[title of blog]

“Do Dead Malls Go To Heaven?”

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

REPORTER: "...gonna go... This is gonna go right over... Uh, right over my house. So, very close to my house, uh, which again is in the Chevy Chase area, Bethesda area, uh, this is along Wisconsin Avenue as well, so heads up if you live along Massachusetts or Wisconsin Avenue."

REPORTER (into phone): "Ken, you there, buddy?"

KEN: "Yeah?"

REPORTER: "Uh, hey man, I want you to, uh, get down in the– in the basement. We got a tornado warning. Alright, so I wanna make sure you and– you and Kyle get downstairs as soon as you can, okay?"

(he pauses as his son responds)

REPORTER: "Yeah, get down there now, get in the, get in the, in that bath– in that bed– uh, in the bedroom down there. And just kinda wait for, like, 10 to 15 minutes, okay? Do it now. Alright, thanks buddy."

REPORTER (to camera): "Alright, so, that was, uh, just, y'know, gotta warn my kids, because I know what my kids are doing right now, they're probably online gaming and they're not seeing this, so we have a tornado warning, hopefully they saw it on their phones. Many of us got it on our phones, in the news room, I heard the phones go off–"

We are first introduced to her as the Body in Harrow the ninth (I mean we knew about her before but I’m talking interactively) and she’s basically Harrow’s rock. She has this calm air about her that provides comfort to Harrow. She courts Harrow, has dinners with her where they talk about anything, and prays with her. She’s Harrow’s partner in crime when she agrees with her that Gideon Zero needs to die. She protects Harrow; instructing her to lie. She has no qualms about Harrow’s desperation for her and looks at Harrow with pity when she regrets it. She takes it as her personal duty to save Harrow’s body at the end of htn, performing cpr, because she truly does care about Harrow and that’s what I’m getting at here; she cares about Harrow a lot. She’s also calm, cool, and collected.

Yet all the remaining Lyctors (save for Pyrrha and Gideon) seem to hate her. A lot of them apparently didn’t like her. They call her a monster. Which is a sharp contrast from what we’ve seen so far, in terms of the Body’s likability. Not to mention that Harrow notices that the Body doesn’t seem too fond of John either when she catches her staring at him (god I love that scene where John drops his bag? on her lap and Alecto just keeps staring at him unmoved, I yearn for their story), so like, what happened between all of them? I know Alecto hates necromancy and Lyctorhood but why call her a monster? What did she do?

Then later, this piece of Alecto’s soul, the Body, enters Harrow to become Nona (why Alecto did that is yet to be revealed) and Nona is a stark contrast to it. She’s this bubbly, sunshine person who’s ditsy in an adorable way and who loves everyone and everything. So yeah, Alecto can also be bubbly. That’s until Nona starts remembering who she is. Who’s that you may ask? Oh yeah, the fucking soul of the Earth! I mean, what? Talk about an insane lore drop. She feels for planets when they are shit talked (New Rho, Drearburh) cause they are her family. Isn’t that crazy? She’s a planet. She’s THE planet. The life giving planet. She’s life itself. She’s God.

That’s when the coke starts hitting because she is the soul of the Earth and she was dying and she picked John to save her and that was how he repaid her? By putting her in a body she deems hideous (because she’s not really fond of human beings actually) after wounding her original body? Killing her siblings? Nona’s in the process of remembering all this and loses her sparkle. Nona the six month old. Alecto the 4.5 billion+ year old. Nona grows colder, both physically and mentally, as she remembers herself. She’s fucking disgusted by the state of things. She’s angry. She lets Pyrrha know this. She gets embarrassed. She cries. She’s the soul of the Earth and she’s six months old and she’s hurting and she’s aware she’s killing Harrow and she blames herself for everything; she just wants to die. She finally wants to let go. Look at what trying to hold on did to the universe, right? The bubbly, calm, caring soul of the Earth is also, disgusted, cold, righteously furious, depressed, and is currently a six month old baby having a panic attack while completely falling apart. She also laughs at butt jokes. Atp, your skin starts itching with the need to know more and more about her.

Then she wakes up after ten thousand years, still angry. Angry because John. Angry because she remembers everything she was, everything she could have been, what she is now. Angry as she sees Pyrrha and talks to her. Angry still, as her eyes land on Harrow. She remembers Harrow and something about her irritates, calms, and even pleases her. This being because she realizes Harrow (after biting her lips off) is a descendant of the one person who seems to bring her any sort of peace, a person she, the soul of the Earth, vowed her entire being to: Anastasia. Why is that? She makes the same vow to Harrow because of this fact. She’s unamused by Harrow’s self deprecation but pleased by Harrow’s strength. She forces Harrow to accept her vows despite subtly agreeing that Harrow is too lowly to receive them. Then there is the whole reunion with John where she nonchalantly swords him through the heart with Harrow draped above her other hand. What I’m trying to say is: Alecto is fucking cold, detached, bossy, and swaggy. Which is, yet again, an insane contrast to her other two personalities.

Not to mention she screams blood and flesh and the sound comes from every part of her body. All this while you sit with the fact that the Earth is a conscious being that is fully aware of herself, her skin, and her body; with the ability to grant godlike gifts to fucking randoms, who are also her. Plus she speaks in old english. That’s sick.

