Many people don’t know this, but that was intentional! Laputa was invented by the English author Jonathan Swift. In his book Gulliver’s Travels, the floating city of Laputa oppresses the country below it (literally). The oppressed finally manage to ground it by having the towers of their capital collapse inward when Laputa descended on it. The place where it happened is called Lin Lin. Lin Lin = double Lin = Dublin. The oppressed country is Ireland and Swift was calling his own England “the whore”.

Of course it was a ritual. It was a form of necromancy, to start you had to invoke the name of an ancient Roman emperor

I feel like watching film theory with Neville could have been the chosen one again. Wasn’t it revealed in one of the later books that that was the question all along?