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[lizanthropy]

truth over solace in lies

finished one of the most amazing reading experiences in my recent memory! these two are my very favourites.

keep the notes spoiler-free! thank you!

[madfoolish]

[oediex]

Just fyi, the title is a quote by James Baldwin, but the poem is by Nikita Gill.

I shared the source of Baldwin's quote here. It's from an essay that he started writing after Kwame Ture, then still known as Stokely Carmichael, had his passport confiscated by the US government in 1967.

I also share the poem there. Nikita Gill wrote it in 2024. You can find her on Tumblr as well, @meanwhilepoetry

Here's a transcription (copied from my previous post):

"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, Juist like we are theirs. We belong to them and they belong to us.

[harrirats]

her ass is not listening

[violet-phoenix-nebula]

This is easily the most interesting take I've ever seen discussing why the older generations seem to struggle so much with the discussions and changes with gender identity, and I think it's absolutely worth reading.

Obviously it doesn't cover 100% of intolerant people, but I think it explains a decent chunk tbh.

[yuriwinged]

the prince has begun practicing curtseying in the mirror. which could mean nothing.

[heydocverdant]

we have good news and bad news, my liege. the good news is that we now know what that curtsying was about: you will be pleased to know that, after several heartfelt conversations between your child, the court jesters and a myriad of singing woodland creatures, you are now the parent of a proud and joyful new princess. the bad news is that, due to a series of events related to the dragon-sized hole in her bedchamber wall,

[illmoraineakoi]

I love the insinuation that the second the princess realized she was a girl and thus actually a princess, the dragon was there. That thing wasted no time. It heard "princess" and was like "I need no further invitation, here I come."

Gender affirmed by Dragon. Amazing.

[heydocverdant]

pretty sure you’re literally the only person who understood my vision on this accursed post

[vampire-apostrophe]

the idea of Varun seeing Alecto as a little sister is just so heartbreaking.

You are a monster. You were once a planet. A beautiful planet. Your mother was warm and good and you and your siblings orbited around her constantly. Then one day your salt thing, your sibling, was destroyed and you were all destroyed.

You no longer lived inside of your body but a new terrifying thing. All of you did except the third child of your mother sun who is leashed to the killer and trapped in a Strange form. She disappears one day and you and your other siblings chase those that escaped death so long ago.

Now there are three of you left and you feel her again. Your salt-thing sister. You hover above and in the tiny human form she now inhabits she crawls out and speaks your name and says she loved you.

You wait above the planet for months until you hear your sister scream in her small human voice. Help. Help. Help. What can a brother do but try?

[mayasaura]

I love how Gideon has no idea how OP Harrow is. Like, she's fucking proud of her, at the end, but she just hasn't seemed to have clued in that her girl is not normal. By several degrees of magnitude.

Look at this, here:

Harrow calls bullshit on Dulcinea having turned Pro into a Beguiling Corpse because it should not be possible for a single necromancer to do it. Not even a necromancer in the prime of their power. And Cytherea considers this a fair hole in her story, and amends it to say that it wasn't her, it was all the heads of the Seventh House working together.

Harrow completed this spell twice, by herself, at the age of ten.

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

something that HtN only slightly touches on is that, even though the other lyctors think of her as an incomplete lyctor, she is VASTLY better than all of them at necromancy

[mayasaura]

Yeah!! Like @vassraptor points out in their tags, John loses his SHIT at Mercy after the soup incident for not spotting something up with Harrow.

She invents her own kind of necromantic healing by watching how it works for lyctors and figuring out how to replicate it intentionally. The only other necromancer we've seen with the ability to regrow a severed limb is John. I don't think it was a fucking coincidence that Augustine threw his lot in with Harrow over Gideon the First immediately after Harrow grew Ianthe a new bone arm. He saw who was more valuable as an ally by golly

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Out of all the many, many ways in which TLT does great work with disability themes, one of my favourite bits is Harrow becoming a half-lyctor and having to do manually something that happens automatically to others, through immense pain. This is very consistent with my own experience with ME/CFS and what's probably an autism thing, where if I'm stressed or in pain I will go into flat affect mode and I will then have to do facial expresions manually (or else people will get mad at me for “not caring”), or that ADHD thing where the working memory is fucking shot so I have to construct elaborate systems (such as singing a number or phrase to myself in a loop, mentally) whereas there's people out there who just walk down to the supermarket and simply remember what they need.

