#tamsyn please. i know you've thought about this

[dykeseinfeld]

what is the political/economic structure of the empire and which house has administration over colony planets or is that shared somehow despite the clear lack of trust between leadership of these planets and does blood of eden have a governmental as well as militant arm and how does it function how do they recruit are they united only by a hatred of "zombies" or do they have some ethnic/religious/regional commonalities that underlie their recruiting and how do colonized people who agree with the empire or at least fear it enough not to fight back fit into this society and how long did it take john gaius to even discover these outer planets post resurrection like is he actually omnipotent or has he just been alive for a long time and how many intelligent life forms exist in this empire or is it all humans/resurrected and are the resurrection beasts intelligent and how much sovereignty do the nine houses each have anyway they all have one shared military but independent administration over their own citizens how does that work how does defection to other houses work if the ninth house has the most secure prison how does extradition work does the ninth house even run that prison itself bc i can't imagine devoted wannabe nuns agreeing to that or do they have an independent administration made up of noncitizens like the swiss guard in the vatican is there one central judicial system of the empire or does this prison house criminals from all nine houses or does this prison only house foreign criminals convicted in military court or otherwise captured á la guantanamo bay and anyway how on earth has the ninth house kept so isolated while still receiving enough trade to function what is keeping these nine houses together besides unwavering fealty to the emperor based on religion bc it seems shaky to have nine separate houses with separate forms of government/administration that have no real need of each other especially if the emperor hasn't been heard from in 10,000 years and how independent is the second house and where does their farming come from john did you resurrect the seeds too did you resurrect the cows is there meat you can't survive on thanergy and thalergy alone there are non necromancers in this empire what are their jobs what do they eat john please tell me what do they eat

[carniferous]

honestly dil i’d pay actual money to ask about every single one of ur wips BUT since i guess i must choose one.. im vvv curious about hey girlypop.. please and thank you <3

laurieeee you flatter me so much ily <33

okay so hey girlypop is actually one of my oldest wips that i still haven't let go of bc i love the concept... will i ever finish? unlikely at this point but who knows. she still gets included <3

so around the time i started writing this i was reading harrow the ninth by tamsyn muir and also dwelling by aideomai both of which deal heavily with altered memories, dreams, and the concept of fandom AUs. from this i got inspired to create smth in this vein with jegulus

the story starts out seemingly as a gryffindor regulus au. regulus is in his first year and he asks the hat to put him in gryffindor. but quickly we start to notice something... off. at first it's just characters pointing out that regulus doesn't act very much like gryffindor which regulus rationalizes by claiming he asked the hat to be put in gryffindor when he wasn't best suited to it. but then as james and regulus start to develop feelings for each other + get together it Escalates and things seem more and more wrong. james makes comments that allude to things that happened in the canon timeline but Not in this timeline and then seems confused as to why he said that. for a snippet, here's the scene where regulus gets picked as gryffindor seeker:

“Frank said he’s picking by tomorrow, so let us know when he gives you the news,” said Sirius. “We’ll do a prank in celebration—a proper Marauders prank!”

“Oh, I should’ve known this was an excuse for a bloody prank,” said Regulus, rolling his eyes.

“Oi, you love the pranks! And it’s not like you ever get caught.”

“That’s because I'm smarter than you.”

“Alright, enough,” James said before Sirius could offer his next retort. “You can fight all you want on the pitch.”

Sirius sighed, “Mate, I can’t exactly fight with my own teammate, can I?” 

A curiously blank look crossed James’s face, gone so quickly that Regulus thought he might have imagined it. “Right,” he said. “Can’t jeopardize our chances at winning the Cup.”

"Can I go now?” Regulus asked sullenly. 

“Who’s stopping you?” Sirius replied. Regulus flipped him off.

