katakaluptastrophy
Katakaluptastrophy
Abigail Pent, if you got her from Wish.
The Locked Tomb, Tolkien, Star Trek, assorted nerdy things, religion, the ancient world, general tomfoolery. 30-something.
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He often summoned you for a theoretical lesson, or the cups of tea you still hated but would have rather seen your skin flagellated off than say so, or simply to sit in silence. He had a trick of asking you to come over and talk, and then never actually talking, but sitting with you watching the asteroids continue their graceful orbit around a thanergenic star.
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midnite hagette does math in god’s least favorite basement
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i knew we shouldn't have come to the club on catharsis night. everyone is weeping and wailing as their negative feelings are cleansed through vicarious emotional experience and it's really bringing the mood down, which is simultaneously bringing the mood up. plus all the fake blood from that production of the agamemnon is making it too slippery to dance
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ortus nigendad inherited his position as cavalier primary to the ninth. he would have started training with the sword before his adept was even born, and been pledged to her the moment she could speak. reasonably, aiglamene would have been working with him since he was a boy.
do you think he was the only swordsperson aiglamene trained?
do you think he learned what a formal duel was by sparring with someone his age under their teacher’s watch? do you think maybe there was another child or two who showed promise, someone with a future in the cohort? and it frustrated everyone that *he* was the one to be cavalier when he was the worst swordsman in the bunch. do you think he tried to be better back then, to measure up to the other kids, even though he would’ve preferred to be doing anything else?
of course, he’d have needed one on one help from time to time. having classmates makes certain things easier to learn, but he was the future cavalier primary. he was meant to represent his house someday, and he hardly even seemed interested in it. some lessons would be for him alone even if the whole generation went through martial training.
do you think they called him for training one day, when every other child was meant to be in the nursery? do you think the older ones were jealous he was getting out of prayer circle, and the little ones were jealous he was missing naptime? and he told the more athletic ones not to worry and that he’d show off what he learned when he got back, but he didn’t mean it. they were meddlesome and annoying, and he wouldn’t think about swords for a second longer than he had to. everyone called him lucky, and he didn’t much feel like it.
do you think he got back from his lesson to find his home under quarantine?
do you think he was told that some unholy illness had broken out in the nursery and that they’d have to test him in isolation, but he couldn’t be allowed back in his bed out of hope that he was spared? it killed them all so quickly; the fact he was alive at all meant he’d likely gotten lucky. he didn’t feel like it.
do you think that was the day ortus nigenad gave up on the sword for good?
#Everybody knew and Ortus knew most of all#That's why Ortus is like that#He was 17 and all his friends died and he was spared under some flimsy pretext#But everyone knew it was because he was the the next Cavalier Primary#And no one in his family ever really recovered from that horrible bargain#No wonder he gave up
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Part the second, because Tumblr apparently hates links:
Overthinking House religion:
What do the Houses believe about death?
Was M's nun a Franciscan?
Cavaliership and arbitrary socio-religious structures
Ritual scarification
Sacraments and sacramentals
What did Silas think god wanted at Canaan House?
In defense of Silas
There's no such thing as a 'good' necro/cav relationship
Veiling and shaving in Ninth House cult practice
Tongue-in-cheek thoughts on Eighth and Sixth religion
A very long deep-dive on House belief and practice
Overthinking Harrowhark Nonagesimus:
'The meat of your meat...belonged to god' and 'that is how meat loves meat'
The horror of parental touch: Harrow, John Gaius, and Abigail Pent
Why is Harrow so obsessed with Abigail's hands?
Frontline Titties of the Fifth and transgressive necro/cav relationships
Harrow, Wake, and permeability of the soul in HTN
Harrow and psalm 147
Bible studies for weird queer necromancers:
Epiphany: revealing god's child to the wider world
The Holy Innocents and the creche massacre
The Virgin Mary and Commander Wake
John Gaius and John the Baptist
Instantiating the Trinity and the Second Resurrection
What's the significance of Paul?
St Paul's theology of gender and sexuality and the House theology of cavaliership
Maundy Thursday: consuming another for eternal life
Harrow and the Harrowing of Hell
Teacher tells us in GTN that John is not God
Masterpost of TLT metas
This is mostly for my own reference, as tagging doesn't seem to guarantee something being findable on Tumblr...but if you like wildly overthinking lesbian necromancers in space, enjoy!
Overthinking the Fifth House:
What is a "Speaker to the Dead"?
Actually, Magnus Quinn isn't terrible at sword fighting
Imperial complicity: Abigail the First
Pyschopomp: Abigail Pent and Hecate
Did Teacher conspire with Cytherea to kill the Fifth?
