Earth cares for us, she provides, right? But Tamsyn Muir wrote Nona the Ninth and said YES planet earth is loving but also she is SO SO ANGRY and HURTING. And actually she cannot care for others right now she needs to be cared FOR.

Also she wants to eat pencils and she thinks flowers are sexy.

[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.

[sheepydraws]

I know no one cares about Naberius Tern but that is exactly the problem.

Every single lyctor we have seen so far is undone by killing their caviller. Mercymorn makes it very, very clear that she has been carrying the grief of killing Cristabel for ten thousand years. Palamedes doesn't say he would rather die than kill Cam to become a lyctor because he is busy dying rather than killing Cam to become a lyctor. The unspoken rule is that lyctorhood can only be obtained by killing the person most important to you.

Unless you are Ianthe.

Ianthe is the only lyctor who isn't in a constant state of mourning. She has achieved immortality and cosmic power without losing the person closest to her.

Incidentally the person Ianthe loves the most is Corona, who also doesn't care what happened to Babs. Ianthe chats with Corona while wearing Babs discarded corpse and they banter about it.

Ianthe essentially made her Faustian bargain with counterfeit money and I think eventually she is going to have to pay up

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

Since it'll be a while longer until alecto releases (take your time tamsyn) I think we should try to avoid the usual insanity that befells a starved fandom by doing something unheard of: Reading another book. So uh.

What books would you recommend to your fellow locked tomb fans to help with the urges until we get alecto?

[mayasaura]

There were so many good suggestions on this post, I had to make a poll, so

[naomistares]

guys.. i'm facing a problem.. that is i cannot reply to everyone.. too many replies 😭😭 BUT KNOW U R NOT BEING IGNORED! i am reading it. i haven't stopped smiling since yesterday and a very big giant thank you to all

🫶🫶🌹🫶🌹❤️🌹🫶🌹❤️🫶❤️🌹

[thunderon]

love seeing newcomers just finish ntn and be like “how long until alecto???”. i still remember these days:

at this point im like “eh what’s another year? what’s another five? alecto happens when it happens”

[theforgottengreatpoem]

Alecto using Annabeths hubris to convince her to give up Percy vs Medusa using Percy's loyalty for his mom to convince him to kill his friends

Monsters + Playing into the Hero's Fatal Flaws | Percy Jackson and the Olympians 1x03 | inspiration

[twolovelyberries]

there’s a dead girl in the pool!!!!

[nonas-third-tantrum]

I’m trying to figure out when exactly Pyrrha realized that Nona was Alecto. I had been thinking that it was after Kiriona woke up, because at that point Pyrrha would have understood that Nona’s eyes came from Alecto, not Gideon, but I think it may have actually been a bit earlier…

After the fight between Ianthe and Cam, when Pyrrha and Nona go off to find the corpse, Nona tells Pyrrha that she’s dying, and Pyrrha says, “‘Course you are…the soul longs for the body, Nona. Even a fucked up soul…even a soul that’s been changed forever. It takes a lot to acclimate a soul to a body it wasn’t born in, if that original body’s around for it to miss.”

Now, she could still be talking about Gideon. BUT something about the way she phrases this, with the “fucked up soul that’s been changed forever” …feel free to disagree but to me that sounds a heck of a lot like Alecto. I think it’s possible that Pyrrha has even worked out Alecto’s true nature, so when she refers to the ‘original body’ she could be talking about the planet earth itself.

Pyrrha goes on to say, “Kiddie, when you were yelling…” but she trails off and doesn’t get to finish her sentence. We know that Nona “screamed like the captain had screamed.” We also know that when the captain screams, Nona hears her speaking in varun’s voice, and it’s interesting that Pyrrha describes it as yelling, not screaming, which to mean indicates that Nona may have said something. Something that alerts Pyrrha to the fact that Nona is not who they’ve all been thinking she is.

Yes - Pyrrha does say within the next couple of pages that Gideon’s body “might be you, kiddie.” But I don’t think that necessarily means she doesn’t at least suspect that Nona is someone else. I know the rest of that scene heavily implies that Pyrrha still thinks Nona is Gideon…but I’m suspicious. I think what she wants to believe and what she knows to be true might not match up.

This post is getting away from me but I just have to add that after the roof incident, both Nona and Pyrrha know who she is, and Nona is desperate to keep herself in the dark. Pyrrha starts to call Nona “A…” but Nona stops her and begs her not to make her remember. And then Nona slips into her Alecto self, and mocks Pyrrha for playing house with her (hello, more doll references), and that must absolutely break Pyrrha’s heart, but she lets it go.

So when Pyrrha finally says her “what’s like except a love that hasn’t been invited indoors?” speech, she’s reckoning with her feelings towards both Nona and Alecto, has probably been wrestling with those feelings for a while, and it’s just. So devastating. Pyrrha loved Nona. Nona loved and was loved by Palamedes, Camilla, and Pyrrha.

But Alecto? Nona is terrified that when she realizes who she is, she won’t love anything. We know that John loved Alecto, and I think we can infer that Anastasia did too, and Alecto loved them back. But then Pyrrha tells us that she and Gideon liked Alecto, and for some reason that feels even more significant to me—maybe because there are all kinds of twisted love in these books and to like someone, while less intense, is more…mundane. There aren’t a lot of instances in these books where people just like each other, plain and simple. And I think that the love everyone has for Nona is a lot less complicated than the other types of love we’re shown. Truly a like that’s been invited indoors.

[taxinealkaloids]

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! 

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

Describing Alecto as inspired by Hollywood Hair Barbie is on the one hand objectively a genius choice and hilarious but it also undeniably did irreparable damage to the fuck up looking Alecto economy, I need more depictions of her looking like the frozen corpse that she is STOP yassifying my 8 ft tall rage filled lip biter!!!!

[imjustcryinginthecorner]

“Arguing with the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review”, The Mountain Goats // Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

[mayasaura]

There's a stanza from Annabel Lee that's been tickling my brainstem for a while, and it feels even more relevant now that we know how John and Alecto are bound together, and that their love was and still is mutual:

But our love it was stronger by far than the love    Of those who were older than we—    Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above    Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

That's the heart of it, isn't it? The source of all of John's power, the reason he's God, it's because his soul is connected to his Annabel Lee's. To end all of this, they'll need to be dissevered.

I'd say that the angels have already tried and failed, and the demons look like they're winding up to take a shot. Odds are that'll go about as well for them as it did for Augustine and Mercy. But there's someone the poem doesn't ask. It doesn't account for Annabel.

I think that may be why it matters so much that that Alecto still loves John, and where the true horror of love comes in. If Alecto's soul is going to be seperated from John's, Alecto has to want it. No one else can do it for her. Annabel Lee has to become the subject, and not the object.

[elfieafterdark]

I am suddenly struck with dread terror, down to my very marrow. My heart freezes like the waters of the tomb, my soul trembles under the staggering pressure of this new burden I bear.

I have to wait for the last book with everyone else.

And I must scream.