kill us twice, shame on god

me: the ninth is a poor planet, and harrow is more cognizant of that than anyone, so if anything her look should be austere!

+ 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