#gaius excuse

[jayisgay]

no you don’t get it it’s like. Yea Gideon is Jesus but John isn’t exclusively god, he’s also the Antichrist.

because if you look at the actual traits that Jesus had- being forgiving, the embodiment of truth, acting according to the will of the one who sent them, being self-sacrificing, thematic references to light- John is portrayed as the exact opposite of this *multiple* times in the text. And if John is the antichrist, that calls his dynamic with Alecto into question.

I see Alecto being referred to a lot as Lucifer in the fandom but if you take John as the Antichrist, that makes her like. Actual god. Because she initially sent John (“I chose you to change and this is how you repay me?”) to save the world, but he went against her will to destroy it and remake it in his own image instead. And then (unlike Jesus) he obscured the knowledge that she is the one who actually gave him those powers, the knowledge that she is a greater divine than him, by any means necessary- to the extent of entombing her in the earth.

I could go into it a lot more (I actually have a three and a half hour long PowerPoint presentation on my theories about this and what it means for Alecto the Ninth) but essentially if Alecto/the earth is God, that means that John was intended to be the second coming, but he failed, making Gideon the second coming like. 2.1 or something.

When I have time I’m gonna write a longer post going into more detail because I’m leaving a lot out (like why John is John the Baptist and what that means for Gideon and Harrow’s ending, because I think I’ve got it figured out) but yeah. Alecto isn’t Lucifer, she’s God. John is the Antichrist desperately trying to obscure the truth of god. And Gideon is the true child of god who is bringing light/truth into the world.

#Someone please give me an excuse to talk about my theories. I don’t have the energy to type them all out right now #But everything fits together so well #the locked tomb #tlt spoilers #the locked tomb spoilers #tlt meta #the locked tomb meta #gideon the ninth spoilers #gtn spoilers #Harrow the ninth spoilers #htn spoilers #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #Nona the ninth #john gaius #alecto the first

[groundbreakingdot872]

#he’s calculating the maths on ‘collecting herbs for Gaius’ and ‘getting shitfaced at the tavern’ #as excuses! 🧐🧐🧐 #Merlin runnnnn #bbc merlin memes #merlin emrys #arthur pendragon

[mayasaura]

Just saw your post about the Mercy/John/Augustine whole thing and *chef's kiss* so I have this question that's been on the back burner for a while and thought I'd ask your take on it then, why for dios apate did they chose it to be Mercy and Augustine with John? Why not just one of them? I mean Mercy is an anatomy expert right, she probably could have done something by/on herself or Augustine

Well it's like in the post, right? Dios Apate Major had to be both Augustine and Mercy, because just one of them wouldn't have worked.

If one of them had started coming on to John, it would have put John on the spot and had a much higher chance of setting off his paranoia. Their seduction technique relied on the existing dynamic between the three of them, and played on one of John's most fervid desires: for his friends to get along and like him.

It goes like this: Augustine and Mercy start an old fight, and pull John in as mediator. They let John "succeed" at deescalating the argument, thereby making him feel good about himself, then pivot the remaining tension to sexual tension. John's already part of the argument, so it's easy enough to make it feel like a natural progression when they pull him into their exciting new method of making up. And there you go! John's seduced, their complicated power dynamic isn't upset, and John's none the wiser that it was all a scheme to gain access to his genetic code.

So long story short, just one of them showing new interest in John would have been suspicious. Showing new interest in one another and taking John along for the ride gets under his defences, because he wants so badly for them to get along.

#a lot of john's paranoia in centered on not believing anyone could possibly love him #and feeling like everyone is going to betray him the second he gives them an excuse #so odds are a direct approach would have badly spooked him #they had to sidle up on it and make it so it was never about him or how they felt about him to avoid triggering him #actually very very sad when you think about it for too long #the locked tomb #dios apate major #augustine the first #mercymorn the first #emperor john gaius #htn spoilers #harrow the ninth

[wishmemellon]

Just realized I never actually posted my references for Cassius, Brutus, and Porcia’s designs 💀

#Brutus my short king #love that for him #i was going to render them but having the flats is a lot more useful #julius caesar #shakespeare #gaius cassius longinus #marcus junius brutus #porcia catonis #art #ides of march #my excuse to dump all my Julius Caesar art #late roman republic #roman republic #rome #brutus #cassius

[crowleying]

Foggy telling Karen Matt has a drinking problem to cover up for his superhero night job has the same vibes as Gaius telling Arthur Merlin is in the tavern to cover up for his magic, and I love it.

