#Mentioning Gaius

[mayasaura]

So I noticed something in Harrow the Ninth. In chapter two, when John is trying to console Harrow over having lost Gideon, he puts his hands on her shoulders, and he says "Gideon Nav did not die for nothing."

Harrow feels "a hot whistle of pain run down [her] temporal bone," which is, we know now, Harrow having a stroke as her skull alters her brain so that she hears him say 'Ortus Nigenad' instead. And she replies to him in kind, using Ortus' name. So the interesting bit is John's reaction, look:

He had his hands on her shoulders the whole time. Physical touch negates lyctoral blindness, and she had a stroke while he was touching her. That look on his face. Is he working out an emotionally taxing anagram, or is he taking a good look at her and working out what the hell just happened? Then he says Gideon's name again, like he's running a test, and Harrow has another stroke. That's exactly the same test Mercy performed to figure out what Harrow did to her brain in chapter twenty-nine.

He knows. He's known about the lobotomy since chapter two. He thinks she did it to forget her grief and guilt, and he thinks he understands.

Which means when he 'notices' the lobotomy in this scene:

He's not really noticing it for the first time at all. He's calling attention to it. He's just told Harrow that she didn't open the Tomb, that she's wrong about the events of her own life, and then he deliberately 'discovers' and points out her brain damage to seal the deal.

John Gaius uses: Gaslight! It's super effective.

#the locked tomb #emperor john gaius #harrow nonagesimus #harrowhark nonagesimus #harrow the ninth #htn spoilers #here's that fun new John crime I mentioned!! #lmao he touches her cheek and tucks her hair behind her ear just before this #he has never touched her like that before and he never does again #he just needed to make physical contact with her head in that moment so he could 'notice' her fucked up lobe #what was it Augustine said? John is never as sentimental as you think #incidentally this has me thinking he took her claim MUCH more seriously than I'd first assumed #he didn't get distracted—he pulled out all the stops to shut her the FUCK down #she scared ya didn't she John?

[brother-emperors]

ANTONY: if Caesar doesn't set Sextius Baculus up in a house worthy of Lucullus for all that he did, I'll kill him myself.

so the fun thing about the Caesarians is that there is. weird stuff happening in there. a lot of focus seems to go towards non Caesarian dissent, specifically with the conspiracy of Cassius and Brutus, but there's like. stuff going on in Caesar's own camp that's very Intriguing.

There's a couple places where you can see some clear points that would be grounds for a conspiratorial falling out between Caesar and Trebonius, but from the way that Trebonius tries to seduce Antony over to conspiracy, I wonder if there was a secret third thing that was going on since Antony turned him down but. didn't snitch intriguing!

anyway, all of this is to say that this means I get to invent some shit. like, I'm drawing comics which is already invention, but this is one where I get to really start throwing stuff into the narrative soup because it has to set up three different character arcs (Trebonius, and then Antony twice)

(in theory, this would be explained in the story itself if I did the entirety of the Gallic Wars out as a comic. which I have not done because I do not want to draw horses. I wanted to fuck around with some panel layouts and not draw a single horse, so now I will provide the context and revisit this in the future)

Antony's comment about Trebonius running himself into a grave has to do with the Caesar's Gallic Wars have a lot of men doing a whole lot for Caesar that has me going. hey. hey guys. uh.

specifically, Sextius Baculus:

The War for Gaul, Julius Caesar (trans James J. O'Donnell)

and the closing comment from Antony is playing on several things: romans claiming gods on their family tree (see: Legendary Genealogies in Late-Republican Rome, T.P. Wiseman for more on this) and then divinization arc of Caesar and Octavian. Antony himself will later be taking part the same kind of god-association that has prompted his disdain in this scene

At any rate, when Antony made his entry into Ephesus, women arrayed like Bacchanals, and men and boys like Satyrs and Pans, led the way before him, and the city was full of ivy and thyrsus-wands and harps and pipes and flutes, the people hailing him as Dionysus Giver of Joy and Beneficent. For he was such, undoubtedly, to some; but to the greater part he was Dionysus Carnivorous and Savage.

