#me to ave: can i talk about classics on your post it won't be long. <- me: unable to shut up & completely unsure how much info to include.

[hypokeimena]

this post is EXTREMELY good. as a broad overview of the classics aspect of this, i don't think necessarily think there are any specific texts missing (though if anyone wants to disagree with a more specific reclist PLEASE feel free!), but i do think having a broad sense of what themes and ideas exactly tzm is playing with re: classics is helpful!

generally: the idea of "classical civilization" is part of what's being played with. part of the humor of tzm's switching registers - making memes in the same breath as references to classical or biblical literary traditions - is interrogating what gets the cultural weight of being classical, of having socio-cultural authority and the weight of tradition. think of john's interactions with Wake in Harrow - he makes jokes about her name, passing implicit judgment on BoE 'ancient' traditions by comparing them to Evanescence lyrics, as if that makes them intrinsically sillier than his own none pizza references or any less serious than his 'higher-brow' references.

the iliad (and odyssey!) are both good stories but if you look at a list of character names you'll probably get what you need to for tlt purposes.

more specifically: as ave references above, john positions himself as a greek 'tragic hero' so having a sense for what that framework implies might be helpful (does a tragic hero have agency? are his actions divinely determined? is he accountable for his actions? how do both of these interact with ideas about who gets to enact violence and to what ends?) i am not a tragedian (or, frankly, a hellenist) but if you want to check some out, i personally like aeschylus' oresteia (<- has cursed houses) and sophocles' antigone (<- has tombs in it). anne carson's translations are very popular and easy to find, and she's done both plays.

i think some of what's going on with ancient rome is much more interesting,* but i think a lot of what's interesting is going on with historical rather than literary references.** so it's probably good to know, for example, what a lictor or a mithraeum is. but probably what's more important than knowing what those are is knowing what that indicates. so, a lictor was the bodyguard to roman officials who had official state power; their sign of authority was a bundle of sticks with which they were allowed to attack or kill those who overstepped. that tells you something about how John is positioning his lyctors relative to himself. but it's also worth knowing that the bundle of sticks is called a fasces and is directly linked to... the rise (and aesthetics) of 20th century political fascist movements. invoking these aesthetics is not value neutral (and would not be value neutral to john). it's particularly notable that john styles himself 'john gaius' and as emperor/his demesne as an empire, rather than using other terminology from various other classical traditions (hegemony, 'leagues'/alliances, republics were all options); it's specifically rome being evoked here, i think, rather than (but perhaps as analogy to) other later empires. (further reading: Chapoutot (2016). Greeks, Romans, and Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past <- cannot remember how ~academic~ this book is but iirc it's good)

re: roman imperial history, i hate to be like "roman military history :)" because i am not that man but rome was a geographically expansionist military empire which supported its military by taking land and giving bits of it to soldiers after they served. eventually, you run out of land AND you can't support enough soldiers to cover the territory you already have. rome solved this by intermittently reconsolidating power and occasionally losing bits of territory at its edge and then eventually by splitting into two administrative zones with less territory to cover etc etc, but that didn't work forever and it's notable that if you kill a planet to conquer it you don't really have that as an option anymore. (further reading: ugh i don't have anything super specific. maybe "a history of the roman people", ward heichelheim & yao)

religiously, i think the invocation of a mithraeum is fascinating here; it pulls on all of these (now discredited? <- active academic debate) ideas about ~mystery religions~ and secret initiatory cults (that's not what cult meant in the ancient world but it means that today and we/john are functioning in that world). the cult of mithras was something like a mix between an social/eating club, a fraternity, and a "religion"; it's also notable because mithras was seen as a foreign god (so there's stuff going on with how the foreign gets narrativized as it is folded into the imperial core).

not for nothing, but if absolutely nothing else it's essential to understand the mechanisms by which christianity moved from a weird little religion mostly doing its own thing to becoming an active contributor to the violence and exploitation of empire. unfortunately this field (the historiography of early christianity) largely pisses me (<- also a jew) off and i cannot recommend anything specific to read off the top of my head but I think you can look at changes in christian theology prior to 300 and post ~400. like. looking at religion as a tool of imperial control but also empire as a tool of religion is what i am getting at here.

