#ntn paul

[patient-779h41-n7]

Imagine being born. Imagine you didn't exist one minute ago and now you exist and you are on fire (!) and there's a lot of people staring at you. You are naked and you have the memories of two people in your brain and everybody was expecting them to save the day, but they died of codependency and left you at the helm. Also outside it's raining huge insectoid monsters. Nobody wants you there and they are mourning the people whose memories are now yours. Despite being born like 5 minutes ago, you have to drive a huge truck into the afterlife and save a bunch of people. Oh, and you have to persuade the spirit of the Earth not to commit suicide killing you and the aforementioned bunch of people in the process. Also everybody hates the name you chose for yourself.

For some reason, you are in a good mood.

I must hand it to Paul: they might have a terrible name, but I really, really envy their "working under pressure" skills.

[thegothicchangeling]

I once saw a post talking about how Cam Pal and Pyrrha, believing Nona is either Gideon or Harrow, are operating under the belief that her personality is different because she hasn't been traumatized. I would like to add on to this by pointing out how differently Nona is being parented.

Harrow had enormous guilt and pressure placed on her by her parents. Nona's only responsibilities are to eat and recall her dreams. Gideon was beaten as a child. Not only do Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha never hit Nona, they are endlessly patient with her.

They live under poor conditions on a war torn planet in a horrible situation, but they never take it out on her. They plan to give her a sixth month birthday party.

It may not have lasted forever, but Nona knew she was loved, and you can't take loved away.

[missmolsa]

*she should've been at the club voice* they should've been. Having a normal Saturday at the beach

[puffywiz]

"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”

- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)

[future-crab]

I know I just made a post about it, but "You can't take loved away," fucks me up SO bad. Nona, who's known that she's dying for ages, facing the fact that regaining her memories is a form of dying that she hasn't prepared for. Nona, who isn't afraid of dying but is so, so scared of becoming someone who doesn't love Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha. Nona, who is love - deep, vibrant, endless love, for the whole world but especially for her family. "I won't love anything... I won't know how."

And Paul. Paul, who's already done the thing Nona is afraid, or at least a version of it. Two people who Nona loved more than anything in the world died and became Paul, and Paul both is and isn't Camilla and Palamedes. Paul, who regardless of whether they are or aren't the people Nona loved, loves Nona. Paul tells her, "Camilla and Palamedes were loved by Nona. Pyrrha was loved by Nona. It's finished, it's done. You can't take loved away. We loved you too. Palamades and Camilla loved you."

And I'm just supposed to be okay after that.

[hadalzonee]

ending of nona the ninth got me like

[zombie-bait]

happiest girl in the whole entire world

thinking about my favourite kind-hearted eldritch horror trapped in the body of my favourite traumatized goth girl

(+ purple variant)

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

What does Alecto want?

This is something I thought about while I wrote that post about Gideon's immortality.

When people speak about Alecto the book and Alecto the character, there is often an assumption that Alecto wants revenge for John turning her into a Barbie, and that our main characters want to kill God.

I'm not going to get too much into what I think the endgame might be for Jod (I'll leave it for another day) but I have some observations about Alecto!

First, people think Alecto wants revenge for the initial act of ripping her soul out and stuffing it in a Barbie body. I'm honestly not so sure that's her main concern!

Initially, Alecto's main fear is dying:

This is presumably what frightened her when in pain as Gaia, and what frightened her here, starting her life with John at the end of the world.

Of course, in the middle, there's her actual murder, and how she felt about it:

This fragment is so interesting. Most of this chapter the dialogue is in quotation marks, indicating it's not the memory of John and Alecto but current dialogue between John and Harrowhark.

John tells Harrow what happened. He is the one who asks her if she remembers what Alecto said. She (Harrowhark) said “What else did I say?”. And when Harrow says “I still love you”, Jod remembers that Alecto was also willing to love him despite what he'd done.

But Harrow is left without the answer to one question. “Where did you put the people? Where did they go?”

After this paragraph, she will say there are things she doesn't understand:

Apparently Alecto's memory isn't fully accessible, or she can't know Alecto's thought process, or there's bits of her memory gone for other reasons, whether it's John's intervention (unlikely, given how much incriminating stuff Alecto does remember) or because that's what was most traumatic to her and—unlike John's tale of apocalypse—nobody later reminded her. (Diegetically, of course, Tamsyn is simply saving that reveal for Harrow's arc in Hell.)

