#and she believes it! even after seeing the john mercy augustine mess at the end! because it's such a seductive idea

[vaguely-concerned]

Thinking about the symbolic weight of smoking in the TLT universe that comes to the fore in The Unwanted Guest -- the way it moves through from person to person: Pyrrha smoked, and Augustine wanted to impress her in all her stone cold fox MILF James Bond glory (and tbf who wouldn't) so he started too. and even though as far as he knows she's been gone for a myriad and is never coming back, he keeps the habit. Ianthe sees something in the hollowed-out Faberge eggshell of Augustine that resonates with her, all that gilded eloquent emptiness and disdain through the ages, so she picked it up from him to try to emulate it. She picked it up so hard that Palamedes -- the exact spiritual antithesis of the 'smoking! on a space station! what a powermove' ennui Ianthe so admired -- spontaneously unnerded enough to even known how to, simply from a sort of contact contamination of the soul.

G1deon and Augustine sharing a jittery smoke after their near-Harrow experience during soup night, and it's the closest thing to any real sense of brotherhood that remains between them. Pyrrha going ten thousand years dying both literally and for a smoke (and then Camilla sold her fucking cigarettes (for a third of what they were worth, probably Pyrrha's own good, and also more importantly grocery money). what an entirely haunted time to be alive etc.). Augustine and Mercy trading a cigarette back and forth in the middle of their collusion over the love and murder of god.

An act of small and measured self-destruction in the name of something a little bit like connection when you're stuck somewhere in yourself where love itself dares not or cannot tread (ritualized, transmissible)..........

#the unwanted guest #the unwanted guest spoilers #the locked tomb #ianthe tridentarius #augustine the first #pyrrha dve #palamedes sextus #this series is going to make me lose my mind completely one day (affectionate) #the locked tomb meta #the fact that ianthe seems to have had some genuine admiration for augustine makes my head spin. of course though. #of course she sees the person who looks the most like he's successfully made himself impervious to the world #utterly untouchable and impossible to hurt because he isn't even really there #and she believes it! even after seeing the john mercy augustine mess at the end! because it's such a seductive idea #when you've stuck yourself in an inevitable ocean of pain to think you could make yourself numb enough that it doesn't matter #it's the emotional equivalent of 'oh there's water all around? well I just won't breathe in then. easy lmao get on my level' #she holds on to that thing from him even when it's been proved to be both impossible and ultimately untrue even in him #because uh. oh I'm about to be kind of sad for ianthe what the fuck is going on. he might actually have been the closest thing #to parental and especially paternal affection she's ever known. certainly known enough to try to model herself after #IMAGINE how fucked up the nine houses must be when augustine the first registers for anyone as a model of psychological survival #ianthe do you really want to be yourself completely so much that you're willing to be nothing. I mean yeah probably but. oh my god #gaining nothing at the cost of everything

[liesmyth]

Idk I think we should also consider how the name feels on them? Like Mia is a beautiful name, it’s so unbelievably light though….. Matilda or Miriam though. Matilda is very popular now. Mercymorn is not a real name I think so he straight up made it up for her specifically. I bet it was something like Marceline and they called her Marcy. Also probably means that she was somehow special to John. Hmmm.

Also, I kinda think that Augustine’s real name would be something short and boring, like Alan. But that’s because I have this horrible suspicion that when John tampered with his friends memories after he resurrected them he accidentally (not) made them into sort of caricatures of their original selves. 1) they act very differently in his memories, waaay less theatrical and less refined and it cannot be just the 10000 years, 2) that’s just how memory and personhood works, 3) this one is very hard to explain but Mercy, Augustine and Gideon just feel to me like people who have very limited ways of expressing themselves. Like Mercy and her “yuck ugh”? I’m sure M- used to say that, yeah. I’m sure that’s what John remembered about her. But I don’t think she speaks like that in his memories. Same goes for Augustine. I don’t know how to explain it. The og Lyctors are supposed to feel like people burdened by their own selves, yeah, but when I realized that John picked and chose their memories I was like. Oh! So that’s like if you only had to express yourself the way your friend sees and remembers you. Because then all three of them make sense. Like imagine that you have real feelings but you have very very limited actions to express yourself because you are designed to reflect Johns memory about your own dead self. Like. That sucks!!! Gideon Prime especially has this thing about him. And even Pyrrha although to a lesser extent and she def has some of her og memories.

I kind of have a headcanon that BOE might know their real names but only because they were remembered as heroic scientists that helped them save humanity but Sadly Couldn’t Be On The Ship or something. I think it would be very funny.

I love how everyone in the fandom has their original name headcanons but we all agree that they were boring (except Pyrrha)

Also I LOVE all the thoughts on the relativity of memory and how someone appears to another's eyes is never who they really are, and how that translated to the backstory mindwipe. I don't believe John picked and chose their memories with any finesse, just because 1) he does things very intuitively; 2) picking and choosing which memories to keep for an entire group of people who all knew each other AND knew you too is logistically complicated? what if there are inconsistencies etc; and 3) I doubt he wanted to risk accidentally messing it up.

I think their personality was informed by their souls—that are definitely a thing in TLT!—and they definitely didn't feel "caricatures" in HtN (to me!), just very tired very bitter people. But I can absolutely seeing John consciously or unconsciously shaping their personalities just bc he expected them to behave in a certain way that mapped with what he remembered, even if it wasn't necessarily how they'd have behaved if he hadn't been there.

Personally, I doubt BoE know much of anything about the end of earth. This is a whole different topic but tldr: it's been 10k years; they know the names that have been passed down the generations, but they don't have any context for where they came from. Language has evolved, and IMO what Wake said to John in HtN is more speculation and guesses than based on facts (she repeatedly talked about only one bomb; I think that was deliberate on Muir's part)

I think often about John becoming the flood myth for generations of human refugees fleeing earth — a wrathful deity, a vengeful enemy etc! — and IMO what little BoE know (or think they know) survived as hazy mythology and there's a lot of debate around it and probably no actual documentation.

(I AM ONCE AGAIN THINKING ABOUT THE CULTURAL PECULIARITIES OF THE BOE PLANETS... what if I did a Nona reread and went on a long post spree)

#Anonymous #ask #og lyctors #tlt thoughts #blood of eden #tlt #long post