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#yes this is about gideon the ninth
zombie-bait · 6 days
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i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it
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Fellas is it gay to give yourself a lobotomy to possibly preserve the soul of your one and only companion who died to save you? Asking for a friend
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gideon contemplates a career change and the fifth house reveals a secret past
part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4
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mindfogs · 6 months
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Manbun Griddle???? I feel like she would struggle getting her hair up
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Maybe Harrpw could help her like she did the face paint…?
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Maybe not…
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lulafia · 1 year
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The Saint of Duty.
Twitter
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ourg0dsal · 1 month
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Breaking news: One woman used the power of Pussy to turn The Emperor's Hands against their Kindly Prince, The Necrolord Prime.
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svenghouly · 2 months
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Here I am, just having my heart squeezed out of my eyes at the end of chapter 24 of gtn when Gideon is watching all the intimate cav/necro interactions and thinking about Harrow, but at the same time, I can’t help but imagine the whole preceding duel scene as a series of Pokémon battles.
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sofipitch · 8 months
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One of my favorite on going jokes in TLT is artifacts from the original Lyctors, saints from ten thousand years ago, are mostly meaningless nonsense, often bad sex jokes. They are just crude notes passed between friends made meaningful due to their age and what they tell you about the people that made them, just like the graffiti at Pompei or Victorian erotica
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nav-ix · 2 years
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not to draw conclusions that will probably immediately be disproven when I read nona, but I'm thinking a lot about the dynamic of the old lyctors compared to the people at canaan house
imo, this series seems to discuss the way that official and oppressive systems get turned human over time- how a harmful, twisted hierarchy (that of the necromancer and cavalier, for example) inevitably strays from the horrible trap it was designed to be (epitomized by mercy and augustine, who are still trapped within it). over time, people explore that framework, interpret it in their own ways, subvert it, turn it inside out. you get twisted versions of it, like silas and colum, but you also get new and wonderful versions of it, like abigail and magnus or cam and pal.
they didn't know what lyctorhood was designed to be! they didn't know how sinister "one flesh, one end" actually is. all they know is that they love each other, and that love kind of redefines what a necro-cav relationship COULD be, and what it is in so many instances. and the proof of that is that of ALL the houses that showed up at canaan house, none of them but ianthe would have gone through with lyctorhood.
did that mean the cavaliers were objectively worse at being cavaliers? maybe! but I think the series is arguing that love is what redefines those horrible traditions, and in light of those new definitions, the old traditions become flimsy by comparison. mercy and augustine are trapped. that's what being a lyctor means to them and it always will. but the story isn't written in stone yet for harrow and gideon, or for cam and pal! it's a tradition that has done violence to them, and they'll carry that forever. but beside that old and twisted tradition, someone like cam kind of stands out as an even more perfect cavalier than one who would see their entire purpose as sacrifice.
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weirdprophetess · 1 year
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once again just in love with how realistically tazmuir writes people especially since tlt is a totally off the rails with background lore sci-fi/fantasy series. specifically ianthe because i fucking hate her. shes a dick especially to my favorite character harrow and id fucking kill her if i could but also godDAMMIT shes funny. when everybody finds out protiselaus has been dead the whole time and theyre examining his severed head she makes a head pun. when the spaceship shes on is being attacked by unstoppable planet soul monsters she says choke me daddy. when she enlists the old dude shes been sucking up to to help harrow murder one of his friends and he starts making out with god and another one of his friends on the table of the dinner party they arranged specifically so he could do that shes like old people should be shot. in each of these instances and more ive had to stop reading to feel indescribable rage because NO you fucking suck at no point should i be actively reminding myself of that the hatred should just be there but i just have to excuse her antics for a scene because the unfortunate truth is that ianthe tridentarius is a bitch but shes also a comedy gold mine
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syl-stormblessed · 1 year
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So I have been having some. ahem. thoughts and feelings about Anastasia and Samael since Nona came out, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why John killed Samael. I think that after obsessing over this I may??have connected some major dots. please correct me if i’m wrong on anything, but I am currently convinced I’ve figured something out. also please forgive me if it’s incomprehensible. but this is the locked tomb nothing can make too much sense
Nona spoilers ahead
short TLDR, in case you don’t want to read the whole thing: Anastasia & Samael would have merged their souls together and become a being like Paul. John killed Samael because he thought of the synthesis like Nona did at first, believing that they would both die, rather than create a new life made up of 2 souls, and he would rather lose one of them than both.
