September 2022

thetableintheback:

frontlinebicepsoftheninth:

harrow’s feelings about death

[id: a series of screenshots of quotes from the locked tomb series.

1: You could have gone meekly to the slaughter without a muzzle or a leash.

2: And you walked to your death like a lover.

3: After a brief pause, he said: “Harrow, please don’t be in such a hurry to die.” / “Do not underestimate me, Teacher,” you said. “I have always lived.”

4: Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid.

5: It’s no secret that I’m going to die,“ you said. In no way were you resigned to that. You had never died before.

6: You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips.

7: Your rooms grew profoundly dark except that excited red blinking; the klaxon continued as you were left in that red-hued darkness, tight with anticipation, ready to die.

8: (all caps) Guidlines #1: (underlined) Stay Alive.

9: Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?

10: But Harrowhark - Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years - Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die. /end id]

Anyway. The hugs in this book are truly something fantastic

uglygirlstatus:

friendship bracelets

mayasaura:

In the midst of all of this chaos and confusion there is at least one shining light in the darkness. Gideon Nav from a third person perspective really is just as incredibly outragously annoying as I always knew she would be. Babygirl. Beloved.

corpsesoldier:

okay so the more I process the last chunk of nona the ninth, the more I think that functionally it doesn’t matter too much whether kiriona is a fragment of gideon’s soul, or has had her memories altered, or is something to do with her being a revenant. because no matter which, if any, of these things end up being true, it’s going to be a metaphorical expression of the way prolonged trauma and abuse can warp a person and their relationships to other people. how systems of control can make people choose to do things they would never choose if the situation were different.

kiriona’s appearance, her necromantically booby-trapped corpse, and her apparent devotion to the emperor are all expressions of john’s need for control. john’s desire to rename and reshape everything to suit his purposes, regardless of the harm caused, indifferent to the personhood of the people he changes in order to get his way. it’s john promising forgiveness and acceptance and love, as long as you don’t challenge him and do exactly as he says. it’s john’s empire rendered small and personal and heartbreaking.

and gideon is someone who has been starved of acceptance and love her entire life. gideon has lost everything she cared about, gideon died apparently for nothing, and now she’s trapped half-alive in an existence that has no meaning. so if she can turn herself into exactly what john wants then, hey, at least he’ll keep her around.

kiriona gaia is where john’s need to turn everything he touches into an extension of himself meets gideon’s need to be needed, to be useful, no matter how much it hurts her.

youreafadedmoon:

Thinkin about sweet Cam with her fringe clipped up until Haircut Day

isbeeshy:

Hey remember that interview where tazmuir said nona’s main concerns were things like “How do you cope when the biggest jerk in the universe … turns out to be your secret crush’s out-of-town cousin?!?!”

I spent the whole fucking book trying to figure out who she was talking about and thought maybe the secret crush was cam after all and the biggest jerk was Naberious body that turned out to be ocupied by Palamedes

BUT NO. TURNS OUT. THE CRUSH IS OUR LADY OF THE PASSION. FREAKING PASH. WHO TURNS OUT TO BE WAKE’S NIECE. WHICH IN TURN MEANS THAT SHES GIDEON’S COUSIN. SO GIDEON IS THE BIGGEST JERK IN THE UNIVERSE THAT TURNED OUT TO BE NONA’S SECRET CRUSH’S OUT OF TOWN COUSING.

Goddamit tazmuir

xenadd:

God’s undoing, bringer of the end, the body in the tomb, firelight of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ loins:

theonlysei:

gideon 😍

oatlybrandoatmilk:

Harrow when she returns to consciousness to find Gideon not only a ✨corpse✨ but knowing up to five necromancy facts now

gveret-fic:

A lil fic in which Gideon showers with her clothes on, changes in the dark, applies her face paint out of a manual, and doesn’t touch herself ever. Well. Hardly ever.

HtN spoilers ahead!

—

A bit anticlimactic, if you ask me, after slaying brain melting horror bees and swimming right out of hell, for my next great big challenge to be trying to figure out how to take a dump in a prudish little nun’s body without compromising its modesty.

Not to put too fine a point on it or anything, my sombre bathroom break micromanager, but you really didn’t stick the landing on this one. You had a letter for basically every contingency, like you had one for if God sneezed really hard and blew out the sun, I’m pretty sure, and then mine was basically just ‘fuck you, return to sender’. You just went and parked your porsche in my landing pad with the blasters still on and didn’t even bother to leave the DRY CLEANING ONLY tag on the upholstery. I had to come up with a virtue-preserving game plan all on my lonesome, you know.

And I’ve been such a good girl, Harrow, you’d be proud. Well, at least you’d be such an unexpectedly small, tiny, miniscule, astonishingly negligible amount of pissed off that it’s basically pride at that point, right.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a logistical nightmare. Ever tried to shower in multiple robes plus what I must assume are, like, pantaloons? The sonic flaps it all the fuck around, and let me tell you, getting spanked by heavy Ninth vestments is now officially off my kink list. Now, the other option is wet dog trapped in straightjacket, and I’m not too keen on that one either. But I stuck with it. It takes like 20 minutes, no joke, to struggle out of all your stupid layers in the dark, with my eyes closed, without touching any of your most hallowed skin. But I’ve got a knack for it now, you know? If I ever get the chance to get a lil frisky, maybe with a hot ghost or something I don’t know, I can totally impress her with my wild 100% contact free striptease skills.

