John Gaius - Blog Posts

Not to mention that everyone from Dominicus seems to have surnames that match linguistically with the corresponding number of their houses. Jod literally named everyone 2-9 lol

I think often about the heavy irony of John laughing at Wake's name and mocking BOE's naming systems. BOE are trying to preserve lost Earth culture, but clueless of context, their fragmented merging of high and low culture comes across as silly to John (and us. But it's a noble attempt to preserve everything, even the stuff that wouldn't necessarily seem 'worth' saving. But what does John rename his friends? Pyrrha and Cassiopeia and Ulysses and Augustine. He also names almost everything after Earth culture, but it's literary/religious/historical 'high' culture. BOE is scrabbling to save everything possible, but John has the privilege of context and memory, and so he picks and chooses what's 'worthy' of being used or shared. Low culture is reserved for his little jokes with himself— though honestly, a lot of his references to earth culture full stop seem to be inside jokes at the expense of others. I doubt Cassiopeia knew she was named after the infamously vain ancient queen, for example. John also quotes things at people without explaining what he means, like when he quotes Shakespeare and Hans Christian Andersen at Harrow; he's not really sharing it, he's mostly using it to isolate the other person in the conversation, or make himself seem unknowable and superior. It's honestly very telling that when given the choice John will name most things biblically or classically. It does partially feel like he's desperately scraping to preserve something of his childhood and the home he destroyed (especially with the renaming of Gideon to the Māori translation Kiriona, but... well, he literally renamed her and made her into a walking corpse teenage soldier so :/), but when you look at how he deploys earth culture on the whole, it usually becomes weird and imperialistic and weaponised. He's not really preserving lost art, he's selectively using it for his own agenda, and he's often using the two biggest things that were ever co-opted by conservatives and imperialists, the classical world and biblical convention.

For me a lot of the horror lies primarily in the fact that the culture, traditions, and tactics of the nine houses stem almost entirely from the mind of one eccentric depressed nerd with a (literal) vengeful god complex.

Like, John lives in a space station where the walls are coated floor to ceiling in the corpses of people who have died serving him over the span of 10,000 years, one of his houses is a literal army of cloned child soldiers sent to the frontlines like a slaughterhouse conveyer belt, and the entire toxic necro/cav dynamic is based entirely around him being unable to trust his closest friends to stay by his side without emotional manipulation.

This entire universe is built on the hypothetical what-if of what would happen if someone was allowed to reshape the universe to their liking at the expense of everyone else, and that someone happened to be terminally online.

It’s like when authors jokingly say they’re terrible people for what they put their characters through but in this case, John’s fanfic is real. It’s like if Paul Atreides had a Tumblr account.

For me, I guess, the locked tomb is really superficially a good story and has lots of aspects that are good in isolation and appeal to a wide variety of queer readers but I think this series would have been better and more satisfying if Ms Muir had leaned more into the gothic and away from the internet humor. In my mind there’s no reason why each House wouldn’t be entrenched so deeply in things we consider taboo and repulsive that it’s unpalatable to most readers. Instead it’s like if Homestuck 2 was good

John Gaius shortly before eating the solar system to kill some useless bastard billionaires, creating the creatures that would hunt him and his friends down for the next 10000 years and also the Barbie that will (hopefully) lead to his downfall in the process.

sometimes i wonder what it's like to he mentally stable. anyway *resets the universe* this time it's gonna work out for sure

Amen

character with HUGE LIAR written in his forehead: waughh i am so sad...nobody like me

audience: waaaugh he is so sad...nobody likes him :(

I remember when I was starting to read htn I hated mercymorn because she was mean to my bb girl and I liked god more but now that I’m almost done htn I hate him I hate him I hate him and now I love mercy (I still can’t forgive her for trying to kill my baby and being rude to her ) but I want John to become dust and disappear forever and go bye bye

John Gaius is a iPad kid

my friend wrote a paper on tlt concerning gender, queerness, and ecofeminism and it broke my brain

tldr he outlined how the present necro/cav dynamic (eg. how cav is subservient to their necro and romantic relationships between the two parties is taboo) is a result of johns implicit misogyny he projected onto earth/alecto; how in this sans-misogyny world queerness/homophobia still exists in necro/cav ships

so ive been reanalyzing all the tlt relationships from the lense of necroxnecro cavxcav = hetero and necroxcav = queer and OH MY GOD

griddlehark = queer

lobotomized harrow was replacing her queer relationship (cav!gideon) with a coworker hetero one (cav!ortus)

giddianthe = hetero

kirianthe = queer

tridentaricest = queer, but as corona was “necro-passing” it could be BUTCHFEMME REALNESS

idk how to classify paul…

I’ve been thinking about John’s choice of Barbie-form Alecto in the conext of ecofeminism.

The idea that environmentalism and feminism are intrinsically linked and we cannot save the Earth without first disbanding the patriarchy.

Man dominates the Earth and its resources, because they have dubbed it as female, and that’s what you do to women. It’s your God-given right.

Gaia, Mother Nature, Prithvi, Terra.

Notice how matriarchal societies, like North American First Nations (from the West Coast i am most familial with Musqueam), value and respect the Earth. Many of their creation stories centre nature and animals, featuring them as something humans can learn from and follow.

Patriarchal and colonial societies like England dominate both their women and the Earth. Their God puts man (male, white) above everything else; so is his right to own everything.

In a misogynistic society it is almost impossible to treat the Earth with respect, because how can you value Mother Nature when women are a resource to be used?

John is against trillionaires. He’s a scientist. He recognizes that the rich have abused and destroyed the planet, harming the poor. He cares about the Earth and wants to let it heal. He loves Alecto, in his own way.

But still, he uses her. He locks the Earth’s soul in a Barbie doll and uses her power to consume all the other planets in the solar system, murder every person in sight and make himself God.

He’s passionate about climate change because he recognizes the abuse the wealthy enact on the world for their own benefit as what they have been doing to him—the common people, the indigenous people. He’s mad (rightfully) at the injustice against him, but he’s not trying to save the Earth because he respects it, but because he wants to save the people he resonates with.

He doesn’t want to remove the boot, he wants to become it. He shows this by recreating catholicism in the Nine Houses. He’s Maori, that’s not his indigenous religion. It is the religion of God-given domination. That’s what he wants.

He was never going to save the Earth, he just wanted to be the one to imprison it. TM has shown us this through his objectification and feminization of Alecto.

so Alecto the Ninth

saw the new Barbie trailer and had to do it to 'em

I finished reading Frankenstein

Dream scenario for Alecto the Ninth - Alecto just comes and rips John apart and puts him into a tomb instead.

This is inspired by a seggsy statue of Medusa in the same pose, and considering that Alecto has apparently a little to do with Arthurian legend, and like gives me medieval or medieval art poster vibes (probably due to the writing style in the epilogue) I thought to give her some clothes that resembled that (but I ended up with a more Renaissance inspired dress, thought that fit better); and also I tried to get the text to look a little medieval.

[ID: Two digital drawings of Alecto The First, in a green-blue lightning. She is wearing a white flown dress that is reminiscent of renaissance dresses. She has manacles on both wrists and her neck. The chains on her wrist manacles are broken, the chain coming from that on her neck is unbroken and wraps around her waist. Her right hand holds the severed head of John Gaius and her left hand holds her iron sword. The sword, the head and Alecto’s mouth and bottom of her dress are covered in blood. The first drawing is only different from the second in that is has text written on it. The text is “That is how meat loves meat” written in a medieval-esque font. /end ID]

God aka John Gaius aka The Emperor calling Phyrra a bombshell, and then making a ‘your mom’ joke to Augustine is the highlight of my day