After finishing Nona the Ninth, I’ve been thinking a lot about Anastasia. Specifically, the fact that Anastasia never achieved Lyctorhood. From Harrow the Ninth, we know that Anastasia did extensive research on Lyctorhood, and the only person allowed to watch her attempt was John. And John kills Samael, resulting in Anastasia never becoming a Lyctor. However, Nona the Ninth revealed that John and Alecto’s Perfect Lyctorhood only worked because Alecto was Earth’s Resurrection Beast, and John couldn’t completely exchange their souls. Alecto held too much power, so even after John had consumed a massive amount of her soul, there was enough left of Alecto that she could still live. This implies that Perfect Lyctorhood, at least as we perceived it before Nona, isn’t possible with two normal people who have two normal souls. Alecto was simply made up of billions of souls. This means that what Anastasia and Samael almost did couldn’t have been Perfect Lyctorhood. Meaning that John didn’t kill Samael to cover up the fact that he lied about Perfect Lyctorhood. Because he didn’t lie about that, specifically. So the question remains: Why, exactly, did John kill Samael?
In Harrow the Ninth, John says, “She panicked midway through. She hadn’t got his soul inside her all the way—if she had, Samael dying would have killed her too…They were both in danger.” This is immediately questioned by Augustine, and for good reason: It’s total bullshit. We already know that panic and other intense emotions don't cause a failure of the Lyctoral process. At the end of Gideon the Ninth, Harrow flat out rejects the Lyctoral process after Gideon falls on the fence. During that scene, Harrow gave us the iconic “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it,” because she was already so consumed by her grief. She actively tried not to become a Lyctor, yet she still did. She even begged John for Gideon’s life back. And we know that Harrow did do the process correctly. When she tells John she misapprehended the process, John says “I don’t believe you did, Harrowhark.” We know that it was actually her homebrew lobotomy that messed with her consuming Gideon’s soul, not her own feelings of distress and panic. We also have Augustine’s story. While talking about Anastasia in Act V, he says “It didn’t make sense that I became a Lyctor under scrambling pressure and did it right, and that Anastasia screwed up in laboratory conditions.” Just from knowing about Harrow & Gideon and Augustine & Alfred, we know that John was full of shit when he said that Anastasia’s panic was why he had to kill Samael. Intense emotions and “scrambling pressure” aren’t enough to fail the Lyctoral process. So we know that John didn’t kill him because of Anastasia’s panic, like he said.
So why did he kill Samael, then? That’s where Paul comes in. During that same conversation in Act V of Harrow, John says “[Anastasia] learned the trick was to do the Eightfold slower—more methodically...” And now that Nona has been released, we have an example of the Eightfold being executed slower and more methodically—the creation of Paul. Let’s go back to Gideon for a second. When Gideon fell on the fence, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on by necessity. They both would have died if she hadn’t sacrificed herself and forced Harrow to consume her soul. It was not a premeditated decision, they had never considered actually going through the process. There was no viable option other than the Eightfold. It happened in a split second, and Harrow consumed Gideon quickly, resulting in regular Lyctorhood. Now back to Nona. When Camilla and Palamedes merge their souls together, they are both entirely confident in their decision. Palamedes offers Camilla a chance to say no, and instead she says “My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes.” Their decision is in a much more controlled environment, and both of them are entirely sure of what they are doing. And then they actually begin the process, which is much slower and more methodical. Every action seems to have a purpose, whereas Harrow & Gideon scrambled and panicked. Nona observes that “Nothing particularly interesting happened, until Camilla burst into flames.” For Nona to have noted that nothing of interest happened, it’s safe to assume that at least five to ten seconds passed before Camilla combusted, meaning it was a much slower process than that of Harrow & Gideon. Even without Nona’s observation, the process was much slower and well thought out. And the result of the slower process? A fusion, or synthesis, between Camilla & Palamedes—what I’m going to call “True Lyctorhood.” And if Anastasia realized the secret to Lyctorhood was to do the Eightfold slowly, she would have had the same results with Samael as Camilla & Palamedes. Their souls should have combined, and they should have achieved True Lyctorhood. This is where John’s words start to have a little tiny sliver of truth. When he says that Anastasia & Samael would have both died, he wasn’t entirely lying, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either. Nona struggles with seeing Paul as both Cam & Pal because she thinks of them as dead. She’ll never see either of them again, but she has a harder time realizing that they both still live on in Paul. I think that John was able to see that Anastasia & Samael would have merged their souls had they continued, and he could only view it as the death of them both, rather than a new life made up of two souls. So he chose the option that looked most favorable to him, and he killed only one of them, rather than lose them both.
