the thing about harrowhark nonagesimus is that in a modern au she would not be goth. she would be an ex-homeschooled deeply religious intensely modest small town closeted lesbian. she does all that skull makeup because that’s her religion and she’s literally ashamed to have her face uncovered, not because she wants to go against the mainstream. also she canonically hates dressing up in a way that she finds “unusual” (see the makeover scene in htn) so I don’t think modern au harrow would be doing a ton of goth make up every day. especially because she’s catholic. anyway it’s about the religious guilt not the goth aesthetic
Had had this idea for a Harrow illustration since someone pointed out “Los Ageless” by St Vincent is a very HtN song, hope y’all can read my chicken scratch handwriting!
there’s something about tamsyn’s writing that really fascinates me, in that she often doesn’t describe her POV character’s emotional state and just lets their actions speak / be interpreted by the reader. for example the scene in gtn when gideon meets the sixth, and she just goes into some kind of dissociative panic state over harrow. but she never acknowledges it and honestly it took me a couple of reads to develop some kind of sense of her emotional state in this scene. it really adds to the impression that gideon feels very strongly about harrow and just doesn’t know that about herself. That’s denial if you ask me.
the locked tomb just has so much going on and so many details, at this point i could be convinced of just about anything happening just because i might’ve missed it
literally someone on here could say “wow that chapter in htn where goncharov the tenth died was crazy” and my first reaction would be “wow i cant believe i missed that scene with goncharov the tenth, i really need to go back and do a reread”
y’all ever read a series of books you love so much it sends you into a weird, four month long downward spiral that culminates in you dropping out of university to change schools and majors next academic year
I am never going to forgive Cristabel for what she did to Mercymorn. Inflicted on her the same “cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you” that Gideon did on Harrow, but without the same pressures. No one was banging down the door threatening to kill them both. She didn’t have to choose between watching Mercy die and dying for her. When Cristabel violently manipulated Mercy into lyctorhood, she did it with fore-thought. She planned it. Fuck her.
Thinking of how the way Cristabel’s death is framed in HtN is one of the MOST narrative choices of the series. It’s all: She died. It made everyone around her very sad. It’s presented as something that happened to her instead something Cristabel did on her own volition, because everyone who knew her has long ago decided how they were going to remember it and crystalized into those roles. Augustine blames her loudly and often but it’s all oblique; he doesn’t explain his reasons in a way that can be picked up at first glance, because to him they are bitter old news and he’s not having that fight again. For the reader is just a scavenger’s hunt in unreliable narrator land.
I think a core trait of Mercymorn’s character is that she has been pissed off at Cristabel for millenia and has never been in a position where she could admit it to herself. Augustine is free to hate her, but he does it in a way that he puts Mercy in the position where she has to defend the person who traumatized her, because if she doesn’t speak up for Cristabel who will? It’s a betrayal. John is John; he’s the kind of person to put ‘she had good intentions’ ahead of ‘she did actual harm to people’ and go along with Mercy talking about what a tragedy it was. Mercymorn has never had the possibilty to just yell at Cristabel because she made herself keeper of her memory; she carries the title of saint but it’s Cristabel she santified. I do think part of her envies how loud Augustine is about his hatred, and I also think she channelled a lot of this in how she feels about John, whom she worships and resents and hate at the same time. When she breaks down telling John that none of them had to die, she is taking out her anger at Cristabel. I mean, John deserves it! But so does Cristabel and Mercy never lets herself deal with that.
It’s all about the survivor’s guilt, innit?
It’s a uniquely helpless kind of grief, when someone you love is their own murderer. Who does the poet judge?
I will never tire of this theme in particular being explored through literature.
Actually I’m saying this with my chest girls from tlt are so holey it’s like everywhere you look there’s another gaping cavern a tomb if you will and almost none of these tombs are locked in any way. Girls will share all their tombs with the world. has a tomb ever actually been locked in this series because it seems like it’s even debatable how well that original tomb was shut
this started as a horrible sex joke but now I’m thinking. The empty place where gideon’s heart used to be, the empty tomb, the empty place in the original lyctors’ memories, the place harrow carved out to keep gideon, the ninth house itself. What do these things have in common well they are all tombs. Can they be cough. Filled again or should they remain empty? Are empty tombs an invitation or a sign to look elsewhere, nothing’s here? questions I love to ponder at 3 pm on a thursday
“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then
he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself,
and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes
worse than the first. So shall it be also with this evil generation.”
(Matthew 12:43-45, RSV)
In other words: fill up that “clean” heart with love, sicknastybadwrong though love is in this series, or else.
I love this fandom because real priests and deacons fumble over this passage from Matthew in their homilies for their entire adult lives whereas Tumblr user @gideonisms knocked it out of the park in one sentence.
