rip john gaius you wouldve loved blackout poetry

g1deon and pyrrha + gideon and harrow throughlines scattered in all of tlt continue to drive me insane.

the initial investigation scenes post the 5th deaths where the 2nd house tries to pull cohort rank control of the situation, gideon & harrow immediately sneak away to learn that the winnowing trial was developed by the second house and cohort founders, g1deon & pyrrha. winnowing as incorporating the other, refusing distractions for the sake of true control, loyalty and duty.

gideon is wearing his sunglasses, rifling through their things. she doesn’t see it as a real place someone would live in, only a stop along the way to somewhere else, more whole.

she sees a gun on the wall that her mother's ghost will use the river memory of to try and kill harrow in the dream of cannan house:

It took Gideon a long time to realise that she was looking at something goddamn ancient: it was a blowback carbine gun. She’d only ever seen pictures. ….. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck had risen when the lights came on, and they hadn’t gone back down, as if her intrusion might well tempt time back to claim its grave goods. GTN chapter 19

Carbine rifle, read the key. For a moment she pitied Judith Deuteros’s last seconds. To be killed with this ancient piece of grave goods! It would have been like being set upon by a ghost out of time. HTN chapter 18

gideon reads "one flesh, one end" for the first time. she tells harrow these people were living in each others pockets, the same phrase she'll later use to describe the two of them. pyrrha spent nearly 10,000 years locked in a drawer in gideon the first’s mind bc he couldn't bear to let her go. gideon tells harrow how they feel like strangers despite growing up together.

harrow cant stand the thought and in less than a month harrow will lock gideon in a drawer and gideon the first will relentlessly try to kill harrow in her waking hours to spare her the agony he'll never learn is closely parallel to his, and when she fails to hear his real name her brain starts bleeding:

And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”

“This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty. HTN chapter 20

g1deon was john’s oldest friend, he carried that suitcase in his loyalty to him. then he becomes an amnesiac, immortal thanergy void, absorbing and nullifying the echoes of that catastrophe. founding the cohort that flips planets in the exact mirror to the ecological tragedy they all sacrificed everything to spare earth from. over and over again.

He didn’t even ask me to explain. That was the kind of guy he was. He and I had grown up on the same street. I’d spotted him for mince pies all the time as kids, so stands to reason he let me cut off his arm and carried a nuke for me. John 1:20

in g+p’s room harrow says that theyre all the ninth house has ( = you’re all that i have). gideon firmly says shes "NO ONE'S son or daughter"

but in less than a year gideon’s mother, sitting opposite her father, will recognize pyrrha with a sense of profound relief before her revenant is unceremoniously killed. gideon will watch through harrows eyes, in hiding:

Harrow, I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live, or as long as I die. (…) It was the smile for your old cellmate who’d just landed back in prison, the one that told them at least you were in it together—or more correctly, the smile of someone stepping out of jail after serving a very long sentence, having seen someone there waiting for her. Someone whose presence meant total reprieve, someone she hadn’t expected. It was a little bit mocking. It was deeply relieved. HTN chapter 50

i don’t have a conclusion to this rn i’m just……much to think abt. the displacement of grief, the loyalty through control, how it just happens over and over and over again and they just bear witness as tools or trapped souls or revenants, clinging to anything they can even if they don’t remember it.

Every time I remember that Pyrrha has never seen Palamedes’s face I suddenly want to jump into a trash compactor.

palamedes sextus was so real for writing an insane sequel to a shitty erotica book on the walls of his fucked up little river bubble prison. nothing else going on in there, just the same awful romance novel on repeat 600 times and his own little silly headcanons scrawled all over the nearest surface. outside there’s a million screaming ghosts and the only way to stay sane is to hyperanalyze the same story for eight months. that’s literally exactly what it feels like. he gets it

Hey, question.