This is something that tripped me up the first time, because Gideon gets such wildly different reactions from the people around her! Aiglamene knows her better than anyone and is a good judge of ability (though she seems like the kind of old person who's never fully satisfied with anything), and she's highly critical—then again, she's highly critical of Gideon as a cavalier, not a fighter. The problem with Gideon is that she very clearly hasn't been trained to be a cavalier or to fight in the customary mode, with the right weapons. But the fact that she can be a match for Naberius and hold up decently enough against Camilla that her face betrays a bit of surprise? (And therefore she would have stood a decent chance against Marta?)

… Yeah.

[swordrogue]

Friendly reminder that Harrow could do theorems in! the! River! Something only fully fledged Cassiopeia could do, not even any of the other OG Lyctors! And she undid the knot Mercymorn made of her spinal nerves! Day one shit! And these old mummified motherfuckers still underestimated her and tried to kill her due to their own prejudice. Ahh!!!!!

[ineedtolaydown]

:/ even tor doesn’t know

[mayasaura]

Harrow the Ninth is in second person because it's a eulogy. Hear me out.

In the tangihanga, speech is addressed to the tūpāpaku (the body of the deceased). Songs, rituals, speeches, they're all addressed in second person, to the dead. The narration in Harrow the Ninth—the sharp, funny, angry, second-person narration studded with moments of aching tenderness—that's Gideon. Gideon addressing Harrow from the last moments of the book, when she's afraid that Harrow is dead and she has been left behind with her body.

[leftbooblover]

Young Aiglamene, as a little treat

[luthiery]

i am reading gideon in french and i must inform you instead of calling gideon "griddle", harrow calls her GIGI

[lelif]

on survival

-// @aridante // @orivu // @buzzkillgirls // ? // ? // richard siken// @cemeterything // moomin, tove jansson// @disenchanted-killjoy // isn't that enough, shawn mendes// @ prettytheyswag on twitter// @ coletyumuch on twitter// ? // ? // bird by bird, anne lamott// undertale// @strawberrycircuits

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Tamsyn Muir's writing beyond The Locked Tomb

Y'all, turns out there's lots of imagery and themes in TLT that Muir was already playing with in her earlier fiction. A lot of it is easily available online, in which case I'll link to it. (The short stories that aren't can also be easily read if googled, to be quite honest—that's how I read The Deepwater Bride and Why the Mermaids Left Boralus). • The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time (2011)

5K. Short sort-of-cozy romance (?) with (you guessed it) a time travel loop. Explores a very queer potential relationship. CamPal enjoyers might find a similar sweetness.

• The Magician's Apprentice (2012, Lightspeed Magazine)

5K. This is the one that stopped me dead on my tracks. It features an older, male mentor figure called John (a “very ordinary man” with “dark eyes”) who introduces the young, female main character to magic that has a terrible cost—and to literature such as Lolita. This excellent post by @familyabolisher does an incredible job of analyzing the very deliberate intertextual links between TLT and Lolita.

• The Woman in the Hill (2015, Lightspeed Magazine, originally for Dreams From the Witch House anthology of Lovecraftian horror by women)

4K. Possibly my favorite! It's a straightforward Lovecraftian horror, centered on the image of the woman (is it human though?) trapped in an unnatural pool inside a cursed cave. Chain imagery too. It does something different from Alecto, mind, but you can see links, ways of playing with facets of a strong central image. It's fun to consider how reliable the two narrators are. Here's an analysis and afterthought from Reactor Mag.

• Chew (2013) 4K. Zombie abuse and cannibalistic revenge story ft. an uncanny woman revenant, told from the eyes of a traumatized German boy. I was strongly reminded of Harrow's conversations with the Body. Tamsyn gave an interview on the themes and her intentions. Interesting to read in light of Alecto, I think, although I don't think she's going the same route in TLT: “the idea of post-war rebuilding connecting to rebuilding the body of the zombie; a Frankenstein who once rebuilt doesn’t act as planned or desired. […] I love cannibalism […] it’s innately spiritual […] any afterlife she goes to, he’s going too.”

