Camilla was crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets. When she looked up, Nona was electrified. One of her eyes was a pale, pearlescent grey; the other one of her eyes was a deep, cool stone colour. Nona understood in a sudden shiver what she was looking at.
it’s so iconic and important to me that tamsyn muir saw andrew hussie create the concept of kismesissitude but then barely utilize it and went. hold my beer. and wrote the best most gut wrenching pitch romance possible.
jack noir and the black queen limped so that augustine and mercymorn could fucking fly
also the way kiriona/gideon reacts and withdraws when she sees cam and pal become paul. they are the love perfected by death. gideon was so mad in htn that harrow didn’t eat her because she couldn’t conceptualize that there could be a different way (harrow could not either, she didn’t have the time that cam and pal did to plan, instead of saying ‘no, there must be different way’ like them she just said ‘no.’) (no one could, not even god) — a kinder way, as pal said — but now it’s happened right before her eyes and she has to come to terms with that. at the end of htn gideon wondered if in death she and harrow would become harrowhark-and-gideon, gideon-and-harrowhark, and then months and months later after she has had her soul tied to a corpse alone she watches how in death cam and pal become cam-and-pal become paul, alive and new. and later in the tomb, when she yells at crux saying how dying is the only good he’ll ever do harrow, it’s the only thing any of the ninth ever knew how to give her, none of them knew how to live for her……how much of that is her berating the ninth, and how much of that is her berating herself. you know?
The way The Locked Tomb uses cannibalism is so interesting, because while it does serve as a metaphor for intimacy, the series only uses it that way when it’s cannibalism of the soul. Cannibalism of the flesh is either extremely limited, or straight up horrific.
Like step six of the Eightfold Word. It’s literally presented as “consume the flesh,” but Ianthe goes out of her way to specify that a single drop of blood is sufficient. The most unhinged act of intimacy in the series, and it’s explictly the soul and only the soul being digested.
Human flesh is only consumed in any volume twice: John’s post-apocalyptic survival cannibalism, and Harrow’s delicious murder soup. Both those scenes are exactly the opposite of intimate, and about as far from erotic as you can get.
John and Alecto gorging themselves on anonymous strangers was debasing to everyone involved, and not something John ever wanted to be reminded of. Harrow’s soup was a desperate attempt at self-defense, like an animal in a trap gnawing through her own leg. It horrified and disgusted everyone at the table, even Ianthe, the number one suspect at making it weird.
I love the overall effect of the layered symbolism, because it allows cannibalism to be explored both ways. Seperately, without one connotation implicating the other. Except for Babs, of course, who gets to be both.
you really gotta admire the craft of a poisonously catholic narrative that manages, nevertheless, to make a woman consuming a man NOT about sex OR birth OR communion
like what ianthe did to babs was absolutely fascinatingly unerotic AND profane. absolutely stunningly gross on every level. 10/10 writing. no idea how taz managed it.
if I had a nickel for every ship where one is tall and goofy (also died and came back) and the other is short and has catholic guilt, and one’s a redhead, and they investigate murders together, one of them had a lobotomy which resulted in them temporarily forgetting the other, well I’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice
Pyrrha Dve, to a teenager she met 5 minutes ago: so I know you’ve just had a lot of bombs dropped on you but you should know that my necromancer fucked your mom. Also, I fucked your mom.
necromancers in space unraveling the mystery of how tf there came to be necromancers in space (the answers WILL shock you!)(this is where the cows come in)(also the horrors of love)
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