“She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”
Crux is in the unique position of being both the Ninth's marshal - who provides security for officials and oversees prisoners - and its seneschal - a steward who manages the estate and its servants. So while Aiglamene, Captain of the Guard, protects the Ninth from threats without, Crux's role is to protect the Ninth from threats within, and to manage its property, prisoners, and assorted underlings.
Most of the Ninth just avoids and neglects lil' Gideon, which she perceives as disgust and later realizes is actually terror at her uncanny survival. Crux, on the other hand, relentlessly torments her and is implied to have tried to kill her directly. Gideon believes this is all on orders from Harrow, but she later learns that Crux is likely just doing on his own whatever the fuck he thinks is best for the Ninth.
And what Harrow's parents taught Crux, before they rested in piss, is that you maintain the Ninth's bloodline at all costs. Crux interprets this charge as protecting Harrow, which is in line with his role as security for the Ninth's officials and estate.
But Harrow, I think, will eventually interpret this singular goal much the same way her parents did. You maintain the Ninth's bloodline at all costs. Not the Ninth's current blood, its bloodline.
You will not live forever, so you must reproduce what you are. And to the Ninth, it doesn't matter all that much what other blood drips into that bloodline. We know that Harrow's paternal great-grandparent was an external penitent and that in fact "This was common. Drearburh had never practiced Resurrection purity. Their only aim was to keep the necromantic lineage of the tomb-keepers unbroken."
Harrow knows exactly how expensive it is to ensure that necromantic lineage. She knows that her parents miscarried repeatedly before she was conceived, and that ultimately two-hundred children died to make it happen. So maybe, someday, when she starts staring down the barrel of her own morality, and by extension the Ninth's mortality, she'll start thinking about that one baby that didn't die. Maybe she'll start wondering if, now that the baby's grown up, it has the capability to sire another baby that doesn't die - a baby that's actually Ninth.
The technical capabilities are there. Even without vat wombs, Harrow was shown by her parents the necromancy for internal ova manipulation, and gamete recombination in general is a known quantity this universe, so making any heir is a real possibility at least. But to make a necromantic heir, that baby has to survive, and that baby has to be flooded with enormous amount of thanergey. The former is possible through Gideon, and the latter might be possible through Harrow, given the thanergetic overkill of her conception. She states that the babies alone generated enough thanergy to take out the planet, so is it possible that some of that raw power remains within her? It would be worth a try at a necromantic heir at least - if not by certainty, then by probability, so long as they make enough of them...which has got to be the most terrifying aspect for anyone for whom one Gideon is already too many.
Once Harrow's parents die, and she closes off the Houses to external visitors, this possibility becomes an inevitability. There will be no other option but Gideon for the Ninth's bloodline to survive. Harrow doesn't realize this yet because she is a child, and at this point she's focused on preventing Gideon from escaping the Ninth. Crux, on the other hand, has already envisioned 14,000,605 alternate futures and the only one without Gideon becoming Harrow's completely unregulated consort and ruining the Ninth forever is the one where Gideon no longer exists.
It's not just that Crux is disgusted with the premise that Gideon is not Ninth, not even House, and refuses to even pretend to assimilate to either. And it's not just that Crux's job is to protect Harrow and to keep her servants and prisoners and thralls bowed low beneath her, and Gideon threatens to rise above that pure and holy hierarchy just by virtue of her theoretical grotesque fertility - although I think that inversion of status is a huge part of Crux's impulses, too.
Crux is one of the few that, knowing both of Harrow's conception and the truth her dead parents, perceives exactly how dangerous Gideon is to the Ninth. Harrow understands that Gideon is dangerous if she escapes, because she can reveal the Ninth is leaderless and unprotected. But Crux understands further that Gideon is also dangerous if she stays on the Ninth, because someday Harrow's stern resolve to hate her surly thrall will crumble beneath same temptation as her parents. And Harrow will choose, to her own utter humiliation, to maintain the Ninth's bloodline, at any cost. Gideon as consort will hold hostage both the Ninth's secret past and its only future, placing her in an enviable position to make significant demands about what the Ninth becomes.
So because Gideon cannot leave the Ninth, and because Gideon cannot stay on the Ninth, from the moment the Ninth's doors shut, Crux knows that Gideon must die. This is the only way he can see to protect Harrow, both because he cares for her in his own horrible misguided way that also strips her of all agency, and because protecting Harrow is his actual job description. To Crux, Harrow is the Ninth, and he must keep her from realizing, someday, that Gideon is also the Ninth. Harrow alone cannot be trusted to be tempted otherwise.