…

If I can add some more things?

I feel like she's always "detached", in a way; some forms of her just make it more obvious than others. But not in the sense that she doesn't care, but that she's too big, and she loves everything, always. Muir has described Nona as "my character who doesn't give a fuck" and I absolutely see it.

She doesn't see death as a bad thing, in any if her forms, except when she fears her own death in roughly our time. She exists in cosmic time, on a cosmic scale. Death is natural. Plants and fungi get eaten. Predators kill to eat. Rot feeds new life. Her death is different, because her death is the end of all, not part of the cycle of rebirth, but within that cycle, why WOULD she care? Hers is a love that values the forest but will not mourn for the trees—at least, originally.

Even as Nona, she has a few favorites now, but everyone else? She loves the wartorn city. She loves its pollution. She laments how hard it is being happy when no one else is, not in that it's hard to keep her spirits up, but like it's a burden putting up with how no one else understands when they could and should be happy with her. She sees a body lying near the street and idly wonders if the person is dead, with no particular feelings about that. She never worries for or even really acknowledges the fear and stress of all these refugees. "Do you love?" "Yes!—No?—Yes? I don't know what it means! I say it, and I don't know what it means. Did I ever know what it meant?" And she does love. We feel it in every breath. But does she love in the same ways as anyone else? Does she love in the ways they want to be loved? What does it mean to them? She doesn't know.

And then it's fascinating to compare and contrast her with John, and how the proximity and later fusion of their souls changes them both. She chose him, in her own words, "for John had loved the world." And yeah, a guy that's pushed himself to get three tertiary degrees and spearhead a top secret project trying to both save people and more importantly hit "pause" on a lot of humanity to buy her time for other experts to help her heal? Yeah! That sure sounds like a guy with a passion for saving the world to me!

And then she starts pouring power into him, and he never gets a choice in the matter. He gradually learns to control and make choices about how to use her power actively, and sometimes he makes really bad choices. Sometimes he heals everyone who comes to him free of charge while his friends have to force him to take breaks for food and sleep. But sometimes he loses control, her power responds to his emotions to destructive effect, and some things happen completely passively. He's made her vessel entirely without his consent, with no way to opt out, and the closest thing to a single instruction he'll ever get is that her first miracle through him is preventing the corpses he'd gotten most attached to from rotting. If she'd chosen anything else, changed the starting point he had to work from, it would have set him down an entirely different path. But why would she have ever chosen anything else, when she was only ever afraid to die?

And then? "I've found the problem with being the death man is you stop giving much of a fuck." She chose him for his love and doing so absolutely made him worse.

John's love, by contrast, has always been more intense, focused, specific. He is (unfortunately for everyone) generally very likeable to be around but he keeps his inner circle very small, latches on to a few specific favorites. And he takes it to such extremes—everything he's ever let go of has claw marks on it—but without her power behind it he wouldn't be worse than overly clingy. (I don't think his obsession would even get to mundane stalker territory, either, because without her power and the shield it gives him from consequences he's too much of a people pleaser and sad wet cat. He'd pathetically beg someone to come back and then go write angsty poetry about it.) Like there are distinctly unhealthy tendencies but it's not inherently awful, and with a little work it could have been wonderful. For a human.

But not for a planet. Not for God. She picked one favorite on her own and it started all this, and now even outside of putting her in a meat suit and forcing her to play pretend, just tying his soul to hers also made her worse.

She's protective of Harrow. She cares. And one of the first things she does upon waking is hurt Harrow, and she feels no sympathy for that pain, and only questions why Harrow isn't happy. She doesn't understand at all. ("It's coming for you, Reverend Daughter. Oh, it's coming for you.")

They both still primarily experience love the ways they always did, but the ways the other's has bled into them has made both of them so much worse.

And yet. And yet...

It's not her name that unravels Nona. Kiriona says "Alecto, Annabel, I don't care, whatever her name is" a solid minute or so before. The knowledge she cannot exist as Nona while knowing is "John loves Alecto."

And as angry and hurt and cold as she is, she's switched off in the middle of "I still love y" and ~9800 years later wakes up with the "you" still on her lips.

It's so... IT'S SO...

She's the softest purest warmest thing in existence and also the harshest cruelest and coldest. She's Nature, all at once nurturing and cruel. She's every cool breeze and violent hurricane, she's love and violence and peace and war. She's every human's mother and she's in ways John's and Pal/Cam/Pyrrha's daughter. Creator and creation, protector and in need of protection.

Not to vindicate Barbie, in the most literal way, She's Everything.

I'm so, so excited to see more of her, to see even more sides of her. I'm terrified. I love her. I hope she's allowed to die and I hope it's in a way that does create new life and new hope for all her children.

—

Also as lighter sillier things I love that in the single fully-Alecto PoV chapter it uses it/she/they pronouns for itself. Because it's a rock and does see itself as a rock first, before it fully remembers it's also been made more feminine, even though she was always aligned toward femininity too.

And I honestly love that at least as Nona she's a total airhead. I love the whole "she IS everything so she absolutely cannot be arsed to LEARN about things." And I so hope Alecto like... in DnD terms, has a Wisdom of 200 (yes two hundred) and an Intelligence of 3. I need her to be. as dumb as a rock. Because she's. It's. It's a rock.