"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away...but first look at this tumblr post it perfectly summarizes her character and the themes of her book

so to start with i want to get some major reveals and explanations out of the way, and then i'll explain the place she was coming from when she first arrived.

alecto is a resurrection beast. this is what the necromancers named the revenants that came about when the first necromancer, john gaius, destroyed every planet in the solar system to fuel his own power so he could murder the trillionaires that he blamed for the world going to shit. they normally take the shape of a giant insect the size of a moon.

they drive necromancers insane with their songs, which are essentially just them singing their grief over what was stolen from them. because all the necromancers draw their power from john gaius who draws his power from alecto, they all feel the anger and hatred that is directed at him.

when nona has a "tantrum", that's what's happening. it's alecto within her screaming her grief in such a way that it drives anyone who hears it temporarily mad because inside this tiny girl is over ten billion souls screaming in despair.

second, nona and alecto aren't two different people. not... really. though it's a case where like, you could app nona into a game where someone else is already playing alecto, because they're the same person but in extremely different contexts. nona is a version of alecto that was allowed to grow naturally with love and nurture. alecto never got that.

because even though john deeply loved her and alecto deeply loved him, the only thing they could share was grief and pain. alecto was a revenant at john's shoulder, demanding revenge as he wallowed in his despair and self hatred. alecto didn't know how to be a person because being a person was forced upon her. she was a "beautiful blue and green thing".

alecto was modelled after a literal barbie. so she was literally crafted with the body of a doll.

"He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy … I made you look like a Renaissance angel … I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair."

nona was able to grow up and she loved her body because it wasn't perfect, she thought it was beautiful because it had anastasia's features and she loved anastasia deeply. alecto hated her body viscerally because she remembered what she was before, a planet shoved into a doll.

ANYWAY. i will now go into the state that nona was entering in.

me planning on keeping the whole "soul rejecting the body" thing meant that i was fairly limited in terms of canonpoints, because nona the ninth technically takes place over the course of a single week. so nona was actually a little over a month pre canon. and she was a fair bit weirder and more alien than she comes off as in the book because she was younger

and was still figuring out how to be a person.

nona's circumstances before arriving were that she was being kept in a blood of eden safehouse by three people, all of whom are characters the audience is familiar with. camilla, palamedes and pyrrha. they have no idea who tf nona is, and are in the process of trying to work it out. palamedes in particular thinks that nona is a combined harrow and gideon.

because he misses harrow and gideon and wants them to be okay, and if nona is them then they're not out of reach. camilla and pyrrha also want her to be one of those two people or both (she is neither), and this kind of makes nona feel pretty terrible. they all love her ofc but they're all waiting for her to change.

so arriving at a new place in which nobody knows who harrow and gideon are and nobody knows who nona is or even has any reason to doubt that nona is just nona, it was an unexpected relief for her. she missed her family a lot but she felt selfishly thrilled to just be herself even if she also felt ashamed that "herself" wasn't very useful.

this conversation with sonya and this conversation with lacus sums up a lot of her feelings on the matter.

she very quickly established a sort of found family with dodo cabin, even before the others fully trusted eachother she was very open with her love and her affection for all of them and they all appreciated noodle which helped a lot. she also knew the whole time that crea was hanging on by a fraying thread and that beel was carrying a fuckload of guilt.

sits here and chinhands for the nona lore

nona's journey over the course of the game was something that i think was somewhat inevitable. she was always dying, she was never going to truly be able to play the game and would always hold herself responsible for every single death. it being in a game populated by largely assholes was something i didn't expect and there were a lot of challenges to her

empathy and way of thinking. i think the first major one was probably kanon, because she knew all along that a lot of the things that kanon presented about herself were complete and total lies, and she was fascinated with this because she'd never actually met anyone who operated under so many layers of falsehood and delusion.

nona worries that her love isn't real

*“Do you love?” said the Captain’s mouth.
Nona struggled. “Yes—no—yes,” she said, then: “I don’t know what it means. I say it, and I don’t know what it means … Did I ever know what it meant?”*

but i would say it is, it's just a more innocent variety than alecto's or any of the main characters of the book. but she

decided to love kanon very early on, and not the falsehood she presented but the real her that kanon hated so much.

