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twoheadedoddity · 1 day ago

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John Gaius and the Gospel of John

Ok. Here we go. I've spent the last little bit annotating my copies of tlt in detail, and I've been focusing a lot on the biblical references— especially John's confession chapters in NtN. I'm essentially cross-referencing the verses alluded to in the chapter titles with the actual content of the chapters, and recording some thoughts/observations. Not entirely groundbreaking, but I want to be thorough.

I'm building off of posts by @todd-queen here and here; go read these posts because they exploded my brain. The cipher. wow.

Please bear with me and if you read nothing else, read the entry for the final chapter.

Side note: I'm mostly using the New Revised Standard Version (the one I'm most familiar with) and sometimes the New International Version.

John 20:8

"Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed." (NRSV)

This is the big one—as has been previously pointed out, the fact that Muir got this verse to fit as the first numbers of the cipher AND be so relevant melts my brain. Immediately, connotations of Harrow breaking into the tomb at 10 (the first person to ever so do), seeing Alecto, and wanting to live. She saw and believed.

This chapter consists of John setting up the context for the cryo project, the Earth dying, all that. The main link is how the verse fits with Harrow's story.

John 5:20

"The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished." (NRSV)

John and his crew are trying to buy time amid the projects getting shut down. Their power gets shut down anyway, and miraculously, the bodies that John touches don't decay. This verse speaks to both the first pieces of John's powers and foreshadows the more drastic "miracles" that will come later.

John 15:23

"Whoever hates me hates my Father also." (NRSV)

The crew realizes the link between John, his eyes changing, and the intact corpses. They try to experiment to see if anything will bring about changes in the bodies. Nothing does. He names them Titania and Ulysses. He moves the corpses' hands from across the room for the first time. Not really much to link the content of the verse to the content of the chapter here if you ask me?

John 5:18

"For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God." (NIV)

The crew wrestles with the implications of what John can do—in a way, the idea that John could be chosen in some capacity, or that John can now play at being God. This is also the chapter where they decide to stream on the internet; so, you could maybe say that the verse foreshadows the ways they'll be targeted due to John's actions.

John 8:1

"While Jesus went to the Mount of Olives." (NRSV)

The verse, in context, comes right before Jesus demonstrates to a group how none of them are without sin, and shows mercy/forgiveness to a woman that others were wanting punished.

As for Jod—his little necromancy twitch streamer gig starts to take off. People start coming to him for help or healing or miracles. His words, he's "playing Jesus." Obvious parallels to the sections (such as the above verse and those that follow it) where Jesus is teaching folks and performing miracles. Interestingly, Cristabel intervenes, telling John he's wearing himself too thin and that he's making the same mistakes as Jesus by never turning people down. So John sets a limit to one hour of miracles a day.

The cult really gets going. The authorities turn up. The choice is get taken down or do something drastic. John chooses something drastic—COW WALL. Cow wall scares everyone into leaving the cult alone for a bit. I think, in a lot of ways, this is the chapter that was foreshadowed by the previous chapter's verse, if we really want to draw parallels that far?

John 19:18

"There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them." (NRSV)

John mostly talks about the politics of the FTL program—more funding stuff, the way cryo was dropped, the inconcistencies with the program, the trillionaires rushing ahead with stuff. I'll be honest, I only vaguely grasp the corporate-funding-technology-science-and-capitalism side of John's story. But I don't think there's any link here.

John 5:1

"Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals." (NIV)

^ He goes up for a festival (the KJV uses the word feast, so I keep rotating that word in my brain too) and in the next verses encounters sick people in a pool. He heals one of them.

John faces no consequences for Cow Wall and other crimes. If nothing else, his influence grows. He and his crew have a barbeque and talk about their plans.

At the barbeque, big bright lights go off in my brain that point to the word feast in the KJV. This literally isn't anything. Like I don't think it's a very meaningful connection to make here. But my brain keeps going "I connected the dots!" I didn't connect shit "I connected them!!"

John gets approached by an important organization and he agrees to help them. So now he's remotely controlling the corpse of a big world leader to fool the world into thinking he's alive, in exchange for a lot of money and a city-destroying weapon. Great. Comparison between Jesus' miracles of healing and John's necromantic reanimation "miracles."

