Any of y’all ever thought about how the single greatest act of evil in the Locked Tomb series is valuing someone else’s life less than your goal, is picking and choosing who gets to live or die, is viewing life as something to be spent? Everything God is and does comes back to this.
Most obviously, this is the setting’s original sin, John wiping out the entire world in a fit of madness and self-preservation and proving a point. He kills everybody and then gets to bring back whoever he wants, leaving dead all the bad ones and raising the ones he likes. And then pours all those souls into himself and his girlfriend, becoming God through the consumption of countless billions. He builds a "better" world at the cost of all those he deemed unfit to inhabit it.
But that’s not really the original original sin, because what drove John into that position in the first place was the rich and powerful choosing who survives the coming climate catastrophe, taking themselves and their chosen few off to another planet and leaving everybody else to rot. So in the end he replicates their crime.
And nobody much talks about the Eighth House, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that theirs is the most complete destruction out of everyone at Canaan House, the most punished by the narrative. What is their character? Why, fanatical devotion to the Emperor. And what is their specialty? Siphoning — the expenditure of another life to power themselves. That specialty which mirrors God’s sin most directly.
And then think of the process of Lyctorhood, how it requires someone’s death to elevate another. How Ianthe casually butchers a man she’s known all her life to empower herself — and, it’s worth noting, denying Coronabeth her chance to willingly sacrifice, trading one life for another that she considers more precious. Lyctors, the embodiment of the Emperor’s wicked power, are just one soul burning another as “fuel”.
By contrast, the series also wrestles with sacrifice, choosing to preserve someone's life even at the cost of your own. Valuing someone else's life unconditionally. Gideon dying for Harrow. Camilla giving up her body for Palamedes. It's maybe the greatest act of virtue, maybe the most awful wound you could ever cause that person, maybe both. But either way the series consistently posits that sacrifice of the self is the core of love, and love is the most powerful force in the universe -- for good and pain both.
Anyway, that's just a pattern I noticed.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
2087
vaporwave