You've talked a lot about lolita in terms of how it relates to tlt, and as possibly tumblrs premier tlt scholar are there any other works that you think it would be important to read to get the most out of reading or rereading tlt?

oh god!! okay well off the top of my head:

i assume this is a given, but, like, Annabel Lee. some of Poe’s other poetry hits similar beats to that one – The City in the Sea, The Sleeper, Lenore are a few examples, and his short story The Fall of the House of Usher has a woman with a very similar feel to his poetic muses (and frankly a similar feel to Alecto). not required reading ofc but it pads out the kind of touchstones Nabokov + Muir tap into!

i haven’t actually read Homestuck lol but i’ve heard that Homestuck helps, like, a lot (i really really should read Homestuck)

i think a decent fluency in classics is probably also helpful. which i do not have, lmao. but i WOULD recommend reading Homer's Iliad, if only for the fact that the Iliad is very explicitly referenced at multiple points in Gideon the Ninth and continues to thematically lurk throughout Harrow and Nona in these rhetorical gestures made towards heroism + tragedy (i believe Muir once talked about John as conceiving of and constructing himself as a classically tragic figure, which – interesting!!).

there’s absolutely some christian theological dimensions that fly right over my head (i’m jewish, lmao), but a working knowledge of the christian easter story is probably like the minimum you need to get how that’s being played around with in-text.

the opening of Alecto references the opening of Dante’s Inferno such that it’s fair to speculate that Alecto will develop itself in part around Dante (and, considering the role that Dante plays in Lolita, I imagine around Beatrice), so the Divine Comedy is a good one to have a feel for.

Don Quixote! one of my favourite things about Gideon the Ninth in particular is the fact that ‘Dulcinea’ is named in reference to Cervantes’ Dulcinea of Toboso, a wholly imagined woman essential to Don Quixote’s false image of chivalry, representative of spanish nationhood during a time of imperialist conquest, etc etc etc. it does a lot with the gendered paradigms being prodded at in Gideon, especially wrt how they relate back to ideologies necessary to the social structuring of imperialism. i really should put together an essay about Don Quixote and Gideon alongside one another tbh someone ask me about that sometime

i’m sure i’m missing some lmao but these are the ones i can remember! i also have a bunch of texts that i just think hold interesting discursive relationships to tlt, even if i can’t fairly make a case for being consciously present in the text: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire are the Big Three.

[optimalmongoose4]

Talk to me about the minutiae of your current WIP. Tell me about the lore, the history, the detail, the things that won’t make it in the text.

Yes I stole this word for word from the post but I really wanna hear

going to make this a readmore

I'm glad you asked! It's called Centuria Case #102 and is currently sitting at 209 pages with 106487 words though I am hoping to get it to a million words one day. It's divided into five sections

Section One: PT Centuria

Section Two: Freefall

Section Three: Av

Part Four: A Year In The Life of A Drifter

Other Materials

Section one comprises the bulk of the book and is the main focus, it's about a detective (note: detective in the far future this takes place in does not mean police, it mostly just means a person who looks into mysteries) who tries to solve a missing person case and it spirals wildly out of control. Section two acts as a sort of epilogue though it runs mostly parallel to the main story as it focuses on a member of the group the detective joins at the end of their story. Section three focuses on a completely average person whose life only becomes really extraordinary due to how much they affect the detective's life and the detective's life affects them without the two ever knowing about the other's existence. Section four is a classic novel within the universe that the story takes place in, it's mentioned throughout the other three sections, though it is cut short due to a reason we will get into later. Other Materials is just full versions of some documents and things that appear in the story.

