I finally read the three books about the lesbian necromancers in space, and what can I say… Don’t know what’s deader me after reading or the books themselves.
the thing about Pal and Camilla is that they are SO smart and focused and efficient and genuinely dangerous to fuck with but I also cannot even begin to imagine how many times they forgot to have a proper dinner and just shared a can of space red bull to stay up late doing more nerd shit
God I’m a sucker for characters who are so utterly loyal to someone that they’re completely unhinged. Characters who have no moral compass except their overwhelming devotion to whoever they’ve chosen to listen to. That’s the good shit
harrowhark nonagesimus is the character of all time. she’s 3'6 and made of soggy pipe cleaners and will hiss at anyone who gets too close to her and yet she is almost universally beloved. palamedes sextus is like this is my best friend and my special guy. ianthe tridentarius is like i WILL marry this nasty smelly woman. gideon nav devoted her soul and body to her after hating her for 17 slutty, slutty years. god himself was like you are the wildest and saddest bitch i’ve ever met and you are a daughter to me. and harrowhark is just sitting there with ¾ of a brain and vomit on her robe
Enough of the trope where memory loss undoes the damage or the corruption or whatever. More content where removing memories just removes the context.
The tragedy of needing to grieve and not knowing what or who you lost or why. The angst of having trauma and being denied the awareness that it’s trauma. The suspense of being different somehow and left to wonder how and when. The tension of knowing that something is off and you can’t find where it hurts. The Adventure Zone gets it. Kingdom Hearts gets it.
There is an aching inside you and you don’t know how it got there.
thinking about how in HtN ianthe tells gideon that harrow removing her memories of her means she can’t love her because ‘true love is acquisitive, […] love is a revenant that accumulates love-stuff to itself because it is homeless otherwise’, but the thing is, that’s exactly what harrow did, whether she meant to or not. she kept gideon alive within herself by her own unwilingness to absorb her. gideon was made a revenant, alive against all odds in harrow’s body and tangled with her so deeply she couldn’t get in or out, stuck between life and lyctorhood death simply because harrow couldn’t let her go. harrow made herself her mausoleum. and gideon kept haunting her.
characters who view themselves as tools/weapons first and people second… characters who martyr themselves for a cause because they think that’s the only way they can be worth something… characters who push themselves past their breaking point again and again and again… characters for whom devotion and masochism are inseparable… characters whose self-sacrifice becomes self-annihilation…… what was my point again? i had a point. anyway.
