#John Gaius

[perpetual-ash]

to the people who want to have a conversation about john's being an indigenous man, a māori man, i would like to remind you that the first time we see māori spoke onscreen it goes as follows.

one person in this room is interested in the cultures and languages of the world that came before, to the point her name and mission in life are respectively a human chain reaching back ten thousand years and justice for the destroyed earth: a mission that allowed her to persist beyond death, which brings her to being in control of cytherea the first's corpse. the other is john, who is disinterested in her idea of justice for them and speaks over her multiple times.

that human chain, her name? he doesn't respect it just as he doesn't respect her. this conversation is beneath him and so is her full name. he is annoyed into reciting it.

māori is spoken by john here, and it is spoken with contempt for the woman who wishes to avenge earth and whose name preserved a part of the language that he helped annihilate, along with aotearoa and all other māori people.

the first time māori is spoken in the series it is spoken by an indigenous man—who received an extensive colonial scholarship, who was alienated from his culture and sought respect and recognition in predominantly white academia, who was burned time and time again by the systems of oppression that formed the basis for climate change and the earth's abandonment by the trillionaires—who speaks it with a tone of condescension and a complete lack of gravitas because it is irrelevant to him. genuinely sad, bordering on very funny.

the second instance of māori is when he renames gideon the transliteration of her name into māori. she does not identify with it and she likely does not know its significance.

she is also a corpse: killed indirectly by cytherea the first, who presented a threat to harrow's life that could only be dealt with via her ascension to lyctorhood via gideon's death, who groomed gideon into accepting her role as cavalier primary to harrowhark nonagesimus.

killed by one of the emperor undying's fists and gestures, killed by the ideals of cavaliership which he societally instituted, killed due to cytherea the first's disillusionment with him leading her to go on a killing spree at canaan house in order to gain his attention, killed due to john and john's actions and the systems of the society he created.

the only time we see john use the māori language in a way that isn't dripping for contempt is when he renames his daughter's corpse, wherein he clarifies that she is prince kiriona gaia, heir to the emperor divine and the emperor's only daughter, the emperor's construct.

construct, like the skeletons that farm leeks on the ninth. she is not entitled to resurrection: she is to ownership, to being the ninth's chattel in life and her father's construct in death. he uses the language to declare her his.

gideon is the name of his saint, his oldest friend, spoken by the ghost of the woman that birthed her, to the nuns of her house—kiriona is john declaring a corpse his heir, and his daughter his construct.

there is a conversation i would love to have about john's indigeneity: it's the one where we acknowledge that after wakes death he has preserved the legacy of the māori language by using it to name his daughter, a māori woman killed by his society and the consequences of his actions, something she doesn't feel any connection to.

john is an indigenous man, a māori man, who was born into a land settled by colonisers who rendered it rife with systems of oppression that alienated him from his culture, and led him to fall back on the same systems of oppression when he founded the nine houses. indigeneity describes a relation to colonisation and settler capital, primarily in the form of dispossession; when john declared kiriona his, did he do so as an indigenous man or as the emperor of an empire that ships populations between planets like cattle?

#the locked tomb #john gaius #kiriona gaia

[noxcorvorum]

John battle who wins

John Gaius vs Jonathan Sims vs John Doe vs Jon(ny) d'Ville

You can either vote for your favorite blorbo or consider the information I have provided beneath the cut (spoilers ahead). No results button pick on pure vibes if you have to

John Gaius, Necrolord Prime

- the first necromancer, created the 9 necromantic houses by resurrecting the solar system

- 10,000 years old

- immortal

- was a twitch streamer

- incredibly powerful necromancer (bone, flesh, and spirit magic), once reformed himself after getting vaporized

Jonathan Sims, the Archivist

- the specialest little guy of the Ceaseless Watcher, a fear god surrounding eyes, knowledge, and being perceived

- avatar, the Eye heals him supernaturally quickly, functionally immortal

- has vaporized multiple people with his mind

- asexual

- canonically greying in his late 20s, has so so many scars

John Doe, the Undefeated

- piece of the King in Yellow residing in a 1930s private investigators eyes and arm

- purple prose, says Arthur's name a lot

- tenacious, stubborn, determined, survived the dark world and the dreamlands for quite a while