I feel like I should explain the setting first. So Earth has been abandoned for a large number of years, well not technically abandoned it's been placed in a sort of containment zone due to its historical significance so every time it develops sufficiently advanced technologies it gets reset to a point where it didn't develop that and whoever developed the technology is made sure they don't, long story on why and how that is. Anyways most of humanity now lives in "civilizations" large superstructures out in space (I don't think I can overstate how big these things are, the smallest ones are the size of multiple of our sun), humans are immortal, don't need food, water, air, etc, and are extremely more technologically advanced due to something called Multiversal Energy (technical name is Spacetime Energy but no one really uses that), this name came from when the universe was still a bunch of separate universes, but now it's one, will get into that later. Energy is the true base unit of everything and can be transmuted into atoms and subsequently physical matter, and vice versa (note that this isn't the type of energy that we know in our universe the E=MC^2 kind, though both can be converted to matter they're separate things), energy can be infinitely compressed and decompressed, gaining or losing power respectively, and this is perhaps the most important property of it, energy creates energy if you leave 1 mL of energy alone for enough time you will eventually have 2 mL (this is for very complicated reasons that only pertain to a few plotlines not in the story so I won't get into them right now). When a human consumes enough energy they eventually become energy dependent, in this state wounds they get will be almost instantly healed if they have enough energy, they can exist entirely off energy without food, water, air, etc, and they now only really have two ways to die, energy starvation and energy overload, with energy starvation your body does not have enough energy to keep going and shuts down, most people's energy will create enough energy for them to survive off of (there is also the fact a lot of people live in civilizations that just have a lot of energy in the air that is automatically absorbed by the body), the more energy you consume the higher your energy level gets, meaning you have to have more energy in your body to survive at any given time, but the higher your energy level is it's harder to kill you with energy overload, which is when your body consumes too much energy at once, gets overwhelmed and dies, once you become energy dependent there is almost no way to not become energy dependent again (well technically there is one method but the general public does not know about that). Since energy is the base for everything it can be used to create a lot of technologies as well.

Alright I think that's enough about the setting for now, on to the main character, PT Centuria. There is a lot of history with them, and I actually think I have to explain a bit more about the setting to explain them. There is actually five energies, spacetime, chaos, connection, creation, and destruction, spacetime is the most prominent one, chaos exists throughout the universe in small amounts, the most prominent example of it is a group who worships chaos energy and attempts to interpret it's randomness, creation and destruction mostly exist on one planet and go through a cycle like this: creation creates something, destruction destroys it and leaves behind remains, creation creations something out of those remains, there's a really beautiful story with that planet, probably one of my favorites I've came up with, but it's not in the book, and connection is one of the most interesting energies. Most all of it is obviously connected to one group called The Connection Network, this is the group PT Centuria joins in the end, lots of lore with this group. So PT Centuria finds an artifact with a chaos/connection mix of energy, majority connection, before it is bought off of them by a mysterious detective named Danielle (Danielle is a very interesting character, she's 3 trillion years old and has only been conscious for a small number of those, lived on a farm that was owned by the guy who became basically the grim reaper because she was in hiding as she is DB Cooper). PT Centuria gained an amount of connection and chaos energy (the chaos energy prevented the connection energy from connecting to the connection network) and decides with this new power of connection to become a detective themself, they are very successful with this career, until they find something they cannot solve, The Gunslinger. Here's what The Gunslinger is about, they are also a chaos/connection mix but they are majority chaos and here is how this manifests everytime The Gunslinger opens a door it has a randomized destination from any other door in the universe that is relatively the same size. PT Centuria becomes obsessed with The Gunslinger as they are seemingly entirely random, going against everything PT Centuria believes in, that the world is connected, everything has a reason for happening, the two develop a rivalry, in a form of a game of cat and mouse and PT Centuria tries to catch up with The Gunslinger, The Gunslinger views it as a playful thing, while PT Centuria views it as an extremely serious matter, which leads to some funny interactions.

While that is going on another very important storyline is happening across the universe. The Machine is an ultra-capitalist hellscape of a civilization, it is run by millions of separate companies, it grows by consuming planets and civilizations around it, and as more layers are added the layers beneath them "die" as they are abandoned for upper layers leaving behind an elaborate tunnel system. Watcher is one of these people who's planet was destroyed and incorporated into The Machine, they were incorporated as a watcher, the warden in the panopticon of The Machine, assigned to watch others and look for certain things. Nex is also someone who's planet was destroyed, when this happened they descended down into the tunnel system and weren't able to find their way out again for a very long time, when they did they almost immediately went back into the tunnels seeing the state of things, but Watcher noticed them before they did, Watcher goes to find them, when they meet they talk and decide to start a revolution against The Machine. Very long story short the group they start comes to be known as The Hold, and they are fighting against The Coalition, which is the group that all the companies on the machine formed to fight The Hold. Now here is where a character named Mechea comes in, I originally created them to just be the poster child for The Coalition, someone so Nex and Watcher weren't just fighting against some faceless organization, but then they quickly became one of the most important characters in the universe. They were created on The Machine to just be fodder for a job fueling a generator, and due to the energy from that leaking into their body they were able to rise through the ranks of The Machine, using the war as an opportunity as well they became one of The Coalition's most effective soldiers, but the thing is they were always plotting against The Coalition, there's a lot of lore and politics with the war that I can get into if you want but it's a lot, anyways it ends with Mechea owning the entirety of The Machine, all the people on it evacuated and it basically just scrap, they sell it, become on of the richest people in the universe, and using those riches construct The Mechea Civilization. It is almost exactly the opposite of The Machine, and quickly becomes a very popular civilization.