What I’m saying is, I’ve been such a super duper chaste and meticulous and ephemeral little make believe nun it’s like I was never even here. So you gotta take that into consideration, Harrow, when you pass your terrible judgment once I tell you how I’ve sinned.

Keep reading

gideontheeninth:

gideontheeninth:

i really enjoy that ianthe has clearly, after the death of augustine and mercy, decided that She’s In Charge Now. Shadow Leader is Back Baby. god and gonad are too mopey and weird so i have to keep the show going. Lights! Camera! Action! it’s time for Prince Ianthe Naberius to shine

ianthe in harrow was trying to adapt to lyctorhood and learn from her elders, augustine mostly, and try to fit into this new structure she’d found herself in. she spends a lot of it trying to create a relationship with harrow that resembles what she interprets as the older lyctors relationships to each other.

and then everything including several people explode and die and all she has left in the fall out are in her eyes a broken john gaius and a broken gideon nav. and she’s like okay, i got this, i’ve spent my whole life managing two idiots. and we see her try to replicate aspects of what she had with corona and babs. she goes matchy matchy with gideon, becoming her shadow instead of corona’s. she’s hiding that gideon is a corpse instead of hiding that corona isn’t a necromancer. she appoints herself as a sort of caretaker of john, sees him someone whose moods and actions she needs to track and monitor for his own good.

cedarbranch:

tazmuir really said what if the earth was a girl. what if the soul of a planet was a little girl who wanted a birthday party by the ocean with all her closest friends because she loved them all so, so dearly, and her love was a force of nature, so much that it could swallow bullets through her skull and hide her memories away long enough for her to have a real family, a family that shouldn’t have been but they just couldn’t help loving her back, they couldn’t stop. tazmuir said what if a dead planet was alive in a girl and she didn’t know how to do anything but love.

gil-estel:

gtn

ntn

tfw a monstrous immortal being tries to hit on ur girlfriend

:

Mom Pyrrha makes me *explosion sound effect x1000*

Plus daddy Pyrrha for flavor

nil-elk:

Mmmm, some griddlehark for the soul.

muskrosevetiver:

gideon the ninth:

harrow the ninth:

nona the ninth:

katkonstant:

NONA SPOILERS NONA SPOILERS NONA SPOILERS NONA SPOILERS NONA SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT

Keep reading

jewishsuperfam:

blessyouhawkeye:

i simply think that in alecto the ninth harrow, faced with having gideon back, being able to see her face and hear her voice, should drop all pretences and just be incredibly romantic. first flower of my house romantic. i just think that gideon, who has become angry and bitter and jaded, should make cracks like “don’t look now nonagesimus, i’m a corpse. you getting the hots for me?” only for harrow to reply “I would treasure you in any form you take”

#and if they kiss about it that would be nice too#i just think!!! that after everything after Watching Gideon Die harrow couldn’t be a bitch anymore#she kept the glasses everyone. one flesh one end. how dare you ask her to live with it.#and prince kiriona gaia being faced with that sudden affection from harrow! i mean come on!#tamsyn please. please.#let harrow be profoundly changed by the loss of gideon. please. (tags via @blessyouhawkeye)

alectothe9th:

gynecologistmsfrizzle:

sorry to lockedtombpost but i think a lot of people online are missing the point of john gaius. everyone walked into nona like ‘i hate the guy irredeemably’ and walked out like ‘i hate the guy irredeemably’ and that does a disservice to his character and to his arc and to the end of the world. john’s apocalypse was not an orchestrated, preplanned, malicious endeavour: it was a series of downward trips and falls that just kept happening until finally he went tumbling all the way down the stairs and hit the ground with a nuclear blast.

john is a commentary on incremental evil– we all like to think we could never end the world, but we could certainly all raise a stink to our bosses if they tried to cancel our global salvation project. And when they didn’t listen, we could all turn to our friends and their friends in our desperation, and try and try and try to struggle against the immovable object of capitalist greed. And when that failed, of course we would get desperate– when we realized we’d made this terrifying breakthrough, developed this incredible power, of course we’d look for some way we could use it to change things. when the world tried to stop us, of course we’d cut ourselves off from them, do whatever we had to to buy more time to try and change things, fix things. and from that point of desperation and immediate personal threat, the cows don’t look like such a horrific act after all. and from there, is it really such a leap to be willing to leverage that amount of fear and power to try and save the world? and from there, isn’t taking a bomb as a bargaining piece– never intending to use it– laughing about it, almost– isn’t that the next reasonable step, if we’re talking about leverage?

john wanted to save the world. and that isn’t relevant because it redeems him in any way– it’s relevant because all of us want to save the world. all of us. it is easy to look at him starting a nuclear war and declaring himself the King Undying and go ‘lmao what the fuck I would never do that’, but the whole point of him is the steps in between, the fact that he didn’t jump straight from well-meaning scientist to planet-killer. coming out of nona with no empathy for john is dangerously conceited. would you simply do better, if you woke up able to raise the dead with the end of the world looming? why? at what point would you stop? at what step in his descent would you have declared ‘no further?’ are you immune to the sunk-cost fallacy? would you see a way out from that cave of meat and bone?

john ended the world and remade it in his image at the end of a very long walk. all of us would have begun that walk by his side. the question nona poses is– would you stop where he hadn’t?