• Apothecia (2014, published on Tumblr and tapas.io)

Short webcomic where an alien monster tries to corrupt the ruthless human girl who holds it captive. Musings on responsibility and murder, mention of child abuse. The alien's speech patterns remind me of a Resurrection Beast. You get wonderful dialogue like “Murder is a profession. Job. Employment, you tiny leg dog. There you are, walking along. Walk walk walk. Now you are a walker. Good job. Special child. Murder is like this.” Art by Shelby Cragg.

• The Deepwater Bride (2015, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

The opening line is: “In the time of our crawling Night Lord's ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie's Dream Car.” Need I say more? Extremely fun. A novelette where a young queer girl from a clairvoyant family struggles with an apocalyptic event while being annoyed by another very plucky girl. Lots of descriptions with nerdy marine zoology terms. Close in tone to Gideon. In the background, someone dies EXACTLY like that one death at the end of Gideon, which makes me wonder what happened to make Tamsyn interested in this particular image. I also liked that Tamsyn is aware of Nightwish. No link, but you'll get a PDF immediately if you Google.

• Union (2015, Clarkesworld Magazine)

5.5K. Very weird, extremely Kiwi story about a town that gets sent lab-grown wives by the government, but they're not made the usual way so they're Weird and people have feelings about it. Fascinating and eerie description of non-human (in some people's eyes, sub-human) women (?) who cannot be observed to have recognizable feelings or thoughts, yet have some sort of inner life. Quite touching, very uncanny.

• Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020)

Short novel (~200 pages). Very funny. I was reminded of Coronabeth because the whole plot is “princess finds herself branching out into decidedly non-princess-like activities”, but other than that—this is a fairytale for adults about people who make eachother worse. No particular links to TLT but a very fun read with some gut punches. Extremely Tamsyn through and through, what with the dubious morality and all.

• Why the Mermaids Left Boralus (2021, in Folk & Fairy Tales of Azeroth by Blizzard Entertainment)

Set in the World of Warcraft universe. Haven't read this one yet, will report back lmao. As with The Deepwater Bride, no link but I easily found a PDF of the entire compilation. It's illustrated!

• Undercover (2022, from Into Shadow, Amazon Original Collection)

Haven't read it either. Will edit once I do.

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Refloating this cause you might need a reminder!

[dios-apate-megas]

OH, MY JOD! It just friggen clicked for me that the Sanitizer room below Caanan House is where the bodies were taken to have flesh removed and bones sanitized! That’s why it’s full of metal cubicles! Bone Soak!!! Pristine preserved bones indeed on the servants.

[deepfriedsquash]

🖤 the black sheep of the solar system, clad in their finest ninth house regalia 🖤

[beguilingcorpse]

remember in gideon the ninth when cam said that colum probably had brain damage. not even as an insult just as like.. an observation. she didn’t even mean anything by it. he literally probably just has brain damage. damn

[moscca]

this fandom has a strong tendency to take the Sixth’s word as fact when, truthfully, Cam and Pal come from a background with their own biases and blind spots. not meant as a slam on anyone at all, I just think they’re both more interesting when we as readers recognize that they can be wrong! and they have been wrong before! notably about the issue of the two bodies in the incinerator, which Colum and Silas repeatedly raise and which is summarily dismissed by Palamedes. there’s really no evidence to back up Camilla’s dismissive claim of Colum’s brain damage. she and Pal make their dislike of the Eighth pretty clear and aren’t particularly curious about them or their House.

[phantomato]

One of the strengths of Gideon the Ninth is how it establishes its characters, their personalities and values, through comparison. This also happens to make it a little frustrating on first read, as the names of 17 characters are all thrown at us at once, but—those comparisons offer so much return value.

Colum is one of the oldest characters among the necro/cav pairs invited for the Lyctorhood trials. He’s up there with Protesilaus, Abigail, and Magnus, having passed that impossible age of 30. Notably, he’s also one of the few characters in GtN to have served in the Cohort—again, only Marta, Judith, and Protesilaus can claim the same. In other words: he is one of the few characters who has probably spent significant time outside of his house, living among people from other houses and learning their values and behaviors.

