reading Straight People Takes about griddlehark is very funny to me because like,, none of them understand it. sometimes you’re in a hard-to-define pseudo-romantic relationship with your worst enemy/only friend/roommate/chosen one/childhood plague survivor/bodyguard/closest confidant/ride or die soulmate/self-proclaimed parent murderer. that’s literally just how queer women are
One of my favorite things about the locked tomb is that you just absolutely cannot predict where it’s going. The first part of Nona (found in one of the previews) is labeled with “5 Days until the Tomb Opens” and I’m over here like “what the fuck does THAT mean??” Literally it straight up tells you that the tomb opens in 5 days and I still don’t know what that means. If Nona turns out to be Alecto that’s amazing for me and everyone else who thinks Nona is Alecto, but what then? Literally what happens when we find out who Nona is. What happens when the tomb opens.
Also where is this series even going????? How is Alecto the Ninth going to end literally what ending is this series heading towards. I have no clue. Will we get a Griddlehark happy ever after? Does John die for real? Does Alecto do…something? If anyone has theories about how the series will end please share them because I have no idea. Despite that, I’m sure that whatever end we get, we’ll look back to page one of Gideon the Ninth and be like “oh my jod tazmuir is insane she foreshadowed the end of the whole series on page one and we were all too stupid to see it.”
Tamsyn Muir made the most unpredictable series ever and yet she foreshadowed everything perfectly. There’s a reason Act V of Harrow the Ninth is my favorite section in any book ever. It connects the insane, batshit crazy plot of Harrow and wraps it up in a nice bow. What I guess I’m saying is that Tamsyn Muir could tell us straight up how it ends and nobody would get it until it actually happened. This series is absolutely 100% unpredictable until tazmuir pulls it all together in the end and I love it.
when I tell you I am STARVING for Resurrection back story and idc how we get it, if it has to come from J*hn’s lying bitch mouth so be it I just want to KNOW
I don’t care how contrived it is. I will always enjoy two characters who don’t like each other somehow getting trapped in the same place, and having to work together to escape, while at the same time growing closer and learning that maybe, the other person isn’t so bad after all.
the tonal shifts of the locked tomb series… the murder mystery of gideon morphing into the psychological and cosmic horror of harrow which shifts to an apocalyptic survival thriller in nona… tazmuir is insane for this series
the locked tomb is such a special series because where else are you going to find a character like harrowhark nonagesimus. she’s a repressed goth camp mean lesbian space nun necrophiliac immortal teenage saint. she’s a war crime and the greatest necromancer of her generation and she’s bad at making soup. she’s the deadpan depressed leader of a death cult and she fell for a horny jock who makes “your mom” jokes at every opportunity. she tried to have sex with a hallucination of a 10,000 year old corpse. she’s a strict conformist to liturgical tradition and also a heretic who almost killed god when she was ten. should i continue
“nona is gideon” this “nona is the body” that. nona is what happens when you decide to play musical chairs with souls and mix in a DIY lobotomy. personally i think she needs to see a neurologist.
he’s god. he’s a millenial. he resurrected an entire solar system. he eats peanuts in meetings. he started a nuclear war. he’s 10,000 years old. he makes none pizza with left beef jokes. he’s a slut. he killed and then anthropomorphized the earth to look like Barbie. he has threesomes with his besties who want to kill him. he’s a deadbeat dad. he listened to evanescence. he locked his ex up in a block of ice in an unbreakable tomb on pluto because his friends didnt like her. he hated billionaires. he wanted to adopt a psychotic bone nun who lobotomized herself. he likes tea and biscuits. he controlled the body of the dead US president. he’s from new zealand. he wears baby fingers around his head. his name is john of all fucking things. he killed the whole solar system. he was a tumblrina. his only comment on destroying melbourne was “shame about the tram service”.
just thinking about how harrow’s body literally starts to fall apart at the end. just “oops there goes an arm. grab that toe.” 2 steps later her other foot falls off. absolutely hilarious behavior.
friendly reminder that these two things were happening at more or less the same time:
“You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda. Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.”
“Harrow was too amazed by her body’s expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling had doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.”
i am straight up obsessed with mercymorn. she’s an atheist with a nun best friend, she raids graveyards with her best worstie augustine, she negotiates billion dollar contracts by playing bad cop worse cop with aforementioned best worstie, she probably has multiple degrees - i could go on and on
“nona the ninth should have been the intro to alecto” to YOU. i think becoming intimately acquainted with the people especially children of this setting and the struggles they face and the ways in which their priorities are small and intimate and far removed from the galaxy-shattering events happening to and around them and then watching as the protagonist and her loved ones are wrenched away from their tenuous peace due toforces and history that have been out of their control for 10000 years is does necessitate like 500 pages actually
i’m pretty sure everyone knew she was gay from day one honestly
camilla writing down “GAY” in her little nona observation notebook. palamedes being like this doesnt tell us anything about which one she is. camilla being like yeah
anyway now that Nona’s been out for 48 hours I feel comfortable sharing my personal favorite joke of the entire thing, which was Camilla valiantly trying to deflect Nona’s curiosity and defend Palamedes’ honor by insisting that he’s a respectable nerd whose sexual interests center academic achievement only for Palamedes to out himself as having a nurse kink with 0 hesitation the second he got control of the body
spending all of Harrow the Ninth drowning in Harrow’s grief and seeing the gaping maw that Gideon’s death has rent into her whole existance, and then getting smacked in the face by Nona the Ninth and the apperance of Kiriona Gaia and realizing that Gideon really just does not know. Gideon does not fucking know how much Harrow loves her. Gideon thinks she was abandoned and thrown away and that she gave her life for nothing and based on the information she has avalible to her that is like, a totally reasonable assumption.
head in hands i understand why she wanted to become Kiriona. she spent her childhood being told she was nothing and no one, abused by everyone who could have shown her care. she learned that she was created only to be a bomb. the one thing she had was Harrow. and then she felt like Harrow abandoned her, threw her away like trash. just like everyone else. fuck. no wonder she wants to just be the Daughter of God. no wonder she shed her name, given to her by the Ninth that hated her and the Mother that only created her for slaughter. no wonder she wants to reject everything that had rejected her. fuck.
I was going a little mad knowing the chapter headings referred to something, but I didn’t know what to, so I have written up brief chapter summaries and provided the passages cited, sometimes with clarifying details. I used the New International Version of the Bible.
John 20:8 - Jod tells Harrow about his early life and how he came to work on the project. Bible: Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed.
something something Augustine & Mercymorn hated each other in two lifetimes something something Cassiopeia and Nigella loved each other in two lifetimes something something Cristabel committed suicide in two lifetimes something something Alfred known for his patience in two lifetimes something something a trace of the true self exists in the false self something something
alecto’s true introduction in the series is her kissing a girl with tongue and teeth then stabbing god with her big sword and i for one cannot wait to see what other horrors she will bring upon the universe i think she deserves to be a cosmic horror. its hot