that's how her love works, it's universal, and she doesn't differentiate based on what they've done or the cruelty in their hearts. as an example, there is a resurrection beast, one of nona's siblings, that looms over the entire planet (she doesn't pay attention to this but it's called antioch ftr) called Varun the Eater, and it wants to kill everyone she

loves

**“Green thing,” said the Captain. “Green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? Where will your body go? What did he do to you, to make you this way? You eat yourself. I gorge on unliving marrow.”
It was true; the Captain looked as though she were withering before Nona’s eyes.**

**“You cry mercy?” said the Captain.
“Yes—mercy—yes,” said Nona.
“I have crossed the face of the universe,” said the Captain. “I poison it to match my grief.”
“Yes,” said Nona, “but—but stop this, stop hurting the Captain…”**

i don't know why the boldness and italics aren't working

whatever

“Hot Sauce never did anything wrong, or Beautiful Ruby or Born in the Morning or Kevin, and Honesty”—here she was compelled by the truth—“Honesty doesn’t know any better. Camilla and Palamedes never did anything wrong … Pyrrha says she did a lot wrong, but at least she knows it … and we don’t like the Captain, but we pity her.

"Stop hurting the Captain … don’t do this.” And Nona found herself saying— “I’m ready to die … really ready.”
“Nothing is really ready to die,” said the Captain.

this is nona's interaction with the ghost of another planet. i think probably mars or venus or maybe mercury

It's because you have line breaks

ah thanks

but the thing is, she loves varun. as much as she loves anyone. as much as she loves kanon or waltaquin or any of the friends she made because even though they might be kind of horrible people and even if they hurt her, she has decided to care, adamantly.

for that reason she literally never voted for anyone but herself. she explained it here.

also exchanges that retroactively make me SO EMO

she said this very much knowing that she would die in this game and that nona would never get back home

God me coming over here to say he was thinking about Lilith during this and it just hurts even worse now

it mirrors another canon exchange too

“Would you be mad if I died?” said Nona.
“Yes,” said Hot Sauce simply. “You’re my crew.”
This made Nona deliriously pleased, but then deeply anxious.
“Hot Sauce,” she said timidly, “I don’t want you to be sad or mad if anything happens to me. Promise not to be sad—I don’t like it on your face.”

simplistic: I FIGURED

also unlike the other stupid names hot sauce's name is literally just hot sauce because she likes hot sauce. she's a grim child soldier who has been to war. i love her and so does nona.

anyway things got more complicated when lobelia's trial happened because nona really liked vergilous and was really upset that he died. she wasn't feeling vengeful towards lobelia until lobelia threatened to take away haruka and xiao, and because it was in a trial where her empathy was dulled, she was completely unable to understand lobelia.

her anger starts out as like. cute mostly.

Captcha Check then uh.

this was the first glimpse of alecto. she has these moments in the book where when nona is really really angry she starts to channel her repressed alecto very hard. in those moments she hates everyone she loves. and for the record she probably would have midtrialed if not for crea.

but she was hardly the only one lining up to midtrial lobelia lmfao

Yeah I think there was honestly a line at that point LMAO

also we will come back to this exchange later lmfao

OH i forgot to mention hang on

here. she talked to vergilius about her dying and a bunch of other things and that was the first time she'd ever admitted this to anyone which made the fact that he died immediately after so much worse for her.

vergilius also dadded at her which was really cute. she never understood why people didn't like him or found him unpleasant because he was never anything but kind to her.

from here was when she kind of started to slowly get worse physically. i mentioned a few times that she looked tired and like she had considerably less energy as time went on, because physically and mentally she was starting to decline.

she told lacus about it, which makes her the second person she'd told, because she'd never gotten the chance to tell her friends or palamedes or camilla or pyrrha. the third person she told was actually waltaquin, and again, we will... get to that.

then kanon's trial happened and nona felt..... very isolated? because she felt as if she was the only one who could understand how absolutely fucking miserable and pathetic kanon was. she couldn't be mad because she sure expected this, she could only just feel sorry for her.

