The parallels when gideon realizes she has to die in Gideon the Ninth, and when Harrow realizes she has to live in Harrow the Ninth

Nona the ninth is like,

Imagine you are a girl, and you woke up sixth months ago and thats your earliest memory. You dont know who you are. Your name was chosen for you seemingly at random, because nobody else knows who you are either. All you know about yourself is this: you cannot let anyone see you injured, or they will kill you. You are inhabiting a body that the others recognize, but you dont. You are probably one of two people, but nobody knows which one. You dont know these people. You dont know yourself. And deep down maybe you know you're not either one of them.

You are happy anyway.

You live with three people, who love you and who you love back fiercely. One of them is inhabiting a body that doesnt belong to her. She understands you, but she also doesnt. The other two are sharing a body, so intertwined that you can never be sure which one is standing right in front of you, unless you study them closely and know them well enough to guess. They understand you, but they also dont. They expect you to be one of two people, but you arent and you dont know why. You dont know who (what) you are.

You are happy anyway.

The world is crumbling around you. Your life is on a time limit and your soul is trying to claw its way out of your (her) body. The people you love are in danger but you dont know why or how to stop it. You are in danger, and the people you love know how to save you. You dont belong in this body, everyone knows that now. You are too big, too much, and the rest of your essence is trying to claw its way into your mind, becoming whole again, but you cant let it. You cant let it because if you are whole then you will be different, you wont be Nona anymore and you will not be that girl who loves and who is loved. But there is no choice, you must go back or risk killing yourself and the girl whose body you inhabit. You may remember your time as Nona, or you may not, but either way you will never be the same again. You might not be loved anymore. You might not love.

But you are happy anyway.

Because at least you know this. You cannot take loved away.

VAMPIRE APPRECIATION WEEK 2022 → day two: favorite vampire/non-vampire dynamic. — SPIKE & BUFFY ⤳ “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1997 - 2003).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | 3.08 “Lovers Walk”

Buffy season 6 is insane. It’s like what if someone you loved died a meaningful and accepting death but you couldn’t live without them so you brought them back. And against all odds, they didn’t come back wrong, but they didn’t WANT to come back at all, and now they have to learn to live in this world again while resenting their friends and family for taking the death they willingly chose away from them. And existence is hell compared to death because in life they never get a break and never get to rest because they’re constantly needed by everyone. And they can’t chose to die a second time because they know what it would do to their loved ones who still never got over the fact that they died the first time. And also there’s a musical episode.

that ship is toxic to YOU. to me it's a complex, multi-layered, essay-worthy dynamic that'd take numerous hours to dissect (during which i'll spend crying screaming tearing my hair out)

yes one of the theses of the unwanted guest is that love changes you. and that’s nice and beautiful, but we could go another way and say it’s that love and freedom don’t coexist. you can be completely alone, completely free to do whatever you want and be your own immutable self, but you can’t have love that way. love is compromise. love restricts. Ianthe is the perfect example of that. she thinks she’s perfectly herself, perfectly Ianthe, but her freedom and individuality is being slowly eroded by her close contact with Naberius’ soul, as well as her desperation to get Coronabeth back. as Tamsyn said, you have not yet begun to see the horrors of love. and I think I finally have an idea of what she meant by that now.

thinking about this again after reading the unwanted guest.... the permeability of the soul as love, or as not even love, as care, as proximity, as life

the thesis for the locked tomb series is that to love and to have been loved is to change and to have been changed, fundamentally, forever, and nothing can take that from you. that love is transformative. that love survives within those that have loved and have been loved. that love perseveres. that love matters. that life is too short and love is too long. that love is an indelible weight that you carry with you forever, for better or worse. that love transcends your body and your soul. that love and freedom doesn't coexist. that love is a terrifying mutual ownership, and by having a part of someone in you, and a part of you in them, you are forever tied. that to devote yourself to another person may lead to your destruction, but you do it anyway because life without love is only a shell of itself. that devotion is violent, and we are all its casualties in the end. that love is a force of nature, and it is the one thing humanity has always known, and will always know, how to do. that even when it doesn't change anything, you just cant help but love anyway — and that changes everything. that love is horrifying and it can consume you but nothing is more important than love.

ngl i'm kind of obsessed with babs and the role he plays in the narrative. he's the worst. he's a poor little meow meow. the only point of his existence was to be used and consumed by the tridentarii. no one has ever loved him in his entire life and no one mourned his death. he's haunting the narrative but nobody cares enough to notice.

palamedes & harrowhark: Gideon the Ninth // Harrow the Ninth // Nona the Ninth

also, another little detail that tamsyn put in the unwanted ghost: multiple objects, random objects, are purple. what's up with that

i saw someone on reddit wonder about what soul permeability says about judith and varun and now im just like. going insane about it

Imagine the soul of the earth gives you god-like magic to save the planet from a climate apocalypse and you just hard focus on doing necromancy with it lmao. Imagine being handed the keys to life just to close off the door and declare that you conquered death. Imagine putting the embodiment of all life in a tomb and calling her an apocalypse to come. Incredible loser behaviour tbh.

sometimes i just think about how completely batshit wild the last chapters of harrow the ninth were

the pool scene is so good because it's when harrow decided she would live for gideon and it's when gideon decided she would die for harrow

of all the plot twists in the locked tomb literally NOTHING hits quite as hard as the twist in GtN that the only reason gideon and harrow """hate""" each other is because they hate themselves and assume the other one has to hate them the same way and the second they both come clean about that they're immediately ready to drop it and die for each other in Grand Displays Of Dramatic Lesbianism. like it still fucks me up every time i think about it