"Could you give him a permanent pulse? Could you make it so he bleeds if he gets hurt? Could you fix any current degradation to his corpse? Could he talk, if we wanted him to?" (NtN 271-272). This is a quote that @/todd-queen pulled from the text, and it fits really well.

John 3:20

"For all that do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed." (NRSV)

More FTL stuff. The nomination for that. John finds out that the plans that were progressing for FTL and the evacuations were dubious at best—just trying to make it look like progress. John is furious, and decides to lean into the necromancer-cult-leader-twitch-streamer act even more, gaining even more sway.

I think something could be said for the verse—being all about evildoers hiding and preventing their deeds from being exposed—can be linked to the trillionaires lying and covering up the ways they are interfering with the FTL project/evacuation plans. And how John tries to expose them. I'd be able to give a more concrete argument if I understood the FTL plotline better but for some reason I struggle so bad with it.

@/todd-queen also links it with this quote, about how John and his crew hide the nuke, intending to never let it see the light of day. Which is also a good connection imo. "We kept laughing that it came with a manual. I think we were scared of what would happen if we stopped laughing. We pulled up the floor and put a safe beneath the lino and swore we were never going to use it." (NtN 279).

John 9:22

"His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders, who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue." (NIV)

John grows in power. People come to join. It becomes an international sort of crisis. The first violent exchange occurs, and John uses the energy burst from the deaths to commit atrocities. One could link the verse to the various authorities coming after John and arresting anyone trying to join his cult. John certainly would. I hate him so much.

John 1:20

"He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, 'I am not the Messiah.'" (NRSV)

The chapter where everything goes to shit. FTL accelerating their escape attempt to mere days and then hours away. The attempted coup with G1deon and the nuke. John's crew is convinced this is the end; Cassiopeia and Nigella getting married. John reveals that he also has the corpse puppet ready to start a nuclear armageddon, as a backup threat to prevent FTL. Everything goes to shit at the cult compound. Cristabel shoots herself to make John figure out how to work with the soul. Everyone kills everyone else and John starts the apocalypse. Becomes God using the collective souls of the population and that of the earth. Obtains perfect lyctorhood with the earth, creating Alecto. The order of events for the actual nuclear apocalypse are unclear, because John is self-contradicting and a liar.

The actual contents of the chapter are... a lot. All over the place. But it's the most raw and visceral part of John's confession, which kind of fits nicely with this particular verse—given that it's from the section about John's (the Baptist, like, from-the-bible John) confession.

While I haven't covered the alternate ARC chapter numbers, I need to point out that this chapter is John 1:9 in the ARC. "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." (NIV). Seems pretty fitting for the chapter where he becomes God and begins the process that will become the resurrection, right?

John 5:4

This verse doesn't exist in the NSRV and many other versions, because in recent translations scholars think this verse wasn't part of the original. It is:

"From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had." (NIV)

The first connection, of course, is John picking and choosing who to bring back. Healing, resurrection. Yeah.

In this chapter John answers some of Harrow's questions. It's hard to tell which bits he lies about, exactly, but Harrow knows that he's full of shit. She decides to find the truth, and find God—probably not John in the end because he's a horrid lying sham—and walks into the River.

Right. Ok. Now back to this verse not being accepted as part of the bible anymore. On one hand, many of the Christian sources explaining its removal talk about how older, more accurate manuscripts do not contain this verse, so it's more accurate for more recent translations to remove it. Interesting. A chapter where Jod is clearly falsifying information being named after a verse that is supposedly not genuine. Tamsyn Muir your game is incredible.

Please direct your attention to this reddit post. The verse could also have been removed to focus attention on Jesus' healing power rather than having an angel also be doing the same thing. The post puts it better than I can, go read it, but essentially: John is trying to focus the attention on himself—the idea that he's the source of the world's power.

Choosing John 5:4 for this final chapter of John's confessional was very, very deliberate. I would like to shake Tamsyn Muir's hand and also ask her oh so many questions.

Final thoughts: I definitely that the main purpose for the choices behind most of the verses were primarily to fit with the cipher. But, where possible, Muir would have wanted them to fit somewhat with the contents of the chapter.

However, where things were very, very deliberate, were the first and last of these chapters—20:8 and 5:4. There is no doubt in my mind that these verses were handpicked for how incredibly relevant they are.

