bestie i'm so sick and tired of queerbaiting so before I read the locked tomb is there an actual gay romance between that oversized butch blonde and the skeleton lesbian or will i be left yearning? thank u in advance !! <3

Ok so obviuosly there’s gonna be spoilers here. There’s a very short and concise summary about my thoughts on this at the bottom, if you wanna avoid being spoiled (I’ve tried to keep the spoil to a minimum)

So what you need to understand is that yes, there is romance. ISH. The series isn’t about romance, so it isn’t the main focus at all. Big Butch (Gideon) and Skeleton Lesbian (Harrow) have grown up hating eachother; Gideon has hated Harrow because Harrow has both represented and been an integral part of a system that has kept Gideon prisoner in a dying society, and Harrow has hated Gideon because Harrow hasn’t been able to understand Gideon (Gideon should have died a bunch of years ago, but she didn’t, and it freaked Harrow and her parents tf out).

But they come to this realization that they’re each other’s person. They’re in a new environment, in a new dynamic, away from home, and things are collapsing around them, people are dying. And they have a short period of time when they come to understand each other, they’re a unit. And then they collapse too.

Gideon dies. Harrow, in an attempt to survive this loss (and also to stop her soul from absorbing Gideons, due to death magic) has an even MORE skeleton lesbian (Ianthe) perform lobotomy on her so she won’t remember Gideon. But Gideon has already been a bit absorbed, and is living is the back of Harrows brain. She’s stuck there for almost a year, while Harrow is having the worst time dodging Ianthe’s (sorta) unwanted advances and “Ortus”, god’s friend who keeps trying to murder her. While this is happening, Gideon comes to terms with the fact that she is in love with Harrow. She’s watching Harrow go through life being a wet stinky rat of a necromancer, with no memory of Gideon, and Gideon loves her.

The kicker is that Gideon thinks Harrow had her brainjob because she was grossed out by having Gideons soul in her, and wanted to forget about Gideon because of the yuck.

Due to circumstances, Harrow dies too, and Gideon pilots her body while Harrow roams the afterlife. She regains her memories of Gideon, and Gideons death, and decides that she’d rather have Gideon keep living in her body, alive, than live in a world without Gideon.

After that, a bunch of stuff happens, Gideon gets back into her own body, some other lady takes over Harrows for a while, and Harrow takes a well deserved soul-nap before eventually getting back into her body again. The latest book in the series ends with Gideon declaring that she still wants to be by Harrows side, even after Harrow gets kissed by an eldritch horror with the face of Barbie.

Summary:

There’s a lot of layers to this, but yeah they love each other. They’re idiots who can’t communicate for shit, but they both die for each other and then help each other back to life. The series is about love, and what it does to a person. I’m not gonna lie and say there’s romance, because there isn’t (not in the traditional sense), but there is love.

Also, they are lesbians. By default, it cannot be queerbait. They’re queer, wether or not they end up together – which I think they will, just to be clear, but even if they don’t it doesn’t erase the fact that they’re queer. So it actually can’t be queerbaiting.