#I love funny lovely dorky side characters who can't come up with good excuses to cover up for their heroic best friend/adopted son #matt murdock #marvel daredevil #daredevil #foggy nelson #karen page #matthew murdock #matthew michael murdock #franklin nelson #superhero #secret identity #bbc merlin #merlin #bbc gaius #bbc #merthur #arthur pendragon #king arthur #bbc emrys #emrys #merlin emrys #tavern #marvel #disney

[roosterlasagne]

Merlin is totally not a good liar, nor is Gaius. But the only reason nobody knows of Merlin's magic is just that they make such shitty and confusing excuses that the person (usually Arthur) is focused on the absurdity of the excuse and not that it's a lie.

#merthur #merlin #bbc merlin #arthur pendragon #arthur has to know fhat merlin doesnt actually go to the tavern that often #and gaius needs to come up with a better excuse #i mean arthur believed merlin saying he was dying was an excuse #what kind of fucked excuses does merlin come up with that arthur believes him dying is an excuse

[xxmothangelxx]

This is my coping mechanism

#still considering the new story mode non canon tho!!! 😁 #dislyte #dislyte yamato #dislyte izanagi #dislyte gaius #dislyte zeus #dislyte sachiko #dislyte hare of inaba #please excuse my yamato posting I love him #dislyte meme

[texts-from-last-ninth]

[Augustine Font: (814): I am attempting to break the habit of calling him daddy.]

#The Locked Tomb #Harrow the Ninth #Augustine the First #John Gaius #814 #no excuse for this one except the idea made me laugh

[idkwhatthisisbutheresdcandstuff]

Smashing my favorite fandoms again (DC and NATM, of course)

Everyone in the museum is sick and fed up with the Batfamily sneaking up on them and scaring them, and then leaving in the middle of a conversation

The only exceptions are Attila and Octavious

Attila sees it as a cool magic trick and is like "WOW! :0"

Meanwhile Octavious is still kinda pissed off about them sneaking up on him, he found a loop-hole through just keeping his eye on them

That way, if they try to run off while they're talking to someone hes like "hey! Come back here, we're not done!" the only person he doesn't do this for is Jason bc he wants Jason to leave

#he doesnt tell anybody bc he has no excuse for why he lets jason run off other than hes being petty #natm #night at the museum #octavius natm #natm attila #attila natm #gaius octavius #batman #batbros #bat family #batfam #batfam headcanons #natm headcanons

[myrfing]

also this is me being nitpicky but orphaned kids have complicated enough relationships with their parental/guardian/provider figures without their adoptive dads being the colonial military governor of the rule in which their parents died to poverty and plague who pretty much by sheer chance found them and granted them a kind of noblesse oblige “charity”. the scene where they all sat around in their beds and were like Gaius Rocks! I’m going to join the military to be just like him! made me laugh so bad dude. and this is the writing people are saying is a litmus test as in if you think it’s bad you can’t read

#if they werent so focused on trying to make gaius seem less bad they would have had him directly lead them to be soldiers #wouldve given them an excuse to talk more

[2impostors]

i’m sure spending all day drawing this little dress up doll of god was definitely a good use of my time on earth and definitely what tamsyn muir knew was going to happen and intended.

#2impostors art #i have no excuses for myself #but it DID help me figure out some minor clothing details for another picture i'm working on?? #tlt #john gaius

[deus-and-the-machina]

ffxiv garlemald discourse is so funny because people will go "ugh people just cant stand it when things aren't black and white" and then you look at how the empire are portrayed in stormblood and shadowbringers and its like hm. that seems like a pretty intense and accurate display of violent imperialism to me! Wow I wonder why people in this day and age may find it hard to feel sympathy for them or even hate them on principal. god its such a mystery.

the games like 50/50 to me on how it tackles these themes because I actually like the garlemald arc in EW, I think it has a lot of horrific and powerful scenes depicting how self destructive fascist propaganda and beliefs are, but I also think it doesn't go far enough on some fronts. the garleans' xenophobia is most notably and obstacle to getting them to accept the contingent's help, which is what they're there to do,

but there's never an admission of harm from any garleans on the uuuuuuuuh massive amount of war crimes the nations around them are still suffering from they're just kind of like "we misjudged you...but you actually wanted to help us all along" like yeah thats great now can we get you all some deprogramming because you keep talking about returning to your prime and glory days and I think we need to unpack some stuff you really SHOULDNT return to. im not even really talking about EW proper but the patches where things are a bit more chilled out and people are recovering.

It feels like they wanted to have their critique of imperialism and also have things end with the beauty of human connection and reaching out and these things just don't mesh well because hey a lot of your modern day audience is not gonna like having to treat people yelling xenophobic things at the cast and your character with kid gloves after you showed them hours and hours of the awful things these people's beliefs have done. especially in the present day hoo boy.

