In Catholicism confession is important. You admit your sins receive penance and are forgiven. It used to be that if you didn’t go to confession you couldn’t receive the body of Christ.
We see Harrow confess her sins to Jod and Gideon both of whom hold a sort of spiritual authority beyond her (even if she doesn’t know about Gideon).
But that’s the kicker. Confession can’t be done by anyone it has to be someone with spiritual authority and the only people who had that in the Ninth were her parents. After their deaths she would have been the leader of all devotional aspects.
She would not have only been unable to receive atonement for her sins but she likely would have bore the confessions of the entirety of the ninth.
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Sci-Fi over Fantasy: A Lunatic With No Associated Degree Attempts to Assign Scientific Principles to The Locked Tomb
or,
Pre-Resurrection Timeline, Space Installations, and Several Hot Takes
Welcome back, deranged devotees of the Locked Tomb! In THIS installment of my descent into madness (wherein I noticed Tor classifies TLT as Sci-Fi and thereafter lost my mind*), we're going to build a wobbly Pre-Resurrection timeline out of John's piecemeal testimony. In the spirit of Science, I consider this a team project! Your thoughts, opinions, insights and corrections are strongly encouraged.
Pick your fighter:
When does the “Pre-Resurrection?” take place?
(under the cut)
Approximately now / plus or minus 10 years (different timeline/alternate universe)
In the Near(ish?) future, 100+ years (projected real-world timeline)
Nuance / I am bald / What is time, really?
You there! With the reading comprehension! I bet you can predict my conclusions. Let's stumble through them together, hand in intractable hand.
Population Math: Whether You Like it or Not
On the first fucking page of NtN, John claims the population of Earth is currently 11 billion. So how many people are alive on Earth right now? Thanks to Internet, I've been informed it's approximately 8.3 billion. Rough estimate of when it reaches 11 billion humans? Around the year 2200, or 175-200ish years from now - HEAVY on the -ish.
This seems technologically reasonable to me, the Increasingly Esoteric Wikipedia Tags Winner of 2026. We invented the airplane 122ish years ago and landed on the Moon only 66 years later. SIXTY SIX. Humanity said “oh shit, you can go up??” and just never stopped. 175-200 years to achieve further space exploration while continuing to drown in maudlin social crises? Yeah, that seems about right.
(By the way: If you're clinging to John being a tumblrina, You can decide whether tumblr lasts hundreds of years, there's a future social media equivalent, or a secret third option.) (I choose Immortal Tumblr)
While scrambling for last-ditch solutions, John recites a litany of space installations, outposts and projects that already exist in his timeline (he also mentions fusion batteries but that's not the point right now, unbelievably). These locations are ideal options to “restart” humanity, being away from the scene of the crime Earth and at least partially constructed. They'd have plenty of dead scientists and support staff to play dollies with, which we know John likes.
In order of appearance, and with associated information:
Mars
“What about the Mars installation? We've still only got room for five million tops out there, and we haven't worked out how to feed them either.”
There's already a vast network of existing infrastructure on Mars for humans to starve in. Neat!
House Candidate: The Second. It's right there, pre-fab, includes the people killed by John in the Apocalypse (helpful??), and we all basically agree on it. The next may be more divisive...
The Shell on Uranus
“What about Uranus, what about the shell we're building there?”
All we really know about Uranus today is that it's *probably* composed of a thick layer of ice over a big fat sexy ocean. It seems a great candidate for human habitation, and a shell/bubble structure on its surface is a logical housing candidate. It's past Mars and towards the Kuiper Belt. "Why not," says I, in the Year of Our General Ignorance 2026.
Not my circus: there's a tangled web of mythology about castration and Aphrodite being Uranus's daughter, being borneded from the sea from her dad's cut-off balls as a tall blonde hottie rising from the ocean on a half-shell. This may intrigue you but my current field is grasping at scientific straws, thanks.
House Candidate: The Third.
Oh, just you wait.
Unless John’s testament fully redacts a settlement or project large enough to house/support large numbers of people off Earth (and boy do I have feelings about that!!), this would be the best place after Mars to take advantage of corpses and water or whatever The Shell facilitates. You know, the Third Place to Go.
It strikes me that the only three (3) people we've ever met from the Third seem VERY comfortable moving in water - unusual among the Houses. (yes, Harrow and saltwater, don't distract me; bitch can't swim)
Everything else I have is about buttholes, bc of Uranus and Ianthe in my ear (Whatever you Classics freaks are up to would be incredibly useful here)
The Kuiper Belt Installation
“What about the Kuiper installation?”
WHAT ABOUT IT, JOHN? The Kuiper Belt is a huge area around the whole solar system, so it's (probably) not in a fixed location. A space station is sensible given a permanent installation on a celestial body would move away from Tau Ceti as it orbited the Sun. In my mind, this structure served as the "last stop" for travellers before exiting the Sol system.
House Candidate: the Mithraeum
As the last lone outpost of humanity, the Kuiper Belt Installation would be the closest anyone, including John, could get to the escaping Billionaires. If everyone working there died, it was already a grave - and a perfect place to “start fresh.”