He spared a glance over his shoulder as he stalked off towards the showers. He caught James’s eyes and saw, for a second, a flash of confusion before it vanished as he gave a little wave. Regulus waved back, heart stuttering in his chest and thinking of Sirius’s assurances that soon he would get to be in the air with them, together, playing for their House. 

and after they get together it just becomes more and more clear that james's memories of the canon timeline are conflating with his memories of this timeline. at one point later on james and reg are canoodling in james's bed and sirius knocks on the door and james is like Horrified to which regulus is like ? okay i don't want him to see us like this but it's not That serious.... (but like. it was that serious. in a different time). as james starts having more doubts about the world around him he starts questioning certain little things that don't make sense in the world + regulus's memories start to come back but he actively avoids thinking about it bc he Likes this world! he wants to stay here! with james!

anyway i never really settled on an ending but like it was going to be something about regulus surviving the cave, sending a message to sirius, but before they arrive he tries to open the locket and destroy it which pulls him into this dream world. and james tries to wake him up but ends up getting pulled into the dream world too. and then sirius and remus wake them both up and regulus is like "everything was so perfect in that world we can never have that here i can never have you in this world" and james is like "you've always had me" or smth cheesy like that you know me...

[undercrowns]

@loveisworry tagged me eons ago to list nine books that I like/would recommend. I'm finally reading again so here we go, vaguely sorted fiction -> non-fiction:

The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner: I think it's best to go into The Thief knowing as little as possible so I won't say much about the plot, instead I'll say that MWT is truly a master at using structure and form to convey character and narrative ideas! THE heist novel of all time. Also these books make you insane so there's that

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke: Honestly one of the books of the decade. Extremely different from Jonathan Strange if you've only read that one; it drops you in the deep end from the first word which I always admire (try not to know too much about this one going in either. In fact I'd mistaken it for a completely different book at first and kept wondering when the House was going to turn into the magical school I thought the book was about). Features many topics that interest me: the self as an idea and the mutability thereof, buildings that are maybe alive and maybe love you, loving and caring about people even when things suck so bad

Watchmaker of Filigree Street/Lost Future of Pepperharrow: Natasha Pulley I love you. Do you want to learn a lot about clocks while also losing it as everything goes in the wrong direction. You should. I'd recommend all of Pulley's books (still trying to get my hands on an ARC of the new one!), but Pepperharrow is my favorite of the bunch; I felt every available human emotion reading it and potentially a few others. They're all also SO funny to me while also making me cry multiple times. (originally read these after they appeared on many @lotstradamus rec lists, truly thank you)

Lives of the Monster Dogs, Kirsten Bakis: I don't know that I've ever read anything quite like this book and I have a tough time explaining it. I wrote in my rec to a friend that it's about being nostalgic for something that was painful for everyone involved, but at the same time held so much genuine wonder. Also about trying to understand your place in a world that has no place for you. I don't know what else to say; I loved it.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel: I love a SCHEMER I love INTRIGUE I love to feel a creeping sense of inevitable dread spread out over three books! Hilary Mantel was simply a genius

The Multitude, Hannah Faith Notess: I debated what (if any) poetry to put on this list and in the end I went with The Multitude simply because I think many people haven't heard of it and Yoshi: A Pastoral is one of my favorite ever poems. beloved i will wait for you / always in the roadless shade

H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald: I came to this a few years after it was popular so maybe everyone has read it already, but I think it's a lovely meditation of grief and nature and how sometimes you just have to pick a (very specific and maybe odd) thing and do it to get through life

Fighting at Sea in the Eighteenth Century, Sam Willis: I love an extremely niche book and I LOVE boats, particularly tall ships. This book was basically made specifically for me, in that it's clearly a labor of love by someone very knowledgeable on a topic that I'm already interested in. If anyone has recs in this vein (about ships or not) please send them my way!!

On the Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagège (Tr. Jody Gladding): Another of the niche topic books, this time about how and why languages die out and the ramifications of their loss. I haven't read the original French so I can't comment on the faithfulness, but the translation is wonderfully done imo. Some turns of phrase I'm still thinking about

Honorary Mentions: The Lymond Chronicles, Dorothy Dunnett (only read if you're willing to be in over your head but if you are!!!! they are a masterpiece) The Locked Tomb series, Tamsyn Muir (very polarizing books, I'm obsessed), the Temeraire series, Naomi Novik (dragons fighting in the Napoleonic wars largely featuring the Navy, tailored exactly to my interests)

tagging if you want @valentinetexass @veryspecificfantasies @unrealcities !