Crux is on the Ninth's front porch racking his shotgun wearing a shirt that says "10 Rules for Dating My Daughter", and every one of those rules is You Will Drink the Poison.
I went—not overseas, but by public transport—to Corpus to hear Tamsyn Muir speak.
The bad news: Alecto is not finished. It will hopefully come out "soon" and will likely be fast tracked with few ARCs when it's finished.
The news you may take differently depending on your preferences: It is not being split.
The good news: It is not all written in Ye Olde Alecto speak (it sounds like Harrow's POV will be fairly major, but there will apparently be several narrators).
A slightly random selection of things I frantically scribbled down:
The protagonists of TLT would make an "absolutely shit" D&D party ("Palamedes and Camilla would be fine")
We could have had horse plinko and begone thot, but for the anti-meme ministrations of her editor. She would love an edition that puts all of the memes back in.
On Catholic imagery and lesbianism: "you ain't seen nothing yet"
"Harrow is now a believer without a church"
She said that while John and Alecto's relationship is not meant to be a 1:1 analogue to Humbert Humbert and Lolita, there is the idea of a man fashioning (something he thinks is) a girl into a perfect partner (the question of whether that is a sexual partner apparently may be relevant to ATN)
She does not have a favourite House and would just be a regular person in the world of TLT (though she would last about 0.5 seconds)
The tension between the Houses' ostensible gender equality and the misogyny that still persists is apparently also relevant to ATN. "John has set out to make a society on values he holds dear and cherishes and in some ways he has done really well... And in some way he has fucked it up beyond comprehension" (Maybe not an exact quote. My auditory processing is questionable.)
The backstory in NTN was planned right from the beginning
Lyctors "are not truly human any more. They've crystallised themselves" and "They have lost themselves and the only thing they've been able to hold on to is what other people make of them". She said she would have liked to make the Lyctors more alien but had to balance that with them being relatable narratively.
She is dying to read TLT fanfiction once she finishes the series.
hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes
i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D
Key takeaways
Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that
Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)
Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame
Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda
Q&A: Alecto when?
(putting this first because I know you want to know!)
Alecto is not yet finished
Reason why:
Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)
Floralinda took longer than expected
Muir also suffered from health issues
Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.
Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies
And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!
Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series
TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts
George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion
Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing
She spent around 3 years publishing short stories
Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel
Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now
Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.
Muir wouldn’t do anything differently
We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript
Advice for aspiring authors
Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are
Work in the industry
There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.
Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)
Basically, getting successful requires having good connections
Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series
Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford
Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.
Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.
In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players
This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…
…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series
There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV
Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?
Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence
This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books
Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader
Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!
A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything
POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series
A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’
She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s
Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)
The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it
Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person
POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style
There will be different POVs
Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?
Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person
She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller
And this is another videogame inspiration
She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…
The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series
Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain
This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book
It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto
Muir is using memory as horror
The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real
She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic
Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series
Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT
She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons
She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn
She also wanted a magic system to be gross!
TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”
Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?
Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula
Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced
For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom
She wanted the story to be about two young women
Gideon was originally a cop/fireman
For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake
Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot
Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?
Absolutely not!
Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine
There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out
Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series
Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction
She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example
For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi
Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space
The genre merging created publishing problems
Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth
We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune
Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?
Not really.
Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences
An example is A. K. Markwood
Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)
Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series
Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.
Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing
Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)
Mr Bones’ Wild Ride
Emperish meme
Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)
Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN
And many more
Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore
Writing process for short stories vs books
Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)
With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot
Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills
Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new
Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series
Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN
GtN and HtN are the question arcs
NtN and AtN are the answering arcs
Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story
Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series
Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?
All epics want you do to is die gloriously
You can do anything after that
Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series
The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.
There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.
The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.
This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero
Add lesbian to anything
Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games
Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow
“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir
Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’
Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda
Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?
Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back
Take a sin, take a virtue
All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’
Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general
Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?
It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic
And also very fun!
Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?
In the TLT universe: Valancy!
In the real world: Saint Barbara
This sparked some light-hearted banter
Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series
Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight
Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol
She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life
Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role
Also Biblical names
Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona
Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names
Umineko inspiration
Lolita and the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.
Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery
Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.
There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people
Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.
Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.
They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there
Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth
Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work
Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series
Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?
This question had Muir wriggling in delight
The answer to this is addressed in Alecto
Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?
Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.
Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series
Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love
Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh
Link to Lolita
It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently
Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas
And, it’s not necessarily negative
Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)
They had to eat each other
Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?
Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?
HtN spoilers!!
John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?
John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back
Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers
BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John
Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?
Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader
But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?
The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular
Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?
0.5 seconds
Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier
Nor is she particularly aligned with any House
Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend
(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)
Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
‘Payback for Malory Towers’
A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher
Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.
Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child
She was a highly prolific reader as a child!
Obviously Animorphs
Weird Kiwi fantasy stories
Margaret Margey
She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books
Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)
Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)
Q&A: Warhammer inspiration
Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.
She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work
Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?
Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!
There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add
For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…
Muir wants to go back to videogames
But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold
Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python
A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited
Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))
my favorite recreational theory is that samael was anastasia’s son. the only evidence i have for this is that one day i thought to myself “what would be the most fucked up samael reveal?” and that’s what i came up with thanks for coming to my ted talk
You know, I had a theory that involved Anastasia being pregnant and Samael being the father, but this is very very interesting.
Anastasia took a different approach that was far slower than typical imperfect Lyctorhood. What if that process was gestation? Was Anastasia creating her own cavalier?
It would also put a nice endcap on the recurring theme of reproductive rights in John and his disciples’ beginnings. Specifically, the rights of the pregnant to remain pregnant in order to be transported off-planet.
((Counterpoint: there is a monument to Samael in Drearburh that has his signature weapon, which I doubt would be for a baby))
okay SO i am just going to brain dump here, apologies ahead of time for whatever amorphous format this ends up taking.
definitely devising the most fucked up reveal is what spurred this thought but also had been thinking about how we see lots of different kinds of relationships between necromancer and cavalier, with one notable exception. we’ve seen friends, spouses, partners, siblings, (second) cousins, uncle/nephew, and babs. but never parent and child. part of that might be logistical - a necromancer parent would be left waiting without a cavalier for quite some time while the child grows old enough to be any level of functional within that role. and then there’s the emotional aspect of it - with the social roles of cavalier and necromancer so prescribed (at least by the time the time the books start, that is) and with emotional intimacy being discouraged between the two (thinking of marriage, judith and marta, judith’s assessment of cam and pal’s relationship, even ianthe choosing naberius over corona) it may just be that for many families, a parent/child relationship is nearly incompatible with a necromancer/cavalier partnership.
the only time we’ve even really approached this is right at the end of NtN when kiriona says that john told her she could be his cavalier. which, hoo boy, that could be a very juicy parallel/inversion. it’s also bringing to mind how john says he thinks of the lyctors as alecto’s children, and how he sometimes wishes harrow had been his daughter. to say nothing of the outburst at pyrrha: “Did you like playing pretend? Did you like being mother and father? You should have given into your desires and eaten us. Chew and swallow. More natural. Would have respected you for it…” this feels so much more sinister in the context of anastasia and her son pursuing lyctorhood, particularly if alecto was close with them. if any of this holds in AtN, i’m going to need to have a stockpile of drywall nearby to chew on.
a couple of people pointed this out in the notes and i hadn’t even thought about it, but YES the ninth’s titles are Reverend Daughter (or Reverend Mother, Reverend Father, etc). if anastasia was the one to select these titles, she’s putting a very heavy emphasis on familial roles. revering them, literally. also i just want to specifically pull in the tags that @dangerbeasts and @remnm left: that if samael was anastasia’s son, then the ninth began with the sacrifice of the founder’s child, and it’s been doomed by it’s leaders sacrificing others’ children for their own child. it would also provide some horrific recontextualization for harrow’s remarks about “we are all the sons and daughters that the house of the ninth possesses,” and even gideon’s response that she’s not anybody’s son or daughter, because she’s not, in that sense: she’s not from the ninth. @mayasaura had another great connection in we see harrow nova, disowned by her parents, risking her life to wield the chain of samael. i’m amending my statement from before: if we get any of this, drywall will not be enough.
throughout the books we see the themes circling unusual circumstances of birth and reproduction. both harrow and gideon are conceived for very specific purposes and huge sacrifices are made for their births. NtN brought this into even greater focus with M–’s emphasis on maternity. the nursery that pyrrha mentions painting explicitly links the ninth to birth and infancy (even as our first association between the ninth and a nursery is death). i’ll even pull in nona’s fascination with Beautiful Ruby’s mother’s baby. paul gets born. alecto referring to harrow as the baby. going back a bit to HtN, we get Mercymorn’s “children as fists! infants as gestures! we live in the worst of all possible worlds!” and john’s baby finger bone crown, wake asking how many babies died in the bomb and john saying “all of them”, etc etc etc. also i have been waiting and waiting for this to be explained and if any of this pans out, it’s just gotta fit in here somehow but i feel like we don’t have quite all the right pieces yet, so i’ll just pop the GtN quote in here and you can make of it what you will: “The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do - for some reason.”