A lot of what I've pointed out has been pointed out by other people as I've mentioned throughout this post. I'm glad to be bringing it all together and freaking out over it, even though I doubt I'm the first to do so.

#this might be the most autistic thing I've ever done #alectopause #tlt #tlt meta #tlt analysis #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #john gaius #tamsyn muir i need to steal your brains. all i can hope for is to one day write something so well thought out and deliberate #i love nothing more than playing at being a scholar so this was fun #side note: i come from a nonreligious background and my interest in this comes from academia. fixated on religious studies in 1st year uni #and the department never got rid of me lmao #but what im saying is there's probably deeper meaning/context to some verses that i just might not pick up on #tried my best to be thorough #long post #rambles #if you are an irl friend who know me please ignore this i am normal

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merthurxxxmerthur · 2 months ago

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My Problem With Prongsfoot

This is going to be an anti post because my feed is full of posts about these two, even though I block them all the time.

And it's not like I want to hurt anyone personally, it's just that this pairing with THESE characters is my pain.

It's not that I'm not a fan of the "friends to lovers" trope, I love the Albus/Scorpius, after all, but James Potter and Sirius Black? God, no.

I should probably say that I can't stand James Potter; I get physically uncomfortable whenever anyone spends more than a single word on him. He's a genuinely vile character who has no excuse for his actions, and who is adored by everyone in canon. I mean, he's a very real character. You can meet him at school, at work (as a boss, and if he doesn't like you, he will make your life a living hell, just for his own amusement), or anywhere else where he would be an equally bastard.

He is a character with a huge crown on his head, who believes that everything in the world is subject to his will, and he never changes. Whether he didn't have time to, because he died, or simply did not want to - the fact is, he has not changed. And that is my first problem.

And then there is Sirius Black, who adores him, who is ready to give his life for the glory of his friend, who never judges his actions, who completely relies on him. He is almost James's dog - he subjects himself to a punishment of 12 years because he believes himself guilty (even though he was responsible for Harry and could have escaped much earlier), he justifies it when Harry, his son, sees who James really is. You can interpret their relationship in canon in different ways (as almost-brothers or as unrequited love on Sirius' part) but the level of loyalty is just off the charts. And that's my second problem.

I'm not a fan of the dynamic where one character will never say the word "no" to their lover. And what's more, it literally locks Sirius in this, lol.

If these two stay together, then you're just watching happy sex and two pure-blooded nobles living their best life, where one is forever on a leash and is perfectly happy with it. If that's your food - okay.

But I need dynamics, some development. Themes that could be read about - grief, unrequited love, hard-won happiness. Prongsfoots doesn't have that - they're static, they never change because they don't need to. You can't imagine them living in the muggle world and dealing with the shit of common life because they don't need to! They have Grimmauld Place and Godric's Hollow - they're rich. Poverty? Radicalization? Friendship struggles, betrayal? None of it. They don't even need Remus and Peter, they can just stew in each other.

Speaking of Sirius Black: I always see his unhealthy love for James as an anchor that keeps him from developing his own path. Not that the canon Sirius ever wanted that, really, and not that James is a bad friend to him, it's just… He feels trapped. My assumption is that Sirius (who loved James for 7 years or so of school), if his best friend had lived, would have continued to love him. Like, it's not even my idea, but that's what he would have continued to do, right? Continue to love James, suffer silently, whine into his pillow, never seek out another relationship because he's too comfortable in his pain. That's insane.

Sirius is an interesting character in his own, he doesn't need the crutch of a wife who is his moral compass, or a bunch of friends who defend his honor. He's as hypocritical as James, but he has dynamics with other characters, with Harry, Severus, a fragile friendship with Remus, his obvious issues with his mom (and maybe dad), his relationship with Regulus.

James without Lily? A completely empty, disgusting character with zero empathy, oddly cruel to those who don't live up to his standards. James cheating on Lily with Sirius? This character can be made worse, but not better, lol. And that alone turns me off Prongsfoot.

Not that I want to demonize James Potter or Sirius Black, or fans of their pairing, I'm just expressing my "eww".

#sirius black #james potter #anti james potter #anti prongsfoot #i will be crucified on the cross for this #blurry and stupid #my personal opinion

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