thinking of what an oopsie making ianthe tridentarius a lyctor has to be. john you made your best friends / lovers / coworkers become lyctors and they hate(d) your guts literally so much. you found this woman on craigslist
thinking of what an oopsie making ianthe tridentarius a lyctor has to be. john you made your best friends / lovers / coworkers become lyctors and they hate(d) your guts literally so much. you found this woman on craigslist
WHY would you leave these golden comments in the tags, op
Tags on this post are great! OP’s really hammer it home but other people get it so well also
I’m absolutely obsessed with the idea that Ianthe is playing the long con. It’s the only thing that makes sense. She sees John, God of her known world, without any allies at the end of HtN. And what does she do? SHE MAKES THAT GUY OWE HER! this is so devastating for him, the only thing she’s loyal to is herself and Coronabeth… she’s gonna pretend she’s loyal and all to him but like yeah Jod, you tell some people they have to consume a soul and shove it into their heart as fuel and they’re actually not gonna care too much about the morality of it! Especially considering how Babs was kinda a model cavalier as that position got more rules and norms about it; he was absolutely subservient and loyal to the twins but makes no other personal attachments… unlike literally all of the other necrocavs we see…. (Yes he does resist after his Death but I really think that has to more with Ianthe drowning in unknowns and a lack of her own confidence, bc the weird replacement arm is not her arm) Ianthe’s consumption of Babs is just a whole affront to Jod’s actual original design for loyal lyctors. His whole shtick is that his lyctors went through unfathomable grief and so became dependent on him… Ianthe is at this point, using Jod to get ahead.
ianthe “some people will do anything to get … a head” tridentarius
I am thinking again about when John says “if you abandon something, you have no more right to act as if you own it”. and at first I assumed he was talking about Blood Of Eden, which I think he is, but I also think he is talking about himself. and Harrow.
John tells Harrow this immediately after he learns of her parents’ genocide. he assures her that he will shepard her dead 200; he will remember them until and long after dominicus has burnt away. John isn’t JUST talking about Harrow’s dead 200. he’s talking about the dead 10 billion and every single person that dies as a sacrifice to his empire’s expansion. he’s justifying his own crimes by saying as long as he remembers them, as long as he does not percieve himself abandoning them, he still has right to own them, use them, burn them as the battery of his empire. and he’s telling Harrow that she can do the same.
I think some often-overlooked context for gideon’s sacrifice at the end of GTN is that, if gideon survives, harrow asked her to return to drearburh.
of course, harrow’s plan of I’ll-hold-the-lyctor-off-you-and-cam-jump-into-the-sea is dogshit, not going to work etc. of course gideon is a perpetual Good Girl, a butch in shining armor–she’s a saint. she’s jesus christ. I don’t mean at all to undermine her selflessness, but in her panic i can’t help but think the threat of the ninth house made the choice much simpler.
let’s go back to the beginning of GTN to the amalgam of everybody’s worst hometown:
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gideon the ninth, chapter 1
gideon’s entire life has been a series of escape attempts. in canaan house her relationship to harrow undergoes a metamorphosis, but behind her is eighteen years of trying–relentlessly–to run from a cold dark place that she is beholden to. (whenever beholden comes up in this series at least 8 alarms go off in my head and i drop whatever i’m holding).
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gideon the ninth, chapter 4
I think aiglamene understands drearburh is inherently soul-killing in a way that harrow does not. harrow genuinely loves her house (which, to her, is the Tomb). gideon was never allowed to love the ninth house–it rejected her at every opportunity. harrow, however, threw herself into it wholesale. she had nothing else.
skip to the pool scene. harrow receives absolution and a emotionally charged tender forehead kiss (top 10 lesbian baptisms of all time). they are finally on the same side, out from under drearburh’s shadow. they can trust each other. then harrow, with her seventeen years of pining, obsession, and isolation, asks gideon something truly fucking awful:
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gideon the ninth, chapter 35
in harrow’s mind, the locked tomb (specifically) has served as her reprieve. it is The Thing For Which She Suffers It All, and so it must be good. harrow sees herself as the thing that poisoned gideon, because she IS the ninth house, and she hates herself. I genuinely don’t think harrow understands the depth of cruelty in this ask at all. in harrow’s mind she is saving gideon and protecting The Body.
and as cytherea bears down on them, harrow reminds her:
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gideon the ninth, chapter 37
if harrow sacrifices herself, gideon owes her AND gets abandoned. gideon has to go back and protect the tomb, back to a life she could not bear long before she had ever seen the sea and the sky, before kind-hearted house scions and princesses with swords. the chains would be slapped on. gideon would not get out twice. not even in a box.
gideon can die neatly and heroically, like a protagonist in a comic book—she can save harrow, save camilla, get vengeance for lost friends, carry out the last wish of jeanmarry and isaac, who she so badly let down—or she can live and return to drearburh.
