Go on singing!

did you see they made jane prentiss from the magnus archives real

to me what the dramatis personae sections bring in is more the role and performance aspects of theater. gtn has the most formalized and "normal" one with this big long list spanning three pages giving us our sorted, numbered, and labelled full cast. it looks conventional and regular and primes you to think this will be a conventional and regular book. I've said before somewhere that I think one of the biggest tricks gtn pulls is playing with genre and trope expectations and making the reader think this will be a fun and sexy enemies-to-lovers adventure story that ends with gideon and harrow learning their roles as cavalier and necromancer and becoming a cool power couple, and it kind of does, but the twist is that this is a bad thing. they figure out how to fit the molds, and that's the tragedy.

in contrast, the dramatis personae in htn is weirder looking, and it establishes that this is a book about people who aren't here. all the lyctors are labelled as [x] the first, [n]th saint to serve the king undying, theoretically defining their main identity as being about the emperor, but the much weightier part of all of their listings are the struck through names of their cavaliers. this tells us that this is "supposed" to be a story about god, but really it's a story about the conspicuous absence of everybody's dead friends.