yet another of devotion's casualties

a locked tomb sideblog. follows from @/likesomethingblooming.

[lambentgrey]

what’s good locked tomb enjoyers?

i’m erin (she/they, bi, late 20s) and this is my tlt sideblog! i follow & interact from @/likesomethingblooming.

please interact: harrow apologists, gideon appreciators, sixth house stans, (lapsed) catholics with guilt issues who latched onto this series, ppl who want to study mercy & augustine’s relationship under a microscope, ppl who are a little Too into cannibalism & consumption metaphors, etc. etc.

[annabelle--cane]

harrow the ninth asks the question "what is the first impulse of a genius necromancer when trying to retain any shred of coherency in a river bubble?" and gives the unambiguous answer "write fanfiction"

[annabelle--cane]

to be clear I am talking both about palamedes "the necromancer's marriage season... 2!!!!" sextus and harrowhark "role swap au" "ballroom au" "coffee shop au" nonagesimus. tamsyn muir said that in 100% of case studies the last frantic attempt of a prodigy to avoid entering a final psychological death spiral is writing tropey fanfic.

[annabelle--cane]

ortus I'm so sorry I forgot about you and your matthias nonius rpf. you may not be a necromancer but you were still fucking it up in a river bubble. unequivocally harrow the ninth boldly states that fanfiction saves lives.

[mothermara]

what if orpheus was butch and she unclipped her carabiner and held it out behind her and then eurydice clipped it onto her belt loop and then orpheus didnt have to look back because she could hear eurydice jingle jangling behind her. follow me for more dyke solutions to famous tragic literature

[talesoflore]

Prev you are a vile, wretched, evil creature

[mgposani]

[themaniacisinthemailbox]

When reading the Locked Tomb books as an adult, there’s an added tragedy in recognizing how young all of them are. The idea of setting up a bunch of young people to become Lyctors, powerful but stuck permanently at the age one dies and the other eats them is so cruel.

It might not seem that way to readers in their late teens and and early twenties, but when you live long enough you start to realize you have so much more potential to change and grow. The Fourth are the most obvious examples of this as they’re like 14, but the saddest losses in my eyes are Palamedes and Camilla because within the story, they’re the slightly older, slightly more mature ones. Gideon and Harrow treat them as very competent peers. Nona sees the two of them as trustworthy adults. But they’re only like 21.

I remember being 21 and feeling like such an adult. But I got to live long enough to understand that no, the 28 year old girl who proclaimed that at 21 I was just a baby was right. And John is a bastard for encouraging all those young people to unwittingly die and stagnate themselves so early.

Even Abigail and Magnus. When Harrow laments what Abigail could have continued to do if she hadn’t been murdered, to me that’s one of the core themes if lyctorhood

[turtletotem]

Tags from @katakaluptastrophy that made me see the River bubble a little differently. Of course they stayed to help Harrow. She was just a kid. They had to help her.

[discountmareep]

tlt fandom does not pay enough attention to John's (and Augustine's) misogynist violence towards Mercy. The constant condescension, shaming, teasing her into a rage and then acting like her upset in response is ridiculous theatrics, for TEN THOUSAND YEARS. Calling her unparalleled expertise a parlor trick. Augustine assigning her - not asking her! - to seduce John with him for dios apate minor. "I hated the sexy parties," Mercymorn says, and I can absolutely imagine why! Augustine says that dios apate major was planned for five hundred years, kiriona is 19, pregnancy is ten months, that's nearly 520 years of pasting on bare-minimum tolerance for a man who coerced your best friend into an ungrievable suicide that fuels your immortality while he nitpicks and pokes and prods and demeans and teases and condescends to you and encourages everyone around you to do the same... and then he fuckin explodes you. It's giving classic nuclear family interpersonal violence where ganging up on your Dumb Bitch Mother is the bonding past time for Daddy and the kids. hashtag justice for Mercymorn

[lambentgrey]

Just wanted to pop by and say that I passed the description of “lambent grey” wrt the Sixth in my GtN reread, and I did in fact have the thought of “oh hey, does Erin still have their tlt blog?” And yes they do! Hi! :)

omg hello! 👋 yes this blog still exists, i’m just inactive on it atm because a video game is eating my brain and i’m being embarrassing about That on a different sideblog (the crossover btw tlt and ffxiv fans is wild btw, i did a dungeon with a bunny-fied magnus quinn the other week!)

i Will reread tlt and be insufferable about it once i have more brain space 🫡

[middenprincess]

i can’t stop laughing at this

[tact1calnecr0mancy]

yall gotta stop talking abt screen adaptations before that little french boy ends up playing palamedes

[zaccrimart]

Matthias Nonias

[sophelstien]

chapter 20 of htn is short but has so much weight to it. the entirety of the chapter is this: the whole family watches and cleans up and does nothing else while harrow gets violated over and over again by her eldest brother, at the behest of her father.

the chapter begins with gideon penetrating harrow's pelvis, then god makes her whole again, yet claims powerlessness.

he calls her to his rooms and insists she consume things she does not like and does not want, and she does it, because she has nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to, and no other form of protection.

the chapter ends with harrow seeking physical solace from the body: a woman, her silent caretaker, john's original victim,

and then it is revealed to us that the poem john recites to harrow is the poe verse at heart of humbert humbert's (of nabakov's lolita) backstory.