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gideon the ninth, chapter 37
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gideon the ninth, chapter 37 (final line before the epilogue in harrow’s POV).
you’re harrow nonagesimus. you hate yourself and you love your house. you are your house and are a warcrime. you despise the sight of your unpainted face and you are in love with a corpse who looks a lot like you
Tamsyn Muir probably doesn’t need a lot of introduction here on Tumblr, but for those who aren’t yet familiar with her work: Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Series. Her fiction has won the Locus and Crawford awards. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.
We asked Tamsyn some questions about Nona the Ninth, the next installment of the Locked Tomb series, which comes out on September 13. (Mild spoilers ahead. You have been warned!)
Can you tell us about Nona the Ninth? How would you contextualize it alongside the previous Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth?
The Locked Tomb has always followed a concrete set of rules about whose point of view we’re in—there’s a priority list and a hard if-and-else-if set of codes about who is telling the tale. The priority character is always Gideon Nav herself, but after Gideon the Ninth, in many ways, she gets knocked out of the ring.
Nona is the next rule on the priority list—the next storyteller. Except there are also a bunch of other storytellers popping up in the priority list as she lets her guard down. That’s kind of one curtain I wanted to pull back on The Locked Tomb as a whole. Who’s telling this story? What is the truth as someone else understands it? Which is why, where the last two books have been told very much from the perspectives of the Nine Houses, we’re finally in a setting where the Houses have pulled back, and the truth told is completely different.
You have a knack for approaching the next part of the story from a completely different vantage point, which is deliciously frustrating for the reader. Why do you think this works so well (when really, it sort of shouldn’t)?
Oh, but it does, and it’s been proved to work—just play an RPG! One thing I passionately loved in Final Fantasy IX, my very favourite Final Fantasy at the end of the day, is that one moment you’re with the thief-turned-thespian Zidane and a wonderfully dashing attempt to kidnap a princess in the middle of a theater performance—then you’re with…some very bizarre kid called Vivi…who has lost his ticket and is getting negged by a horrifying rat child. You’re given a completely different lens on a completely different situation in what’s basically a completely different genre. In the same game! There’s a risk of getting too comfortable in someone’s truth—you might want to settle down in a character whom you have learned to understand. But then you have to practice a very radical empathy in settling down in Nona, who just absolutely does not give a shit about swords or empire and, at her worst, can be quite an irritating, materialistic babe in the woods who is WAY too into dogs. Of course it’s alienating. If the experience of being in Gideon’s head was the same as being in Harrow’s as being in Nona’s, there wouldn’t be any point. If different vantage points didn’t work, A Song of Ice and Fire would never have gotten off the ground. Hell, neither would The Iliad. I just sit longer with my vantage point.
After writing foul-mouthed and horny Gideon and acerbic, memory-challenged, and also horny Harrow, how did you approach writing Nona’s character, and what did you enjoy most about the process?
Harrow would hate that you described her as horny. Gideon would be fine with being described as horny. Nona would love to sit you down and talk about all the things that make her horny, at the end of which you are 50% worried that she doesn’t honestly understand ‘horny,’ and 50% worried that she DOES understand ‘horny.’
Nona is my character who doesn’t give a fuck. Gideon and Harrow both give too many. It was fun to write a character who sincerely seeks out love as she understands it, who has a large collection of friends and interests, and has no ambition. And yet what I really enjoyed is that Nona is easily also the most terrifying POV character of the series.
We meet some old friends in a new place in Nona. What aspect of the familiar characters meeting the unfamiliar world was the most fun to write?
Honestly, the fact that they’re in such a different milieu was fun enough. One is a woman completely out of time, trying to find something to live for; two are dyed-in-the-wool Housers forced to re-examine values they’ve always taken for granted and what the next part of life after death is going to look like for them. All three are fish out of water. And then there’s actually the reader meeting the familiar after two long books about the unfamiliar, and all the ways I hope that’s entirely weird and recontextualizing. And then, for Nona, what’s familiar to us is entirely unfamiliar to her. Writing Nona was like one long experiment with jamais vu.
