fanartists who draw camilla hect with a big nose yall are my BEST friends

ianthe describing the process of drinking up naberius tern's mortal soul

to follow up on this great post, i also think painting wake into the 'bad mom' corner misunderstands gideons tragedy. gideon lived her whole life wanting to believe that she had a mother who loved her who wanted to save her who wanted her at all. but wake isn't a bad mother shes just. not a mother. gideon was one piece in a far far larger chess game. no one ever wanted gideon nav. gideon is no one's son or daughter. shes just a girl that didn't die.

Harrow the Ninth, p. 410, 494

I ship this ship because:

I have eyes

I can see

I am the smartest person in the room

I receive divine revelations about them in the dead of night, alone in my chambers

hello ladies

webweaving a post of wake kicking ass v. camilla kicking ass because i want to compare the verbiage used and as much as i love cam with my whole heart i am actually sweating at any scene wake is in even in the moments where she's fucking hobbling around in cytherea's corpse. the woman of all time ever for me i think

honestly it was so bold of tamsyn to have her butch/femme kink on show like this. queering the scene truly

alfred quinque served cunt in his gogo boots i know this in my heart

my main thoughts about judith is like she's been in the military for most of her life. ive had two drinks so i might be misremembering but like she was like six??? or something to do with that when she joined the cohort. her dad is high up so she wasn't sent out at that age but it does suggest something about child soldiers outside of the fourth. also like the drainage part of her necromancy like how do you teach that to someone?? she's very interesting anyways

really good points anon!!!! i think that the houses' normalization of children being introduced to warring for the empire at such a young age is so interesting, especially given how fourth and second seem to function in tandem with each other even though typically fourth is more closely associated with fifth fandom-wide. in turn it's intriguing to see how people in the fandom respond to that association and the military structure of second, how judith functions within it, etc.,

the drainage part of her necromancy seems to be second house standard fare (although i think being a generalist is also fairly common if i recall correctly) and i wish we'd gotten to see at least a little bit of it in action through judith in gtn since it's used to empower the necromancer and not the cavalier, separate from any of the trails which i think are at the ultimate extreme of what necromancy means / does / the theorems of it all. for me it brings to mind the blood of eden memorandum at the end of htn before AYS when blood of eden points out that one should not engage with the enemy unless absolutely certain that there is not a necromancer present in the unit, and even then, maybe still don't, because if there's a necromancer among the enemy and that necro can essentially embolden and strengthen the non-necromantic parties, then it makes combat even more frightening than it already is.

as for judith being in the military all her life, yeah! yeah. yeah... i find some people's hostility towards judith as a character interesting when it makes sense to me that judith, who is still so young by the time she's been dubbed the captain in ntn and possessed by varun, is obviously clinging to the beliefs and ideals of the empire taught to her from childhood, seems to need that belief in the empire to survive in the conditions she ends up in. she serves as a fun narrative contrast to characters like corona or camilla, obviously, in that they've got doubts of their own, but judith's dogmatism in AYS especially is also a response (to me) to her own doubts, fears, and further goes to show how deeply-ingrained her beliefs are and how deeply-ingrained those beliefs may be in second house and the cohort altogether.

what they don’t tell you about helping to run a fandom server in search of lovely people with good takes is that you may end up helping curate a pinterest board revolving around the characters of the book series but with their names as horse puns filled with pictures of beautiful beautiful horsies which also happens to totally decimate your pinterest algorithm by sending you notifications like “inspired by your interest in horse”

regale me with your judith thoughts!

gtn p. 372, 373 / as yet unsent, htn p. 531, 535, 538, 540

judith who entered the emperor's service when she was six years old + judith who is relying on the idea that marta avenged the fifth and fourth, a story she has to tell herself + judith who was told after watching marta die (and potentially having to grapple with the fact she might've been the one to kill her with all of the souls stuffed into one body siphoned back to a single cavalier -- an efficient and precise, skilled cavalier, but still only one woman! that she fixed nothing by horrid ninth house nun harrowhark + the last gideon ever saw of captain judith deuteros was her with her head held high and her face with no expression at all + judith who simultaneously clings to her identity as a member of the cohort and the empire while believing she's completely failed at everything she was born and raised to do, has made herself a liar + judith with the internalized necrocav homophobia of it all + i thank the emperor's mercy that i had a cavalier who taught me that so early + judith who has no interest in her own potential as leverage paralleled with where she ends up in nona + judith who must end her life as a mystery, not as an object lesson + judith who believes she's only presented herself as truly fallible in a way that others do not see, choose not to see, or do not understand + judith who has spent her whole life wanting for something to the point of desperation, from her cavalier to glory for the second house to her death and not getting it!!!! hello!!!!!!!!

i think she genuinely may be one of the most tragic characters in a series chock full of tragic characters, and i really hope that she gets something good in atn, because the books thus far have been, i think, cruel to her in ways that people don't talk about as much compared to how they talk about other characters. i love her desperately!!!!

can we talk about judith deuteros? i would love to talk about judith deuteros pretty please

has anyone mentioned ianthe's flesh transplant arm as another example of sexual assault metaphor in tlt?harrow gets talked about a lot for obvious reasons but imo there's something there with ianthe as well, being forced to carry this (functionally dying/dead) limb that's been sewn into her body against her will and everyone else judging her for struggling with it until she literally tries to cut it out of herself. it would add a new layer to the bone arm scene, both as sex, as is usually interpreted, but also abortion and conception/birth.

(also idk where exactly this fits but something else about how cytherea severed her arm at the elbow but the transplant was attached at the shoulder so that even once she got autonomy back with the bone arm, she had still lost more than was originally taken)

anon this is WILD!!! i've thought before about how ianthe having an arm (whose arm, by the way?) attached to her body without her consent is just one of many autonomy violations we see in the series, but i had never connected it directly to the ever-present theme of reproduction and reproductive horror. this is absolutely blowing my mind.

this is a little more obvious, but i also just want to note while we're on the subject that ianthe's limb also seems to be an intentional parallel with the way that people who develop prosthetics make assumptions about the needs and wants of amputees; according to a 2022 survey, nearly half of upper-limb amputees end up abandoning their prosthetics. some amputees feel pressured into wearing realistic prosthetics to blend in, and people often end up feel hindered even by high-tech prosthetics. on top of being another example of a character suffering a severe violation of their autonomy, it's also an example of tamsyn's dedication to realistically portraying disabled characters, and (like with dulcinea and cytherea) it showcases the ableism built into the nine houses.