#cytherea loveday

also re Cytherea like yes she is a bad person and on a reread often cartoonishly evil just for shits and giggles but also. very crucially. if i tried to use necromancy to cure my chronic illness only to end up chronically ill but unable to die for eternity I would also become the joker.

I recognize that sometimes Cytherea feels like a cartoon villain but I would just like to say, as someone with chronic illness, the idea of having the person I loved most in the world die so that I could get better, only to find out she died so that I could be sick for eternity.... and then to BE sick for TEN THOUSAND YEARS, watching every but you and four people who don't even remember your last name die, while you are still in horrible pain. Bro I would be kicking puppies like there was no tomorrow.

What is actually insane to me is that in Nona, John literally says that he can cure cancer (“… I mean yeah, I was curing cancer but I was freaky” apologies if I got that wrong). I’m not even surprised that it was Cytherea who double down at Canaan and made the first actual direct attempt on Johns life ever made by a lyctor. John was talking like” I’m sure she had a lot of reasons but a big one was probably that I didn’t pay enough attention to her” motherfucker the biggest reason probably has something to do with when cyth said something along the lines of “(Loveday) and I thought (lyctorhood) could save me” like that’s why Loveday gave her life. John let Loveday die thinking that was the only way to save Cytherea. Cytherea only went through with lyctorhood because she thought she might be cured but instead she was subjected to 10 000 years of unimaginable pain all while John could have fixed the problem and saved Cyth AND Lovedays life in a matter of seconds. Like Loveday REALLY didn’t have to die. None of the cavs did obviously but Lovedays reason for dying was such a preventable one it didn’t even require the truth about the lyctorhood process to come out. Wtf

Ohhh it makes me so mad how John treated Mercymorn. How almost everyone treated Mercymorn, by the sounds of it. Mercy who did not live up to her name, unloveable, unfeeling Mercy — G1deon was literally trying to murder Harrow, he was driving her crazy, and no one suggested he was incapable of empathy. Augustine was just as uncaring most of the time, but no one commented on his callousness. Mercy was labeled defective because she failed to meet expectations of femininity, she failed to be maternal and sympathetic and quiet. Cytherea —before, well, you know — was able to fool John and the other lyctors because she made herself fit the mould, she was gentle and caring and delicate. But the real Cytherea is the one we see after Palamedes’s confrontation: cold and bitter after many centuries of pain. John was fooled by Cytherea because he believed her facade of femininity, and he was fooled by Mercy because e believed her too defective to ever fool him. Ohhh John Gaius when I get my hands on you