- the survivability of a cockroach

- supernaturally wooden finger

Jonny d'Ville, First Mate

- mechanical heart that regenerates and resurrects him

- immortal steampunk space pirate C̶a̶p̶t̶a̶i̶n̶ First Mate of the starship Aurora

- unfathomably old through time shenanigans

- permanent death that is foretold (bar fight)

- loves guns and blowing things up and violence

- played by Jonathan Sims who wrote and voiced Jonathan Sims the Archivist

- narrator, dramatic, too many belts

For the purposes of this exercise:

- the Resurrection Beasts are nowhere near J. Gaius for the entirety of the battle

- they are nowhere near a bar fight for the entirety of the battle

- J. Sims has his full Archivist powers

- J. Doe has Arthur, is able to manifest as in part 40, they have their bag and whatever the hell is in it (glass, stone, mask, books, etc), and they have a gun and as many bullets as they would reasonably carry

- J. Doe and Arthur will not be receiving help from Kayne for the duration of the battle, but they start with no serious injuries and are not currently fighting with each other

- teamups are allowed, through there can be only one left alive at the end

- no one has access to their allies (the other Mechanisms, the Archives crew, the Lyctors, the Mithraeum, or the 9 houses)

#tlt #john gaius #tma #jon sims #malevolent #john doe malevolent #the mechs #jonny d'ville #polls

[imjustcryinginthecorner]

the earth put all her power in the hands of a man and it looked like death magic. why was it death magic? did it have to be that way or did John make it that way? why is what’s divine only necromancy? death is inherently part of life, which is everything Alecto is, but was it something about John that made death eclipse the rest, gave it control over life?

#much to think about much to annotate about #Tlt #the locked tomb #jod #john gaius #alecto the ninth #alecto #Nona the ninth #ntn #Mine

[flare-of-flame]

Extra late to the party, but ya girl finally finished Nona!

My notes:

-Cows hate God, justifiably

-this is how meat loves meat

-Prince (gender neutral)

-God hates Melbourne but is also sad it blew up first

-Resurrection beasts have issues

-Noodle is the goodest doggo: “Fight, don’t fight, Noodle!”

#gideon the ninth #tlt #locked tomb trilogy #harrow the ninth #harrowhark the ninth #soup for my family #john gaius #jod #nona the 9th #nona tlt #alecto the ninth #alecto the first #gideon the first #ianthe tridentarius #kiriona gaia

[naomistares]

harrow soup comic! harrow soup comic!

took some creative liberties with the structure of it all otherwise it would've been 20 pages long... love u tazmuir and all your words but i removed some for my sake... enjoy...

#art #artists on tumblr #the locked tomb #digital art #tlt #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #htn #gtn #harrowhark nonagesimus #cw gore #john gaius #g1deon #ianthe tridentarius #augustine #I FORGOT TO SAY #dedicated to my good friend #my good friend sam humphries

[andry-di]

#gideon the ninth #gtn #gideon the ninth spoilers #gtn spoilers #spoilers #the locked tomb #tlt #the locked tomb spoilers #tlt spoilers #harrow the ninth #john gaius #and that guys was the exactly moment when I started to hate him #ad23 #comics

[cutetanuki-chan]

no one is doing it like her

#the locked tomb #harrow the ninth #harrowhark nonagesimus #ianthe tridentarius #art #john gaius

[midnightcrows]

The Emperor Undying and His Saints.

Inprnt store here!

#my art #fanart #just wanted to post them all together #the green dress is what imagine cyth wouldve worn to the dinner party #artists on tumblr #the locked tomb #harrowhawk #ianthe tridentarius #cytherea the first #gideon the first #augustine the first #mercymorn #john gaius #harrow the ninth #art #tlt #harrow the ninth spoilers #the locked tomb spoilers

[rosenkranz-does-things]

my spin on Nona the Ninth cover, id in alt, close-ups under the cut

#nona the ninth #the locked tomb #john gaius #ianthe tridentarius #gideon nav #coronabeth tridentarius #gideon the ninth #camilla hect #pyrrha dve #artists on tumblr

[katakaluptastrophy]

The thing about having read our way through two previous books full of necromancers and weird eldritch shenanigans is that the absolute horror of what happens to John as a person doesn't quite register.

