I think John Gaius successfully utilized girlpower when he fixed global warming and quality of life inequality, and brought his favorite childhood toy to life, all in the span of one day. Absolutely no further details or points to be said about how he did any of that

He solved wealth inequality, fixed overpopulation, and took care of the issue of rising housing prices in the city of Melbourne. He became the de facto leader of the most powerful democracy on earth and dismantled capitalism. He took care of the global nuclear stockpile, cleaned up the Pacific Trash Vortex, and found the answer to several metaphysical questions that have fascinated humanity for centuries, such as "Is there such thing as a soul?" and "Does Pluto count as a planet?" He also ate the sun.

Nobody's doing it like him

I have a lot of WIPs and a little more time than usual this next month so I will leave one very important (<- lying) decision to anyone who cares to click a button

(my goal is to maybe get something ready to post aaaaahhhh)

Hi you can call me Quellie or Elle (she/her).

I'm 32 (🔞), white girl, trans dyke, scientist. ACAB.

Posts: random gay & trans shit, transmisogyny, abolition, family, science, and extremely concerning thoughts that i dont share with people irl. I usually follow back if you're trans or post TLT.

See also: @cow-friends (Locked Tomb sideblog)

throwaway details from the early NtN chapters that I should think about more

Cristabel writing to the Pope

John's “whistleblowing” (?) crashed the global stock market <- we really don't talk enough about the stock market crash

The cryo project facility used 3% of all electricity in New Zealand

There were frequent natural catastrophes every other week

much to think about

@moscca you're right and you should say it! Here's a really great compilation of Taz quotes I've been keeping in mind

From an interview where she says that Lovecraft was one of her main inspirations, talks about her relationship with horror vs. sff as a genre author, and wanting to find relatable heroines in horror lit.

I didn’t write Gideon the Ninth for the characters—I wrote it entirely for the structure. I wanted to tell a very specific story, and I needed everything to serve that story.

I want people to realise there are no boundaries. I also want to release people from having to take their universe entirely seriously, if they don’t want to. Science fiction and fantasy reflects ourselves, our anxieties, our joys. I’m just writing to amuse myself, as per usual.

I am writing for my younger self and it would be disgusting of me to try to teach her anything.

(& other quotes from that same interview)

Although love and forgiveness aren’t necessarily the same thing either, Gideon’s frankly divine ability to forgive is a huge core of the novel. [...] Forgiveness is almost the electrical current being able to transmit through love.

The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. [...] I know that a lot of people do take enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories that ring true to their own lives, but it’s important for me that I tell a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul.

...the God of the Locked Tomb IS a man; he IS the Father and the Teacher; it’s an inherently masc role played by someone who has an uneasy relationship himself to playing a Biblical patriarch. John falls back on hierarchies and roles because they’re familiar even when he’s struggling not to. But the divine in the Locked Tomb is essentially feminine on multiple axes.

It seems to me that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc., whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut.

Sometimes tumblr recommends me post about how actually Cytherea went on a serial killing spree as an act of mercy and defiance against a cruel god and she was actually doing the morally correct thing and she cannot be blamed, et cetera... boring tbh

Every time that happens I'm like, she's an unrepentant mass murderer actually. I'm sorry we have read two completely different versions of these books but the one I read is way sexier. She's grieving and heartbroken and righteous in her anger but also she's an evil murdering bitch just so we're clear. She HAS AGENCY and she chose to FUCK SHIT UP. This is very hot of her.

Doing an experiment with my friend where im making him read tlt in the opposite order and he just dropped the most sentence ever "oh, palamedes and dulcinea are parallels with john and alecto! Got it" and promptly returned to ignore me on discord. what do i do with that

Why are you making him read TLT in the opposite order. Did he volunteer for it. Are you trying to prove something. Are you monitoring him for reactions compared to your other friend who read it in the normal order. The word choice of “experiment” is sort of of ominous here ngl

Also I need to know everything about his reactions oh my god. please say more

always thinking about the HtN AU where John can also see the Body. POV you are God and you are being haunted, baby

gideon really is my little meow meow. she's so brave and uncool and fucking miserable

Is it better if John erased their memories, or if they came back that way and he just decided not to fix them?

It's immensely better if he intentionally mindwiped them. TO ME.

I'm a John fan. I think he's a tremendous tragic antagonist, and that everything he does in the HtN backstory is relatable if not painful familiar. He was under immense pressure, trying to mitigate the literal end of the world, having his mind and his whole self changed in ways he had no frame of reference to understand. He went from being desperate and trying to do his best to being carried away by circumstances to going absolutely fucking insane. There are many ways to rationalise John's actions all the way to the end, which is what makes it such an effective corruption arc. If you want to engage in some blorbo apologism, there are plenty of excuses to be found.

There's absolutely no fucking way to excuse mind-wiping his friends. THAT is why it's so important to me that he did it deliberately, in cold blood, justifying it to himself as a way to take their burdens upon himself so they wouldn't have to feel guilty. He removed their agency. He didn't want any peers in the world he'd created. He could have acknowledged what had happened, for better or worse, and tried to make amends - but instead, he chose to remove their knowledge that something had even happened in the first place. It's the turning point! I need him to go into that with his eyes fully open. He's doing it on purpose! He weighed the pros and cons and prioritised his comfort over his friends' identities.

EYE believe that his story arc is infinitely more powerful if there's a point we can look at and say "here is when John's story went from things happening TO HIM to John doing terrible things". Especially in a backstory that's ultimately about divine corruption and losing touch with your humanity, I think that turning point needs to be something that has a personal value to him, something that can't be chalked up to "he was high on death" or "humanity was doomed" or even "he touched the soul of the earth and went insane."