If we consider all of the ways that the cav and necro relationship is important in universe, would Harrow and Gideon in the beginning of GTN be considered a form of the fake dating trope?

tv “making this difficult” sally vs

book sally

tlt but JUST from ianthe’s perspective would be hilarious. you (necromancer) go to canaan house with your sister (who you trick people into thinking is a necromancer) and babs (your walking jerky stick). there’s a bunch of weird people and a hot nun but whatever. you sneak around and are Smart and u put things together. some people die, whatever, u get on with ur Sneaking and Smartness. you figure out how to become a lyctor (you have to kill babs). you kill babs, eat him (his soul), that’s all par for the course for you. and congrats, youre the first new lyctor in a myriad!!!!!! and then the rest of the weird people who are still alive decide to go and attack you about it. oh turns out ur predecessor has been hanging around, you get in a tussle and she slices off ur arm. ouchie. and she goes down at the hands of the hot nun so at least there’s something good going on. later you and the hot nun get picked up by god, u don’t know where ur sister is but hey! the hot nun is now ur built in bestie for the rest of ur eternal lives. but nooooo she’s depressed because her other nun friend went and died on a fence and boohoo she got ate just like babs. blegh. she asks you to crack her skull open which seems like a good time so you do, and now she owes you a favor and can’t remember the nun friend so things seem kinda dandy. and you get a sloppy lil makeout sesh later too. on ur all expenses paid vacay to god’s house his old friend/fuckbuddy takes you under his wing. swords suck because of ur arm but you get a front row seat to the most interesting and fucked up sitcom in history. the hot nun is There and yeah she might be having some brain issues but u get to play dress up with her and she also makes u a shiny new bone arm. u ALMOST get another kiss after god starts getting fucked in the dining room by two of his besties but the hot nun has it out for the other bestie that’s been trying to kill her for months so u don’t get to have that fun. eventually ur fight with a cosmic horror gets interrupted and the dead nun takes over the hot nun’s body and u witness the death of god. but he comes back and in quick succession he is out of besties and u saved his ass from mega hell. in the next few months you watch god fall into his newest depressed slut era but at least he makes u a new bestie out of the dead nun (who’s his kid?????) and her corpse, u guys even make friendship bracelets and have a handshake. u get to pilot babs’ corpse around on another planet and finally see ur sister again and kiss her on the lips through the jerky body. and the hot nun is back too!!!!! but some of those people from wayyyy back are still there and they take over the jerky body and u have to race them to god’s ex’s unbreakable tomb. and then god’s ex wakes up and beats ur ass and then gives the hot nun a sloppy kiss. what is a girl to do.

I hope Paul looks at Harrow someday - like if she ever gets to be genuinely happy and looks at someone with love softening her face - and asks her to do them a favor and look at them like she's trying to understand what they're talking about. More eyebrows. And then they say, "Good god, perfect. Do you know, I miss Nona terribly."

text (from the interview tamsyn did with tumblr):

I find all ships intriguing. I’ve spent too long in these mines. No ship is too problematic or cracky for me. My only hope is to out-fandom fandom by presenting them with ships more problematic and crack-filled than they do (I will not; fandom always wins). In these tiresome days where ship wars have been taking on airs, as is my understanding, of virtue versus sin (I don’t even know what Bakudeku is and yet I feel sorry for anyone who ships it; I didn’t ship Reylo because it wasn’t messed-up enough and feel the same), I hope the Locked Tomb fandom is just accepting that all shipping is batshit and every ship is just as bad as the next. Gideon x Harrow is just as bad as Teacher x Crux is as bad as Hot Sauce x Cytherea the First is as bad as Camilla x Juno Zeta is as bad as Silas x Every Asht Brother (actually, I wrote the Asht brothers in an unrelated piece that’ll never see the light of day and imo they’ve suffered enough, but). 

some of you should hear this again.

edit: i'm a campal, good lord, please be nice & polite abt campals on THIS post too. thank you very much.

every tlt au should have a harrow pov epilogue with abigail pent saying this isn't how it happened

tbh my favorite part about the drawer bread isn't even that harrow left it in a drawer. it's that her note said she left it in a drawer. at no point did she specify which drawer.

she really had gideon confined to their rooms and hunting for her dinner. enrichment for her enclosure.

the first chapter of alecto harrow wakes up in the mithraeum after fainting and throws up like an entire junk drawers worth of pen caps and erasers and cool looking rocks and alecto is just like. Dost Thou Mind…..I Saving Those…..

haphazard assortment of thoughts on the unwanted guest:

firstly, it really does have to be said—crazy good, probably my favourite of all the tlt short pieces, and i say that as someone who lost my mind over as yet unsent for like a week. excellent conceit and excellent execution, just a really gorgeous piece of writing. the play format of course reminds me of what abigail says to harrow in htn—that the river bubble is a ‘play [she’s] directing’—the inside of one’s head as a stage in which other actors can intervene & whereby mileage can be gotten out of Symbolism as immediately “real,” tangible presences that the kind of realist baggage that a more quotidian prose form would usher in would probably falter in accomplishing. it’s a lot!! i think even if i wasn’t already a tazmuir writing style defender (contra the insistence that she’s yknow homestuck fanfiction serial numbers filed off hack) then this would have had me floored anyway. 

