Where’s it made? Who brought it here? How much were they paid? Who makes it? Is it made in separate parts and put together? How much were they all paid to do this? Where do they get the materials? Who paid for that? Who brings it there? How much were they paid? Who streamlined the base materials? How much were they paid? Who gathered the base materials? Where? How much were they paid? Is it good for them? Is it good for us? Is it good for the land? Is it necessary? Is it biodegradable? How much does it hurt? Do I need it? Do I even want it?
When people speak about Alecto the book and Alecto the character, there is often an assumption that Alecto wants revenge for John turning her into a Barbie, and that our main characters want to kill God.
I’m not going to get too much into what I think the endgame might be for Jod (I’ll leave it for another day) but I have some observations about Alecto!
First, people think Alecto wants revenge for the initial act of ripping her soul out and stuffing it in a Barbie body. I’m honestly not so sure that’s her main concern!
Initially, Alecto’s main fear is dying:
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This is presumably what frightened her when in pain as Gaia, and what frightened her here, starting her life with John at the end of the world.
Of course, in the middle, there’s her actual murder, and how she felt about it:
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This fragment is so interesting. Most of this chapter the dialogue is in quotation marks, indicating it’s not the memory of John and Alecto but current dialogue between John and Harrowhark.
John tells Harrow what happened. He is the one who asks her if she remembers what Alecto said. She (Harrowhark) said “What else did I say?”. And when Harrow says “I still love you”, Jod remembers that Alecto was also willing to love him despite what he’d done.
But Harrow is left without the answer to one question. “Where did you put the people? Where did they go?”
After this paragraph, she will say there are things she doesn’t understand:
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Apparently Alecto’s memory isn’t fully accessible, or she can’t know Alecto’s thought process, or there’s bits of her memory gone for other reasons, whether it’s John’s intervention (unlikely, given how much incriminating stuff Alecto does remember) or because that’s what was most traumatic to her and—unlike John’s tale of apocalypse—nobody later reminded her. (Diegetically, of course, Tamsyn is simply saving that reveal for Harrow’s arc in Hell.)
In any case: after being told the entire story about being killed and turned into a Barbie, Harrowhark still says “I want to understand why she was angry”. And that’s seemingly tied to why John was terrified.
And the text directly relates that to the missing population of the Earth.
There are three things that very nearly make Nona fully recover the memory of who she was. One is when Pyrrha very nearly says her name, and Nona doesn’t want to hear it. Later she doesn’t seem to be lucid enough to Ianthe reacting it, but she reacts to the final one: Ianthe yelling “John loves Alecto!”. In the meantime, however, there’s one more thing that shakes Nona deeply:
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And it’s the sight of the Tower that makes Nona lose the will to live:
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She also gets a couple passages where the sight of devils touches some deep, frightening memory. And we are given one last clue:
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The River is dead.
We knew as early as HtN that the River is broken in some way. Its waters are described as brackish, salty, dirty, full of ghosts represented as rotting corpses. It doesn’t seem to flow anywhere as rivers should. House religion says the dead wait as mad ghosts until John conducts his Second Resurrection. John of course has planted House theology with his idea to conduct “a flood” at some point and start over (“empty is just another word for clean”, etc.), once his revenge is done. He needs souls to not move on, in order to do that. We know through Abigail and Dulcinea that there is another shore, a Beyond that they’ve managed to exceptionally reach.
Alecto seems upset, above all, by what happened to the River.
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Alecto states that she no longer fears death. She has experienced it (“I died once… no, twice”, and that’s before her brief tenure as Nona).
She might be ready to leave John behind and move on, but.
What if she can’t move on?
By which I mean: what if she—a Resurrection Beast, intimately acquainted with the spiritual dimension that is the River—what if she knows that she could never cross it, if she were to die? What if she knows that she would be absorbed by the stoma in the River’s current condition, or float around insane forever? What if the sum of all necromantic transgression is that Jod committed ecocide on the afterlife and true death is no longer possible?
What if she needs the River to be healed in order to die?
To conclude, two other tidbits:
1. When Nona, trying not to engage with her Alecto consciousness, briefly considers just giving up and dying, she says:
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2. Palamedes speaks of the Beyond (after briefly witnessing Dulcinea as she is there in TUG) right before he describes Paul as an end and a beginning. I don’t think this is accidental?
Oh. Oh.
I have long considered John’s search for the last ship as something like a twisted version of the parable of the shepherd: he will search endlessly for the lost sheep, even if it means neglecting the rest of the herd.
It’s revenge and anger, yes. But I also believe that it’s necessary… For John’s plan to start over fresh. Let’s put this first-draft dream of mine to bed.
A Resurrection Beast is a communal soul.
You need the entire soul, to resurrect someone fully.
Maybe you also need your entire soul to die.
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Part of Alecto’s soul is still on that ship. Of course, part of her soul is also in John.