Plutarch, Antony 24

and the second layer of thematic fun: Antony's later relationship with his soldiers is something similar to what Caesar had with his here, but ultimately: decayed. Antony's love affair with his military makes his failure to lead well at the end a worse betrayal. at some point I'll talk about Antony's Tormentous Military Nightmare and cite some academic sources, but Linda Bamber's description of the final tragedy of Antony and his men lives in my head rent free

Cleopatra and Antony, Linda Bamber

where's the fun in doing identity focused tragedy if you don't become unrecognizable to yourself later on! isn't that right mark antony

ko-fi⭐ bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost ⭐ cara.app

#gaius trebonius #mark antony #man. this explanation for the scene. is longer than the three panels. #anyway i changed my mind about how trebonius gets his eyebrow scar. he gets it during his Fight with caelius #oh! the crassus mentioned here is the eldest son! sure hope something bad doesn't happen like his father and brother dying haha ha h-- #(head in hands) #long post #komiks tag #drawing tag #roman republic tag #anyway. i need to. i need to get my sketch book. this book i was reading called trebonius a pro cassian commander #and im fucking. losing my mind about that. oh my god.

[ezramire]

thinking of what an oopsie making ianthe tridentarius a lyctor has to be. john you made your best friends / lovers / coworkers become lyctors and they hate(d) your guts literally so much. you found this woman on craigslist

#i know she’s a princess #but like. i doubt john knew anything about her personality coming in #she should have killed corona and went nah. anyway babs wyd #and babs murder afforded her a freedom no other lyctor has #she still has someone she is loyal to above god #not to mention harrow is in love with johns doom and his daughter who harrow lobotomized herself to save #they both failed the initiation ritual of coming into lyctorhood grief-shattered #harrow is definitely grieving on a subconscious level though #the locked tomb #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #ianthe tridentarius #john gaius

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Ancient Roman trading cards: Tribune Trouble!

Historical notes and artist attributions under the cut. For more silly trading cards, check out the Julio-Claudians.

Many famous Romans were tribunes of the plebs at some point, but I'm only featuring those who pushed that office to its limit, usually by causing trouble.

My aim here is to capture some of their personality while making history fun and silly. So, some of these facts come from ancient sources that might be biased or wrong, but I have tried to keep it plausible. Some of the art has been adapted from paintings of other Romans because it felt fitting for these guys. If you want to learn more about them, check out my favorite Roman history books!

Background color = highest office achieved. Orange for quaestors and tribunes, yellow for aediles, green for praetors, blue for consuls, purple for emperors and red for dictators. Everybody else gets gray.

Paintings featured:

Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi by Joseph-Benoit Suvée

Farewell of Gaius Gracchus to his family by Dióscoro Puebla

Cato Uticensis by Josef Abel

Lictors bringing Brutus the bodies of his sons by Jacques-Louis David

Marcus Aurelius by Eugene Delacroix

A Roman Feast by Roberto Bompiani

Other art textures come from the frescoes of Pompeii.

#jlrrt speaks #ancient roman trading cards #suicide mention #gaius gracchus #tiberius gracchus #cato the younger #titus annius milo #publius clodius pulcher #gaius scribonius curio #just roman memes #my edits

[apotheotic-cravings]

What was meant to be a sketch of Harrow in formal wear quickly devolved into a shitty comic of perhaps my favourite scene in htn

#the locked tomb #harrow the ninth #ianthe tridentarius #harrowhark nonagesimus #augustine quinque #mercymorn #wtf is her last name… ouogh #mercymorn the first #john gaius #dios apate minor #THESE GUYS HAVE SO MANY ALIASES ID RATHER DIE THAN TAG THEM ALL #semi related- I drew this before god asked harrow if her and Ianthe were having safe sex. which is also. SUCH a scene #ALSO?? Whooooo gives a fuck if they weren’t having safe sex they’re literally lyctors….? couldn’t they just necromance away the crabs like #my art #fanart #comic #also I love how exactly you can see how much effort I put into which panels lmaoz #it’s partially because I’m lazy but also partially because sometimes a more simplistic style can evoke the right emotions better #if anyone mentions the disappearing glasses they three of them are fucking while casually shredding their soles on a pile of broken glass k

[adhd-merlin]

Christian iconography? in my Merlin??