i really love the way tamsyn muir navigates incest and sexual violence here. it is inarguable that harrow the ninth is a family drama; john is a patriarch in every sense of the word: a divine patriarch, a scholarly father-figure, and a literal father; harrow's narration posits him as fatherly, ianthe's dialogue refers to him as such, the other lyctors half-jokingly call him daddy; the lyctors dutifully call each other brother and sister. they are god's children, in that he made them, literally or hegemonically, and as both lyctors and theocratic royalty, they interpret god's will. they have a religious compulsion to follow john's orders and to not question him. the lyctor's familial titles call to christian ecclesiastical titles of sister, brother, and father. john uses his self-appointed divine right and the historical hierarchy of the catholic church to perpetuate systematic violence and allegorical rape against harrowhark. john lived out a jesus narrative, coopted historical european aesthetics, political structures, and religion, recreated the catholic church with necromancy as religious praxis, and is now cycling through the historic legacy of that very system—and in this chapter, and harrow the ninth as a whole, the macro becomes the micro. this family dynamic is just a minute example of what is happening empire-wide.

on a non-religious note: i recently read the incest diary by anonymous, and this chapter reminded me of a few sections of that book where the author details moments where she brings up her incestuous abuse from her father to her family: her mother ignores her, just as she has ignored this fact for the author's entire life; her brother refuses to believe her and threatens to kill himself; her close family friend instructs her to never bring it up again, claiming that it happens to all women and that the author should get over it. mercymorn's callous caretaking of harrow in the previous chapter after gideon's first attack on her reminds me of this, as well as ianthe's mean-spirited snickering. the women in harrow's life reluctantly take care of her in the aftermath (if the family friend is to be believed, this happens to all women; it is entirely believable to me that both mercy and ianthe have been victims of sexual violence as well), and john heals her only to then put her in situations where she cannot say no to him. throughout the book, he steadily defiles her boundaries and backs her into emotional corners where she must confess to him, all the while using the threat of constant violence to keep her weak and scared. the physical is just a small part of the incestuous abuse happening in htn—so much of it is psychological, and it's psychological coming from the entire family. harrow's brother and sisters keep her from completely perishing under the weight of these attacks, but only just. and in doing this, they only enable john's abuse.

[fatedfragment]

scenes in harrow the ninth that always make me get choked up:

harrow reaching for alecto and begging to be able to touch her

palamedes being so excited to see harrow he PICKS HER UP IN A SPIN AND KISSES THE TOP OF HER HEAD when she can’t even recognize one of her only friends

augustine telling mercy “my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”

cam painstakingly gathering the fragments of palamedes’ skull for the smallest chance he might still be in there

gideon gaining consciousness in harrow’s body and the only thing she even wanted was for her to be there.

harrow realizing the theater of her mind and feeling the absolute gut punch of losing the love of her life all over again

feel free to add your misery to this post 😀👍

[pastrypuppy]

I've been rereading TLT and as much as I love the insane lesbian angle, I can't stop thinking about how Harrow as a child fell instantly in love with Earth.

She grows up in the darkest, saddest, deadest corner of the solar system, deprived to the point she's unable to tolerate bright light or really even much flavor in food. And she sees the face of Earth, and without understanding what she sees, loves it. my ecologist heart feels some type of way about this.

[pastrypuppy]

#she loves it and decides to live forever if necessary just in case it wakes

THIS IS WHAT IM SAYING

Depressed actively suicidal kid sees Earth, NEARLY DEAD Earth, and decides it's so beautiful that not only (1) she will not kill herself but (2) it's worth living forever in case it doesn't stay dead. The ancient prayer of the Ninth house tomb cult says "I pray it lives" and Harrow really took that bit to heart.

Remember we've been told that the soul of a planet is comprised of everything that lives on it, down to the bacteria. Again, freaky lesbian weirdos my beloved, corpse girlfriend etc, but also! The planet Earth, the physical representation of all of its combined ecosystems and living residents - is so beautiful Harrow thinks it's worth living to see it wake up again.

Harrow really said don't kill yourself, because even the most messed-up remnants of Earth ecosystems are beautiful. screaminggg it's not too late to restore ecosystems, it's never too late do you hear me!

She has no idea what she's seeing but honestly neither do a lot of people irl! They just go to a natural area and are amazed at a beautiful bit of scenery, and may or may not look any closer at the bugs and rot and microbes and dirt needed to make the beauty.

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

There's that beautiful post about the Māori angle on this, Harrow being Māori aswell as Jod, Gideon and probably Anastasia, and what that might mean for the direction the series is taking.

Also: Gideon feels nothing warm about Harrow's “bullshit dead girlfriend”, but she loved the First House the moment they landed and until she died under “that blue and foreign sky”!

It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up. […] “It's gorgeous.”

[birdyvadu]

Uncle/big brother ortus taking care of the kids and cuddling them was not in my bingo card. yet here we are

[rotten-contemptible-heart]

RIP Mercymorn and Augustine, you would have loved taking your boss to a Coldplay concert

[pathidoszune]

I was promised enemies to lesbians and all i got was cosmic grief

[doorp]

“two is for discipline heedless of trial” yeah motherfucker they were NOT heeding those trials. They couldn’t they didnt even know where the trials were. “heedless of trial” bitch they finally found the trials and were like uhmmm this violates OSHA.