disrespectfully, I will never get over that bit in gtn when harrow said "you are my whipping girl" like wooh okay, we're doing that? rip to my heart and soul.

templars of the white glass

(twitter)

at some point during my gideon re-read last year i became so obssessed w/ the eighth house,,,

One of my favorite things about the locked tomb is that you just absolutely cannot predict where it's going. The first part of Nona (found in one of the previews) is labeled with "5 Days until the Tomb Opens" and I'm over here like "what the fuck does THAT mean??" Literally it straight up tells you that the tomb opens in 5 days and I still don't know what that means. If Nona turns out to be Alecto that's amazing for me and everyone else who thinks Nona is Alecto, but what then? Literally what happens when we find out who Nona is. What happens when the tomb opens.

Also where is this series even going????? How is Alecto the Ninth going to end literally what ending is this series heading towards. I have no clue. Will we get a Griddlehark happy ever after? Does John die for real? Does Alecto do...something? If anyone has theories about how the series will end please share them because I have no idea. Despite that, I'm sure that whatever end we get, we'll look back to page one of Gideon the Ninth and be like "oh my jod tazmuir is insane she foreshadowed the end of the whole series on page one and we were all too stupid to see it."

Tamsyn Muir made the most unpredictable series ever and yet she foreshadowed everything perfectly. There's a reason Act V of Harrow the Ninth is my favorite section in any book ever. It connects the insane, batshit crazy plot of Harrow and wraps it up in a nice bow. What I guess I'm saying is that Tamsyn Muir could tell us straight up how it ends and nobody would get it until it actually happened. This series is absolutely 100% unpredictable until tazmuir pulls it all together in the end and I love it.

if we're pash blogging today, i recently reread the end of nona and i had forgotten about the dynamic between pash and camilla. two women who choose violence <3

i was thinking abt this the other day!! you are so right!!!! everyone always talks abt her and corona (valid, they are fucked up and i am watching them thru binoculars) or her and nona (her just general apathy towards it is hilarious) but we just generally do not talk about her and cam's dynamic nearly enough!!! especially that last section you sent. i go insane over "i'll touch you at the end of the world, but not before" like Passion?? that was Extremely Gay, i hope you know that. (also couldn't be me, i would give anything to give camilla hect a firm handshake, outta my way gayboy)

Empathising too hard with Jod again.

God is the most loser immortal ever he’s the worst and I love him so much

i'm currently going full tin hat in the notes app over this damn series. even homestuck didn't get me to do this

There are two schools of thought on the locked tomb series; there are the people who took tazmuir at her word when she said gideon had a longsword and drew it as such; then there are the people who know what a longsword is and know that the thing gideon swings is at the bare minimum a fucking claymore.

knowing that tazmuir has written 30,000 words of Gideon Nav epistolary au but that we CANT READ IT (yet?) pain. Pain. What the fuck is the context even. Who is she writing letters to.

i think mercy is sooo fucking hilarious for showing harrow how to keep her cortisol going instead of the more obvious way to lengthen the time u stay awake (SCN or EPG) < this is what i would do

mercy: oh you want to stay awake? let me show you how to do that but also make u so fucking stressed

idk if this is bc tazmuir isn't like. a neurologist so she chose cortisol but still i would like to think its bc mercy hates harrow

It's amazing how much incidental and easy-to-miss queerness tazmuir manages to pack into the Fourth House section of the Cohort Intelligence Files at the end of GtN.

"Sir Jeannemary Chatur" is a cool vibe and easy to spot, but it's worth taking a close look at Judith's notes on Isaac too:

Abigail Pent has forged a strong relationship with both Tettares and Chatur, much stronger even than her mothers’ relationship with Tettares’ father. It is already suggested that her nephew will be affianced to him once they are of age.

Firstly, "mothers'" (not "mother's"), indicating that Abigail has two moms - this is subtle enough that I missed it in all 5 or so of my prior readings.

Second, and more complicatedly, that Abigail is planning to have Isaac marry her nephew. On the surface of it, this seems cool - my initial reading was that Isaac is gay, and Abigail wants him to have a spouse who he has some chance of being interested in. But given that this is in the context of an arranged marriage between aristocratic families, we should also consider the reproductive lens (especially given the mention of his siblings being "a mix of vat-womb and XX carry" in the preceding paragraph) - I think a more compelling reading of this passage is actually that Isaac is trans¹ (or Abigail's nephew is). And tugging on this thread takes us to a bit of a dark place.

Given how much the Fourth and Fifth evidently care about the heredity of their rulers, we can infer that someone in Isaac's position wouldn't have any real reproductive autonomy even if he had survived to adulthood. And while the existence of vat wombs obviates the horror of forced pregnancy/childbirth, this is still a pretty fucked up situation (to say nothing of the Ninth where they don't even have access to vat wombs). To me, this signifies a fundamental injustice of organising society around hereditary nobility; one that persists even if it can be made to be superficially gay- and trans-inclusive.

