kill us twice, shame on god

+ these words from Abigail Pent (Ch 45, HtN):

“Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”

Because Pluto can be another name for Hades, the god of the dead. But it's often one that's used to either euphemistically separate him from the fearful concept of the lord of the underworld (as in the Iliad - from which a number of Ninth names are drawn, including Harrow's parents), or to refer to a more complex or even positive idea of the god, particularly in relation to underworld-transcending cults such as Orphism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Which makes me wonder if there's to some extent a deliberate split between Harrow and Alecto's association with Pluto, and the way John is figured as Hades in HTN? Hades as death and control and coercion, vs Pluto as death and rebirth as natural yet potentially escapable cycles?

Muir has also suggested that ATN might start with something akin to the Harrowing of Hell - Jesus' descent to hell to rescue those who died before him. Though in Christian theology, the hell referred to is sometimes also called "Hades", to distinguish it as a liminal resting point of the dead, more akin to the neutrality of the classical conception of the underworld, rather than the place to which those judged sinners might be confined.

So we have Harrow - her very name referring to the idea of souls being rescued from some infernal waiting place - also associated with concepts of transcending the underworld. Which is, of course, Abigail's heresy: that one can cross the River. That there is something Beyond. Abigail is heavily figured as the classical chthonic psychopomp Hecate, who is also associated with underworld-transcending mythologies.

And it's Abigail who introduces the idea that there is something wrong with the River, that she has written notes about this, and that her brother might find them, which would rather seem to be setting us up for some kind of reveal, perhaps one that will connect to what the end of NTN suggested about where John has been putting souls and how that might be going rather wrong.

Look at the sequence of events. The cryonics project was a secret. Most of the planet knew it was bad, but they didn't know it was THAT bad, hence why some of the most important work was being done in a small town in New Zealand. The plan is to get everything lined up so that by the time they have to break the news that, yeah, we're gonna have to evacuate the Earth, they'd have a solution ready to go. Sure, there would inevitably be some panic, but nothing as bad as revealing it without the cryonics figured out and ships ready to go.

Then John decides to livestream himself playing with cadavers, and also reveals that the Earth is doomed and they don't have the technology to evacuate everyone yet. The economy is tanked. Country turns on country. A major world leader has to be puppeted by John because his death would destroy the country. The whole planet is directly thrown into crisis mode, and the trillionaires use the chaos to snap up all the funding and research for their "leave everyone else to die" plan. And since cryonics research has been halted because the main guy in charge is now using the lab as a cult compound instead, they're able to convince people this is the only viable option.

"Then another year abroad, where he got the grant and met the men who would make things happen". That's a very vague phrasing, and seems to suggest a funding situation slightly more complicated than some kind of governmental or NGO grant. Is he being funded by some of the trillionnaires? (Or do these mysterious men have anything to do with the fact that we later learn his cryo cans were being made in a facility owned by a multinational intelligence alliance?)

John talks about "oversight execs" in relation to C—'s hiring, but otherwise only refers to those funding his project as "they": "They mocked it up to look like a freezing works", "they bitched about the timeline, and they bitched about the money", and then, the next paragraph "they were constructing the other ships", "we even lent them G—". It's not entirely clear who "they" are, or whether all of them are referring to the same group. But it's possible that the ships being constructed here, which are the ones that would later be fitted with FTL engines, were being constructed as part of another project funded by the same people as the cryo lab - who may well have included some trillionnaires, and who certainly seem to have been avoiding putting all of their eggs in one basket right from the beginning.

And that's all John 20:8. We don't see John's powers until the next chapter, John 5:20 - it seems like the powers are bestowed on him at least in part as a response to his distress at the cancellation of the cryo project.

It's strongly implied that the funders cut the cryo lab specifically to fund an FTL project instead: "official paperwork claimed they’d decided to pull back and think things through again, but he’d [A-] always known they’d reinvested in something else".