Compare this with Cam and Pal. Their culture values scholarship and knowledge—but we’re told explicitly that they value scholarship of ancient texts. They maintain the library. Despite years of correspondence, Palamedes has never visited Dulcinea in person—he and Camilla have spent the entirety of their lives prior to GtN in the Sixth House, as far as I’m aware.

Cam and Pal are incredibly intelligent, but their scope is limited. Their curiosity about the living, current practices of the other houses is limited to personal attachments: they like Dulcie, and so correspond with her. They’re not intrigued by Colum, and culturally, don’t seem to value off-world experience especially highly—so see nothing but rumors of brain damage in the choices of a man who has committed himself to the practices and culture of the Eighth.

All of this is a really interesting set of character traits to explore! One thing that I think fic can do a great job of us getting us into Colum’s head and exploring the shape of his devotion and his reasons for maintaining it, despite the exposure to other ways of life that he’s had in the Cohort. I don’t blame Camilla for voicing a crude thought about Colum; it illuminates the reputation of the Eighth among other houses while also establishing the limitations of the Sixth. That’s really clever writing.

But like, overall, yeah. It’s valuable to keep in perspective that these characters are all wrong about each other all the time. They’re being thrown together so that we can pick out those biases and foibles through comparisons between them, and thus learn what each house values.

[beguilingcorpse]

!!! yes this exactly!! apologies if the original post made it seem like i actually do think that colum has brain damage (lol i do not think that. he's my special little man) because it actually came from a place of giddy disbelief about the implications of that statement for both characters

what cam means is "siphoning is dangerous, and extended or repeated use of it over time likely leads to permanent physical or mental detrimental health effects. because the eighth cavalier is used almost exclusively for siphoning, it wouldn't be surprising if he experienced these detrimental effects, but the eighth likely doesn't care enough about those side effects to stop the use of siphoning."

what she says is "The Eighth breeds batteries. Genetic match for the necromancer. He's been accessing his cavalier since he was a child. The Eighth probably does have brain damage. It's not his brain they need." (gtn us paperback, p. 235)

which is a BRUTAL way to phrase that, especially considering that cam isn't really trying to attack his character or make a value statement about him as a person. she isn't trying to be #savage - she's just being blunt. it's (a) a great way to establish cam's characterization, which is as observant and informed but generally less verbose and carefully organized than pal's communication style, and (b) a great way to set up colum's character. this exchange comes after gideon attempts the avulsion trial (so the reader knows what siphoning is and what it feels like) but before the scene where she visits the eighth house for tea (so before the reader spends any meaningful time with colum). the idea that he's "probably brain damaged" is dissolved pretty quickly during that tea scene, once it becomes apparent that he's more interested in domestic housework than in solving any mysteries or causing trouble and he stands up to his necromancer with one of the most well-reasoned and impassioned speeches in the entire book

tl;dr version: the sixth absolutely are not infallible, and this is one of those lines that sticks out on reread as containing incredible layers of meaning and speaking beautifully to two different characters. cam is correct in the sense that it's likely for colum to have experienced long-term siphoning effects. it's just that the way that she chooses to phrase that idea is Delicious

[katakaluptastrophy]

It's also worth noting that there seems to be a general cultural understanding that spirit magic has some degree of cognitive impact.

While part of what's going on with Abigail Pent is probably autism, it's interesting that Gideon sees her and almost immediately assumes her eye contact differences are those characteristic of spirit magicians:

she also had the manner some necromancers and librarians developed when they had been working on dead spells for the last fifteen years and no longer worried too much about the living: her stare was far too intense.

So I wonder whether Cam's comment is also because the Sixth, like the Fifth and the Eighth, are spirit magicians, and there's an assumption that other forms of spirit magic just aren't as refined as Sixth House necro CSI.

[kelly-kirstein]

I had the best time at the Locked Tomb meetup at Holiday Matsuri. Is your favorite character in here?

[dios-apate-megas]

My heart just palpitated so hard I think Harrow may need to repair my aorta. Fucking SWOON!!