kill us twice, shame on god @faggedoutsocialite - Tumblr Blog

Posts

mythosphere

"Blorbo from my shows" no. Blorbo from my BA. Blorbo from my major. Blorbo from my primary source document.

katakaluptastrophy

Blorbo murdering me for my "unwholesome" interest in the primary source documents.

light-camera-bitch-smile

corvidaelesbian

I know where the Wake is now

As Abigail said, the soul yearns for the body

Her connection to the sword is broken and the body of cytherea is broken too

What she has left?

Her own bones, preserved by the ninth

So the doctor sex situation, but the body is not buried and she has the insane willpower

So one skeleton on the ninth quietly goes rogue

And including the situation there, nobody can stop her

It would be so funny if Gideon and corona and Pyrrha teamed up with her

katakaluptastrophy

Wake's bones are on the Ninth. Wake's soul is...in Pyrrah's gun? And where is Pyrrah's gun at the end of NTN? The Ninth.

#what's scarier than a skeleton? nothing #WRONG. skeleton with gun

peixesoluvel

The greatest

eskildit

honestly i think why i dislike jod posters so much is that every time i reread parts of harrow the ninth im just thinking. hey someone should kill that guy. "breaking the cycle means forgiving john" not for me. acid jail.

eskildit

post prompted by rereading harrow asking "Did I sin, Lord? Did I kill two of my fathers that day?” like he cannot be allowed to live

proxima-bee

can't stand when a character is a “father figure” to the protagonist. figuring out what? how to molest them?

eskildit

rereading parts of harrow the ninth and aauuuuggghhhuuaaaa this book makes me feel shrimp emotions each time

eskildit

"Did I sin, Lord? Did I kill two of my fathers that day?” I'm gonna THROW UP.

eskildit

harrow sees John as a father but more importantly she compares him against her own father.

When the Emperor touched you, your body recalled, unbidden, each rare and terrible touch committed by your mother and father.

she compares John to the man who never loved or cared for her and who gently instructed her how to tie her own noose. John is like a father to her. But she receives no comfort from that feeling.

eskildit

okay i was a little bit joking but john gaius lowkey is a post-liberal. pre-res john was reading gray mirror

eskildit

okay mithraeum as contemporary right wing us politics au uhhhhhh johns a post-liberal national conservative, augustine works at claremont institute, mercy is whatever helen andrews is currently up to, ianthe is into really into straussianism and harrowhark is of course a catholic integralist. pls trust that this is all extrememely accurate and in character

#i trust #prev:#edit: oh i forgot g1deon uhhhhhhh good ol fashioned neocon #/prev

katakaluptastrophy

John Gaius' commitment to a certain aesthetic for his space empire is...certainly something...

They are using fountain pens on spaceships. Fountain pens. To the extent that every vaguely intellectual character (other than Abigail Pent, who is repeatedly described as "neat" and "immaculate") is constantly described as having ink stains on their hands and even faces, and the smell of ink is referenced repeatedly.

And when they're not writing with fountain pens, they're using necromantically stabilised blood (this isn't just a Harrow quirk - the Sixth have special spikes on their clipboards for signing documents...).

Amongst the Lyctoral traces Abigail finds in the library at Cannan House are "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge."

It also seems reasonable to assume that the "clockworks" they wear are analogue watches, as Nona scolds Cam for referring to her beeping digital watch as a "clockwork" on New Rho.

And besides the fountain pens, regency navy uniforms, swords, and general 20th century pulp literature culture, a few more things that characters specifically describe as antique or ancient include:

Sunglasses

Metal industrial shelving

Paper books with glossy pages

Black tie formal wear

Automatic doors

LED lights

Chrome kitchen fittings

Guns (to the extent that Abigail specifically says to the Sleeper "you come bearing ancient weapons")

And fine, these are all within the realms of things people are reasonably allowed to have a personal preference against...

But you know what else the Nine Houses don't have?

VACCINES.

What was the thought process by which Dr Science and Humanitarian Empathy decided to bring back routine childhood illnesses from the 1950s?

Speaking of the 1950s, why - in a society that appears to find permanently magically manipulating the bodies of living people trivial - does the standard of eyecare seem to also be from the early 20th century?

As a glasses wearer, I totally appreciate that there may simply be a social preference for glasses despite the existence of flesh magic. But Abigail Pent swapping between two pairs of glasses would seem to suggest that varifocals went the way of the mumps vaccine...

And our perspective on this is entirely from some of the most privileged people in the Dominicus system.

scholar-hect

As a licensed optician (non-practicing), I am compelled to observe that Abigail Pent may be one of the people who can’t tolerate multifocal lenses, or who is not yet at the stage of presbyopic emergence where they’d be more beneficial than two separate pairs, or who simply prefers (as I myself do) to maintain a pair for long distance and another for periods of near work (many reasons for this but I’ll spare you all the lesson in optical science, no one really cares about that).

I would like to know, however, why — in the world where flesh magic is a real possibility — is anyone bothering with glasses in the first place? Why are we not simply employing one of the optical-specialist flesh mages to reshape the cornea and eyeball to achieve 20/20 vision again? Being that most refractive error is simply the result of the light not reaching your retina correctly, due to the length or curvature of your eyeball.

I would also like to say: Palamedes, babe. You are at least -10.00 diopters of shortsighted. If you’re not going to employ a flesh mage for permanent refractive correction, please at least consider contact lenses. You will love not having to push them back into place constantly. You will love peripheral vision.

katakaluptastrophy

I love it when people who know about things write detailed replies!

As to why they're not using flesh magic to fix vision, I fear that glasses are probably a signifier of a particular kind of scholarly necromantic frailty.

