I'm Thinking A Lot About The Permeability Of The Soul And Really Chewing On Like, How This Knowledge

i'm thinking a lot about the permeability of the soul and really chewing on like, how this knowledge retroactively impacts and changes the way one can read characters' actions throughout all the books so far. and that's interesting to me, because I'm not sure it's as simple as character X's behavior being retroactively revealed to be due to the soul of character Y. because like...

of COURSE we impact each other. of course when we brush up against each other we bleed. we leave things behind. but at some point, when does that stop being someone else, and start becoming just another part of you? the body of theseus. the soul of theseus. are you the same person as you were when you started this, even though everything has changed? is the Augustine that entered the stoma the same as the Augustine that woke up on the first day of the Ressurection, when it was only the newly re-born sun, and him, and John?

and I mean, no, obviously. So much has happened since then. But Augustine has been Augustine-and-Alfred for thousands of years longer than he was ever only Augustine. Same for Mercymorn-and-Cristabel, same for Cytherea-and-Loveday, same for G1deon-and-Pyrrha, same for John-and-Alecto. and like. the soul of theseus, you know?

Is the Cytherea Loveday who died at Canaan House the same as the Cytherea Loveday who woke up that day after the Lyctoral Ascension, on the first day of the rest of her life? After 10k years are the actions of Cytherea Loveday truly dissectable as Actions-of-Loveday vs Actions-of-Cytherea, or is she just one person, being bled all over by another until they are no longer distinguishable? How much of someone taking on another's mannerisms is because of soul entangelment versus the human visegrip of grief, desperately holding onto anything and everything you can, remaking the person you love in your mind until they are more yours than they ever were themself?

and I'm thinking again about Paul, and how maybe they just skipped to the end. Maybe all lyctorhood is, is damped oscillation, in which the end point between two extremes will always trend to 0. and Paul makes it so obvious, you know? Pal and Cam DIED that day. they did it, it's done, Paul is risen.

but when Ianthe Tridentarius killed Naberius Tern, did she not also kill herself? when she ascended as Ianthe The First, she became someone new. Ianthe Tridentarius is as dead as Pal and Cam are. as dead as Naberius Tern. as dead as Alfred and Cristabel and Loveday and John and the entire goddamn earth. trending twoards 0. thinking.

More Posts from Abysskisser and Others

abysskisser

5 months ago

maybe this time picking at Textures on my skin will lead to being silky smooth

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abysskisser

1 year ago

The 10 minute kilometer and 5 minute kilometer thing has been driving me crazy! A 10 minute kilometer is so slow! And a 5 minute kilometer is not very impressive. Considering they are in the cohort, I just find it baffling and haven't been able to decide if those numbers were chosen on purpose to show the effect necromancy has on their bodies like you said or if they're just numbers Tamsyn thought sounded like an impressive difference. Your post makes me think for the first time that it is probably the former, though I would still expect a bit more from Marta than a 5 minute kilometer.

Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is "rather small and feeble".

Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".

Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"

Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

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homestuck my beloved

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abysskisser

5 months ago

so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things

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