#im kind of torn between 'no characters dont need to be 'punished' to be redeemed but also the characters just being so lenient with the #colonizers after we see far too many people being lenient if not supportive of the colonizers irl. well. it really blows afslkjfalkf and #yeah you can argue if they'd gone through with the garlemald expansion they would've had more time to go into this but the fact is that its #absent from what they did do and I especially think the patches when we go to garlemald and the EW role quests going 'hey maybe the #provinces can help us rebuild' as if they'd have any goddamn right to ask that just make me feel like they didnt stick the landing #seeing all the characters who have suffering time and time again bc of the garleans or seen the results of their actions having to clamp #their mouths shut every time someone said something xenophobic in EW isnt satisfying and it leaves so much unsaid! #also some people feel like the narrative didnt blame emet enough but ngl I think thats reductive even with his micromanaging scheming littl #ass and the intention of garlemald turning out a shitshow that doesnt make anyone else less complicit. most governments like this exaggerat #and lie and spread propaganda but I dont think most people here excuse the actions of a bigot because 'they were raised that way' #this is also my issue with gaius' writing. hes primarily upset that ascians were behind what he thought was his good old fashioned natural #conquering ideology :( and doesnt it suck so much he killed people for it. like yeah he seems pretty aware what he did was wrong but his #ideology remains bizarrely intact and unchallenged by the characters around him. no dude it wasnt just the ascians the system is a lot more #complex than that by this point aaaaaugh #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #siren says #I hope people are nice to me about this I dont think I said anything particularly controversial to the Tumblr crowd (twt maybe but fuck em) #ig my main point with this post is that the game isnt perfect at writing this and also that look. I actually liked the main arc in EW and I #like quite a few garlean characters but I completely understand why others didnt like it or any garleans esp if they have their own persona #experiences with colonialism and I dont get to tell them they're invalid for that. too many people get judgmental about this understandably #upsetting topic and you just gotta accept that this is a big line for many people

[warlordfelwinter]

rewatching cutscenes for reasons and just judging by the way he talks about us at the very beginning, g'raha had simply no idea we were the wol. which makes his inexplicable decision to pretend to be a forest spirit trickster god so much fucking funnier. imagine how he must have felt when he realized

#he's obsessed with hero stories and did not recognize the person who defeated gaius van baelsar #and then he made that person play a silly game with him #and i HAVE to believe it was because he was embarrassed about rammbroes sending someone to do his job for him #and in a social anxiety panic he decided pretending to be a disembodied voice was better than the other option #g'raha later realizing we're the wol and just has to excuse himself to go scream #ffxiv

[mayasaura]

I don't have the book at hand to quote, but what struck me when I was reading it was John going desperately from how he had to make them his hands and fingers!! to keep them!! he IMMEDIATELY segues into how he's so sad he had to feed the revenant beasts his fingers to keep them away :( it was so awful that they made him do that :( like he makes them possessions then having objectified them he justifies having to destroy his Things to keep himself safe. which I think is where he and Harrow are going to diverge. (noting that they've already taken very different tactics as far as the order of what gets kept safe)

It's the very next line! This quote picks up exactly where the last one left off:

That's definitely a legit way to read this passage, though it's not the way I prefer to. I mean. Hypocrisy found in God, fork found in kitchen. Come on. But yeah, that's an undeniably fucked up trajectory.

More seriously, I see John's chapters of Nona the Ninth as a confession, rather than as a justification. It's not meant to be coherent or consistant, just emotionally honest. He's expressing how he felt in the moments he made his decisions and asking to be understood, but he's not asking to be affirmed, or forgiven. "Just as there can be no forgiveness for me," and all.

The way in which his story does make sense—the way he's choosing to frame it—is fascinating for what it shows about John and what he's so deeply afraid of, in his heart of hearts. He loved them, and he sacrificed them, and then he sacrificed them again, but at least they didn't leave him.

And yet even in his confession there are still levels on which he seems to sincerely not understand what he's done wrong—mostly surrounding the autonomy and personhood of other people. Like you said, he objectifies people. He loves them as extensions of himself, because that is the only thing he understands as being real. He has no peers, as he is God. His closest friends are his fists and gestures, the fingers on his hand. As necessary to him as a limb, and losing them cripples him, but he doesn't understand them as people in their own right at all. And that lack of respect and understanding leads to him treating them horrifically.

It's kind of sad, in a way. Not to jump tracks completely, but the way John loves reminds me of this quote from episode 55 of Welcome to Night Vale:

It's presented in the context of a romantic couple, but it works more broadly. lt seems like the only way John knows how to love is by subsuming what he loves into himself, becoming one. Leaving him once again alone.