#it's more likely than you think #ok has anyone written meta about religion in merlin or #i don't mean based on historical facts #i mean literally based on merlin canon #because i'm fascinated #they didn't dwell too much on it (for understandable reasons) #but that scene where merlin talks to his mother and says “THE GODS will protect me”? #implying they're both polytheists #whereas arthur and gaius say things like “thank god” #i'm reading too much into things again probably #i just want to know if the writers gave it some thought even if it wasn't included in the show #i don't know shit about the introduction of christianity to britain but like #isn't it roughly around this time that it was gaining predominance over paganism (5th-ish century??) #so it's possible yeah? idk idk #i just wanna know if the writers thought about any of this #or if merlin mentioning “the gods” was just a random line #merlin #bbc merlin #ramblings #merlin meta #eta: pls read added meta in the reblogs! (not mine)

[mcd-batteryacid]

reject everything draw gaius and hannah

#dislyte #dislyte gaius #dislyte fanart #dislyte hannah #no one mention anything ok

[derseprinceoftbd]

It took me a remarkably long time to actually piece together that Alecto was the soul of Earth. It explains a lot; the childishness, where she's been up until now in his story, his obsession with her in a way-also, heavily evokes the phrase "environmental rape" given everything else about John. Like the imperialist and environmental themes are actually really clicking together right now. I honestly don't know what to say about the fact that he's Maori; he's honestly always seemed white-coded to me, a sort of jovial classical American patriarch crossed with a new-age whiny the-good-is-the-enemy-of-the-perfect anarchist, so I'm wondering what him being Indigenous says about his relationship to the Earth as opposed to what him being white would. (Worth noting that I am white-passing, but consider myself Indigenous, and that the Author herself is entirely white to my knowledge.) I feel like I'm stumbling across some discourse right about now, like I'm curious if "is Muir saying anything offensive"/"is this her story to tell" is a big extant topic.

#the locked tomb #the locked tomb discourse #the locked tomb meta #john gaius #nona the ninth #tamsyn muir #tw: sa mention #tw: sa #indigenous #alecto tlt #alecto the first #alecto #annabel lee #annabelle lee

[alexanderpearce]

caligula, gawain and the green knight / caligula (1979) dir. tinto brass / suet.calig.22, trans. myself / statue of caligula at naples

#im normal about him btw #caligula #gaius caesar augustus germanicus #caligula 1979 #malcolm mcdowell #webweave #tinto brass #suetonius #parallel #web weaving #god complex #tagammemnon #rome #my posts #the trans myself BARELY deserves mentioning its such a small line lol #my webweaves #popular

[lady-harrowhark]

With Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir dares to ask the question, "What if God was an iPad baby?"

#i think about this every single time his tablet gets mentioned lmao #tlt #htn #the locked tomb #harrow the ninth #john gaius #EJG

[i-28-29]

Okay I know i said i wouldnt talk about hannah and gaius but holy shit Helena looks an INSANE amount like hannah like what the hell.

I do understand however that its literally impossible for helena to be related to gaius or hannah in anyway but I just think this is actually crazy

#also i feel like it would be mentioned if she was related to them #LOL #hannah dislyte #dislyte #dislyte gaius #gaius #helena dislyte #helena #i 28 29 #yapping

[mayasaura]

i hope u dont mind me asking but where is it implied john is a survivor of childhood sexual assault?

Yeah, I did kind of just throw that one out there, didn't I? The implication is spread out across a combination of John's backstory and behavior, especially in Nona the Ninth.

cw for discussion of sexual coercion, csa, and systemic abuse in an academic setting

Let's start with his behavior. Mercy and Augustine spent five hundred years planning Dios Apate Major down to the last detail. Luring John into bed was clearly not an easy thing to do at the time. And while a lot of worse stuff came to light in the big reveal scene in Harrow the Ninth to overshadow it, what Augustine and Mercy did was a violation of John's bodily autonomy and a form of sexual assault.

The next time we hear from John, he's on a binge drinking hypersexual spiral, turning on a dime from five hundred years of near-celibacy to sleeping his way through the full cast and crew of the Erebos. I love a good "he fucked that old man" joke as much as the next guy, and I intend to keep making them, but that kind of zero to sixty manic behavior is a pretty common response to triggered sexual trauma.

Very early on in Nona, John recites a list of his schools. First on that list is Dilworth. Dilworth is a private school for economically disadvantaged (read: poor, and majority indigenous) boys, and it has a reputation. To quote its wikipedia page:

A class action complaint is currently underway against Dilworth School seeking accountability and compensation from the school for knowingly failing to protect students from systemic sexual abuse that occurred between 1970 and 2006.

John attended that school as an academically gifted gender non-conforming indigenous boy with no support network. His only known family died of pneumonia while he was enrolled. He was a vulnerable target in a high-risk enviorment.

This wouldn't be enough to come to a conclusion if John were a real person, but if John were a real person, we'd be out of bounds in speculating. Name-checking Dilworth in John's backstory was a choice, and I think the implication is pretty clear.

