Read Along With Me

Reading The Locked Tomb because the fandom looks neat

[starlightomatic]

in a better world palamedes sextus would be a tumblr sexyman

[vibrantstarfire]

ugh we need more manipulative characters that aren’t evil. lie and cheat and steal for a good cause. control every narrative. use narcissism for justice. ruin all of your personal relationships for the good of the mission.

[beguilingcorpse]

i am not defending her per se. HOWEVER. i think ianthe’s actions must be viewed through the lens that she has always had to carve out a space for herself in every social position and identity she’s ever held. because never once has she been anyone’s favorite or first choice. as one of two necromantic heirs of the third house, as one of two baby lyctors aboard the mithraeum, as one of two tower princes. she has always been the one looked over or less favored. and so OBVIOUSLY she would weaponize that trait of hers - seen notably when she uses her ability to escape notice to reverse-engineer the lyctoral process without anyone else figuring out what she was doing until it was too late - and OBVIOUSLY she views herself as the main character, as Above It All. her psychological background necessitates it. she’s never belonged in any room she’s ever stepped foot in and so she must be superior to everyone in those rooms. and she’s fascinated by - and made insecure by - the people for whom that justification seems to be disproven. coronabeth, harrowhark, kiriona. all more important and more favored than her. and wouldn’t that just piss you off. wouldn’t that just make you want to bond yourself to them forever. isn’t that too a form of love

[palamedesnutz]

also:

[vampire-apostrophe]

the special kind of sexualized hell Corona must have lived through as a ‘healthy necromancer’

Because necromancers are an ideal. Adept/soldier seems to be a popular pairing. They are the height of power in society and because their culture romanticizes death the summoners and wielders of it are of course further romanticized.

There is however, the fact that necromancy is a deeply unhealthy. Adepts are incredibly skinny and weak. Even if you aren’t actively dying like the seventh it’s still akin to living with chronic illness à la Victorian era. I think it really signifies something when Gideon mentions mags where necromancers are drawn with uncharacteristic cleavage.

Fertility has always been a sign of physical attractiveness in society and a society like the nine planets where fertility is notoriously complicated would probably have feelings about it. This clashes against necromancy with there being these two opposing things that society wants.

Corona however is both. Can you imagine her going through puberty and realizing how unnecromantic she looks but people still like it. In fact people are actually being really really weird about it. It’s a joke about how pretty Corona is except it doesn’t feel like a joke. Not to her.

[whalefill]

alt-j / cinnamon toast crunch advertisements / simone weil / cinnamon toast crunch advertisements / frank bidart

[wepon]

has tumblr culture circled back around to voreposting already

[wepon]

hi. what the hell is gideon the ninth about

[mythic-moss]

Is this anything

[calliclassic]

and they were wombmates...

[autismking]

god wishes you were his daughter. but you’re in a toxic yuri situationship with god’s actual daughter. and you have the hots for this bitch he considers his ex who never truly reciprocated his feelings. and that bitch was secretly in love with your great great great (x100) grandma. who was besties with god.

[notyournightsky]

When a mommy hates a daddy very much, mommy will conspire with daddy’s coworkers to discreetly steal his genetic material during a night of passion between daddy and his two coworkers who hate each other almost as much as they hate daddy, so that mommy can use daddy’s genetic material to create a living bomb that she will detonate to breach a locked tomb that only opens for daddy or a close blood relative, like a living bomb made out of one half of daddy’s stolen dna, that contains the death of daddy and his evil empire, and sometimes mommy will fail because one person in her ill advised polyclue, who is actually two people in one body but only one of them knows this and who are both daddy’s coworkers but not the ones who stole his dna, will push mommy with her living bomb out of an airlock during which she will die and fall down onto a decrepit planet that guards the locked tomb with her still alive and undetonated bomb. And that’s how babies are made!

[beguilingcorpse]

anyways the genius thing about the way john gaius has set up his empire - and the genius thing about the way TM has structured the books - is that there are multiple ways to view him. gideon the ninth starts by painting him as this unknowable and inscrutable god figure - the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death! - and through most of that book he is more of an emblem than anything. a symbol of dominicus, the patriarch of the nine houses, the divine being of whom the eighth house has a massive fucking portrait for some reason, and ultimately the key to what sets this version of the solar system apart from our own.

harrow the ninth strips him down. he’s not just a god anymore. he’s a cool god. he makes shitty jokes. he eats peanuts. he fucks his friends on the dining room table. he tells our main character that he sees her as a daughter figure. he shows emotion; he makes mistakes; there are things that he cannot do. if gideon the ninth introduces him as the wizard of oz’s huge and intimidating head, then harrow the ninth is john pulling back his own curtain to show the man behind it. see! he’s kind of pathetic! he’s Just Like You!

and both of these images of john ultimately serve the same purpose, because they both play to his favor. whether you fear him or you woobify him, you have fallen into the trap he has set for you. because nona shows us an even truer john, a john who doomed the world and fucked it all up, a john convinced he was in the right even as his friends killed themselves in front of him. if harrow pulls back the curtain, nona peels off his face.

it does make me wonder whether there is a secret, smaller, fourth john gaius that will be explored in alecto the ninth. alecto is the only being in the universe who really and truly knows him. she knows what he’s done and why he did it. she chose him for a reason. beneath the god and beneath the god pretending to be a man and beneath the man pretending to be a god - is there truly just a man? is there anything left?

tl;dr version: john gaius is like an onion. john gaius has layers too

[lady-harrowhark]

After months and months of Gideon spewing the most bonkers goth pet names at Harrow, Harrow, on her deathbed, pulls out “first flower of my house.” Was she… trying to reciprocate?

Like she literally says earlier on to Gideon, “You’d better stop it with all this twilit princess garbage because I may start to like it.” I can just see the gears turning in her head. “I like it when she calls ME pet names, therefore the best way to show my affection is to also use a fancy epithet for HER” and then she shot right past “goofy teasing” and landed in “irrefutable romance” territory.

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Harrowhark “Down Bad” Nonagesimus, every time

[cadaverpilled]

camilla hect suffered more than jesus— she had a fuckass bob and a codependent friendship and a six month old at home😔 literal herculean trials and for what?? becoming a guy named paul?

[arithmonym]

yeah ianthe did all that but have you considered she was also dealing with being twenty-two.

[lalalychee]

closer than you know

i've been working on this painting for over 3 months and i am exhausted 💀 so excited to be done with it. i'm really proud of it though!! it's definitely the most detailed painting i've done in quite some time.

(please be sure to zoom in to see all the little details i worked so hard on!)

[ancientannoyance]

rip to my wife abigail and her husband magnus, they were too powerful and sensible to survive the first act of gideon the ninth

[silasoctakiseron]

If I was Camilla I would be giving "Dulcinea" the hard fucking silent treatment too watching Palamedes bring her tea and tenderly drape her in his bathrobe only for her to barely give him a second glance or even say hello and go back to batting her lashes at the first well-muscled butch teenager she laid eyes on. Never mind the fact that she literally doesn't acknowledge the fact that Camilla exists when Camilla thought they were at least friends. She's not wearing the pulmonary drain he invented for her even though it works as intended and she audibly badly needs it. I'd be on the news

[silasoctakiseron]

Dulcinea feeding Cytherea lies so surely her friends Palamedes and Camilla will instantly recognize it's not her at Canaan House but they're both too blinded by hurt and rejection to see the obvious cracks in the facade. They were so excited to finally meet her. It's so dark in here

[is-this-fascism]

first base is murdering you. second base is ressurecting you from the grave. third base is murdering you a second time