What does the Fifth House actually do?
The Fourth and the Fifth can never just be family
Cytherea's political observations at the anniversary dinner
Abigail Pent's affect: ghosts and autism
Were the Fourth wards of the Fifth?
Abigail probably knew most of the scions as children
Magnus Quinn's very understandable anger
Fifth House necromancy is not neat and tidy
Are Abigail and Magnus an exception to the exploitative nature of cavaliership?
"Abigail Pent literally brought her husband and look where that got her" (the Fifth in TUG)
The Fifth's relationship dynamic
The Fifth's relationship is unconventional in a number of ways
The queer-coding of Abigail and Magnus' relationship
Abigail and Palamedes, and knowing in the River
Was Isaac the ward of the Fifth?
Did Magnus manage to draw his sword before Cytherea killed him? (and why he probably had to watch his wife die)
How did Abigail know she was murdered by a Lyctor?
Fifth House necromancy is straight out of the Odyssey
The politics of the anniversary dinner (and further thoughts)
Was Magnus born outside of the Dominicus system?
Overthinking John Gaius:
The one time John was happy was playing Jesus
Is Alecto's body made from John's?
Are there atheists in the Nine Houses?
Why isn't John's daughter a necromancer?
The horrors of love go both ways: why John could have asked Alecto 'what have you done to me?'
Why M- may have really hoped John was on drugs
What is it with guys called Jo(h)n and getting disintegrated? (John and Dr Manhattan)
John's conference call with his CIA handlers
Watching your friend turn into an eldritch horror
Why does G1deon look so weird? (Jod regrew him from an arm)
When is a friendship bracelet not a friendship bracelet?
Why did John have G1deon hunt Harrow? (with bonus update)
The 'indelible' sin of Lyctorhood and John's shoddy plagiarism of Catholicism
Are John Gaius and Abigail Pent so different?
What was Jod's plan at Canaan House?
John and Ianthe tread the Eightfold path
The Mithraeum is more than a joke about cows
When was John Gaius born? (And another)
John Gaius and the tragic Orestes
John and Jesus writing sins in the sand
John and Nona's echoing chapters
John's motivations
Is Alecto just as guilty as John?
John's cult (and what he might have done to them)
The horror of Jod
Did John get bloodsweat before he became god?
Some very silly thoughts about John and Abigail arguing about academia
Overthinking the Nine Houses:
'No retainers, no attendants, no domestics'
Funerary customs and the violence of John's silence
Juno Zeta and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time
The horror of the River bubble
Every instance of 'is this how it happens' in HTN
Feudalism is still shitty even if you make it queer and sex positive
How do stele work?
Thought crime in the Nine Houses
The Houses have a population the size of Canada
What must it be like to fight the Houses?
You know what can't have been fun? Merv wing's megatruck on Varun day...
Augustine's very Catholic hobby (decorating skeletons)
Necromancers are not thin in a conventionally attractive way
Matching the Houses with the planets of the solar system (though perhaps the Fourth *is* on Saturn)
Why don't the Nine Houses have (consistent) vaccination or varifocals?
How would the Houses react to the deaths at Canaan House?
How does Wake understand her own name (languages over 10,000 years)
What pre-resurrection texts are known in the Houses?
Camilla and Palamedes very Platonic relationship (further thoughts)
The horrors the Cohort found at Canaan House
Do the Houses understand the tech keeping them alive?
The scions from an external perspective (sci fi baddies)
Cav cots
The Nine Houses and feudalism
The horrors of early necromantic education
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Masterpost of TLT metas
This is mostly for my own reference, as tagging doesn't seem to guarantee something being findable on Tumblr...but if you like wildly overthinking lesbian necromancers in space, enjoy!
Overthinking the Fifth House:
What is a "Speaker to the Dead"?
Actually, Magnus Quinn isn't terrible at sword fighting
Imperial complicity: Abigail the First
Pyschopomp: Abigail Pent and Hecate
Did Teacher conspire with Cytherea to kill the Fifth?
What does the Fifth House actually do?
The Fourth and the Fifth can never just be family
Cytherea's political observations at the anniversary dinner
Abigail Pent's affect: ghosts and autism
Were the Fourth wards of the Fifth?
Abigail probably knew most of the scions as children
Magnus Quinn's very understandable anger
Fifth House necromancy is not neat and tidy
Are Abigail and Magnus an exception to the exploitative nature of cavaliership?