....like Mars and Uranus.
(Harrow touches on much of this in John 5:4, which will likely be my next subject.(?))
Before I go lie face-down on the floor, hear me out: in all those descriptions of Places to Put People to Save Earth, where's a super close place we could shove a few billion?
like, The Fucking Moon?
The problem is that citizens of the Moon would still be highly dependent on Earth for supplies, which doesn't really help our planet's struggle. At that point saving the Earth and Moon become one and the same.
Now, wouldn't that be interesting?
++++++
Previous installments of this series can be found here (the catalyst), and continued here and here (if you want to turn your brain into sludge)
Wait wait wait hold on I just fucking realized. THEY call it "Dios Apate."
Augustine and Mercymorn name their plot "Dios Apate"— "Deception of Zeus" AND specifically in Greek.
Do... Do they remember more than we realized, and if so did John wipe less than we tend to assume or is Pyrrha not the only one who's remembered more than she was supposed to? And/or, did they get this name from fucking Blood of Eden?
I can't believe I've never considered the implications of that part...
As I re-read Nona I am feeling more and more that the ‘devils’ are actually aliens native to the planet the houses call Antioch. Will have to pull some textual evidence for this but the main reason I feel this way is that ‘devils’ seems like the sort of thing people who have been taught they are singular and central in the universe would call aliens. Also because alien life has already been canonically established.
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(Disclaimer: I've only read the series once, so I could be wrong about all of this lmao)
I believe that John and Alecto represent Thanergy and Thalergy respectively.
I believe that John is to represent death, decay, chaos; entropy, whereas Alecto is to represent life, generation, order; nagentropy.
I believe they are polar opposites from one another and I believe that this understanding is what the Empirical Saints were intentionally deceived into missing when it came to achieving true Lyctorhood. John was in no need to slay his cavalier because they'd found a balance between the nature of their souls; they'd achieved a balance between life and death, successfully establishing a functioning relationship between Thalergy and Thanergy.
I believe that it was, theoretically, this simple; this straightforward. It's easy to lose sight of the truth when things become overcomplicated and I believe that's exactly what John intended to do to his saints to keep them less powerful than he. Anastasia and Samael came close to achieving true Lyctorhood, but they too had been trained to overcomplicate things and as John had mentioned, Anastasia was making connections that didn't exist.
Therefore, I believe that one half of a Lyctor-Cavalier dynamic is Thalergetic and the other half is Thanergetic. One creates and sustains life while the other completes the cycle by working within death. We see this half-mentioned in John's bastardized version of Lyctorhood, where a necromancer slays their cavalier, consumes their soul, and uses them as a battery. It is a mockery of the truth, but when Lyctors hail from flipped planets, Thanergy is all they know. How could they possibly fully understand Thalergy where Thalergy is in constant scarcity?
Of course John's claims make sense.
From this, I bring you to Harrowhark the First, who hails from the Ninth House and whom did not fail in achieving true Lyctorhood. I'd say that the Ninth House understands more of life than any other house in the system simply because the physical embodiment of Life has been quite literally slumbering beneath their noses for millennia. Their knowledge of Thalergy would have to be very rooted in intuition, though. I'd even go so far as to credit Alecto's passive influence when it came to Harrow's parents hatching the idea of genocide to create their daughter; to create life within death and death within life. Harrow, even when taking her very first breath, was practically parallel to John's version of a Lyctor, minus the signature Cavalier-soul-battery. She would never be as strong, but she did possess the capability.
Now take Gideon; loud, boisterous, flame-haired and golden-eyed Gideon and see that even as a renamed revenant, she is still so obnoxiously full of life that Harrow couldn't ignore her even if she wanted to. Even when her soul is split; body ruined and dead and made incomplete with holes, she's still running on enough fumes to challenge Life herself in Harrow's name. She is the Thalergy to Harrow's Thanergy and the Thanergy to Harrow's Thalergy.
Harrianthe wedding in atn. Calling it now. Jot that down. Ianthe said “one day I’ll marry that girl” and lord knows that skank pretty much always follows through (ghastly but true)
Especially with the release of The Unwanted Guest, I feel like I see too much focus on the “romantic” (as in idealized and regarding any type of love) message of the series and not enough on what I personally think tazmuir’s actual thesis statement is. We forget that she is a horror author, and I think that is her entire goal. Every set of relationships we’re presented with are codependent, unhealthy, consumptive. Someone is consuming someone they love, someone is being consumed by someone they love. Even if they claim not to, even if they try to find a more “fair” way to do it (ex.: Paul), it’s still what is happening in the end. (Abigail and Magnus are the only exceptions I can think of.) Pyrrha is the only character who seems to recognize this, and she tries so hard to call it out, but no one listens because they think it’s romantic. Because every relationship is either seen as romantic or wretched, both by the characters and by the readers, even though they are all so bad. I think tazmuir is trying to make readers question this. Why do we find certain toxic relationships - like Harrow and Gideon - romantic, but others - like John and Alecto - horrifying? Why is one acceptable but not the other? Where do we draw the line? In regards to TUG, why do we jump from changing each other with love, to consuming each other in its name?