With this in mind it's worth interrogating my use of the word "queerness" at the beginning of the post. In the real world "queer" is viable as an umbrella term for all the many LGBTQIA+ identities specifically because those identities are all at odds with the cis-/hetero-/etc.-normative nature of our society. But in the Nine Houses it doesn't seem like being gay/bisexual/trans is stigmatised in the same way, so one could say that these identities are not "queer" per se (strange, other) in a diegetic context.

"Sir Jeannemary Chatur" reflects a similar mismatch. In the real world, a woman using the title "sir" is at odds with both traditional gender roles and (more significantly) institutional usage of the title. But in the Nine Houses this title seems to be devoid of any specific gendered connotations, and its application to Jeannemary is not a subversion of that society's gender norms, but instead an affirmation of the (normative, exploitative) social role of cavalier.

So in summary: Isaac is trans, what queerness means in the Nine Houses can be quite different from what it means in the real world, and pinkwashing an unjust society doesn't make it more just (even if it's headed by a queer person).

¹ This isn't to say that Isaac isn't gay - I headcanon him as both gay and trans. But I don't think him being married off to Abigail's nephew is (primarily) about his sexual orientation.

PS: If you like being haunted by the ghosts of these characters, check out @katakaluptastrophy's fic, Your children are weapons, which got me thinking about these two again lately.

I know this is a gay lawyer opinion and as such probably spectacularly biased but ever since ntn came out I have been going absolutely crazy about the reveal that Cassiopeia is a gay lawyer and that she was the one to, first, call Jod out for granting more importance to punishing billionaires than to saving the billions of other people on Earth, and to, second, plot for ten thousand years to betray him. Idk if tazmuir did it on purpose but this reveal hit me right in the fucking heart and is for some reason incredibly meaningful to me.

Other ppl have already pointed out that Jod picked his STEM buddies to be necromancers and the more humanities leaning people/very broadly service workers (not that I'm a big fan of cops or clergy but you catch my drift) as cavaliers. But what's interesting here is that Cassiopeia is the exception to that. She's a necromancer and she's a lawyer. Which speaks v interestingly to the position law holds in a lot of STEM ppl's minds - it's "tough" enough to kind of be honorary STEM. But, crucially, it is factually not STEM. It is factually, very obviously, humanities. Its whole point is analysing society and figuring out how we want to shape it. And STEM people forget that. Which means that Of Course it's the STEM ppl who forge ahead, doing things because they have the capacity to, and of course it's the lawyer who is the first to question whether they should do so, what the impact of that is on the actual world, whether there shouldn't be agreements and rules about this.

And look don't get me wrong, I don't have an idealised view of law. Law can be one of the most oppressive forces in our current society. People often uphold it for the sake of itself and not for the sake of what it can do for people, to make the world and people's lives better, and the consequences of that are, unquestionably, a net bad. But that's where the gay lawyer part comes in. I work in an office where over half of us are queer lawyers and there is something fundamentally delicate and "in the middle" about being gay and a lawyer. Law is often actively hostile to queer people, and most queer people who go into law go into it with the intent to change it (or its application, even on a very small scale) rather than to uphold it because they are aware of its unfairness and oppressiveness. But simultaneously you need to believe in law enough to believe that it can be a useful tool for change if you're going to devote your professional life to it, which is a relatively idealistic position to hold. In my experience, the consequence of that is that queer lawyers are often the most likely to be very critical and sceptical of law and agreements and systems and people in power, even the ones they're close to, because a significant part of their lives is led in the midst of, very close to, or at least in a state of constant hyper awareness, of a system that is hostile to them for being queer.

Which is why it is so crucial that Cassiopeia is a Gay Lawyer. Of course she is the one who realises that the new rules and agreements implemented by her friend who suddenly finds himself with incredible power are detrimental to society as a whole. Of course she's the one who sees the inconsistencies between what he says he wants to achieve and what he's de facto working towards. Of course she's the one who calls him out for it. Being in close contact with both the rules and the people who makes them or enforce them isn't new to her, and analysing them is literally her job. He made a contract with his friends and with the world and he's not upholding it. Of course she's the one who takes issue.

Cassiopeia has to be radical enough to actively support Jod's cause at the beginning and traditionalist enough to see when he's going overboard and then again radical enough to call him out for it and build her own revolution. Cassiopeia has to be idealistic enough to believe a better world is possible and sceptical enough to realise when the new world they're building is emphatically not better and then idealistic enough again to believe it is possible to change it again, not back but forward, to something even newer. Cassiopeia has to be radical enough to spend thousands of years fomenting a rebellion against Jod and also traditionalist enough and enough of a Fucking Nerd to decide that the best and most efficient way to do that is to turn her House into a Rebellion University over that time period instead of, idk, anything a normal Rebel Against The Established Order would do. Of fucking course she's a gay lawyer.