"Abigail Pent literally brought her husband and look where that got her" (the Fifth in TUG)
The Fifth's relationship dynamic
The Fifth's relationship is unconventional in a number of ways
The queer-coding of Abigail and Magnus' relationship
Abigail and Palamedes, and knowing in the River
Was Isaac the ward of the Fifth?
Did Magnus manage to draw his sword before Cytherea killed him? (and why he probably had to watch his wife die)
How did Abigail know she was murdered by a Lyctor?
Fifth House necromancy is straight out of the Odyssey
The politics of the anniversary dinner (and further thoughts)
Was Magnus born outside of the Dominicus system?
Overthinking John Gaius:
The one time John was happy was playing Jesus
Is Alecto's body made from John's?
Are there atheists in the Nine Houses?
Why isn't John's daughter a necromancer?
The horrors of love go both ways: why John could have asked Alecto 'what have you done to me?'
Why M- may have really hoped John was on drugs
What is it with guys called Jo(h)n and getting disintegrated? (John and Dr Manhattan)
John's conference call with his CIA handlers
Watching your friend turn into an eldritch horror
Why does G1deon look so weird? (Jod regrew him from an arm)
When is a friendship bracelet not a friendship bracelet?
Why did John have G1deon hunt Harrow? (with bonus update)
The 'indelible' sin of Lyctorhood and John's shoddy plagiarism of Catholicism
Are John Gaius and Abigail Pent so different?
What was Jod's plan at Canaan House?
John and Ianthe tread the Eightfold path
The Mithraeum is more than a joke about cows
When was John Gaius born? (And another)
John Gaius and the tragic Orestes
John and Jesus writing sins in the sand
John and Nona's echoing chapters
John's motivations
Is Alecto just as guilty as John?
John's cult (and what he might have done to them)
The horror of Jod
Did John get bloodsweat before he became god?
Some very silly thoughts about John and Abigail arguing about academia
Overthinking the Nine Houses:
'No retainers, no attendants, no domestics'
Funerary customs and the violence of John's silence
Juno Zeta and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time
The horror of the River bubble
Every instance of 'is this how it happens' in HTN
Feudalism is still shitty even if you make it queer and sex positive
How do stele work?
Thought crime in the Nine Houses
The Houses have a population the size of Canada
What must it be like to fight the Houses?
You know what can't have been fun? Merv wing's megatruck on Varun day...
Augustine's very Catholic hobby (decorating skeletons)
Necromancers are not thin in a conventionally attractive way
Matching the Houses with the planets of the solar system (though perhaps the Fourth *is* on Saturn)
Why don't the Nine Houses have (consistent) vaccination or varifocals?
How would the Houses react to the deaths at Canaan House?
How does Wake understand her own name (languages over 10,000 years)
What pre-resurrection texts are known in the Houses?
Camilla and Palamedes very Platonic relationship (further thoughts)
The horrors the Cohort found at Canaan House
Do the Houses understand the tech keeping them alive?
The scions from an external perspective (sci fi baddies)
Cav cots
The Nine Houses and feudalism
The horrors of early necromantic education
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pyrrha, cam, and palamedes in that apartment with nona
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So you know how at the end of Nona the Ninth, Harrow doubts that John is god and goes off into the River to find god, who is maybe Alecto?
It turns out we had a clue right at the beginning that John is not the metaphysical engine of the universe of The Locked Tomb...
When Teacher gives the assembled scions at Canaan House a highly selective history of the OG Lyctors, he says:
Those eight necromancers were first after the Lord of Resurrection; they have spread his assumption across the blackness of space.
Remember that John is, in the theology of the Nine Houses, the "God who became man and man who became God." It's never entirely explained what this means to them, but it's clearly intended to riff on Jesus, the 'Word made flesh' (John 1:14), "born in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:7).
But here's the thing if you're going to be a Catholic-flavoured god: Catholicism has some quite specific terminology for leveling up in terms of heavenly power.
Jesus, who is God, goes up to heaven after the resurrection. This is described as his "ascension" - it's an active process. He is ascending, going to his heavenly throne. He can do that, because he's God. He *is* the rules of the universe and metaphysics. If he wants to fly up into the sky and transcend into another dimension, he can do that, because he's God.
But there are three other people who are understood to have gone up to heaven bodily: Jesus' mum Mary, and the prophets Elijah and Enoch - for all three of them, this is described as their "assumption": it's a passive process, which they aren't doing under their own steam, it's being done by God. In art, this has historically been depicted by showing them being propelled skywards by a writhing mass of cherubs.
So let's get back to Jod.