(also this is like ten miles down the road from where the post is at - which is already several miles down the road in and of itself - but while my tin foil hat is on i’ll just throw it out there… it seems that john gets alecto into the tomb by telling her there’s something beautiful there, and she says that there are almost no beautiful things left, and then asks where anastasia is… would alecto consider a baby to be a beautiful thing? would she consider anastasia’s baby to be a beautiful thing? anyway! moving on!)
as @ghostsandyoumightdie said above, a nine month gestation period would likely be much slower than the other lyctors, whether samael was conceived expressly for the purpose of being her cavalier or not. to the last point above, i was imagining that samael was older by the time he would have been anastasia’s cavalier. it is interesting that alecto calls harrow’s body the baby, and then refers to them as children; in comparison to herself either as alecto or as the earth, they really are babies, children (similar to some of mercymorn’s comments about harrow, but taken to another extreme). so i suppose to alecto, samael may have been a baby even if we would have considered him an adult. i’m also thinking here about how enticing the idea of securing immortality not just for yourself, but for your child, must be. in order for anastasia’s line to continue if samael was her son, she would have had to have had another child, or samael would have had to be old enough to have a child of his own. or, i suppose, depending on exactly where their technology was at by that point, there’s the possibility of either of their genetic line being carried on via vat-womb without them.
so that’s where i’m at for the moment. i love that i initially blurted this out to @lantur recreationally, at which point my only justification was “i dunno, just vibes” and then i proceeded to stew on it for a couple of months and then got egged on by all the delightfully horrified tags and comments, resulting in [gestures towards whatever this is]. great work, team.
fantastic tags on a reblog of the original (moving it over here to keep all my thoughts together) from @wofworld:
#this is the worst theory i have ever seen (i love it so much oh my god)#thinking about how it’s mentioned in the gtn paperback extras that a necro/cav pair that are parent and child is considered mega unethical#i don’t remember the exact phrasing but i might just go back and look bc it’s so intriguing to me that tamsyn included that#why would she specifically mention that one if it wasn’t going to come up again?#anyways i am definitely overthinking that but. i just want this to be true. it would rip my fucking heart out and it’s genius#also consider the line about anastasia getting pyrrha to paint a child’s nursery for her#and about how the tomb keeper bloodline are her descendants specifically#imo she definitely had a child at some point but the only question is was that child samael??
I straight up did not remember the part in the sermon about the parent and child thing, but you are absolutely correct, nice catch! Here’s the specific quote:
As we are concerned with what the relationship is, so are we concerned with what it is not. The love of the cavalier for the necromancer, and the necromancer for the cavalier, is not the love of a spouse. … Neither can the love be familial love, which is why the necromancer and cavalier cannot be parent and child; sibling rules have relaxed, but only in times of unusual paucity.
I do think it’s interesting that this is sandwiched between talking about how a necro/cav pair shouldn’t be spouses and that they shouldn’t be siblings, but that in both cases, sometimes people/cultures do it anyway. That qualifier is conspicuously missing from the parental/familial relationship mention. The sermon spends and awful lot of time detailing both of the other types of relationships in comparison to this little hand-wave at a parental relationship.
We don’t have an exact date on this, but it seems to be roughly contemporary to the events of GtN, contrasted to the included note about “one flesh, one end” sounding like sex toy instructions. (As an aside, what an elegant expository trick to put those side-by-side - we get foreshadowing of the introduction of the Lyctors, a snapshot of Cristabel and Alfred’s fanaticism, acknowledgement that not all the Lyctors feel similarly (in a very humanizing manner), juxtaposition of the casual vs reverent tone when discussing this relationship, and a demonstration of how the modern cultural norms around the necro/cav relationships may not be what the original Lyctors envisioned.) Which makes me wonder if something happened to make the parental relationship still completely unacceptable, as opposed to spousal or sibling pairs. Perhaps something so far back in history that the origin for that tradition isn’t known anymore… or perhaps something that was intentionally kept from the broader public. It’s all veryyyyy suspicious!
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