At the request of mostly random people on the internet I read Gideon the Ninth and now I have been irreversibly changed against my will.

love a canon (?) coffee shop AU

Here is some Gideon art from last year!

Reasons to give oneself a lobotomy, according to Harrowhark Nonagesimus:

1. Your nemesis/only friend sacrificed herself for you and you don't want to permanently eat her soul

2. God maybe had a threesome with two of his Lyctors before

oh ianthe…i miss you and all your off putting tendencies……

I'm always thinking about how G— was an engineer. A damn good one: the sole engineer of the cryo project, good enough that of all the ten billion, the FTL project chose him to inspect their work, back when the project was still a pipe dream. He was a man from an immigrant family in an underprivileged area who became arguably the world's best engineer, which is impressive in its own right, but it gets me thinking... Pre-Resurrection, John says they can't grow food on Mars (and for all John's unreliability, that's pretty believable, given that the high perchlorate concentration in Martian soil is one of the big obstacles to carrying out a sustained Mars mission), and as silly as this might sound, the engineer and scientist divide is real, and of all the nerds that John resurrected, I can't imagine it was the artist or the contract lawyer or the medical and chemistry experts that made the Mars installation viable. Gideon made a House out of it, and one that accepts recruits from across the Dominican system! "Saint of Duty" is said to fit him, evident in his loyalty and commitment to the Cohort and fighting the Resurrection Beasts, but I have to wonder, how much of that was his commitment to making shit work? I can't shake the image of a couple million people awaking to a ruined world, and someone had to get the other Houses settled, figure out spacecraft and space habitats using what little supplies they have left, and what better candidate for that than the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice?

ANON I love this so much. You're SO right, and you put into words something about G1deon and John's shared background that I've tried to articulate for a while. In the very first chapter, John says, "It wasn’t that they didn’t have the money for a bigger team; we were simply the only ones capable of what they were asking."

This was an incredibly elite team. They were a brilliant bunch of hyperspecialised nerds. And, like, among John's squad, A- and M- and everyone else started out as colleagues — very smart people he probably met in academic circles, where being smart was kind of a prerequisite. It was their research that brought them together to begin with.

G1deon, though! He was John's friend growing up. John knew his grandparents. They spotted each other spare changes for snacks!! Then John went on to Dilworth, then to university and then overseas, and G1deon had his own (probably different) academic path, and maybe they only stayed vaguely in touch, but when it was time to look for an engineer that could help them build spaceships constructed to provide life support to the whole of humanity for centuries — and G1deon was the guy for that.

The fact that two boys from similar underprivileged backgrounds individually made huge breakthroughs in their chosen fields, and got to work together on a project that was meant to save the world... I bet at the time it felt like a miraculous coincidence. I think they thought, if they'd made it that far, that they could do anything.

(yet another layer to the tragedy of what happened etc etc.)

Thank you so much for all your thoughts about the Mars space installation, also — I wonder how long there was between Mars becoming the Second House (founded by G1deon! he and Pyrrha did the bulk of the work!) and the institution of the Third House, which doesn't have a named founder and might very well have been a shared project built on the blueprint of what G1deon set up. "the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice" — my god I love this so much. It's G1deon emo hours today

my crepuscular queen

Had way too much fun messing around with my nupastel so I had no choice but to draw harrow 🫶

Riding home. hurts me each time to read Camilla get hurt... and OH MY GOD it's such a well written scene, I loved it so much.

modern tlt au. what no alecto does to a mf

It's exactly as gross as it sounds 💛

aldjfhaldjk a search brought me to Catherine of Siena and. why is it ALWAYS Catherine of Siena

hey im free later if you wanna like get married or merge souls or something

remember in 2014 when you couldn't scroll five posts without seeing your blorbo in a flower crown?

i have an unreasonable hatred of the term "alphabet mafia"

I guess I just don't see the Catholicism and the weird bloody horny elements of TLT being at odds with eachother. This is the cannibalism-as-sacrament, yonic sidewound, St-Teresa-drinking-pus-as-penance, gilded bones religion. Erotic Christ-as-mother mystic visions have kind of been a thing for a while

i'm genuinely very tired of people assigning astarion traits that actually belong to the other companions. astarion would not give you cutesy pet names. that's gale. astarion would not treat you to a fancy dinner. that's wyll. astarion is not even the kinkiest. that's lae'zel. in fact astarion's whole appeal is that you are more or less dating a catboy. he does not know how to respond to genuine affection and does at times need to be sprayed with a bottle of water when he's acting out. and some of us are Into That

petition to start Drafts Dtuesday where you are encouraged to post one thing from your drafts. there is content languishing there, i know it. do not deprive us.