You know, the man who became god, etc etc etc? The one who resurrected his Lyctors who then "spread his assumption across the blackness of space"?
Either John wasn't paying quite enough attention when going through Catholicism for Dummies or Teacher is being a bit sly here.
So this is a nod, right at the beginning, to the fact that John isn't actually the metaphysical power of the universe that he claims to be.
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Interestingly, the only example of what we'd consider a regular pen is found by Abigail Pent!
Amongst the Lyctoral relics Abigail discovers at Canaan House is "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge"
The vague order of preference for pen use in the Houses seems to be fountain pens, followed by your own blood on various sharp implements.
Harrow's study smells of overworked heater and "the just-milled ink in her inkwell. Tannic acid, human salts." (And Gideon, when describing how Harrow smells, includes ink amongst the descriptors). Harrow's hands in GTN are "stained with ink to the cuticle."
Harrow jabs "a fountain pen" into the inside of her own cheek and uses it to sign Gideon's commission in blood. In the Mysterious Study of Dr Sex, there's also mention of the Sixth signing official documents in blood using a thumb spike attached to the clipboard.
Jod's nails are described as "ink-smudged" and he has "a faint smudge of blue where he had been writing with ink and touched his temple"
Ink-stained fingers are one of the few things identifying one of the NPC!Sixth's bodies as Palamedes.
Abigail Pent is the only bookish character who isn't described as being perpetually ink stained, but she's otherwise described as being incredibly neat (and the Fifth probably have very good quality fountain pens).
In fact, the only pens we see a Houser using that aren't a fountain pen are the "fat marker pen" Palamedes uses to do his necromantic CSI stuff around the Fifth's bodies and the "thick black marker pen" Cytherea has used to censor the photos in the labs.
One thing I find interesting in the Nine Houses is the weaponry. All of it real, Renaissance-era stuff. But you only see one polearm, G1deon's spear, which he uses as an offhand(at least when in the Mithraeum, he probably only uses his rapier as a sidearm when doing solo missions). Harrow knows what it is, so it isn't a foreign concept, but the weapon of a soldier in the Cohort appears to be a zweihander, a large, two-handed sword, referred to as a longsword in the Houses, which was a weapon meant for frontline soldiers to deal with enemy pikemen, not for formation fighting. Cavaliers use rapiers with an offhand of choice, yet rapiers never saw battlefield use IRL, and if defending the necro is the purpose, wouldn't you want a shield, especially with many enemies the Houses face using firearms? Also, the Houses don't have any firearms, even the ones that were used at a similar time to other weapons they used, but are fully aware of their existence. They also have small shields like bucklers and targes, so it probably isn't a case of not knowing what shields are.
#the locked tomb#tlt meta#Now I just need more evidence as to whether Abigail's two pairs of glasses are preference#Or because Jod decided varifocals were insufficiently aesthetic 10k years ago
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I want emo versions of idioms
Like, instead of ““you’re barking up the wrong tree” it’s “you’re panicking at the wrong disco”
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One thing I find interesting in the Nine Houses is the weaponry. All of it real, Renaissance-era stuff. But you only see one polearm, G1deon's spear, which he uses as an offhand(at least when in the Mithraeum, he probably only uses his rapier as a sidearm when doing solo missions). Harrow knows what it is, so it isn't a foreign concept, but the weapon of a soldier in the Cohort appears to be a zweihander, a large, two-handed sword, referred to as a longsword in the Houses, which was a weapon meant for frontline soldiers to deal with enemy pikemen, not for formation fighting. Cavaliers use rapiers with an offhand of choice, yet rapiers never saw battlefield use IRL, and if defending the necro is the purpose, wouldn't you want a shield, especially with many enemies the Houses face using firearms? Also, the Houses don't have any firearms, even the ones that were used at a similar time to other weapons they used, but are fully aware of their existence. They also have small shields like bucklers and targes, so it probably isn't a case of not knowing what shields are.
#So many things in TLT make sense when you remember that John has built this world on vibes#Rapiers are just so hashtag aesthetic#Child soldiers with swords bigger than they are will really set the tone doncha think?#While we're at it let's all write with leaking fountain pens because those are so much more romantic than regular pens#And so practical in space
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*barbie voice* what the fuck kind of physical form is this?
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Doyle Canon: This is Dr. John Watson. He has managed to have multiple love affairs on three different continents. He is a love machine. A sex god, if you will. Able to woo multiple Victorian ladies.
80% of Sherlock Holmes Adaptations: This is Dr. John Watson. He looks like a hamster.
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donation comm for @silasoctakiseron. just little guys
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