cows exhibit mourning behaviors too

Mercy is actually pretty good at drawing, and perfect at drawing humans. Give her time and she can make a photorealistic pencil drawing of anyone. She can do figure and gesture drawings for any body type perfectly in no time. This comes with the territory of having inhumanly flawless knowledge of anatomy to a molecular level and ten thousand years to dabble in skills. (And she did a lazy scribble for the RB not even just because it wasn't important but because Resurrection Beasts never look the same even to two people looking at the same one at the same time anyway. The fact that everyone saw something different in her scribble made it more accurate, even. She deserves to beat all of them like piñatas, as a treat.)

M— always had a bit of a guilty pleasure for cute and elegant fashion and Mercy still does, though she leans harder into the elegant side now. She doodles and even tailors outfit designs sometimes.

More angsty but in concord with yours: Mercy's room is the one (1) thing in her entire life that is not meticulously tidy, though it is technically very organized. "What will we do with your ceramics collection? There's so much of it." Why not just leave it in her now empty room, Mercy? Why are you worried about finding space to put it? Anyway yeah we never see her room and the only things we know for sure are in it are a piece of furniture with at least two drawers and her itenerary for her own funeral, so I like to think it's just absolutely cluttered to hell with mementos she's collected from her dead friends, including all the cavs. :3 Like everything has a specifically chosen place / she's Tetris'd it all pretty tightly but there is So much of it. Absolutely including a few pieces of jewelry and even clothes she can't even remember who stole from whom first, they've just been borrowed and lent and stolen so many times.

Softer one, John really enjoys cooking, at least as much as he enjoys anything anymore. His nana taught him and he still really values that knowledge.

Much sillier but also terrible one, in addition to Barbie, John was pretty into Disney Princesses and adjacent media. At one point he got really into Sofia the First and this particular song accidentally did irreparable damage to his personality and moral compass. (/lighthearted)

Most of the text is Palamedes defending his innocence after Odysseus framed him for treason. And an argument he makes repeatedly is that you can't know things from being told them. You can only know things you've perceived yourself with your own senses. This is partly because direct experience doesn't lie and people do.

I love this so much, and also it lends new, insane dimensions to The Unwanted Guest. "You can only know things you've perceived yourself with your own senses" is basically Ianthe's rebuttal when Pal first tries to debate her about the permeability of the soul. While Pal's point is that perception isn't serving Ianthe in this case as it might elsewhere because the timescale of the change in question is too crazy-big to comprehend in the time she's had so far:

And then, of course, his later point that her perception of what change might be happening is also skewed because the soul absorption process is messing with her ability to be objective:

But Wake? She knows. Not only does she know, she drew the parallel herself to get under John's skin. She named her weapon after the one he used, and she made sure he knew it. When he tried to talk down to her over her genocidal aspiration, she countered not with any argument for her own rightousness, but with a reminder that he of all people has no right to judge her.

John wants so fucking badly to think of himself as a hero, and Wake....

Lyctorhood is a process in which the cavalier (woman) sacrifices themself for the necromancer (man).

Among the original seven Lyctors, there were four men and three women; among the disciple necromancers, four of each. If we account for the stong implications that Pyrrha was originally the necromancer, it may have once been five women and three men, even, which is incidentally the same spread as John's original inner circle pre-Resurrection. (And he's always been more comfortable with women. Barbie is the best but Ken is a creep. Mercy can scream constantly but Augustine raises his voice one (1) time and immediately apologizes.) AND YET.

Most of the original cavaliers are also women. And okay, "maybe" the whole group "just" had more women total. Except women are allowed to die for both women and men, and Alfred is allowed to die for Augustine, but the only instance where a man would have sacrificed himself for a woman back then is stopped. John does still kill Samael and save/spare Anastasia, but there's still something to be said there. And man that angle gets so much worse if Pyrrha was originally the necromancer...

Fast forward to the modern day and numbers are more spread out. The traits associated with each role are mix-and-matched. Necromancers are the ones seen as frail and in need of protection, cavs as strong stalwart protectors, etc. Yet there's still a lot of old bullshit. A lot of subtle assumptions toward women. High standards and critical judgment toward the performance of certain kinds of feminity. And then, while women are no longer required to conform to that feminine mold, they can be hella butch or androgynous and no one bats an eye, and gender is something people can freely choose or change ... IF you're choosing to be a man you'd better not be even slightly feminine in any way. Traditional rigid standards of masculinity are upheld there.

And the best example of all the nuance Muir puts into this through all that is in Naberius Tern. The only cavalier in history who was in no way willing about becoming a Lyctor's battery; Cristabel and Alfred and Gideon Nav all forced their necros, and the other disciples resigned themselves to it. (Possibly Pyrrha as one other exception but I'm sure we'll find out if so.) But Naberius was just property, a tool to be used.

He's someone who worked very hard to achieve the image of A Perfect Cavalier. (According to Ianthe, he had to be perfect, so he became perfect.) Perfect swordsmanship, perfectly sculpted body (which Gideon sees as "whipped within an inch of its life"), perfectly sculpted hair. And then Gideon turns around and judges how much effort he's putting into presentation, looks derisively at him using lip balm.

And Corona constantly dismisses him with things like "Go fix your hair," "You're getting hangry," even "The Third showed its stuff, Babs, that's all I care about." She basically goes "oh sweetie, the thing you've spent your whole life forced to perfect is just a silly little game, it's not important" and dismisses him being upset about it. Later, when she's upset and he's the one trying to get her to settle down, she uses him as a literal chew toy and he just submits to it. He quietly submits when Ianthe eats bits to fuel her necromancy, too.

He's the most glaring victim we directly see of the Misogyny 2.0 present in necro-cav dynamics, and it's really driven home by his nickname. Babs is such a stretch from Naberius, but irl it's usually short for Barbara. As in Barbie. Because they treat him more like a doll than a person.

And I think it's really interesting and important that Muir chose to put that narrative role on a snobby annoying man who you would absolutely want to punch in real life. Because the context changes everything. The twins insulting him isn't taking him down a peg, it's 'putting him in his place' and unambiguously punching down.

It removes the direct connection to gender (without entirely removing traditional sexism elsewhere, in the classic Muir move of having her cake and eating it too) to force the audience to stop and ask WHY these behaviors are bad, if they'd ever be acceptable from anyone toward anyone (no). It emphasizes that the problem isn't who's on top of the hierarchy, but having such hierarchies at all. The OG Lyctors display the roots this came from while Babs' everything expands it even more.

At the Oxford event, she encouraged readers to think about what we consider misogyny versus what the characters do, and I feel like this shift in context is a big part of that. John's genuinely tried and done well in some ways, and in others he's fucked it up beyond comprehension. Failing to understand that changing the parameters doesn't make it any less the exact same bullshit feels like a huge part of everything, here and in so many other ways he's just reinvented old shitty systems.

... 😭 But then, the whole marriage angle also absolutely sets up for stuff like this post, courtesy of @elevenbenevolentmammoths

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

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 "It’s better to die. There’s a power to dying clean … dying free. It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right … we were children—playing 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 circumstance—