actually I’m obsessed with commander awake remembrance of these valiant dead kia hua ko te pai snap back to reality oops there goes gravity…. she was sleeping with two people sharing the same body and didn’t tell one of them about it even though he thought he was going insane, she’s basically a deity worshipped by a rebel terrorist organization, she impregnated herself with god’s sperm, she’s the angriest woman alive, she haunted a sword for twenty years, her daughter looks like her but nobody who has seen them both could really tell until they were told…. she both terrifies and fascinates me. i hope to never meet anyone like her ever again
I support my john-appreciators but to me john gaius is like a hairless cat. a little unsettling, extremely unsexy, and kind of pathetic in a way that he has not earned
something something the difference between harrowhark “my mind and body are a graveyard” nonagesimus and john “my universe is a graveyard” gaius etc etc. the inherent difference of “death created me” and “i created death” btw. if you even care.
Do you ever get really fucking emotional about the symbolism of baptismal waters in Gideon and Harrow’s journey? Do you ever contemplate how their relationship was tumultuous from the beginning - from the cradle practically - and how baptism is a sacrament traditionally performed on infants? Do you ever think about how they were able to repurpose a tenant of the religion that had deeply traumatized them both into their own form of purification and regeneration? Do you ever cry over how they went under the water in their customary Ninth face paint and emerged blank and washed clean - no longer burdened by the rituals that both split them apart and held them together - but rather, transformed in their relationship and their very beings?
why did mortus get two nooses. did he actually have two heads and neither gideon nor harrow ever mentioned it because they think it’s normal? did he just need two to support his weight? was someone else supposed to be there but then didn’t show up? help this is a such a bizarre detail to include
Even though I long to call that little body language expert of yours a hack and be done with it, I’m not going to say that I didn’t want it. Because unlike some people, I am not a serial liar. And, on occasion, I can even process complex emotions without purging their source from myself entirely.
At any rate. Put yourself in my shoes, Nonagesimus. You’ve been starved of all companionship except - blech - Ianthe. You were dead for months - felt like years.
And then she touched me with those burning hot little hands of yours, and I thought it was you. I wanted it to be you.
I opened my eyes. That couldn’t be helped, honestly. You were there in the frame of her, and she was all decked out in your favorite shitty color (if not quite as encrusted with bones), and her hair was almost the right length again. But her eyes were all wrong - the same color as mine were before I made the biggest mistake I can’t regret. Worst of all was her face. Not to encourage you, but she doesn’t come close to the force or the depth of your expression. She filled it out with one emotion at a time, and she didn’t have anywhere near the mastery of your eyebrows that you did. When I look back I could kick myself for not calling her an imposter immediately.
I’m not making excuses, but I only had a second to take in all this information. A lot of the more clever remarks above come from later observation. I, fool that I was, was mostly thinking that you came for me. I was looking at the raggedness of your hair and the sharpness of your jaw and the queer unpaintedness of your lips, and I was wanting you in a way you probably would have killed me for.
And that’s when she kissed me.
I didn’t do anything weird! You haven’t had my tongue in your mouth or anything like that. The sanctity of your mouth remains unblemished by all but the corse of the Locked Tomb, unless you count that jaw inspection thing with Tridentarius, which is completely your call to make. I didn’t bite your lip or make a weird noise, or even take your hand. Granted, you can thank the element of surprise for some of that. You don’t have to scrape Nav off your tonsils, is the point - maybe just take a few cold showers and put some extra paint on your lips going forward.
imagine you are gideon nav watching your lifelong nemesis throw up all over God’s carpet while her hallucination of an incorporeal corpse (which is almost an oxymoron) observes passively from the corner. basically shit just got real personal real fast
collecting a list of ways that mercymorn and harrowhark parallel each other. the way that they’re bitter and unlikeable, both VERY good at what they do (arguably the best), probably because the guilt they have from the cost of their creation is too enormous for them to be anything but the best. how mercymorn hates harrow from the start, I’ve seen lots of people arguing that it’s because she reminds her of herself, and I kind of agree. their names are the only ones in the series that follow the conventions that they do (mercy-morn, harrow-hark. no one else’s names are like that.) both of them are trapped for essentially their whole lives in a place with people who despise them, but who they are bound to by necessity and resentment and a lifetime spent despising each other. mercy and augustine HATE each other, but who else do they have? no one has seen what they’ve seen or been through what they’ve been through, and no one will ever feel as strongly about them as they do about each other. I think until canaan house, the exact same thing applied to harrow and gideon.
and the thing I just thought of yesterday that I can’t BELIEVE it took me so long to realize- both of them are so consumed by grief that NEITHER allow themselves to hear the name of their cavalier. mercy treats names as sacred and HATES when people use cristabel’s name. harrow rewires her own brain so that she can’t hear gideon’s.
I think mercy functions as a version of harrow, one much older and like, much more trapped in her grief? I think she would have lobotomized herself in an instant if she’d thought of it, or if she’d had anyone to help her, or who knows if she even could do that sort of necromancy so soon after she ascended. instead all she has is this bitter, myriad long revenge plot.
this post is getting away from me and I’m just kind of waxing on about mercymorn now. I think they’re versions of each other but they’re living in different narratives.
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