What's interesting is that he appears to know this about himself. Right in this quote, he directly compares himself to the Resurrection Beasts. Revenants that crack open worlds to eat their souls for sustenance, then pack the dead shells onto their exteriors to become part of themselves. As he sees it, the difference is that the Resurrection Beasts will eventually be satisfied. He won't be.

As for the parallels between John and Harrow, I don't think we need to look for where they're going to diverge. I think we can point to where they already have. And it's a fair comparison, to a time before John was God.

Look at John's reaction to his cult schisming, here:

He loves his friends, but he doesn't trust them. Deep down, he believes their love is conditional. If he fucks up, if he's caught slipping, if he admits he's wrong, he'll lose them. He's terrified of anyone finding out he's flawed, of the ugly parts of him being known, because he's certain anyone who sees that part of him will leave. He's gone ten thousand years like that, compounding lies to make them stay.

Harrow has a similarly harsh expectation of herself, but she's already taken her leap of faith, and let the mask drop. She's told the people she loves exactly who and what she is, with the full expectation they would punish or abandon her for it. With the full expectation Gideon would kill her for it, in the pool scene. And Gideon embraced her. She confronted Ortus with her failings in the River, and Ortus comforted her, and still chose to stay and risk his life to save her.

The people who loved John would have done the same for him. Did do the same for him. They stayed through his breakdown, they stayed by his side until it killed them, but John could never let his guard down enough to trust that they would have done it just for him. He couldn't submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

This is all, of course, working with the basic premise that the way John treats people is horrific, and he did have all the opportunites in the world to stop. He could have taken that plunge any time in the ten thousand and thirty-something years he's been alive, if he'd been strong enough to accept the consequences or believed in the rewards. It was all so fucking avoidable, but here we are. My favorite kind of tragedy.

#er. I realize I may have a different perspective on the whole god thing than many in the fandom and I don't mean offense! #it's just that gods are understood as being.... beings of pride I guess? they're disadvantaged by hubris #there are good reasons to worship them but their power obscures their ability to understand the true nature of reality #if siddhartha guatama had stayed a prince he would have been a great king but he would never have been the buddha y'know? #same principal #I think the main point of disagreement I have could be summed up as #I see John's account being presented as an explaination #not as an excuse #the locked tomb #emperor john gaius #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth #alexa play the saga of you confused destroyer of world lmao #hm. come to think of it john did have equivalents to the pool scene and the battle with the Sleeper and they fucking sucked #that's for another post

[bcdwclves]

“oh no, dawntrail has one of the writers of Sorrow of Werlyt on its writing team, it’s obviously going to be a bad expansion because of ONE writer—“

DONT CARE. GO MY G-WARRIOR.

#( ooc. ) #like. ignoring the awesomeness of g warrior. #banri oda writing for sorrows and being credited as one of the main writers for dawntrail is getting a lot of stupid people doomposting #about the state of Dawntrail when it hasn’t even fuckin dropped yet. #like sure you may not. like sorrows but doomposting about dawntrail being dead in the water of one writer is so goddamn stupid. #BESIDES I LIKED THE SORROWS OF WERLYT TRIAL QUESTS BUT APPARENTLY PEOPLE ITS EXCUSING / JUSTIFYING GAIUS BEHAVIOR? #ah yes bc gaius losing his adopted children to death mechs being a direct consequence of his previous actions definitely excuses the #fuck off lmao.

[tiodolma]

Arthur: *have met literal gods, seen spirits, fought magic creatures, dealt with magic tribes, have been enchanted far more times than necessary, saw his dad have sex with a troll, been to magical places of legend, used a medium to call back dad from the dead, saw the veil of spirit and human world with his own eyes, have fought the undead at least three times in his life*

Merlin: Please listen to me, take this sorcerer's word seriously.

Arthur: Nonsense! Bullshit! Superstition! Can you believe Merlin, Gaius? He keeps getting upset that I'm not listening to him! Sorcery isn't real, it's just superstition!

Gaius: Don't @ me but I'm an old man and the one thing I have learned is not to dismiss other people's beliefs.

Arthur: LOL NO. I WILL GO THERE AND ASSERT MY DOMINANCE OVER THEM AND THEIR STUPID BELIEFS AND MY KNIGHTS WILL FOLLOW ME.

Merlin: sht here we go again.

#the disir #anti arthur #arthur critical #bbc gaius #bbc merlin #bbc arthur #merlin crit #hot takes #arthur crit #i dont want to make excuses for arthur #he's a frkn political institution #he's still the poster-boy for the anti magic faction #his best friend cant even come out to him #he's That Dangerous