a quick observation from how far I’m into yet another reread of harrow the ninth (…don’t look at me):
in the first fight between augustine and mercy that harrow overhears, early in her time on the haunted fucking space station, I think there’s actually a huge piece of foreshadowing to what happens at the end of the book. at one point in that conversation, what seems to be happening if you read between the lines (since harrow can only hear them)
is that after augustine threatens her – to ‘tell daddy’, which is maybe the most cursed way he could have phrased it, good job fhsfkas – mercy tries to pull the same trick she’ll use against john at the end of the book and starts to cry in order for augustine to let his guard down and let her close enough to kill or disable him with her superanatomist powers. except that unlike john, augustine actually knows her far too well to fall for it hahaha. (we don’t realize exactly how well he probably read her intentions like a book there until we get to see her employ exactly the tactic he’s narrating with john later, which is somehow so delightful to me)
this also lends a weight/adds a certain something to how quickly he realizes what she’s about to do at the end, when he begs her not to. like he also says in this conversation, she doesn’t have that many different tricks at the end of the day; in my mind she’s kind of a scalpel of a person – sharp as fuck, but her repertoire also mostly comes down to cutting when you get right down to it lol. (*sigh* I love her immeasurably, what a character) in addition augustine turns out to be completely, distressingly right, if a HUGE asshole about it as is his wont, when he says john is going to be willing to forgive him and not mercy. so much shit gets set up/foreshadowed around this point in the book even aside from the main plot stuff, it’s wild. I also keep coming back to the fact that augustine realizes someone’s messing with cytherea’s body – he thinks it’s mercy doing it, and tells her to stop it both here and after the threesome. which means god is either an idiot, pretending to be an idiot, or actively covering for someone or something and not too picky about who he has to gaslight along the way, since he’s so adamant the body hasn’t been moved. (we get another example of mercy being the least favorite child in the process too – he says g1deon wouldn’t mess with cytherea’s body out of respect (cue pyrrha in the background going ‘rip my necromancer but I’m different’), augustine wouldn’t do so out of love… and mercy wouldn’t out of superstition fhskjfsda. forget necromancy, the river, or the nine houses, john’s real domain is passive aggressiiveness)
thinking about how
augustine puts all the blame for what happened to alfred on cristabel and by extension
mercy, because if he didn’t direct all his anger that way he’d have to be angry
with john……… and even, most painfully and fraught of all, with alfred
himself. and that is so deeply incompatible both with his devotion and loyalty
and love and with his immense eternal-life-long guilt. (it somehow feels like
there’s something alike here to the dynamic that happened between harrow and
gideon after the suicide of harrow’s parents to me – the trauma-weight
shifting blame and guilt and responsibility around to wherever will hold it
when it’s too painful to look at straight on – though I can’t actually explain
it properly yet, and in that situation there wasn’t also a notorious deific gaslighter involved to intentionally muddy things up even further over centuries lmao). augustine is definitely not a reliable narrator of what
happened back then because of all of this, but notably mercy never really
defends cristabel against this particular accusation of being the instigator of
the suicide pact either, for all that she clearly loved her immeasurably and
will fiercely defend her against any other criticism. so it appears they’re
more or less in agreement about what happened back then, they only
differ in what they think it means? I don’t know honestly haha I have only
Vibes here and from the outside it’s of course easier to spot that at the end of the day the real blame lies with john and the system of empire he set up around him anyway.
there’s also a really
interesting contrast between mercy and augustine in how they relate to their
cavaliers in the now – mercy sort of keeps cristabel alive, she keeps bringing
her up in conversation, makes idle observations about what she might think of
things; to her cristabel seems to be very much still present even in her
absence. meanwhile augustine, during the divine threesome dinner party (I love
these books), describes being prompted to talk more about alfred and what
happened back then as ‘oh very well, then, just dig him back up’, like he
wants to at least let him rest in peace, considers him dead and buried in some
way that’s of course at odds with the fact that he’s kept forever alive inside
him as fuel. (which are also the opposite impulses of what they envision for
themselves after their bout of some light recreational mutual deicide – at that point mercy
wants to be buried with cristabel in death, and augustine feels the obligation
to keep himself and alfred alive at least until they’ve done what little they
can to mitigate the damage they’ve caused. I love how they trade roles back and
forth like that at the end of the book it’s so neat. ‘mom said it’s my turn to
have the hysterics so you gotta keep your shit together for a few minutes
before we switch again’)
mercy says ‘she’s still
here’ and augustine says ‘he’s gone’, and they’re both right and they’re both
wrong. and this is the system john put in place at the start of his new world: a world where nothing is truly alive but grief.
finding love in the crab bucket like. is adjacent and has overlap with enemies to lovers but like it’s about the bucket. the bucket is essential
the crux of finding love in the crab bucket is that two or more characters have been put in a crab bucket. they are in an environment that sets them up to not only fail individually but treat each other with cruelty. and despite the bucket, grow to care for each other deeply. likely not in a way that anyone would frame as “healthy” but the thing is, they are still in the goddamn bucket. it’s not necessarily about getting out of the bucket. sometimes it’s not a bucket they can escape in their lifetime. but they do eventually choose to be kind to each other in the way that they can.
t muir says the more souls u have inside you the hotter u are. incredibly suspicious of my friends with “good circulation”. like ok who have you eaten recently ??? sound off if you’re a trustworthy single-souled guy with extremities like ice pops
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