Alright here's where things start to overlap, in the interesting of keeping this shorter I will not get into the full story with the Multiversal Gods, they are beings of pure energy and the only other life that developed independently of Earth's life, they are constantly obsessed with having their champions fight other gods champions to prove they are better than other gods, and they have basically forced Mechea's hand by threatening to make everyone in The Mechea Civilization into champions and turn it into a giant bloodbath, so Mechea is forced to set up smaller bloodbaths for them. The first experiment of this is to try and replicate the original conditions of previous experiences the gods have had but with an interesting twist on it, the one Mechea selects is the planet of Undif (I actually wrote a 48 page short story about this planet for a school assignment), long story short a group of drones were unleashed on the planet that would attach to people and basically turn them to zombies, this made for an interesting situation for the gods. Mechea is considering options for this when they catch wind of a peculiar planet.

There once was a guy on Earth, he loved old monster movies from like the 70s 80s 90s, think like The Lost Boys and Fright Night. Then he was recruited by a god, not one of The Multiversal Gods, this one is one of two who has existed before the universe, there is too much lore with this to get into if I want this to be short lol, please feel free to ask though! And as this guy is placed deeper and deeper into the cruel world the god recruited him into he falls on that coping mechanism of old monster movies more and more. Eventually he rebels and is imprisoned for trillions of years, during this time he builds up enough energy and sacrifices his physical matter for more energy (strangely something no one else has really figured out how to do, the body usually rejects this process), and when he gets out as a result of the god being killed he uses all that energy to create an earthlike planet that follows the rules of old monster movies. This is things like even though monster attacks happen all of the time the general public doesn't ever find out about them.

Mechea starts doing research into the planet and finds some strange things with it, first, there are vampires on it, and their research shows that in order to kill them you must stab them with a wooden stake through the heart, and if you were to extract a still alive heart you would be able to grow a new vampire, Mechea thinks that vampires would be perfect for the gods, the problem is transporting a whole vampire is too much of a liability for them and all attempts to extract a heart from the planet end in failure. Mechea figures out why, the planet creates "stories" with its people and monsters, and the people Mechea had been sending down weren't being cast as the heroes of the story by the planet, in order to get a heart Mechea would have to set up a specific scenario where heroes would actually be able to defeat a vampire by the planets rules.

Another interesting thing about the planet is that outsiders who enter it will gradually forget who they are as they begin to fit the roles cast for them by the planet, when they leave they gradually start remembering who they are. Mechea recruits four people to become the heroes, not mentioning that previous fact, one of these people is PT Centuria. Long story short as the group is about to stab the vampire with the stake Mechea bursts through the ceiling with their spaceship and personally rips the heart out of the vampire, puts the group in the spaceship and leaves, Mechea waits until they remember enough and then drops them off back at their homes. PT Centuria grows bitter with this incident due to the fact Mechea basically manipulated them into doing their bidding, but without anything they could do they just sat there and seethed for a while.

So after Mechea's vampire experiment turned out to be a success the gods wanted more, and since Mechea didn't have much of a plan to stop them, they force Mechea to hold something called The Tournament, a giant contest to see who is the best god. It works like this, anyone can join and will become a champion of a god and then when the tournament starts the champions will go through a series of arenas and attempt to eliminate as many other champions as possible, either by killing them or forcing them to surrender.

