82 pages • 2-hour read
Nocticadia
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Themes
Forbidden Romance and Its Consequences
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, sexual violence, child abuse, racism, and gender discrimination.
Nocticadia is populated with taboo or high-risk relationships: Several students are involved with professors, professors have affairs with each other, and all of these dynamics repeatedly lead to emotional or physical consequences for at least one party. Mel, a student and daughter of the school chairman, used to sleep with Provost Lippincott, whom she became party to murder with in their efforts to cover up Lippincott’s former crimes. Gilchrist tries to coerce Devryck into continuing their affair after he loses sexual interest in her, and she sexual assaults another student, Spencer, and blackmails him into doing her bidding. The protagonist, Lilia, is the daughter of Lippincott and Vanessa, a participant in a medical study he worked on—an unethical relationship that further influenced the research project before Lippincott ruined it entirely. These overlapping relationships expose how the boundaries between personal desire and institutional exploitation are constantly blurred, with romantic or sexual entanglements often weaponized for control, revenge, or reputation management.
This leads into the primary romance between Lilia and Devryck. They are attracted to one another instantly, but they fight these feelings for many reasons. Lilia is 20, a legal adult, but still roughly a decade younger than Devryck and his student. This latter reason is enough to endanger both of their places at Dracadia, as it would break every rule for them to become involved, but they also carry emotional burdens that make it difficult for them to open up to one another. As they learn more about each other’s vulnerabilities, they bond, making their mutual attraction harder to resist. Devryck worries about the consequences tied to plot tools specific to Nocticadia, namely the retribution of the Dracadia secret society of which he is a part. They would react negatively to his involvement with her, as it could reveal their secrets. This forbidden dynamic is not just a matter of ethics or scandal: It symbolizes the danger of emotional intimacy in a world built on secrets, surveillance, and sacrifice.
However, the novel alludes to broader, more real-world complications that would arise from their relationship. Lilia is a working-class young woman at Dracadia on a scholarship. She faces a culture mired in classism and misogyny, with both past and present-day members of the university using wealth, race, gender, or general privilege to their advantage over others. She is keenly aware of how she is treated because of her class, in particular, and she and Devryck discuss how she inherently has more to lose because of this. If caught, Devryck might be excused entirely; his family’s wealth and research have been essential to the university, and his reputation as a man would not be damaged in the same way hers would be. Additionally, she’d be sent back home with no degree, no money, and no ability to continue researching what killed her mother. Lilia’s sense of independence due to the gender and wealth imbalances weigh on her, and she is only able to persevere through the trials of the novel due to Devryck’s committed protection, care, and financial support.
Their age gap is mentioned, with both Lilia and Devryck internally expressing concern, but they ultimately deduce that Lilia has matured extremely quickly due to her unique circumstances, and they operate at a similar level of emotional maturity. The novel makes no generalizing statements on the advisability of relationships with age gaps of this specific kind, but it acknowledges the power imbalance and ensures that Devryck is aware of Lilia’s needs and allows her to exert her agency. It ends with her as a researcher alongside him, and she is offered a similar level of privilege through her connections with the secret society and university. However, through its use of numerous characters in similar circumstances, it still presents a complex depiction of age gap romances, secret affairs, and other taboo relationships.
The Impact of Past Trauma on Present Actions
Lilia and Devryck both carry a significant amount of trauma from their past. Though it takes different forms, their experiences mirror one another’s. Lilia lost her mother—something she feels responsible for—and suffers because of her morally corrupt father, Lippincott. Devryck unfairly carries the blame for his mother dying giving birth to him, and his father, Warren, frequently abused him as a result. They also both feel or have felt responsible for a sibling, from whom they’re now separated. Combined with their social and romantic isolation, they’ve developed an emotional wall around themselves, and they both struggle to connect with others in the narrative present because of this. In this way, the novel draws a parallel between emotional trauma and scientific inquiry—both characters use research as a coping mechanism, attempting to find clarity, control, or redemption in a world where they previously had none.
The mystery of Lilia’s mother, Vanessa, haunts her, particularly because she had to fight Vanessa in response to her mother’s illness-driven attempt to kill Lilia’s half-sister, Bee. She isn’t freed from this guilt when she learns that one of the novel’s antagonists, Angelo, ultimately killed Vanessa. Throughout the novel, she focuses on what she believes she owes her family in exchange for her inability to save Vanessa. This belief leads to an expression of the conflicting opinions between Lilia and Devryck on how to cope with the parallel traumas. Lilia claims, “I feel compelled to do something meaningful with my life. I owe it to my family,” to which Devryck responds, “You owe nothing to your family […] Passions are useless, if we pursue them for others” (395). Devryck’s claims have validity in that Lilia shouldn’t center her entire life on making reparations; however, his disdain for family is also indicative of his bitter relationship with his own family. This exchange reveals one of the novel’s core emotional tensions: whether legacy is a burden to overcome or a purpose to embrace. While Devryck attempts to sever ties with his past, Lilia seeks to alchemize her grief into something useful, suggesting different models of survival.