Last point and then I'll shut up but equally crucial to this is that Nigella, her wife and cavalier, is AN ARTIST. The biggest cliché of "useless humanities", the person STEM looks at and thinks "I mean sure, fun enough, but ultimately a luxury at best and a waste of money and resources at worst". Because part of the divide within the field of law wrt what law means for society (is law a tool for society as it is or as it should be) is very much informed by how you look at society, of course, and while part of that outlook is informed by personal identity and experiences (ie the gay thing), another part is informed by the experiences and views of the people you surround yourself with. And Cassiopeia who loves an artist, Cassiopeia who strongly believes in the value of art for society, Cassiopeia who admires her lover for the way she studies and represents and transforms society through her art? That's so relevant to her specific brand of gay lawyer. That's the same Cassiopeia who's enough of an active idealist to side with Jod in an active rebellion against the agents of climate change at first, to stress the importance of helping innocents over punishing the guilty second, and to, finally, try to organise a revolution which, if I am interpreting all the care she takes with the Sixth correctly, prioritises helping the people Jod fucked over over punishing Jod.

TL;DR: Of course Cassiopeia is a gay lawyer and I love her, your honour.

Voice request from The Locked Tomb:

The eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me.

The eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me, so I did the implantation myself, you self-serving zombie, and you still sent him after me, and I would have had him if I hadn't been compromised and he took pity on me! He took pity on me! He saw me and he took pity on me. And for that I'll make you both suffer until you no longer understand the meaning of that goddamned word.

Him, I'll kill quick because she asked me to, and because that much he honestly deserves. But you two mummified wizard shits, I will burn and burn and burn until there is no trace of you left in the shadow of my long-lost natal sun.

I will remember the first time you kissed me — you apologized — you said, I am sorry, destroy me as I am, but I want to kiss you before I am killed, and I said to you why, and you said, because I have only once met someone so utterly willing to burn for what they believed in, and I loved him on first sight, and the first time I died I asked of him what I now ask of you.

I kissed you and later I would kiss him too before I understood what you were, and all three of us lived to regret it — but when I am in heaven I will remember your mouth, and when you roast down in hell I think you will remember mine.

The only thing our civilization can ever learn from yours is that when our backs are to the wall and our towers are falling all around us and we are watching ourselves burn we rarely become heroes.

End of the line.

Falling.

Oxygen can't last the distance and won't redirect power from the payload.

Instead I will make you watch every moment as I get the last privilege you cannot enjoy you bygone son of a bitch. I hope you're both as sorry as I am.

...holy FUCK that was fun to record.

Also, @tazmuir, apologies for any mischaracterization in my own recording of your work, but come on, these monologues are a BLAST.

If anyone else has an ask, feel free to kick them in.

Does Harrow even love Gideon? Harrow probably loves Alecto more than Gideon

anon i love you. i love you for asking me this. i love you for opening this can of worms. i'm giving you a little kiss rn

DOES harrow love gideon? does she feel the same way that gideon feels about her? this is the central question driving the entire series, and tazmuir has done a fantastic job of using narration and point of view to conceal it. we get gideon's third person limited perspective in gtn; we get gideon's pov AGAIN in htn, even though we don't find out until the last act; and we see the world as nona in ntn, and nona (respectfully) doesn't know jack shit. the final scene in ntn is the first time that gideon and harrow have SEEN EACH OTHER since the end of the first book, and they don't interact - and we don't really know what either of them are feeling in that moment, since the narration is mostly from alecto's point of view. (we do know that gideon is still tits over ass for harrow tho. "get in line, thou big slut" can really only mean one thing)

we, as the audience, can piece together that yes, harrow loves gideon. or at least, that harrow loves gideon ENOUGH to lobotomize herself rather than remember that she's in a world where she had gideon and now doesn't. harrow loves gideon enough to stop the lyctoral process and completely fuck up her own body because the grief of losing gideon is too much for her to handle. harrow loves gideon enough that she's undone without her.

but is she in love with gideon? listen. i'm biased. i absolutely think that she is. the issue - and the reason that this question is so hard to answer - is that she won't fuckin admit it to anyone, least of all herself. harrow has convinced herself that she's in love with The Body, not even knowing alecto's whole insane deal, and has sworn herself completely to alecto. can harrow be in love with an earth popsicle? does she know alecto? does that even matter to her? does 'one flesh, one end' override a nun's vow to the hot corpse of the holy spirit? we don't know.

alecto the ninth is going to answer a LOT of questions. i assume based on the trends of the other books that it'll be from alecto's point of view, which means that we still won't see things from harrow's perspective - which is really, really interesting. it means that for us as the audience to know what the fuck is going on with her mental and emotional state, harrow needs to (1) admit it to herself, (2) tell another character directly, or (3) telegraph it indirectly with her words and actions - which she's rarely done in the history of the series. whether or not harrow loves alecto more than she loves gideon will be entirely dependent on her interactions with both of them in atn.

tl;dr: does harrow even love gideon? yes, i firmly believe that she does. it's just that she doesn't know it yet.

revisited a post where tazmuir gave alternate names to the houses and here’s my opinion of what they should be:

no one fucking lives there house

lesbian house

lesbian house

child house

straight people house

amalgamation of two people house

among us imposter house

gross men house

lesbian house (goth edition)

tag yourself in the replies guys

what's everyone's favourite tazmuir soundbite. mine is the bit about her "horse butch great aunt" in the same interview about the queerness of disco elysium and posting fic on kinkmemes. honourable mention to "i didn't ship reylo because it wasn't fucked up enough" because samesies taz