Crucially, part of John’s soul is in Alecto. It’s the one significant difference between his “perfect” Lyctorhood and the rest of them. Part of his soul, for the longest time, is safely locked into an unbreachable tomb.
hhh I’m at work so I gotta wrap this up, but. Alecto can’t die, even if she wants to; part of her soul is stuck outside time, probably. John can’t die, because he put his in a safe. Kiriona can’t be resurrected, because her heart has been powering Harrow’s lyctorhood as a thalergy furnace.
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And yes. I also believe that the 10 billion dead are messing up the flow of the river. Something something, the Harrowing of Hell, something something, why did you even put the unkillable man-eating magma fiah in there, John.
I reeeeaaalllyy don’t like how widespread gender realism is in supposedly feminist circles on this website. You are one step away from becoming a radfem.
“Woman” is a socially constructed category and “women” have nothing intrinsic in common, other than viewing themselves as whatever “woman” is defined as in their society, or being judged by the standards of whatever “woman” is defined as in their society. Gender is as “real” of a category as race or neurotype, which is to say, it’s not objectively real at all. It’s an artificial category created on the basis of perceived shared traits among certain people. The people came first, they were grouped into their artificial category later. There are no intrinsic differences between men or women or nonbinary or multigender people.
Do you actually believe gender is a social construct or are you just mindlessly repeating the phrase because it sounds cool
Watching the queer way of interacting with gender go from “Gender is a social construct that can be fun to play with but at heart is a dangerous toy because it has been used for generations to oppress and divide people.” To “Everyone has a perfect crystal of true gender which you must deeply introspect to discover, and you can be wrong about its nature.” Has been a disaster.
the number 1 rule of fanfic is have fun and be yourself. the number 2 rule is the average healthy adult male can lose roughly 2 liters of blood before dying.
the number three thing is that you need to run a google search on anything before you use it as lube. ANYTHING.
Minneapolis as a collective body has shown an unbelievable amount of restraint. Like. This is the kind of shit that’s happening out here.
Another person got shot tonight. Story seems to be that they were chasing a guy around for a half hour, until he went to his home, then he got shot in the leg. I’m seeing people say the victim’s family said they started shooting through the door. They definitely deployed flashbangs. A witness reported “agents in tactical gear were shooting through a second-floor window.” the DHS claim is that an agent was attacked with a plastic snow shovel and a broom, so they shot the victim defensively. Victim is alive, the wound was “non life-threatening,” but that doesn’t really mean anything because just about any gunshot wound is potentially life-threatening.
This situation is an absolute nightmare. They are trying to provoke fatal retaliation in order to declare some kind of emergency and flood the state with even more goons. Frey made the point that there are thousands of ICE agents in Minneapolis right now. MPD has 600 officers. They don’t even have the numbers to resist this operation. Now, federal funding is getting cut, apparently. We are quite literally under siege. The federal Democrats aren’t doing fuck all. All I’ve heard anyone do about this is resign from state-level positions.
People are trying to keep things from getting worse but I’m really worried that a line is gonna get crossed and it’s gonna become a fucking warzone.
straight up it should be illegal for a physical storefront not to accept physical currency, or for restaurants not to provide physical menus
I’m assuming the above is a normie opinion (as it should be) so i do wanna go a tiny step further and explicitly state any laundromat that requires digital payment should be burned to the fucking ground
if a business cooerces its customers to download an app, i should legally be allowed to set both the business and its board of directors on fire
The assumption that every single business, or service, is owed your personal data, and should be able to track you and mercilessly spam you and monetise the ability to sell off your contact details and so on it’s absolutely deranged.
I have flashlights that are borderline unusable because, while the hardware is fine, the company that made them (hello OLight!) demands that you install and login to the storefront before you can access the configuration software.
But they don’t actively maintain the software or provide any of the new utilities that they promise. They are mostly using it as a way to turn off functional hardware to try and force you to upgrade.
We are living in a society where you can pay for something and the manufacturer can turn it off because they’ve decided that you’ve owned it too long .
I’ve just had to warn my family not to buy electronic door locks because the chances are, if they are Internet connected they will be disabled once the company that owns them has decided that they’re not making enough money charging you a monthly fee to open your own front door.
This is part of an ongoing trend to turn money into something that is no longer usable by everybody .
The eventual aim is to be able to pay people company scrip: If you lose your job, or badmouth the company, or disagree with the dictator, they severely curtail what you are allowed to buy, and from who.
And at that point, you have to pick sides – do you want to be able to have drinking water from Coca-Cola, or Pepsi, and whose package allows you to buy Doritos, and use your smart oven to cook food? Because it won’t turn on unless you use the app to scan the appropriate barcode from the company who now owns your ability to eat drink, heat your home, and wear clothes from brands that they approve.
And if you think that Bezos wouldn’t do that or run his own ghetto where employees have to use Amazon brands and be paid in Amazon money… You haven’t been paying attention to what he’s been building lately.
Read “Unauthorized Bread” by Cory Doctorow, from his book Radicalized
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