Now, you may be asking, how do we know that Camilla & Palamedes did the same thing as Anastasia & Samael? That’s where Cassiopeia comes in (and some speculation). Again, in Act V of Harrow, Augustine says “I knew [Anastasia] was working closely with Cassiopeia.” Cassiopeia was helping Anastasia research Lyctorhood, so she would have had access to all Anastasia’s notes and research. And the Sixth House are scholars, Cassy would never get rid of information as big as an alternate form of Lyctorhood. Cassiopeia would have stored her information somewhere, and if she didn’t make it accessible to the house as a whole, she could have put it in the instructions she left. Either way, her and Anastasia’s research would not have been lost, and it would have had a clear tie with the Sixth House. And as Warden and Cavalier Primary of the Sixth, Camilla & Palamedes would have had some sort of access to this research, and would have known that such a thing was possible.
So where does that leave Anastasia & Samael? It means that they, had John not intervened, would have achieved True Lyctorhood and completely merged their souls. We know that John was full of shit, Anastasia’s panic couldn’t have been his reason. We have already seen successful executions of the Eightfold while both people are under extreme stress—or even actively trying not to become a Lyctor. We know the process executed by Camilla & Palamedes was similar to, if not exactly the same as, the process that Anastasia attempted. And we know that they would have had some kind of access to the research done by her and Cassiopeia. So. John saw that Anastasia and Samael would have merged and achieved True Lyctorhood, and he killed Samael because he would rather lose one of them than both of them, even though, had they continued, neither of them would have actually died.
Anyways. I have so many thoughts about Anastasia and Samael. why is this relevant to the locked tomb going forward? if I’m being totally honest, I have no idea. it’s important to me though. if you even care.
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yuck-pfaugh · 1 year
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Insomniac thoughts about consistency of characterisation pre- and post-Resurrection, surfacing mid-morning because I couldn’t cope with the post editor in the iOS app at a quarter to three… *ahem*
My impression is that Jod and most of his OG duplicitous sluts were in their thirties, up to fortyish, at the time it was all going down. Old enough for some of them to have multiple tertiary degrees and be leaders in their fields; not quite older adults yet. In HtN Augustine tells us Pyrrha (the “stone-cold fox”) was ten years his senior, so probably in her late forties or fiftyish. In NtN:
I didn't have to worry about the public or the media — we had a pet cop, P—. She'd made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD. Knew G— from way back, and G– and I were both hometown boys, so P– kept the heat down for us.
Later on Jod reiterates that he and G— grew up on the same street.
We also hear that P— “adored being a cop”.
This is of course off-putting for a lot of readers. But I understand that the New Zealand police, while by no means a squad of saints, are not abusive and murderous on the same level as the American kind we may be more familiar with (e.g. they don’t normally carry guns). So I’m fairly sure what we’ve got here is a character who might actually have been a good cop, in a country in which that concept is not implausible beyond belief — who then, crucially, turns her back on the law (and on her own successful career) to protect the kids from her neighbourhood. Because that was what it was about for her all along.
