was originally gonna go with "dog" but decided to go for a longer word with more "reasonable" mispronunciations instead, but that ended up backfiring and now like half the people on this post think i actually pronounce it like this. guess you could say it was a bit of a. a b. it was a

it was a bit of a self-own

READING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

Specify in the tags please what species or breed of animal you would choose as a witches familiar if the most obvious were off the table

Let's have fun with this

For example for me it would be a great white shark

Also yes men you can interact with this poll too

Pls reblog if u vote :)

Please reblog and add your nationality in the tags along with what you answered! I'm very curious about this; and it's not to shame anybody, so don't be rude!

If you don't do the reblog part it's not very good as a study 😭

I finally got polls!

Since posts can run for a full week I wanted to see how this spreads

For it to spread, it needs reblogged. Reblog for science yall! Let's help OP!

I love summer so much, and had some thoughts about the end of it 🍃

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ok so the whole first generation of Lyctors were people John knew pre-Resurrection. they were his coworkers in the cryo lab. and Alecto was present before the Resurrection.

Earth died, first slowly (climate change that inspired the cryo project and the wealthy men's spaceships), and then all at once (nuclear chain reaction, leaving ash in the air as they sit on the beach eating meat and drinking seawater, probably thinking they would die). So there can still be an Earth RB, potentially.

But I'm less convinced now that John caused the death of the solar system.

Oh AND: since Alecto was there before the quick part of Earth's death: she absolutely cannot be the Earth RB.

not saying I don’t believe you just - where did you get that from?

There are a lot of hints in the text that she is embodied. The Nona beginning poem, the reference to her being sick, her sitting in the tent next to John and the meat. I just reblogged a post from @theriverbeyond saying they think that Alecto and John had ascended already by the point that they're in the tent, which means Alecto has a human(oid) body by then. But John's dialogue towards the end of today's excerpt suggests to me that the actual, final, fast death of Earth comes next. He's going to do "a damned thing" and it sounds imminent. It may not be the thing that hurts Alecto, which is either her first or second death (if the first, then it's imminent; if the second, then it's a while off). But I think the language of "damning" suggests he is going to do a big cataclysmic thing, before anybody else is around. That could be the Resurrection, but I don't think he would think about that as a *damned* thing. I think he was trying to do something hinted at in the poem -- kill the light, make it so that everyone who fucked with him was dead. The kind of thing that makes a Resurrection Beast.

The timeline is wonky, and I'm not currently as certain as I was earlier tonight. It does depend on your interpretation of a number of sentences and context clues, including whether you think a sick Alecto means a planet or a person. I lean heavily towards "person" just because of all of the ways John ends up romanticizing and sexualizing Alecto. I just have a strong feeling that if John's introduction to Alecto was when she was a planet, he maybe wouldn't cast her as an Annabel Lee or an Annie Laurie in his mind. But that's just based on vibes, and people get different vibes.

i am thinking about how the ressurection is always framed as a tragedy, specifically when john talks about it. and it's something he did once but can never do again. im out rn and cant quote specifically but when he's talking to harrow in HtN and she tells him about her parents sin, HE is the one who compares their sin to ressurection, and there is a very strong implication there that in defending her parents hes also defending himself. like he sees his own act of ressurection in harrow's parents massacre-and-rebirth.

Ooh lots to think about here. You're right about how he talks about it. But if the cost of the Resurrection is the death of all of humanity (and I have always thought this is the case) then it makes no sense that the Resurrection happens only after all of humanity dies. Like, once everyone is dead, that "cost" is sunk, so there's no additional price to pay in order to go from being the last survivors of humanity to resurrecting everyone. I don't know if this is making sense exactly, I am pretty sleep deprived rn, but essentially these are things I think are true:

1) Resurrection enacts a cost. What is it? Unclear; but good candidates are "the sudden death of many people" or "the creation of RBs" or both.

2) John thinks of the Resurrection as an awful, sad, one -time thing. Damnable, even.

3) RBs can only be created with the sudden death of a planet.

4) Earth died of climate change + massive nuclear fission reaction. Climate change is slow, nukes are fast.

5) Alecto and John seem to have ascended prior to John doing a damnable thing, but very possibly after the nuclear reaction. Could also be pre-nuke.

6) if they are all alone on Earth at that point, what is there that's damnable? Maybe it's damnable in retrospect, or costly in retrospect, but doesn't seem costly at the time. But that makes no sense to me. I think John did something costly out of desperation, something very last-ditch and extreme, and *that* is the thing that created RBs. But RBs come from the death of a planet, not the resurrection of a planet. So sudden planetary death (and resurrection) haven't happened yet.

I have two thoughts/theories about this:

[image text: In my mind the figure that cleaves the most towards the tragic is the Emperor, John, who is more or less given all the traits of a specific Greek tragic hero in the books – although one has to question whether or not John is actually making himself into this guy specifically; he knows the reference too. Is it a reference if the character is also self-aware of the reference??]

oh john gaius confirmed for genre aware guy who doesn’t know he’s in a deconstructive narrative and fucks himself up over it? oh is that what we’re doing tonight?

Ok but who here is good at Greek tragedy and knows who she’s referring to??

not to be like ~i’m a grad student in classics and i study tragedy~ but i whatever it’s my post i get to clown on it. i don’t think she’s referring to any specific greek tragic figure, moreso the tropes associated with classical tragedy and its characterization as discussed by aristotle, who she namechecks earlier in the interview. my guess is that some john gaius relevant tragedy boy qualities might be: 

- knows a thing is wrong, inexorably drawn to doing it anyway

- narratively problematized infatuation with monarchy, autocratic rule

- masculinities that are sometimes almost shockingly sensitive given how much violence these men are responsible for, which are facts the narrative wants you to be uncomfortable trying to reconcile

- sigh. hubris didn’t actually exclusively mean arrogantly divine aspirations in the way we use today but the god complex is familiar from the roman tragedies of seneca

greek tragedy was also very good at looking empire in the face and saying “this makes us uncomfortable but we also don’t want to stop,” which is probably the most john gaius relevant tragedy trope

please be like “I’m a grad student in classics and I study tragedy”, I am *very* here for that! thanks for sharing!!

Throwing my hat in the ring for Agamemnon, or possibly someone else involved in the Trojan War.

One reason is that many of the characters in the books have names that reference not just Classical Greece in general, but specifically the Trojan War: Pelleamena (Peleus), Priamhark (Priam), Palamedes (who almost was Diomedes, another reference to the Iliad), Protesilaus, Pyrrha. (Did I miss anyone? Is it a coincidence that all of their names start with a P?)

Also, I think that there are interesting points of alignment between Agamemnon specifically and Jod.

Agamemnon comes from a cursed bloodline. He draws several city states/royal houses(!) together for a war of revenge that drags on for a long time, and leaves many of the survivors displaced. He sacrifices his own daughter to appease an angry goddess so that the army can sail to Troy. And when he goes back home, his wife has him killed to revenge the dead daughter.

It's a bit unclear what Jod's endgame is, but he sure is in a war that had dragged on for a while, and according to Augustine he is "assembling [a] bewildering […] invasion force" in order to exact punishment for whatever it was that happened to humanity. He does not seem, uh, uncursed to me. He has become displaced from his home, as had his Lyctors. Her sacrificed A.L., and let the Lyctors sacrifice their cavaliers (and it's quite possible that the Resurrection involved some kind of sacrifice as well). And he has not returned to the First House yet, in fact he claims he can't go back. Maybe someone is waiting for him there, someone who wants revenge for one or all of the sacrifices he made?