In any case: after being told the entire story about being killed and turned into a Barbie, Harrowhark still says “I want to understand why she was angry”. And that's seemingly tied to why John was terrified.

And the text directly relates that to the missing population of the Earth.

There are three things that very nearly make Nona fully recover the memory of who she was. One is when Pyrrha very nearly says her name, and Nona doesn't want to hear it. Later she doesn't seem to be lucid enough to react to Ianthe saying it, but she does react to this final line: Ianthe yelling “John loves Alecto!”. In the meantime, however, there's one more thing that shakes Nona deeply enough she has an actual heart attack:

And it's the sight of the Tower that makes Nona lose the will to live:

She also gets a couple passages where the sight of devils touches some deep, frightening memory. And we are given one last clue:

The River is dead.

We knew as early as HtN that the River is broken in some way. Its waters are described as brackish, salty, dirty, full of ghosts represented as rotting corpses. It doesn't seem to flow anywhere as rivers should. House religion says the dead wait as mad ghosts until John conducts his Second Resurrection. John of course has planted House theology with his idea to conduct “a flood” at some point and start over (“empty is just another word for clean”, etc.), once his revenge is done. He needs souls to not move on, in order to do that. We know through Abigail and Dulcinea that there is another shore, a Beyond that they've managed to exceptionally reach.

Alecto seems upset, above all, by what happened to the River, and that it remains unfixed.

Alecto states that she no longer fears death. She has experienced it (“I died once… no, twice”, and that's before her brief tenure as Nona).

She might be ready to leave John behind and move on, but.

What if she can't move on?

By which I mean: what if she—a Resurrection Beast, intimately acquainted with the spiritual dimension that is the River—what if she knows that she could never cross it as it is now, if she were to die? What if she knows that she would be absorbed by the stoma in the River's current condition, or float around insane forever? What if the sum of all necromantic transgression is that Jod committed ecocide on the afterlife and true death is no longer possible?

What if she needs the River to be healed in order to die?

To conclude, two other tidbits:

1. When Nona, trying not to engage with her Alecto consciousness, briefly considers just giving up and dying, she says:

2. Palamedes speaks of the Beyond (after briefly witnessing Dulcinea as she is there in TUG) right before he describes Paul as an end and a beginning. I don't think this is accidental?

[mayasaura]

I do not now, nor have I ever, expected Gideon to take a principaled stance on the forever war. I just don't think it matters to her. Ostensibly she's on her dad's side because her dad has been on a parenting kick lately, and the best she ever got from her mum was goodbye with a stay of execution. But if she were confronted with the ethics of the situation? Asked her opinion? I don't think she'd have one. She may be a prince, but at heart she's still the abused eighteen year old girl who fought tooth and nail to join the army just for a way out

[2plolo]

Hectus: write that down write that down

[lilliankillthisman]

God... she says this to him and by the end of the same day he and Cam are gone forever. Perfected, complete, graceful. And singular.

[rat-studio]

I don't like confrontation but I'm staring at the sun I won't quit until my eyes go red I'll finish what's begun

Verse 2! I really liked the idea of Nona being sooo annoyed at Varun-- pretty much exactly like this post-- so I tried to make her look as irritated as possible here. Song: Unsweetened Lemonade by Amélie Farren

Verse 1 Verse 3

Version without lyrics, timelapse, and reference/symbolism explanations below cut.

[palamedeeznuts]

So I made an Alecto the Ninth bingo card.

By the way, Paul's BOE name is And Then a Plank in Reason Broke and I Dropped Down and Down A Trian n-Aill Oc Imbirt Ḟidchille My Heart It Pounds Yeah You Got Me.

[Emily Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"; a line from the Táin Bo Cuailnge, Old Irish for "[he spent] a third [of the day] playing chess"; "Tik Tok" - Ke$ha]

Reason for short.

[henreyettah]

Warden and Scholar

[pencildragons]

literally inconsolable about cam and pal and paul btw. what do you mean you loved each other so much you ate each others souls and consumed each other so utterly that in that instant the two of you were destroyed and made anew as one. like what the fuck man

[vulpes-aestatis]

Listening to the HtN audiobook and just got past the past where Jod explains the origin of the RBs.

Did Paul commit the "indelible sin"? Will the RBs hunt them like the other lyctors?