I don’t think the Dad Pyrrha we love to see is separable from Cop Pyrrha. I think in each life she lives her priority is to look after and protect her people, and she does that in specifically masculine-coded, paternal-coded ways. The Pyrrha we get in NtN is — as with the other Lyctors we know, charming Augustine becoming a man of plex, reproductive justice advocate Mercymorn stealing semen, dutiful Gideon obeying even the command to launch multiple violent murder attempts against a tiny traumatised teenager — someone whose best qualities have been worn out and warped by too many centuries of Jod’s unliving, undying empire. But, perhaps because Pyrrha was awake and aware for less time than the rest, that kind of love does palpably linger on in her.
Pyrrha practically stumbled away — she dropped to her knees before the chair and Palamedes — she reached out and took Palamedes's hand, and then Camilla's. Her face and hands showed only dumb despair. "I've loved you two," she said. "Not well. Not even wholesomely. I don't have it in me. But I've loved you — in a better world I'd be able to say, 'Like you were my own,' but I don't know what that would even mean anymore. You've been my agents ... you've been stand-ins for something I haven't had for longer than either of you can understand."
You can feel it every time she bribes Nona into eating, or carries her when her legs fail, or buys a birthday present and hides it away under the sink for the big day. (And when she looks at her lover's daughter with that mute hunger to have been a parent to her, too.) It’s a feature of the system Jod designed, that Lyctors don’t get much of a chance to love anyone but him. His hands, his gestures… raised by him, bound to him, renamed by him… God must be able to touch all of creation... He’s the epitome of the kind of parent who can’t imagine or allow their child to have an existence apart from their own, who’d rather stunt them than let them grow. He claimed Kiriona as his child, but he also made her his construct. And we know what he did to Alecto. But six months with Pyrrha (and the Sixth, likewise good at modeling love) and Nona just blossoms. The betrayed soul of a murdered planet has learnt anger management techniques — and now she’s learning to dance.
It seems as though at every step of Pyrrha’s story (and, just to confirm, I shall be going on a bloody rampage if we don't get the missing pieces in AtN) she knows she can’t save everyone and get everything right. Sometimes she can't save anyone at all. She has often been a casualty of her devotion. But she keeps on and on still trying, also like the Sixth, to make the best and kindest and truest choices she can in this myriadic shit sandwich. And she never stops loving the people she loves. Wouldn't know how to.
In conclusion… since I should probably conclude something… let's see. Whatever she thinks of herself, Pyrrha’s a good dad. Her accidental agents are lucky to have had those six months with her. It's not ‘playing’ house if the love there is real. And you can’t take ‘loved’ away.
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15-lizards · 7 months
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Trying to keep up with The Nine Houses beef
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nonasbirthday · 1 year
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it took me a long time to realize that when Harrow said “death first to vultures and scavengers” in Gideon the Ninth she was referring to, like, vile opportunists. bc i read that line and was like :/ why do the vultures and scavengers need to die :/ they’re just little guys :// important to the ecosystem :/ not hurting anyone!! you’re gonna kill the helpful little guys first?? what is Harrow trying to say here, idgi
but i forgot that not everyone might have such positive associations with. vultures
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stracciatellino · 3 months
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Okay, it's Nona Time!
I am now thoroughly impressed with Tamsyn for managing to write three books that feel so different to read yet all clearly build on the same narrative. It's a really hard needle to thread as a writer and so far she did it perfectly. I'm definitely having a bit of the same "wtf is going on" experience that I had at the beginning of HtN (though not as much) but at the same time there's the satisfaction of catching up with characters I'd been wanting to see more of for a long time, and understanding some elements of the political situation that thus far had only been teased.
So, before everything else, let's talk about the John chapters (the Gospel of John Gaius?). The first one dropped on me like a nuclear bomb. "There they go, John" absolutely broke me. Like, okay. If John is doing everything he's doing as a way to get back at the billionaires who stole his research and cut him off when he was trying to use it to save all of humanity... I get it. He's wrong, of course. Even if the outlying planets were settled by those billionaires aeons ago, it's not their distant descendants' fault. It's a bit like the same energy as the leftist edgelords who call any white person today a colonizer - that's just not how it works. But still, I get it. He was there. He saw it happen. I don't think it's the kind of thing you can ever get over. So yeah, immediately there's a whole new layer of tragedy to him.