What's not clear is whether it's John that leaks the fact that these kinds of projects are underway. He just says "when the leak happened" (the one that crashes the global economy!), and it's tempting to assume he's glossing over his own actions there. But after the cow dome incident, several chapters later, John says "I wanted to break my NDAs. I wanted to let them know about the cryo plans and how we got shut down", which suggests he previously hadn't broken his NDAs. (This could be a what order did the bombs go off in Melbourne situation, of course...).

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

here's the intro

2023 alectopause: you know it's ok we can wait. i got some fics to write

2024 alectopause: here is 30,000 words on how john's characterization as emperor and lyctorhood interplays with colonialism, imperialism, sexual assault, and misogyny, featuring a full bibliography, a reading list, and peer reviewed by three mutuals

2025 alectopause: gideon would not fucking say that

what the fuck was john, necromantically speaking

i don’t mean after the genocide/resurrection thing. we have plenty of theories about what he is then (i personally favor the theory that he’s a new and exciting kind of resurrection beast).

BUT. before that, but after he gains necromancy, he should just be a normal necromancer, right? but instead there’s a bunch a weird shit:

1. he isn’t frail? like necromancers are canonically pretty physically weak and sickly. but john mentions no illnesses or new limitations (there’s an argument to be had about his mental state, but that can easily be attributed to the Everything Burning Down)

2. doesn’t eat?? PLEASE correct me if i’m wrong, but i believe that john stops eating food while back on earth and he’s fine (for a given definition of the word). afaik, necromancers still need to eat, right? canaan house served kind of shitty meals that the necromancers still ate. why would they eat plain leaves if they didn’t have to? sooooo why could john starve himself without actually starving?

3. is more powerful that most necromancers??? at some point, john drops 100 people in a kilometer radius, and he can pinpoint the ones with guns. if adepts can do that, why aren’t the battles against boe and the rest being won much faster? if that level of power is - we’ll say slightly above average, for the sake of argument, then the normal necromancers are really not up to par.

the thing is, we know necromancy has a genetic component to it. it is possible to alter dna to make an extra strong necromancer (hi, harrow). john’s eyes turned gold when his necromancy kicked in and his daughter inherited them, as well as a portion of his unkillability, indicating they were at least partly genetic traits.

A soul is the best battery there is, and having total access to one is what makes Lyctors so much more powerful than a regular necromancer and means the toll for their "magic" does not go to their bodies. (I'll also like to add that Lyctor's apparent lack of "necromantic recoil" could be because they just heal super fast.) 

In John's case, he was connected to a planet's soul, which would be the greatest source of energy we have seen until now, so his limit is extremely high (but as far as we have seen, it does exist, he can't just do whatever he wants), and his regeneration is also almost limitless. 

He does seem to have an adverse effect (or to have had it before killing the planet) since Harrow lumps him with Augustine and Mercy as having a more typical necromantic look in comparison with Gideon I, but that could also be because he was being influenced by a non-human soul to have weird habits that were detrimental to his health (like how Nona acts). As for why that did not kill him, my best bet is that being connected to the Earth's energy let him keep his body functioning via magic.

Also, necromancy is pretty much not genetic but does seem to be soul-based (it is said that there is no biological difference between necromancers and non-necromancers except for greater activity from vestigial organs), but being conceived in the wake of a mass death (so, a place supercharged with thanergy) would seem to be able to skyrocket the chances of a soul being "in tune" with thanergy and therefore the baby being a necromancer. Gideon does not only have John/Alecto's golden eyes but also their regenerative abilities (or at least regeneration on par with a Lyctor), so she is probably (somehow) also connected to the Earth's soul, and that is how she gets both of those things.

What John is, pre-res, is actually pretty horrifying.

He's a regular human being, and something about him catches the attention of a vast and ancient entity entirely beyond human comprehension and communication. It picks up in some way that he is trying to help it, even though he does not understand that the thing he is trying to help isn't just a biosphere but a conscious, ensouled entity, albeit on a scale so vastly more complex than a human that they are scarcely comparable. It wants to help him to help it. They will both live to regret it.