I think it's important, thematically, that one of his first actions after acquiring godlike powers was to make sure that no one would be able to remember his human self and challenge him on equal footing, even if he's still internally lamenting his own loneliness and wishing things were different.

Obviously, this is all coming from a known John Girlie™ and Eldritch Alecto Enjoyer — I interpret John's ascension to quasi-divinity as something that was mostly imposed ON him and he couldn't control, which is why I need him to cross the moral event horizon outright with the mind violation of his inner circle. Someone who views John as more directly culpable in the end of the earth might feel less strongly about the importance of the mindwipe in his story arc than I do, but TO ME it's the culmination of the tragedy. You've become the inhuman horror, baby.

/post that inspired the question

here for the horny lyctor posting as requested

anyway do you think dios apate was actually like. good sex. or was jod trying so hard not to come after not fucking for ten thousand years that it was terrible to severely mediocre

John thought that the sex was amazing incredibile awesome showstopping. tender. heartwrenching. pleasantly filthy. Objectively it was probably kinda mid. But I think Augustine and Mercy choreographed it down to rehearsing the bickering they would allow John to mediate, and planned in details how to blow his mind so he wouldn't notice the treason. He complained about too much foreplay but the foreplay was calculated to drive him out of his mind. I think also he was his normal amount of patronising during it, and at multiple points Augustine and Mercy thought in vivid details about strangling him.

(I love thinking about Dios Apate it makes my day 100% better! ty for my LIFE)

would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!

Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote

#earth conception of race doesn't impact any character in the series except the canonically brown main antagonist

By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).

I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.

[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]

Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It's not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards... these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.

John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.

Ok so im antichrist gideon anon my bad i only noticed this rn.

Ok so technically, from a catholic point of view, alecto technically fills more requirements for being God than John does. Most relevant for us rn, the requirement she fulfill is the tripartite god (which im unsure is actually the term in english), ie: the father, the son, and the holy spirit, or alecto, nona, earth.

What does this make John? Lucifer. John was chosen by the earth for a task because he was her specialest little guy (Angel-era) fucked up massively, destroyed the world, got humanity kicked out of "eden", and even now torments their descendants for the same reasons he did then, is, technically, a False God, and depending on which interpretation of Lucifer's actions and background you have, actually does have similar reasons to John (At least regarding rage at the unfairness, him and his buddies getting fucked up for it, his buddies becoming "demons" like him, ie necromancers. Idk if lucifer was an environmentalist.)

Now, Gideon! As we have established in this allegory John's Lucifer, she does get the Antichrist treatment automatically, but she also has ascended to a place of social prominence, her showing up as John's daughter has coincided with stuff you can technically argue sorta relates to the Armageddon (the demons being released, the war against demons, the fucking possession stuff which may qualify as a plague) and she also distracts the followers of Actual God (Get in line thou big slut), drives them to wickedness and to harm others and themselves (Harrow, lyctorhood, their rivalry, the lobotomy), but she's also necessary so people can, yknow, get into heaven and for things such as the apocalypse to happen (Protagonist— I mean her blood opens the tomb and that's needed for God Alecto to wake.)

Anyways this was prompted by me stumbling across the term Lesbian Jesus again, pausing, and asking myself "Is she, though?" Which through this very well organised essay we have determined, she is not.

Nona is the one who's lesbian jesus.

this is a GEM of a thought to receive in my inbox I'm honoured you graced me with it! the part of me who was obsessed with Paradise Lost at age 17 loves your argument for Lucifer = John.

I think TM treats catholic theology in the same way she treats most of her influences, picking and choosing what to keep so but anyway catholic lore expert @monstrousgourmandizingcats get in here. do you have thoughts 👀 🙏

okay, what do we think the average niner thought after all of the kids died & p&p's pregnancy announcement? personally i'd be so horrified by the thought of my political leaders a) hearing that a bunch of children had died and deciding to rawdog it, or b) hearing that my leaders didn't hear about the mass death b/c they were so busy rawdogging it that i'd expire on the spot

Ok LISTEN. I think actually the average Ninth dweller might have taken it as a sign of... things going back to normal? I don't think there was a big announcement, and even if someone did the maths, for all they knew Harrow could've been conceived in vitro (she might have been! All we know is that the ovulum was irradiated with death juice) and I just think that births give people hope. Gideon POV sort of implies that, with the “only birth amidst a sea of tiny tombs” line.

However. I also think there was widespread suspicion about the timing of ALL those death, and imo if we're going to not question canon's implications that there have been NO births on the Ninth since Harrow, then the obvious conclusion is that it was a consequence of the mass death event. So like... I can imagine initial positive feelings after all that grief, followed by rising disquiet and fear once things did not even BEGIN to go back to normal.

Anyway tldr I don't think the average Ninth holy order think TOO much about the Reverend Parents having sex in details Only me and my homies do that. It's our roman empire so probably the rawdogging took a backseat to everything else

I think Wake and Cytherea should've fucked nasty. They would've made each other worse and it would have been Cytherea toying with Gideon SO much worse. Do you see the vision

you think Harrow was so horny for Gideon, because she was another buff girl with yellow eyes and she wouldn't lose a couple fingers to frostbite dating her

No, sorry. I think Harrow would've developed an angry crush on Gideon even if she never broke into the Tomb. She always wanted Gideon for MORE than her body-temperature pussy, which is a good thing because it means Harrow will still love her now that her pussy is as cold as the rest of her corpse