and she wasn't upset at the way that everyone else hated her and in her pcs with kanon she pretty much used kanon's logic for killing kallamar against her, by saying "well if you killing kallamar was okay, then surely them killing you is also okay because none of them like you."

then the execution happened and this was mostly just nona being completely at peace and only moderately displeased even as her friend seemed to be dying, just because she could read crea and knew that crea wasn't like... scared, or anything except pissed off, and she didn't get why nobody else could see that.

it's the same way she couldn't understand why nobody else pitied kanon because to nona this is the single most pitiful thing she has ever seen in the world.

then the memshares.... i planned to do a lot more of these but i actually only ended up doing one with beel. nona got the memory of beel's sister dying which now that i think about it was probably nik planting a trap and cackling.

oh and i got a bit through one with lacus but the thread sort of dried up

OH and nona went through one with kanon where she found a photo of what kanon used to look like, and wanted to flay people for bullying her, but was calmed because she saw the photo of kanon and kissed it. beel's sister will be important later though because at this point

nona knows she's dying. she has days to go. lacus guessed correctly that she'd been holding out for her birthday party, and while it wasn't a big one, it was a good one and it had many of her most treasured friends there. dodo cabana was together for the first time during a curfew and lacus and haruka came over.

lacus was the only one that knew she was probably going to be dead in the morning.

but a fun fact about this week before i start to entangle sickos x10000000000

i submitted a murder proposal that followed basically the exact same steps as nona's death, except nona would have killed waltaquin instead. and i specifically asked for waltaquin. and shay specifically asked for nona.

HELLO?????????????????

so in that au, nona would have woken up the next morning completely fine, and she would have been doing... an okay job of pretending to still be nona. augustine in canon describes alecto as "incapable of even a simple con" so it would have fallen apart quickly.

also she probably would have partially cannibalized waltaquin's body.

me and shay

a double cannibal case would have been

so much

no because crea would have lost his mind

how to midtrial except it's to protect the killer

also you chose the memory so really it is kai setting up the trap for themselves and me being like OH NOOOOOOO

but also cackling

we did this

we sure did.

and i would do it again.

god the idea of alecto and beel being the culprits would be so so much because like. yeah. alecto would have midtrialed to protect beel AND crea.

anyway onto the actual murder.

we threaded some of it out. it's one of the interactions i'm most proud of tbh. in particular i'm pretty proud of nona's last words as nona.

the way this happened with the like one person in the cast least likely to even be able to say too

puts my head down

YEP

waltaquin never had any reason to doubt the legitimacy of nona's love, and nona never had any reason to doubt that waltaquin was capable of it because she "loved" in the way that was understandable to alecto. destructively and selfishly.

oh pw

ow even

it was funny to me that people suggested that nona might have let alice kill her, and it's like... mm. you're sort of half right? she wasn't willing to quite let waltaquin kill her but she was completely uninterested in fighting back, just because she was dying, and sonya said that she had potential and she was thinking, well maybe my potential will be

dying her at the hands of someone i love

then nona unraveled and alecto came to party. and because of the nature of the memory, alecto could not differentiate between john gaius and waltaquin. they were both necromancers, they were both people that alecto/nona loved and they both hurt them and violated them in the worst possible ways.

but waltaquin saw what it was like to be the earth, what it was like to truly die when you're something so incomprehensibly massive and full of life and love, and so waltaquin saw nona/alecto in a way that not even john ever managed. waltaquin saw her to the very depths of her core and alecto saw right back, and she screamed and drove waltaquin mad.

and also destroyed the entire arcade. get fucked shigaraki and other gamers.

her death was only so horrible because waltaquin tried to make it quick and hit her in the head in such a way that would kill any normal person. and then waltaquin walked away to try and dispose of the evidence in the snow room and nona... got up and followed her lmfao

relatively weak-armed mage who's just stared into the black hole of all existence trying to hit someone hard enough to kill them:

We Were Not Thinking About The Regeneration Anymore

OH NO I NEVER CONSIDERED THAT OMG....