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NOTES SUBMITTED FOR A MEGATHEOREM

Click for better quality// Unfortunately the handwriting cannot be improved.

(this is... my best attempt to condense this down. Already I’ve thought of like 6 different things I should have included as well-- did I mention that “I” is how to denote “any base” for nucleic acid sequences? --- does jod’s real name start with J (is he John or Jesus), E (is he Eve), A (is he Adam), or N (lots of N’s show up, also Nikolai our friend up there) or is his name simply JEAN? That would make an epic Jod the denim god joke, considering I’m pretty sure it would only have been a very contemperary prediction and not a certainty we’d adopt for him the moniker Jod.)

#tlt #tlt meta #the locked tomb #nona the ninth

wolfycoffee

sweet girls ^^

alabasterten

aspiringwarriorlibrarian

Sometimes I think about how one of the few things we know about M— was that she was an ardent supporter of reproductive rights. Even when the investors had already dismissed the possibility, she was insistent on creating a form of cryosleep that would not force anyone to terminate their pregnancies. Even 10,000 years and a memory wipe later, when it became necessary to steal John's genetic material, she still provided her own eggs for the child that would break the wards on the Tomb.

The Eighth House is the house of justice, the house of conviction. The house of a woman who demanded complete bodily autonomy, and another woman who was willing to die to save humanity. But Mercymorn and Cristabel Oct had nothing worth fighting for, just the lies of a would-be God and his endless, pointless quest for revenge. And so the Eighth House, Keepers of the Tome, the Forgiving House, have become empty zealots, fanatics of an empire. Fanatics who use the bodies and souls of their cavaliers as batteries without consideration or consent.

I wonder how Mercymorn feels about soul siphoning. I wonder if sometimes, right before she wakes, she remembers what it was like to believe in something true.

#did jod do this on purpose to punish them

gideonisms

What if tazmuir just puts aliens in the last book

the-boring-distopia

Harrowhark Nonagesimus when she wakes up in Alecto the Ninth to be reunite Gideon but some green martian creature is also there

lastflowerofyourhouse

harrow's relationship with gideon's name is insane to me. like she hardly ever says it. she almost never actually says gideon's name, and when she does it's usually a big deal. the first time of course being her shouting "gideon! gideon!" after the avulsion trial, a rare display of open attachment and concern. the other that stands out is when her last words in harrow the ninth, for all intents and purposes, are gideon's name, even though she doesn't even know what she's saying. i don't think harrow ever once says it lightly, without really truly meaning something by it. but the rest of the time? the rest of the time she calls her "griddle." which is transparently babytalk. fucking insane that harrow's mean annoying nickname for gideon is just. just her struggle to pronounce it as a toddler. how perplexingly cruel and vulnerable is that. parroting your own babytalk at someone. you have always been stuck with me and you always will. you will never escape our shared childhood. i am as fundamental to you as you are to me. your name was one of the first i ever tried to say. i have been asking for your attention for our entire lives. i have been calling to you since before i could form the syllables. gid-oh! gid-oh! gid-oh!

mouldybrie

cutetanuki-chan

Nona's birthday 🐩🐕🐕‍🦺

Commission for @bensavagae

commission info

calamedesext

just re-read the gid/babs fight in gtn & i’m rotating that disarm in my mind. there are parallels here.

gideon is losing the fight to babs because she’s a brutal fighter constrained by the rules of cav duels. but the moment he disarms her, she immediately floors him.

similarly, in htn, nonius is losing the fight to wake bc he’s constrained by the rules of the dream bubble’s logic and ortus’s mythology. but the moment she disarms him, he’s set loose, a brutal fighter willing to play dirty to win.

gid and nonius are both efficient, brutal warriors constrained by false personae.

ironically, babs also says:

(lol. lmao, even.)

and then! from babs’s point of view: the disarm was the end of his fight with gid. technically, he won.

you know who else duels a cav and technically wins, but loses the actual battle? ianthe, in babs’s body, when she duels cam in ntn.

babs’s muscle memory and training allows her to beat cam according to the terms of the duel… but she loses the larger battle because her opponent is playing to win.

even after death and lyctorhood and antioch, babs is still an excellent duelist, but he’s still not the best fighter.

a-drifting-boat

Thinking about memory as a form of control in HtN. Because obviously Cristabel and Alfred and Loveday don't appear in the story, they survive only in the memories of the people who ate them. And remembering a dead person is an act of control, because memories are not objective. Someone's perception or memory of another person will never be entirely accurate, it will instead be their own version of the person. Even if someone loves you - perhaps especially if they love you - their idea of you will be influenced by how they want you to be, and there will be things about you that they have never seen or noticed.

