the hitchhiker's guide to heresy

gobby, crippled dyke; multi disciplinarian in obsessions & creative mediums

[phalangemedes]

best human experience is Enjoying A Thing and a stranger is enjoying it too and you smile at each other before you both move on, and sometimes, in the future, think of them fondly when you experience The Thing again

WORST is when someone mentions a symptom of a mental illness with a grave tone and tears in their eyes and you have to be very sympathetic whilst the hamster in your brain is going 'oh shit and fuck i have been raw dogging that for 15 years thought that was normal'

[phalangemedes]

feeling some kinda way about egl again

[phalangemedes]

So intern kid decided they were ready for 'adult feedback'.. Chat, he was not ready, had a full on tantrum about it. And when I was not moved by his little bitch display and reiterated what was wrong and ways to fix it, then asked if he was done, looked genuinely frightened. He has latterly made me an apology card

[phalangemedes]

why do half of lestat's songs actually slap??

[phalangemedes]

wild things to unironically post: 'i think he'd wait until she understood'

excusez-moi??

[clubconsent]

In light of the recent Muir event where she talked about 1) Lyctors losing their humanity by definition and 2) the centrality of memory to the series, I would like to draw everyone's attention to the fact that Paul has to ask Gideon where they've seen the Devils before, because they're struggling with memory.

[phalangemedes]

did you know if you're having a bad day you can just pick a subject you're passionate about and email your MP about it until you feel better :)

[runningonspitensunshine]

i need everyone to get 300% more insane about mercymorn right the fuck now. this is a lady who spent ten thousand years learning everything there is to the human body to the point where she could just modify a person blind. just reach in and and tie harrow’s lil noodle spine into a knot, bypassing her lyctoral shielding. seduced her best friend, worst enemy, and sworn god to steal his sperm (it’s also apparently implied she just. summoned it out of his balls instead of collecting it the normal way) to help a terrorist make a baby from it.

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.

god fuck what is wrong with me. what is wrong with you guys. be more insane about mercy she deserves it.

[annabelle--cane]

if none houses with left grief has no fans I am dead. if the world is against none houses with left grief then I am against the world. she studied the blade? I could take it or leave it. you can't just ask someone why they want to become a lyctor? I would nuke it from the timeline and all human consciousness if I could. none houses with left grief? I will defend her until my dying day. my #1 stupid as all fuck hill to die on.

[katakaluptastrophy]

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.

[eskildit]

[phalangemedes]

something fun and alchemical about getting second hand tomes and lovingly packaging them in the hyaline shield of a freezer bag before tucking them under a bag of petit pois to cast get fucked book mites

[koldefingre]

The reverend daughter

[phalangemedes]

so I've got a lad who's interested in my field who asked me nicely if he could have some help with a project and somehow in the space of 6 months I now have a 19 year old who calls me sensei and tells me (in detail) about his gay little love life whilst I try, as gently as possible, to tell him his boss is a cunt and taking advantage of him

[phalangemedes]

I was told Project Hail Mary was hard sci-fi imagine my shock when I sat through two and a half hours of what is ostensibly a kids movie???

[badgerjaw]

Anyway >>here's<< an epub of muir's short stories on a gdrive

do let me know if there's an issue

The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time

The Magician's Apprentice

Chew

The Deepwater Bride

Union

The Woman In The Hill

[badgerjaw]

Reblogging for the reminder to include >>APOTHECIA<< By Shelby Cragg and Tamsyn Muir

do be aware of a couple HP references as this was from 2014

[beguilingcorpse]

also re:people assuming that the thematic implications of tlt are unintentional. this pops up soooo much with the way that social prejudices and strictures are held up within john’s empire. like yes on the surface things are cool and neofuturist and liberal - same sex relationships are normalized! women are political leaders and scholars and swordfighters and revolutionaries! this guywoman calls herself a prince! - but there’s also significant evidence of the continued existence of misogyny, patriarchy, strict gender roles and generally binary gender presentation, etc etc etc. gestures emphatically to everything relating to mercymorn. and it seems that john is not only complicit in these social systems, and not only an active participant in them, but at times even the font and root of them. gestures even more emphatically to everything relating to mercymorn.

and instead of examining what muir might be trying to say by having these seemingly at-odds ideals present in the same universe and stemming from the same father-god-emperor-king, tlt fans are so quick to write off all of this as “well, the world building just isn’t that thorough” or “it’s probably muir subconsciously writing women through a lens of internalized misogyny” or even “who cares, it’s a sci-fi fantasy series about bones, it’s not that deep”

it is. it is that deep. engage with the text. PLEASE