I was also hoping for an explanation for how he became a necromancer, but so far the explanation seems to be "it just happened one day"? I'm sure there has to be more of an explanation to it, but I'm dying to get to it. The other thing I'm dying to find out is who he's really talking to. He calls her Harrow, and even Moira Quirk has begun to give her Harrow's voice, but the things they say to each other only make sense if it's Alecto. "You were sick", "is that when you hurt me?" - all that in connection to the events of the resurrection? Unless we're building to the reveal that Harrow was Alecto all along (which raises... interesting implications to say the least), I'm not sure what to make of it. Oh well. I'm sure Tamsyn knows what she's doing!
Now we come to Nona and her awesome parents. What a wonderful rep for nontraditional families! Three parents, two in bodies of the opposite gender, two sharing a body with each other like the other one (who's also 10000 years old) used to before their "other half" died. What more can a child ask for?? I'm gonna briefly take credit for calling the fact that Camilla and Palamedes had worked out a way to share her body at the end of HtN (I don't remember if I brought it up here but @mayasaura and @monstrousgourmandizingcats can confirm). Looks like it's not quite True Lyctorhood, which was my initial guess, but instead Pal has to only come out briefly or he'll start consuming Cam. Not ideal, but way better than I expected for him when he blew himself to bits in Canaan House all these millennia ago. Him and Cal are now forever together yet forever apart... A beautiful and tragic conclusion to the unique and compelling bond they've shared and share. Although who knows if it's really the conclusion, I still have 1.8 books left to see how things go from there.
And now we get to Nona. Oh, sweet Nona... She is too pure for the rotten, dying world she lives in, and frankly Pyrrha is right that they probably should try to get her off world. As much as Palamedes has proven time and time again he's not to be underestimated (most recently by apparently singlehandedly -heh- orchestrating the mass defection of his entire House, which has to be a HISTORIC loss for the empire and maybe even the beginning of the end) even he has to know his limits eventually. He can't possibly save everyone, so he probably should focus on saving those he can. But anyway, I love Nona for finding joy and beauty in all the little things, and since I was an autistic kid I can relate to an awful lot of her sensory issues. She's so valid and if anything happens to her I'll be devastated.
But that being the case... who is she? So far all evidence points to her body being Harrow's (including the sensory issues around food, but also her hair color and the fact that Pyrrha had her before she ran into Cam and Pal). So Cam, Pal and Pyrrha must be acting on the assumption that her soul is either Harrow or Gideon's (hence why they're testing her necromantic and swordfighting abilities). But if she woke up suddenly with no memories, then for all intents and purposes she is a new person, and fully bringing her back as Harrow or Gideon would still mean Nona is gone. Alas, it's hard to see how all three of them can survive... And so far all of Tamsyn's protagonists have ended up dead at the end of their book, so I'm afraid this book's ending will break my heart AGAIN. Yeesh.
On a final note, I really love the worldbuilding in this book. One of the criticisms I've heard of GtN and HtN was that the worldbuilding was a little minimalistic, focusing on small secluded areas with only minimal connections to the outside world. While I don't think it was a flaw at all, and in fact served the stories of those books perfectly, I do love we are now getting a glimpse of a much larger world now. A world where ordinary people to the best to survive while war rages on around them. Reading some of the descriptions of shooting in the streets, of decaying infrastructure and social chaos, I couldn't help but thinking about the people of Ukraine, Gaza and many other places who must be experiencing these things every day. War is hell. It's hard to say exactly who's at fault for what here: John is a ruthless autocrat who seems to practice ethnic cleansing on a cosmic scale, but BOE (or at least the new branch of BOE that took over after We Suffer, who seemed like a decent person, fell out of favor) don't seem to give a shit about letting the people they're supposedly fighting for get slaughtered. Oh and also, it looks like a Resurrection Beast is slowly manifesting above them? That can't be good.
As usual there's so much more I could say, but mainly I just want to keep reading. This is such a gripping story and I can't wait to find out more, even if I know I'm probably in for more punches in the gut.
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sweaterregrets · 1 year
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✨💕who will you romance?💕✨
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parasocialite · 1 year
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But your honour, I love her.
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