[griseldagimpel]

#once again always and forever endlessly fascinated by whatever went on in John's mind as he built his empire#(or got his lyctors to build it for him? who's to say)#he renamed the sun after his old alma mater's motto. but the prestigious one mind you. not otagu or auckland#the latin. the biblical references in the lyctors names. the western literary canon#the fact that the he likely resurrected NZ / oceania and cast off the global north with the dregs under the tower...#but everyone in the Houses speak English and he MUST have made a conscious effort to preserve the language artificially for a myriad#he had the whole of human history at his disposal but when he looked at a framework for an empire went with what he knew#consciously or unconsciously#renaming his newfound daughter kiriona.... the public (westernised / anglo) sphere vs the private sphere#I wonder if John even could speak Māori when he was human and I think not very well#I wonder if he speaks it now#I'm always thinking about what it meant to him when Wake spoke her full name to him and she had no reference for what she was saying#anyway mmm. I don't think Alecto == Barbie. John namedropped Galatea and Frankenstein and Adam and Eve too#I understand why the fandom latched on it! It's cool and meme worthy and fun#but personally I'm much more interested in how John playing with hand me down barbies as a kid says SO MUCH#about the guy who's now god and all the things that shaped him#Tamsyn really does THE MOST with so little godbless#tlt thoughts#tlt#ejg (@liesmyth)

Something I noticed though is that with all the parallels in Nona the Ninth between John's backstory and the present, John becoming a force of colonization isn't what's emphasized.

Like, in the backstory, you've got the compound being raided by the authorities. And in the New Rho portions, there's a parallel raid. But the parallel raid is being perpetrated by the Blood of Eden against Nona and her found family. Of them, Nona and Pyrrha helped found the Empire. And while the Sixth House (Camilla and Palamedes) have seceded, they're still seen by the New Rho populace as House. They aren't colonized victims of the Empire. We aren't even shown the Empire doing raids. (Does it do raids? Probably! It's an Empire. But we don't see that.)

Then you've got John killing the cops in his backstory, which is framed as him being drunk on the power of magic. And the parallel there is Camilla and Palamedes working together to kill a bunch of cops in the New Rho portion and being a bit drunk on the power of magic with them working as a proto-Paul. Are the cops agents of the Empire? Well, they probably started as such, but the Empire isn't in control of New Rho anymore. (NtN is very vague about the socio-political situation of New Rho, since Nona doesn't care about that on account of it not being a dog lol.) And again, Camilla and Palamedes aren't colonized victims of the Empire.

Or look at the exploitation of the Earth, which John is fighting against. There's a strong parallel with the Blood of Eden seeing Nona only as something they can use and exploit for their Lyctor project, while it is Pyrrha, Palamedes, Camilla, and later Paul who care about protecting her. (John absolutely wronged Alecto, but locking the Earth away to please your lovers is a different category of wrongness than the exploitation of Earth for its resources.)

The parallels in Nona the Ninth feel very deliberate. I'd bet Muir sat down in the outline phase of writing and planned out what they were going to be. But they don't exist in the service of a 'John recreated colonialism and imperialism he himself suffered under' theme, for all that John did, in fact, go on to make an imperialist Empire.

(As always, I so hope that Alecto the Ninth gives us more flashbacks, this time to the early days of the Empire. I want to know what John was thinking!)

I wish the take I see most often on hollywood barbie alecto wasn't that john chose that because he wanted a sex symbol because it's missing out on a lot of thematic resonance about how john cannot help but return to frameworks of western imperialism and even at the moment he is seeking comfort in his childhood he ends up with one the symbols of western capitalism and how that relates to him recreating the same systems that harmed him and were destroying the world when he becomes god