John's own glib, matter of fact narration tells the story as an apotheosis. He was doing great. He'd have fixed everything if only people had listened.

But reading between the lines in the John chapters, you glimpse something rather different.

John basically spends the first half of the Jod chapters sitting in the dark with his creepy yellow eyes, not eating or sleeping, literally stroking his favourite corpses and coming out with chill and fun statements about how he can feel their skin when he's away from them and he's 'waking up'. Cool, cool.

Passing swiftly over the cow dome, Presidential Puppet Pals, and the suitcase nuke, day to day life in the cow dome must have been fun... You're all on the Interpol watchlist, the Vatican is asking a lot of questions, the police are outside and John - who hasn't slept in a week and doesn't eat anymore and is probably wearing some kind of weird novelty tshirt - comes wandering past while you're eating breakfast, followed by a dozen silent, dead-eyed corpses like some kind of mother hen. He makes a cow joke, and then zones out because he got distracted by listening to the bacteria in your gut.

And then some guys die accidentally and it turns out he can eat death energy. So now he's got creepy Twilight eyes, an entourage of corpses, a cape, some very dodgy eyeliner, and he's barely breaking a sweat as he instantly kills over 100 people, says it was an accident, and then, dead serious, tells his followers to drag dead UN peacekeepers inside to add to his 'skeleton army'.

By the end, he's not slept or eaten in weeks, is tweaking his own bodily processes on the fly, is puppeting the dead US president and possibly an army of over a hundred corpses, monitoring G- in Melbourne, carrying on at least two conference calls, and helping to build barricades out of chairs.

And I just keep thinking how weird it must have been for his friends. How sometimes he would have seemed like the man they'd known and loved for so long, and sometimes he would seem different. Did they ever find themselves mourning the man he was? Did they ever stand there as he tuned into something they couldn't fathom, staring at them with those yellow eyes, and feel some awful, uncanny valley terror? Did he ever feel like he was losing himself? At what point did the cow jokes stop feeling like oh, classic John and start to be a reminder that his desire for vengeance and the scope of his powers were outstripping his remaining...perspective?...restraint?...humanity?

#the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #john gaius #We think about eldritch Alecto lots #but I think John's whole 'I'm just a guy' routine sometimes obscures that in many respespects he's just as unsettling

[perpetual-ash]

#the locked tomb #john gaius

[foxy-alien]

I'm obsessed with this moment in NTN, where we realize that John is no longer the prey but the predator

#my art #the locked tomb #OKAY NEXT COMIC WILL HAVE TO BE LINEART bc holy shit this took my 16 HOURS #but also this was so much fun #the locked tomb fanart #tlt fanart #john gaius #harrow nonagesimus #htn #ntn #ntn fanart

[amphiaria]

#tlt #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #john gaius

[smallanddivine]

Idk how a cow could be negative, I hear they watch sunsets

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth #harrow the ninth #tlt #gideon the ninth #htn #john gaius #jod

[sydneysageivashkov]

I wish the take I see most often on hollywood barbie alecto wasn't that john chose that because he wanted a sex symbol because it's missing out on a lot of thematic resonance about how john cannot help but return to frameworks of western imperialism and even at the moment he is seeking comfort in his childhood he ends up with one the symbols of western capitalism and how that relates to him recreating the same systems that harmed him and were destroying the world when he becomes god

#the locked tomb #john gaius #and isn't that way more interesting anyway.

[future-crab]

Trying to break down that one part of htn like. There’s three characters in the scene: God, a teenage nun, and God’s dead daughter (who is currently sharing a body with the nun and is also kind of the nun’s girlfriend? They didn’t really get a chance to define the relationship before the whole dying thing). God doesn’t know his daughter ever existed. The nun has forgotten that she ever existed. The audience does know she existed, but they don’t know she’s present in this scene. The daughter knows that she exists and is here but doesn’t know that she is at all related to God.

And then God looks the nun in the eye and says “If I ever had a daughter, I’d want her to be like you,” and no one involved has enough information to know how fucked up a statement that is.

#harrow the ninth spoilers #htn spoilers #htn #harrow the ninth #tlt #the locked tomb #harrowhark nonagesimus #gideon nav #john gaius #jod #tlt spoilers