Reblogging because just yesterday Pope Francis had a major speech on this passage that I think speaks to TLT’s themes and especially its (controversial within the fandom) depiction of revenge and forgiveness:
Dear brothers and sisters, it is not enough to condemn evil, including the evil that quietly lurks among us. We need to respond by choosing to be converted. Mere condemnation can give the illusion that we have solved the problem, whereas what really counts is making the changes that will ensure that we no longer allow ourselves to be imprisoned by evil ways of thinking, which are often those of this world. One of the most helpful virtues to practice in this regard is the virtue of vigilance. Jesus uses a striking example to illustrate the need for vigilance, attentiveness to ourselves and to the Church. He tells us: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but not finding any, it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’. When it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first.” Our initial conversion follows a certain pattern: the evil that we acknowledge and try to uproot from our lives does indeed leave us, but we would be naïve to think that it will long be gone. In short order, it comes back under a new guise. Before, it appeared rough and violent, now it shows up as elegant and refined. We need to realize that and once again to unmask it. Let me put it this way: they are “elegant demons”: they enter smoothly, without our even being conscious of them. Only the daily practice of the examination of conscience can enable us to be aware of them. Hence the importance of the examination of conscience, to keep watch over our house.
In the seventeenth century, for example, there was the well-known case of the nuns of Port Royal. One of their abbesses, Mère Angélique, had begun well; she had “charismatically” reformed herself and her monastery, even banishing parents from the cloister. She was a very gifted woman, born to govern, but then she became the soul of the Jansenist resistance, intransigent and unbending even in the face of ecclesiastical authority. Of her and her nuns, it was said that they were “pure as angels and proud as demons”. They had cast out the demon, but he had returned seven times stronger, and under the guise of austerity and rigour he had introduced rigidity and the presumption that they were better than others. The demon, once cast out, always returns; albeit under another guise, but he does return. Let us be attentive!
hey, your goth girlfriend was haunted by 202 ghosts but now she’s haunted by 203 and the 203rd one doesn’t know what being goth is. yeah so she’s not goth anymore. yeah sorry
Tamsyn Muir was insane for ‘Life is too short and love is too long.’ like she really said I’m just going to make Camilla Hect sum up the essence of life and then move on
the locked tomb is about grief all the way down and it’s not pretty because grief is not pretty. it’s a kind of obsession. an unraveling. it’s the inevitable outcome of love. love can never be pure because it opens you to loss. trying to alleviate the possibility of loss is, inevitably, a kind of corruption. life is too short and love is too long.
the thing about griddle as a nickname is that phonetically speaking it makes no sense as “baby talk.” in my dialect the “r” and “l” sounds are difficult for babies and are learned later than other sounds, so it makes no sense for baby harrow to have added them when they didn’t already exist in “Gideon.” tamsyn should theoretically know this seeing as in htn, palamedes comments on how the baby in the romance novel speaks with a “phonetically impossible lisp” leading me to believe that she has an idea of what phonetics is and of what lisps ARE phonetically possible. and therefore, the whole idea of “griddle” being harrow’s babytalk version of gideon only makes sense if griddle is pronounced in a wildly different way in NZ English than it is in my dialect. New Zealanders please let me know if this is the case because currently I’m drawing the conclusion that Harrow nicknamed gideon griddle on purpose and I can’t imagine what her exact reason for that would be besides to terrorize gideon
whenever I rec the locked tomb to people I’m like you should read these books they are literally indescribable. if you’re reading them and they make no sense don’t even worry about it. so I’m not exactly selling them
Favourite genres of media include ‘makes me want to lie on the floor’ and ‘have to stop and stare into space about it for a while’ and sometimes both of those as well as ‘has rewired my brain so completely I will think about it every day forever’
the thing about griddle as a nickname is that phonetically speaking it makes no sense as “baby talk.” in my dialect the “r” and “l” sounds are difficult for babies and are learned later than other sounds, so it makes no sense for baby harrow to have added them when they didn’t already exist in “Gideon.” tamsyn should theoretically know this seeing as in htn, palamedes comments on how the baby in the romance novel speaks with a “phonetically impossible lisp” leading me to believe that she has an idea of what phonetics is and of what lisps ARE phonetically possible. and therefore, the whole idea of “griddle” being harrow’s babytalk version of gideon only makes sense if griddle is pronounced in a wildly different way in NZ English than it is in my dialect. New Zealanders please let me know if this is the case because currently I’m drawing the conclusion that Harrow nicknamed gideon griddle on purpose and I can’t imagine what her exact reason for that would be besides to terrorize gideon
Thanks to @z-gone-mad I found this interview with tamsyn where she talks about griddle!!! Here’s what she said:
so conclusion: griddle is not babytalk for gideon, it was an extremely deliberate nickname on harrow’s part. this confirms what we all know, which is that harrow goes to dramatic lengths just to be a bitch. thank you for coming to my ted talk
what if i loved you and asked you to kill me. what if i loved you and asked you to kill me and you said yes and that was an intense relief. what if i loved you and asked you to kill me and you said no and that was as good as heartbreak. what if i loved you and asked you to kill me and i didnt wait for your response. what if i loved you and asked you to kill me and i didnt wait for your response but you wouldnt let me die. what if i loved you and asked you to kill me and you did but i wouldnt leave. what if i loved you and you loved me and someone else we loved asked you to kill me. would you do it
what if loved you and asked you to kill me but you wouldnt so i begged but you wouldnt so i begged but you wouldnt so i begged but you wouldnt so i begged but you wouldnt and i begged until you had no other choice and then you did and you wished you had died too
Harrow can do her tongue magic thing to make it impossible for someone to talk about something, right. Like what she did to Ianthe in HtN, we know this.
So at the start of Gideon – when Gideon knows the secret, about her parents, that could destroy Harrow completely –
Harrow *doesn’t* do that. She doesn’t stop Gideon from being able to spill.
ALT
