palamedes and harrow being literally best friends and harrow not realizing it and thinking they are hateful rivals because she has no idea what its like to have friends at all is something that can be so personal to me
john gaius is literally the most character ever. im just so fascinated by him going from a person who wants to save everyone, absolutley everyone and fuck all the triollionares who only want to save themselves, and how he becomes what we know him in HtN to be: callous and cruel and manipulative and the leader of a fascist murdering endlessly expanding death cult. he’s a god but he used to be a man – and as augustine said, whereithal did that transition happen?
i love that palamades is extremely smart and observant and careful EXCEPT when he is down bad and wanting. the man figured out perfect lyctorhood AND managed to get through gideon’s 37 emotional layers of defensive deflections, but could not tell that the woman who he was in love with, who had been exchanging letters with for over 10 years, had been replaced with a stranger. love that for him.
John: I’d like to have sex one more time with my cavalier/wife who passed away from me putting her down for rabies 9000 years ago. My body yearns for hers. The ultimate downside to finding “the one” is she may die young and leave you wanting.
Harrowhark: I also choose this guy’s dead cavalier.
People keep being like “If you liked Gideon the Ninth, try this other book about lesbians and space and empires!” And some of those books are very good but what the recommenders seem not to grasp is that Gideon the Ninth is fun to read. Even funny. If I want space adventures, I can go to any sci fi book from the past century or so. If I want to see lesbians, I can just go on Instagram. If I want to see an empire brutally attempting to maintain its stranglehold on those it oppresses, I don’t need to go anywhere. What I want, and do not get, is, “I did offer him a stupendous work of a titty nature, and he got offended.”
Laying on my bed weeping over the role of the Noniad in HtN… the love and care and passion of a poet being strong enough to summon the spirit he idolizes… the fact that Harrow considers the Noniad a joke and then is the one to recite it at the end… the fact that the poem not only constrains Nonius’ spirit to verse but changes the very rules of the dream… that Nonius’ appearance is the deciding factor in the fight against the Sleeper… as a poet and a writer I am incoherent over this love letter to art and how it can save you
Okay but what’s it like to be Cam or Pal right now? You know Harrow, and you care about her. You don’t love her, not really, but she’s a friend, and you’ve fought by her side, and maybe you feel like you owe her.
And you know Gideon. You like Gideon, it’s hard not to. You don’t accept her death, that’s why you don’t leave her body behind at canaan house. you rejoice over her survival. But you don’t love her either.
Then you meet Nona. In Harrow’s body, with Gideon’s eyes. I imagine at first you pray this resolves itself soon, that she gets her memories back and reveals herself to be Gideon, or Harrow, or both. But she doesn’t. And she becomes a part of your family. And she loves you. And you love her.
What happens then? Do you still pray one day you wake up and Harrow/Gideon are back? Or do you start dreading that day? Maybe you hope it’s amnesia, and that when her memory comes back she still gets to keep all of Nona. Do you try not to think about it?
What’s it like to be Pyrrha? You barely brushed past Gideon Nav, and at most you caught some glimpses of Harrowhark. You don’t love them. You love Nona.
thing about the locked tomb that really resonates is that the apocalypse has both happened already and is still happening. the worst (annihilation of natural life on earth) has happened and is happening (genocide, enslavement, mass migration of dispossessed and traumatised asylum seekers). the is relevant to us all living in the midst of climate crisis but also particularly to those living in colonised countries. t muir is a kiwi and as an australian, living in a place your ancestors invaded and stole, living in a place you are in the process of killing, living in the edges of an empire of expanding death? it’s been apocalypse for centuries, for indigenous people.
capital and empire are the opposite of organic life, and taz does a good job of embedding that in the books without ever saying it outright.
ALT
