Childishness absolutely feels like the point! How it's not just a meme but a very recognizable children's book he references there.
It's a running theme for better and worse, and it's equal parts appalling and tragic. Cytherea with a face that could have been 17 or 37. Mercy's petulance and very young voice. She and Augustine in the candlelight, where Harrow isn't sure if they look unimaginably old or no older than Ianthe. Holding each other like children who had just awoken from a nightmare.
Gideon and Harrow who never got to be children, women before their time. Ortus the grown-ass man still being coddled and swaddled by his crying mother and never taken seriously. Palamedes forcing himself to grow up fast, and growing up so deeply kind, in large part because someone even at eight years old treated him like a human being who knew what he was talking about.
Pyrrha's gut-wrenching "Itâs better to die. Thereâs a power to dying clean ⌠dying free. Itâs not love, what youâre about to do. Itâs not beautiful and itâs not powerful. Itâs a mistake. We didnât even do it right ⌠we were childrenâplaying with the reflections of stars in a pool of water ⌠thinking it was space."
John, who in his darkest moment when he very much was largely out of his mind desperately grasped for an idea of "perfect" and thought of being 7 years old playing with his favorite doll. John who in one of the most unsettling moments in the series writes that "J + H" in the sand in "blocky child's letters."
And Nona. Nona who is an unfathomably ancient being and a 19-year-old barely-but-still-adult and 6 months old all at the same time. Nona who is also egocentric, selfish and vain and petulant, who thinks she's the most deserving person who's ever lived, and who is bursting with so much love for everyone and everything at all times. Nona who struggles to tell even the smallest lie both even when it's harmless and even when it's vital. The embodiment of innocence, precious, and when combined with any level of power, utterly terrifying.
The tragedy of Jeannemary and Isaac and so many kids like them. Kids like Pash used to be, kids like Hot Sauce and Honesty and even Kevin.
There are so many ways to look at the blurring of those lines, especially if you add too the Christian lens (that Muir does have) of humanity all being God's children (and in this case Alecto's children, emphasized when she wakes up as herself).
It's as if saying... we're never really all that different, it's always more the world around us that shapes up, yet we should always have a say. That none of us are ever really ready to handle things, even if we're semi-immortal grizzled veteran milfs in our 50s. A duality between offering all humans of any age the same grace we would ideally afford to children and the same caution you'd have handing a child nuclear launch codes, which is to say, under no circumstanceâ
And I don't know. There's something so compelling about John Gaius, age ten thousand forty or close to it, still telling himself and others over and over, "There can be no forgiveness." Next to Hot Sauce, age fourteen, saying "I'll always love you, Nona." (But you ARE on Kevin bathroom duty forever for being a zombie. đ¤)
amandla
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