The Gunslinger happens to wander into the facility where Mechea is, and after the situation is cleared up Mechea realizes the novelty of them and asks them if they want to be entered into the tournament, having nothing better to do they say yes. Then during the news PT Centuria sees The Gunslinger in an ad for The Tournament, it is obvious they are a contestant, so PT Centuria enters as well. Both The Gunslinger and PT Centuria are chosen to be champions of the goddess Agamemnon (no intentional narrative significance to this name, was just watching Agamemnon Counterpart when I thought it would be a good name). Alright to skip over most of the tournament it ends with PT Centuria and The Gunslinger on the top of a mountain, they are the last two champions, and while it would make sense for the tournament to end now, the rules stipulate that only one champion can remain. This is the first in-person confrontation they've had, The Gunslinger smiles and raises their gun to PT Centuria, then they pull the trigger, and a burst of red erupts from the barrel (forgot to mention the color associations with the energies, red = chaos, purple = connection, creation = white, destruction = black, spacetime = mostly blue but can be multicolored). PT Centuria just stands there, then they clench their fist, and time seemingly reverts, the bullet disappears from the air, the confused gunslinger fires again, same thing happens, then again, PT Centuria clenches their first, time reverts, then PT Centuria raises their hand up and a purple projectile flies out of it, The Gunslinger shoots it.

Here is where things start to get complicated. I won't go over the mechanisms that resulted in the outcomes that happened but I will discuss the outcomes, the mountain is leveled, The Gunslinger has disappeared, and a coin has appeared in PT Centuria's hand. Tournament drones retrieve them from the now flat ground they are lying down on and unable to move from and after medical attention, they are declared the winner of The Tournament and gets all of the winnings from it, but unfortuantly another outcome has emerged, PT Centuria has seemingly lost their connection energy, the result of which can be likened to a really fucking bad hangover (I mean I've never consumed alcohol so I wouldn't know, basing my knowledge on this on pop culture as well as my playthroughs of the video game Disco Elysium), so they just kind of stay in their room for months feeling shitty, until they decide to take on a new case, this is where the book starts.

Alright still not to the actual novel contents because we have to go back and talk about that coin that materialized in PT Centuria's hand, they dropped it in the flattened mountain, and a scavenger (there are three main jobs in the universe, scavengers, transporters, and merchants, scavengers go to ruins and well scavenger, transporters take those scavengings and bring them to merchants who sell them, it's not unusual for someone to do two of these jobs at once but someone who does all three is called a drifter) finds it. The thing about this coin is that it has hypothetically infinite sides but only one exists at a time, the other hypothetical sides are attached to other hypothetical universes that could exist but don't, whenever you cause the side of the coin to change you drag that alternate universe into existence. Long story short the scavenger after messing around with it for a while discovers it secretes a liquid that they discover is a sort of inversion of the liquid that results when you mix all of the energies together, and then when you mix the inverted mixture which the standard mixture it reverts time (actually it makes time hypothetical which reverts time to the last non-hypothetical time and then the hypothetical time is overwritten), so regretting decisions they've made the scavenger makes a big pool of energy mixture and then jumps into it with the coin, in response the universe kind of folds up, you know when you make a cut in a folded piece of paper and when you unfold it the cut is everywhere? The scavenger leaves a sort of human-shaped hole in that folded-up universe, and when it unfolds that hole is everywhere throughout the universe. This results in beings known as "static people" due to the fact that these human-shaped holes are seemingly filled with static, these beings act as a sort of hive mind but they deny this fact stating that they are only one being, despite being in many places at once.

A strange phenomenon is observed, the static people seem to be being pulled toward each other by some force, and they're bringing the universe with them. Eventually, they all converge into one being, and the universe has too. The static person and universe sit down across from each other, in the middle is a table with a gun on it, the static person explains they are in conceptual space right now and the gun, table, and chairs are just representations of concepts, the gun is a representation of an ideological action that would result in one of the beings dying, the resulting released energy would "unfold" the other being, the static person has realized that they are a compressed universe themself, and to unfold into a universe the universe would have to be shot with the gun, but the static person could also be shot and the universe would unfold and things would go back to mostly being the same, but the new universe wouldn't get a chance to exist, the static person leaves this up to the universe. The Universe picks up the gun, points it at the static person, and shoots, the bullet flies out of the gun and comes into contact with the static person, ripping through their body and killing the universe inside, the old universe flies out back into existence, something comes out of the bullet wound of the static person's corpse, a remnant of it's universe, this comes to be known as the True Image, and it is entirely other to the universe, it exists completely outside of it and can only be observed through its effects on the universe.

I'll be back in the morning for more, but now its 2:00 am and time for me to go to sleep