+1 to this. Definitely the most disturbing part of John is when he says something super accurate and distressingly insightful. The one that stuck with me was “It turns out no one wants papers, no one wants principle. They want magic. They want to be saved.”

sheepscoyote:

hadestown, anaïs mitchell // nona the ninth, tamsyn muir

Definitely I’m sad about everything going on with Gideon, Villain Era etc, but by far the choice I’ve found most upsetting was the Crux scene. She confronts her foremost childhood tormentor who had tortured her, imprisoned her, tried to kill her multiple times, all while she was completely powerless and alone. She demands recognition and remorse and of course gets none. She kills him. It doesn’t feel good. She melts down over it. This is far and away the most significant moment of reckoning with Gideon’s very recent childhood since the pool scene. And all of this is happening as a fun lil aside while our narrative has much more important things to worry about. We get no description, no reactions, no insight. I can’t get over this. Gideon doesn’t get to have catharsis and neither does the reader. I will be a little baby about this

Left My Friend’s Body Outside the Mithraeum: One New Zealander’s account of the New Zealand stuff in Nona the Ninth

junozeta:

A few points before we begin:

• I’ve quoted everything out of context, but probably don’t read this if you don’t want to be spoiled for the book.
• I’m just one person (a Pākehā North Islander millennial, for context), but hopefully I caught most of it. Please tell me if you see anything I missed!
• If you see something and think, ‘Tumblr user junozeta, why have you included this piece of information when it is very easily Google-able,’ it’s for the sake of completeness.

Kia ora!

Keep reading

theriverbeyond:

in this essay I will,

pygmypouter:

they have so many problems <3

comfiecore:

Her most serene highness, the crown prince kiriona gaia as fallen angel by alexandre cabanel

+close ups

pygmypouter:

imagine getting banned from social media for saying what ianthe did to her chest wound

jesse-is-inarguably-purple:

the locked tomb is a fun series because you start gideon and you’re like enemies to lovers! hurt/comfort! skeletons! duels! memes! this is gonna be great! and then you get out the other side of nona and you’ve been completely hollowed out by unfathomable, immeasurable grief

ancientannoyance:

ALT

come on barbie let’s go party (å̷͖̕h̸̪̓ ̴̝̗͈̌̉̽ḁ̴̰̈́͗ĥ̷̪͂̓͜ ̶̦͗̉͋ȃ̴͚h̸͎̍ ̶̣͊y̴̧̋̕͠e̷̹̎̇͊ạ̷̗͒͝h̴̪̮͛́́)

transdike:

Tamsyn Muir is the funniest author to read because I am genuinely concerned that she’s going to throw out 90% of the characters names for the last book in her quartet and just call everyone “the children” and you’ll just have to guess at who’s talking

theriverbeyond:

something re: the Gideon -> Kiriona evolution that is perhaps not the most important (esp on the scale of other things) but that i keep feeling fairly fixated on is that Gideon hated the Lyctor Aesthetic (”like Silas Oktakisseron threw up in the glitter drawer”) and she is so valid for that but now she’s dressed like “the military wing of disco”. and on a personal level i think her new look is incredibly sexy BUT i cannot help but fixate on how this is now the third outfit she has worn that is not really something she would have chosen for herself (cavalier skull paint, harrow’s body, military disco). and she only gets three outfits in the whole series anyway!! 

something something abt being butch and How We Dress being so related to Who We Are, and having that choice taken away is always some sort of thing. something something abt body autonomy and how she continues to have none despite her proclamations otherwise. she says ”nobody locks me up anywhere” but Kiriona Gaia is arguably locked up everywhere she goes, on account of her body having the fun feature of being able to be turned off by someone else. Gideon started her escape attempts at age four. four!!!!! something something abt how the one thing she has always fought for is her own freedom, and everything she has done and everything she has been through since then has only served to render her more and more under others’ control. on the Ninth she had an ankle cuff and at Canaan House she had the cavalier’s sword and as a prince the leash and collar is her own dead body, which is once again (as always) dressed by someone else. 

muskrosevetiver:

you ever think about how palamedes is another addition to the list of people harrow never got to say goodbye to

mayasaura:

Gideon hating Alecto out of burning petty lesbian jealousy is great, but that the innocent loving amnesiac version of Alecto took one look at Gideon and went ‘lame, nothing to write home about. I hate her hair’ just sends me

Mutual distain. Instant shared animosity. Gideon is going to end up pledging her devotion to Alecto by the end of this series this is how all her relationships start

pygmypouter:

it’s pretty nice like this. it’s funny — i never feel like that in the dream.

marceline2174:

Spoilers ahead!