This entity modifies him on a genetic level without his knowledge or consent - and we still don't know the extent of that. What can Gideon's abilities tell us about John pre-res, and how might they be relevant in ATN?

It's hard to say at what stage John not sleeping or eating went from a symptom of his mania to something preternatural. Maybe it was always both. He's certainly latterly manually tweaking biochemical processes to skip sleep and meals. What's not entirely clear is whether he's describing a situation where there's something else sustaining him, or if it's more akin to Harrow's experience on the Mithraeum and he is running on reserves he can't spare. Or whether the framework laid onto him by an entity so different to him has complicated these things for him - after all, even experiencing human bodily needs doesn't make Nona like eating.

Pre-res, he's operating at a level beyond the necromancers he created, but within a recognisable framework of energy exchange. : he kills those 100 people using the thanergy from five accidental deaths, and in GTN Harrow says "Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes". But we don't know much of the broader mechanics of his abilities - just the aspects that he comes to identify as 'necromancy'.

John has been Changed and has no frame of reference for how or why. But he is working closely with cadavers, and much of his work will have involved the liminality of life and dormancy and death. So that's where his terrifying new senses take him. To the cadavers, to the workings of bodies, to what makes someone alive or not. But we know he had other abilities, and that he was aware of them: C- talks about the idea of him stabilising a glacier or manipulating the atmosphere. Later, we see him commanding water and earth.

it’s also just way more juicy for john. like he is so obsessed with getting it right and fixing it all, but it’s not just because of his literal god complex. he was made to fix it all, and he failed. oooh that’s just so interesting.

The thing with how necromancy works, and indeed, what's going on with House fertility in general, is a bit murky.

What we do know:

There is something specific about the thanergetic Dominicus system that makes it possible for necromancers to be born: "necromancers do not reproduce successfully outside the system" [GTN glossary] The planets of the Dominicus system are "thanergetic" - they produce death energy in the way a normal planet produces life energy, as opposed to flipped shepherd worlds which are merely "thanergy planets", dying slowly. Hence Judith (or her pregnant mother - it's unclear) wrapped in grave dirt while stranded interstellar, and also presumably why Gideon - conceived, gestated, and born away from the thanergetic soil of the system - is not a necromancer.

M Bias also has a long digression about this in the Sermon: "'One flesh' is the underpinning of our whole Empire. We are born necromancers, or we are not; yet we are one. The non-necromancer will still have necromantic children. The necromancer will have parents who lacked the aptitude. The possibility is within us. We live under the thanergetic light of Dominicus, are born, grow, and die in his thanergetic Houses; the Resurrection made us so. We are fundamentally different to those born on thalergy planets outside the empire" (it rather goes on, including the whole wrapping your...bump?...baby?...in grave dirt thing, and a whole kind of imago dei-esque bit).

There is some kind of intersection of exposure to thanergy and necromantic potential: Harrow's conception is obviously an extreme example of that, but Silas' comment that the twins' parents intervening to save Ianthe in utero was "a wasted opportunity, I'd think" seems to suggest there would have been some theoretical benefit to extra thanergy exposure at birth.

Harrow seems to describe two separate processes in her parents' terrible no good very bad date night: "My mother used the resultant power to modify her ovum on a chromosomal level, so thanergy ignition wouldn't compromise the embryo. She did this so I would be a necromancer" (HTN ch 14). The only other reference to chromosomes we get in TLT is Judith's description of the Fifth's "genetic failure of their chromosomes", and given how strongly Abigail is figured against Pelleamena in TLT, I wonder if we're meant to read this as Harrow's parents resolving some kind of genetic issue that was impacting their ability to carry to term, as well as making the embryo able to withstand an abnormally high thanergy exposure at conception?