(If this is recirculating, I should add even more curiously, the Houses *do* appear to have vaccines, as Gideon talks about getting them in Drearburh. So the Fourth's mumps would either seem to be turbo breakthrough space mumps, Fifth anti-Cohort plotting, or evidence that not every House shares the Ninth's...unique and inconsistent...approach to public health.

#anastasia was like ''no that's stupid'#or hm. 10k years is a long time. maybe HAD vaccines and then lost them? but the ninth which is isolated and regressive #is still doing it? although how much manufacturing takes place on the ninth anyway...#vaccines are a total non-priority to him seemingly no matter how you cut it #like how much does jod administer his own empire #tbh the obvious answer is that there are vaccines and they elect not to use them because it's a mega death cult.#making more necromancers exist taking top priority over anything else. bad!#if infants generate more thanergy (curiously) do children generate more than adults? or is it a metaphysical thing for brandnew life only #idk if it's canon or not but i've always imagined it's house infants only that have this weird burst and it has to do with being resurrecte #gideon talks about getting her vaccines and makes it sound routine/ordinary #so there's some kind of cultural framework for vaccination clearly. and you could say only ninth vaccinates but how'd they GET the vaccines #and also the fourth mumps.#adult vaccination solves both of those. hashtag dead baby fingerbones #simplest explanation is to have vaccines for adults only and harrow had herself and gideon vaccinated and damn convention #although the ninth is so isolated and with a small population perhaps it receives a special dispensation and it's just normal to vaccinate #in childhood on the ninth and not even in a ''what are they getting up to all the way out there tho''

trambrosia

If people go to the 9th house for penitence, what are they guilty about anyway?

katakaluptastrophy

It's hard to say, because we know so little about what the Houses mean when they talk about sin, and what their religious frameworks for responding to sin even are.

We do get repeated discussions about what does or doesn't qualify as a sin, or a "necromantic sin" specifically, but no firm conclusions about what those sins might actually be (making a beguiling corpse? Siphoning? Making eyes at your cav outside of the niche jurisdiction of Fifth House canon law? Engineering a necromancer out of 200 infants?).

Silas seems to suggest that there's some kind of practice of confession. But given that the Eighth regard the Ninth as heretical, I can't imagine they're sending people off to do penance on the Ninth when 10 King Undyings and a donation to the Cohort Orphans and Widows Fund just won't cut it. And what is penance understood to do, spiritually, in House religion anyway?

The other question is whether they're in penance for their own specific sins, or whether there's a more general sense that the orders of the Ninth House are doing penance simply to keep the Tomb shut.

On trying to imagine it, what comes to mind is the phenomenon of people doing penance, or joining religious orders, as a response to their experience of fighting in the Crusades. With half a myriad of ongoing war, there would probably be no shortage of people for whom the Ninth might seem to offer some kind of solace.

corpsesoldier

fic: in the next world, for new people

Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series Pairing: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Gideon Nav Rating: T Tags: Written in the style of Disco Elysium, Angst, Memory Loss, Canon Typical Lobotomy

1. Pledge your eternal loyalty to the your Lord. 2. [DEBTOR - Challenging 12] Ask God to restore your house. 3. [SALTWATER - Godly 16] TEAR OUT HIS HEART. > 4. [NEMESIS - Legendary 14] Beg for the life of Gideon Nav.

YOU - “Please undo what I’ve done, Lord. I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”

NEMESIS - Don’t ask for some stupid shit like that. You’ve got more important things to deal with.

#''wreak havoc on the middle class''#to read

nightinvaelus

gideon i love you but arghhhhh what were the communiqués and between whom????

katakaluptastrophy

I think we see some of Abigail's discoveries in HTN!

She shows Harrow several "Lyctoral traces" that she discovered in Canaan House, including two parts of a correspondence about a potato-based recipe in HTN ch 10:

After that cut into cubes, fry in the butter or oil, turn it occasionally until it is crispy. Cut up the pickle so there are no big chunks and mix it into the pan before turning off the heat. M told us yesterday that Nigella "eats like a child," so I

and

If you come to my room, I will make you the potato dish you liked

as well as the "calligraphic S" in chapter 21, and a note that says "I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say" in chapter 28. Several of these are the notes that Harrow instead sees as Wake's messages and memories.

If so, "unencrypted communiqués" was perhaps a rather tongue-in-cheek or grandiose description offered at the dinner party, and it's all the more tragic that notes about potato recipes and Lyctoral predilictions may have partly led to Abigail's death.

But also...it seems like one of the correspondents about potatoes might have been Cassiopeia, who is repeatedly and significantly referenced in HTN. When Harrow scoffs that the notes seem unimportant, Abigail responds that she could use them to summon the writer's ghost - and there is then a long discussion about the fact that both she and Magnus are very certain that she could do this, and that the only limitations are the amount of blood it would require and the question of where Lyctors go when they die.

Which feels...significant in a series where Abigail later reveals that the River does not work as John has suggested it to, where the entwinement and metaphysical weight of Lyctoral souls is revealed to be more complex than first believed, and where Abigail and Magnus also chattily hint at other significant secrets in Canaan House, such as the "lost chambers of the Emperor Undying" (something she suggests Magnus is more likely to trip over than she is to summon the ghost of Matthias Nonius...).

This may all be me desperately hoping my blorbo makes a reappearance in ATN, but it sounds rather like we may not have heard the last of those communiqués...

dungeonmastersconsortium

yeah, sure, it was the "power of friendship" that defeated you, and not my super cool "mega bone explosions" spell that I worked really hard on, whatever idiot