If you are dead you no longer exist as an individual person with agency and an internal world; so the image that living people have of you will be superimposed over the person you actually were. You are no longer yourself, you have been made into what other people think you were or want you to have been.

And of course this is particularly relevant when it comes to the cavs. Someone consumes and destroys you, and then they commit a final act of violence and control by replacing you with the idealised or demonised picture that they have of you in their head. The narrative itself participates in this violence by erasing you and prioritising your consumer - they appear in the story as a character, whereas the readers know you only through their descriptions and memories.

We also see the memory-as-control thing pretty explicitly with Nonius. He shows up speaking differently than he did in life because that fits with Ortus's image of him as an idealised epic hero. It's not clear how much of his ghost is actually him as he was, versus the version of him created by Ortus and the Ninth after his death.

I think it's significant that in order to preserve Gideon's actual existence, Harrow has to remove her own ability to remember or perceive Gideon. Harrow stopping herself from being able to create her own image of Gideon also stops her from consuming Gideon and entirely destroying the person Gideon was. The lobotomy protects Gideon from the violence of being made into a memory, and so it protects Gideon from the violence of Lyctorhood.

katakaluptastrophy

The joy of having a niche blorbo in a series with wildly differing POV narrators:

Gideon The Ninth: Here's Magnus' autistic wife, who isn't hot, can't have kids, and is talking about really boring stuff. Aaaand they're both dead.

Harrow The Ninth: Here's the famous historian Abigail Pent! I don't trust her or her agenda, but wow, she has nice hands. Like, really nice hands. Her towering intellect is a loss to the world! She's feral and otherworldly and heretical! She has declared herself my mom and won't let me stay up past my bedtime 😠

harrowedsoup

Sometimes I think about Harrow’s AUs and like. There is a LOT more to worry about but I have to wonder what Abigail and Magnus Got from that.

Because, if I remember right, they only had the one real conversation with her, right? But while the fandom LOVES making Abigail and Magnus Gideon’s parents in AUs and stuff, the same can’t be said for Harrow.

But like. They’ve now seen deeper into her mind more than anyone else. They’ve seen the Ninth, they’ve seen how she views the actions of her parents in the lenses of how she’d be treated if she didn’t have necromancy, they’ve seen her deepest desires when her dreams how much she wanted her duties to the Ninth to somehow match having Gideon and they saw that she was at her core just a teenage girl who wanted a meet cute with the hot girl she had a crush on.

Anyway: more Abigail and Magnus becoming Harrow’s parents. Gideon can still have them as in-laws.

katakaluptastrophy

This.

I had assumed you had picked this battlefield deliberately, and raised an army to fight alongside you. I didn't quite know why you'd chosen us. Now I know, but it seems you did not. (HTN ch 43)

What a rug pulling out moment this must have been: the realisation that she had not been summoned as some act of Lyctoral mystery to assist in Harrow's battle against a ghostly invader, but that she was there because a frightened teenage girl - who had met her once at a dinner party - had instinctively reached out for her help.

I understand you didn't ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me by yours." (HTN ch. 47)

I think Abigail is meant to call to mind the classical psychopomp Hecate, associated with ghosts, keys, pomegranates, and the liminal transitions of girls (whether into death or adulthood). Harrow at this moment is literally dying, but her AU dreams are also all explorations of what a transition into some kind of adulthood that didn't involve ascending to Lyctorhood and losing Gideon might have looked like. But staying in those dreams means death.

Also...there's a tendency to assume that Harrow reached for the Fifth because Magnus was kind to Gideon, but a through-line of HTN is very much Harrow processing her feelings about Priamhark and Pelleamena in relation to the respective parental figures of John and Abigail. After all, like Pelleamena, Abigail is a brilliant necromancer with a complicated relationship with both motherhood and the demands of leadership, and a willingness to use other peoples' children to her own ends. But unlike Pelleamena, Abigail demands that Harrow live, rather than asking her to die.