the play format also works in the way that muir’s general dexterity in form and willingness to really make use of craft as a technical space where discourse can be generated always works—i’m talking about the ‘fanfictiony’ voice in gtn which manages to say something both about fanfiction and about the text itself, the use of the dramatis personae as a space where atmosphere can be established and plot points hinted towards (thus blurring the lines between what is and is not diegesis), the drastic shifts in style between different close thirds, the shifting from third- to second- to epistolary first-person, the use of poetry both diegetic and not (the noniad, the epigraph poems…), the mimicry of the ‘voice’ of the king james bible in the nona epilogue—she never stays in one place for too long and she never seems to stick to one central style or form, and it really works in her favour. insofar as tlt as a whole is a very ‘patchwork’ kind of work, building itself up from its big big index of references and intertexts and memes with hugely variant levels of ‘prestige’ or legitimacy attached to them, the ‘patchwork’ use of form really works in muir’s favour. however i am also fuming because i was right in the middle of writing a tlt fic which jumps into a play format two-thirds of the way through and now my idea doesn’t look ORIGINAL but ANYWAY—

& i really do need to flag my good friend vee’s mercy/augustine fic, which makes use of a similar conceit and pulls it off masterfully—i am deeply jealous of vee’s talent and i think the unwanted guest makes this piece (from 2021!) shine even more, if anything.

i am DYING to see where muir is going with the use of hamlet, of all things—dulcie quoting it to palamedes immediately catapulted my mind back to abigail’s reference to ‘that undiscovered country’ in htn. obviously muir likes to drop contemporary (or contemporarily canonical) references and turns of phrase all over the place, but the attention drawn to the quote as diegetically referential (“I like that. Is it from something?” / “Yes. It’s complicated.”) has me wondering about a) the survival of ‘pre-res’ literatures ~over the river and like WHY and b) what a thematic interlocking of tlt and hamlet can do, here…….real aveheads remember cytherea ophelia theory where i tried to use ophelia as a point of reference for teasing out some arguments about cytherea and death and aesthetics and white femininity and whatnot. all of which is to say i need to sit with this hamlet reading a lot more but i love it, i am so here for it.

of course ‘kissing or feeding, we can’t be sure’ calls to mind ‘how meat loves meat,’ alecto biting harrow’s mouth by way of a kiss…and the general thematic throughline of, you know, certain practices of love as practices of consumption, naberius later being figured as the ‘meat’ in question contains echoes of this eroticism which ofc guides the contours of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, eroticism as a currency of power, we know all of this stuff because it’s all over the text but i am just thumbs-upping it from the sidelines

the coffins had me thinking of utena’s black rose arc, which is a fun link to make considering the equivalent moment in the main body of nona is also referencing utena, ie. with the ‘rules’ of the duel being that cam has to get the handkerchief out of ianthe’s pocket as kind of an equivalent to skewering the rose. i feel like the tlt/utena overlap is pretty self-explanatory but it’s just fun to see the fingerprints all over lol

i think a lot of this was treading old ground thematically (erotics of consumption, dog motifs, we’ve seen it already!) but i will say that i did Yell Out Loud over ‘who's she got dawdling behind her but that creature—tugging visibly at her leash like an overeager dog.’ reminded of the other memorable use of ‘leash’—’even the devil bent for god to put a leash around her neck’—and, of course, the endless parade of commonalities between gideon & alecto. anyway there’s not really anything in this line that we didn’t already know about gid as a character, thematically speaking, but i point it out because it inflicted +100 psychic damage when i read it. gideon as a ‘creature’ is particularly slimy, & sort of puts me in mind of ianthe's tendency to talk about what appears to us as 'butch masculinity' (as opposed to the more effete masculinity of augustine or even babs) with a notably derogatory slant (the 'hurtful threats of sexual violence' line comes to mind); i don't know that i have much to say about it here specifically but it's an interesting one that i think informs the kirianthe dynamic pretty heavily (especially when held up against, like, harrianthe ... ianthe has a kind of respect for whatever harrow's gay and stupid gender is Doing (at least insofar as she can mould it to her own desires; i'm thinking of the dios apate forcefemme scene lol) in ways that i don't think she has for kiriona? but this is v off-topic, lol).

