ticks and Clocks and fireworks

thinking about this it most likely depended on the era and individual circumstances. like i can definitely picture organising a lavish celebration for Looks to the Moon's activation, for example, because she's an older iterator and i assume it was incredibly important to the public to be able to familiarize themselves with an entity that they're going to associate themselves with for the rest of their existence. an iterator's activation is an event of astronomical importance, and since the benefactors' culture was so spiritually rich, it's safe to assume the celebration would be grand. later down the line, as more and more iterators were built, the celebrations became mostly a show, since everyone knew damn well what their main purpose was by that point, but not celebrating an iterator's "birth day" could be seen as disrespect to both the iterator and their respective society. Five Pebbles was one of those cases where nobody was actually happy about the guy being built, especially not the culturally-attuned parts of the society so to speak (rip citadel), so the fancy festivities were mostly just some bullshit i think. not in the sense that they weren't as excessive, more so that they were simply performative. everyone was already mad while FP was being built. by the time his construction was finished, many already resented him - not for what he had personally done, but for the circumstances of his construction: the forced abandonment of the culturally important Citadel and relocation to a new and unfamiliar superstructure, which wasn't even deemed fully safe to their beloved LTTM because of the security and water supply concerns. because of how rushed FP's construction seemingly was, the celebration was most likely cut short as well so the iterator could assume his duties as soon as possible. and he had many of those. maybe even more than he would have had if he wasn't built in association with LTTM.