Devryck can recognize that his father mistreated him and that Caedmon’s loss was not technically his fault; however, he struggles to expunge the belief that his father held that Devryck was to blame. He also feels guilty for pursuing his father’s work and involving himself with the Rooks’ secret society, which Caedmon abhorred as a child. Devryck does this because the Noctisoma research is his only shot at surviving his illness, but he hates that he must sacrifice his values to perform the research as part of Dracadia. This isn’t helped when he kindles a relationship with Lilia, whose mother participated in his father’s botched study and had to flee her home as a result. Devryck is aware that his father and the people he works with have been and continue to be harmful to Lilia throughout the novel. Lilia helps him break through these feelings of blame, however, to accept that he was mistreated and can’t be held responsible for his father’s actions. In exchange, Devryck helps Lilia recognize her talent and intelligence and feel more secure in her surroundings. Together, their relationship models a rare kind of intimacy, in which shared trauma becomes not a source of dysfunction but a mutual act of witness, validation, and transformation.
How Harmful Power Structures Shape Scientific Research
Lilia, as well as the broader narrative of Nocticadia, has a complex relationship with the power structures present in the novel. The prestige of Dracadia University is alluring to Lilia and presented as a positive aspect of her studies. Major aspects of the school’s draw are its exclusivity, beauty, and status, all of which are derived through its wealth. Lilia embraces the privileges allowed at the university—such as the aesthetic of the campus, the perks of life there, and the privately owned research of the Noctisoma—yet she feels acutely out of place as a working-class woman amid a much more affluent student body and staff. The class structures prove to be more than a passing form of tension; the need to gain or maintain wealth drives the primary antagonist, and class is wielded like a weapon against Lilia on numerous occasions. Provost Lippincott explicitly tells Devryck that he doesn’t care if a major donor for their research sexually assaults Lilia; he instructs Devryck to let it happen to sustain the influx of donations. Lilia is also put in explicit danger in her relationship with Devryck, as his wealth and gender could shield him from consequences in a way that Lilia’s poverty and gender couldn’t. This power imbalance reinforces a brutal truth: Even when women like Lilia contribute meaningfully to scientific progress, they remain vulnerable to exploitation and erasure in patriarchal systems that value money and legacy over ethics.
These structures explicitly influence research performed at Dracadia, both in the present and historically. The theme is introduced through the subplot of Commodore Adderly and the original colonizers of the island. They killed the Indigenous population and erased their culture, subsequently destroying the knowledge that the island’s black rocks are a natural cure to the damaging effects of the Noctisoma parasite. Their privilege as white imperialists worked against them, harming both the Indigenous populace and themselves, and set major scientific discoveries back centuries. Despite being ignorant of this fact, Lilia’s resident assistant, Mel, mentions that the veneration of Adderly—through his memorial statue and the room named after him at the university library—is a testament to how modern American culture honors white historical figures while ignoring their impact on marginalized people. As a white woman, Lilia isn’t adversely impacted by racist societal structures, but the author makes an overt point about the broad ways in which colonization and racism impact, among many things, scientific discovery.
Returning to Lilia’s experience, however, there are numerous examples in which the lives and contributions of women—particularly working-class women—are ignored. The original Crixson Project performed by Devryck’s father, Warren, included all-female subjects. This implicitly reflects how he was trying to find a cure for his wife’s insulin-resistant diabetes, but it set an inherent gender dynamic too, as all the school staff, Rook society, and research leaders were men. When Lippincott botched the study amid his own quests for wealth, two women were forced to run away, and numerous more died. This was never openly acknowledged, only covered up, as the women’s experiences were deemed less important than the men’s reputations. This alludes to broader trends in real-world medical research, wherein women have been rarely studied, if at all, in many cultures, resulting in poorer medical care for women even into the modern day. Had the characters in the novel been willing to risk the consequences of their mistakes and stand up for the women involved in the study, they would’ve expedited the discoveries to be had through the research and perhaps come to their conclusions sooner, saving countless lives.
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