#the locked tomb #emperor john gaius #ntn spoilers #csa mention cw

[thermodynamic-comedian]

thinking about the scene in htn where everybody's talking about what they think mercy's sketch of a resurrection beast looks like, and both harrow and john agree that it sort of looks like a flower.

and then i fucking realized that flowers are significant to both of their stories.

harrow's is somewhat obvious: "the first flower of my house", gideon nav.

but john grew flowers for cassiopeia's and nigella's wedding. the flowers that went a little wrong, the flowers that had teeth.

idk man im thinking thoughts and perhaps feeling feelings

#does that mean that all the things the others mentioned are significant to their stories? who knows. #tlt #the locked tomb #htn #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #?? i guess #tlt spoilers #mercymorn the first #john gaius #harrowhark nonagesimus #cassiopeia the first #nigella shodash #fritz rambles too much

[lilbittymonster]

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist but what if it was Emet-Selch who stopped Kitali from outright dying after Lahabrea killed her?

Hydaelyn had used up what strength she had to protect her from Ultima, and tbh given how fucking weird Hades is about Timoria as well as petty coworker drama, I can see him slamming the door to the Lifestream shut and saying "not this one. Not yet."

Which adds a whole new layer of juice to him showing up with all his theatrics in Shadowbringers and playing his role as the antagonist, because that's the closest to any sort of friendship he'll allow himself to this Mori shard.

Anyways, I don't know how canon I want to make this but just a thought that manifested this morning out of fucking nowhere.

#not to mention he was supposedly napping while Lahabrea was fucking around with Gaius #so the 'and where were YOU' accusation becomes even funnier when Emet is now lying about not knowing what was going on

[g1deonthefirst]

it's interesting to me how a lot of john gaius defense posts harp on how he wanted to save the world (unlike the trillionaires who were abandoning it) when he was working on a cryogenics project

#LIKE. ? #NOT TO MENTION. that alecto gave him power that very well might have been able to save the world #and he NUKED the PLANET #john #john gaius #tlt

[cindthia]

Whumptober Day 5

Kiriona had never even believed in God, really. What did God mean to someone like her? Maybe it worked for the nuns, for the Reverend Parents–until it didn’t, anyway. But Gideon Nav had always had little time for something so nebulous.

Family was a little easier. She had believed in family. She believed in her mother’s bones, in the empty niche left behind. She believed in dreams of a far-off parent who loved her, who might come for her one day.

Staring at the naked snoring form of the Dad that became God and the God that became Dad, she was pretty sure she believed in neither.

Kiriona kicked at the debris scattered across the floor of his holy bedroom: empty beer bottles and cans, scattered crumpled papers, messes of tangled wires and…oh, barf, condom wrappers. Kiriona made a face. She prayed to-–well, she….she vowed to spit in her Dad’s morning coffee if she found a used one.

John snorted suddenly and rolled over, mumbling into his pillow. “...broken, ‘s broken. …onna get out…” Kiriona kept picking her way across the filthy cluttered room towards the table on the far side. His drunken sleep mumblings didn’t mean a good goddamn to her. Until: “...Annabel. Annabel…out, she’s…”

Kiriona tightened her jaw. It all kept coming back to that fucking popsicle chick. Frozen for thousands of years and John was still obsessed with her. Dead and cold and unmoving and Har–

Fuck that. Fuck her. One day Kiriona would open the Tomb and kick her ass all the way back to hell. Then they'd see.

She was almost to the table when she stumbled over a box full of ancient dysfunctional tablets. Catching herself, she knocked over a shitty tower of beer bottles with a loud clatter. Shit.

"Kiri!" came a hiss from the doorway. "Stop being incompetent or I won't share."

"Fuck you, Ianthe," she hissed back. On his bed, her unshaven sperm donor snored.

Kiriona reached the drawer and unearthed the bag full of the weird musty dried plant John had gathered from one of his colonies that was only half flipped. Prize in hand, she dashed back across the room with little grace, crashing into Ianthe at the entrance.

"Finally," Ianthe drawled, snatching the bag out of Kiriona's hands. 

"Steal it yourself next time," Kiriona snapped.

"Then why would I need to keep you around?" Ianthe grabbed Kiriona painfully by the ear and yanked her down the hallway. Kiriona slapped her hand away and followed.

#whumptober2023 #no.5 #ficlet #debris #“Its broken.” #kiriona gaia #john gaius #the locked tomb #tlt #ianthe naberius #tower princes #mention of drugs cw