i have never been especially taken by dulcie as a character but i think this may finally have forced me to fold and admit that she’s great. her haters!!! her agonies!!! camilla would have to cook!! the balance between levity and sincerity was really well-managed. & i love the double meaning of “unwanted guest” as both palamedes intruding on ianthe’s mind palace and naberius setting up shop inside of her.

i need a week to sit with where this idea of the consumed soul as being literally ‘digested’ such that it can begin to ‘inhabit,’ however immaterially, the host body, or like to alter the characteristics of the host body such that to carry out such a consumption is to kind of kill yourself as well, slots in with lolita theory. or like, i need alecto right now. i am however reminded of chew, a short story that muir wrote in 2013, which also plays with these ideas of sexual assault as a forcing of a part of yourself meaningfully ‘into’ another person, and cannibalism as the reenactment of such a process, figured in the story as kind of a reclamation or at least an assertion of permanence—“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.”—which the unwanted guest seems to kind of, play with in reverse? i don’t know, but i’m interested—as ever—in where muir wants to take these ideas of rape and consumption and absorption that she’s got in her hands.

i keep returning to…i hesitate to say ‘parallels’ because i think that imposes a narrative onus that i’m not actually that convinced by, but these, like, commonalities between babs and gideon. gideon is played off against so many people (cristabel, loveday, alecto being the big ones) that it feels kind of inane to add another person to the pile, but like…they’re the two who get got in canaan house, they’re both ironically ‘false’ cavaliers and expressions of the ‘truest’ or most paradigmatic form that cavalierhood ‘can’/’should’ take, they both have unconventionally gendered names (‘babs’ is a shortened form of ‘barbara,’ it is a typically feminine name imo) and (by our standards) somewhat unconventional genders (gideon is butch, babs effete)—and of course the unwanted guest places a lot of emphasis on the coercive ‘making’ of cavalierhood (the reference to babs being ‘fixed’ were he to have a disability! ianthe’s glib ‘society really is to blame’ comment—ironic, obviously, but not wholly untrue) not dissimilar to the emphasis that gtn puts on cytherea moulding gideon into the state she comes to be in at the end. babs and gideon as the two possessed corpses in nona, obviously. two wildly diverse but ultimately converging trajectories! a dialectical tension between their fundamental ‘opposition’ (as by-the-book cavalier vs whatever gideon is doing) and their fundamental ‘sameness’ whereby the dialectic is resolved in their mutual deaths. also just, of course, continuing the throughline that muir has had going for a while now, of gender/gendering as a set of coercive enforcements loyal to a hegemonic structuring of the world.

that’s all i’ve got, i think. just. really good everyone say thank you tazmuir

something that is so important to me is that Gideon and Harrow are both extremely talented individuals with enviable skills and remarkable origins, and also complete and total girlfailures

Sorry I was just really busy thinking about how Gideon spent her entire brief life lusting after women in magazines because the only ones around her were elderly and/or treated her like garbage her entire life, only to enter a teenage death game where she was immediately overwhelmed into silence by the presence of real human women she was attracted to, some of whom it actually turns out were attracted to her in return, only because of everything going on and her own inexperience she barely spoke to them let alone touched them-- even seeing the girl she grew up alongside without face paint discomfited her-- and then died (for that girl!) a virgin at eighteen. But it's fine because she came back for a minute, and spent most of that time learning that her mother didn't love her and "confirming" that the girl she died for also didn't love her, featuring a jilted asshole who then became her only friend solely on the basis of them "both" having unrequited feelings for said girl, leading up to half a year of imperialism for the sake of the father she never knew, looking in vain for the love of her life, only to then be kissed by someone who looks just like her. So is it any surprise that she "did not respond;" that she didn't know how to kiss her back? Is it any surprise that she trembled? The expression on the corpse’s face could not have been more rigid with shock and disbelief-- The most shock and disbelief Gideon had ever felt was at the idea that a girl she loved could love her back, in any physical way. Except it wasn't her, actually, so Gideon just had to sit with this, alone, because not a single person around her cared about anything she might be feeling, as per usual, only solidifying the fact of her aloneness. But, yeah, please repeat whatever it is you just said to me I'm sure it's just as important.