the locked tomb series is really like. maybe love doesn’t conquer all. maybe love is not pure and good and holy. maybe love is not a white dove come to save you from yourself. maybe it won’t fix you. maybe it’ll make everything worse. maybe love is dirty and ugly and terrifying and awful. maybe it’ll kill you. maybe it’ll warp you into something unrecognizable. maybe love is a parasite and by the time you realize it’s there, it’s too late to tear it out of you, no matter how badly you might want to. maybe it’s a cordiceps fungus, tangled up in your nerves, making you do things you’d never ordinarily do. maybe love is a dog with its jaw locked on your arm. maybe love is an angry ghost. maybe love is a brain hemorrhage, a seizure, two weeks of sleeplessness and cracking open your own tibia unanesthetized in a bathroom. maybe it’s the ocean you’ll drown in. maybe it’s poison. maybe it’s scary and filthy and difficult and bad for you.
so what now? are you going to stop? are you even going to try?
thinking abt the subtle yet overwhelming body horror and dysphoria present in Nona the Ninth. I’m not even talking about Ianthe piloting around Naberius’s corpse or Kiriona’s whole. thing.
it’s the subtler shit. imagine you’re Pyrrha. you’re lying awake in bed on a doomed wasteland of a planet and you’re in your dead best friend’s body. in the next room is a kid, and you have no idea who she actually is. she eats pencils and she’s physically weak but when she’s mad she will break her own bones over and over just to communicate her rage. you kind of have feelings for two people living in the same body, and that very situation is killing that very body. You shave your dead best friend’s face every day. You will never have your own body back.