2022-05-05 2:54:15 ¶ ●

##

re: your post about Harrow asking Gideon for help even thru the murk of lobotomy. it dovetails very nicely into the moment before the avulsion trial, when Gideon told Harrow all she's ever demanded was to be asked. I am feeling incredibly normal about this, thank you

!! I hadn’t even thought about that! I love that it’s such a recurring theme, that Harrow doesn’t know how to admit she can’t do something alone, but on some level she’s always needed Gideon more than anything.

I think the avulsion trial is also where their dynamic really begins to shift in a meaningful way, because it’s the first time that Gideon (who I think is at the disadvantage in their power dynamic) is asked for her devotion instead of being wrestled into it, and only in that context can they begin to approach seeing one another as equals. glad we’re both feeling so normal and sane about this

2022-05-05 19:28:33 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

beroebluejeans:

> abigail-pent:

> > madtomedgar:

> > > abigail-pent:

> > > > duchessofrhodes:

> > > > > abigail-pent:

> > > > > > nav-ix:

> > > > > > > I don’t know how I feel about it and I don’t know what it means but I think Cytherea was one hundred percent sincere when she held and comforted Gideon during the avulsion trial. I don’t think she was pretending at all

> > > > > > oh I completely agree!! and it brings up such particularly Cytherea feelings because the invitation to collaborate to get the 8th key was absolutely a murder attempt. if Harrow (or Pal) had tried to siphon and wasn’t strong enough, or if their cav wasn’t strong enough, she would have knocked out another potential Lyctor and made it look like a casualty of the process. but she genuinely does like Gideon, I think, and doesn’t want her to die! so it’s part murder attempt for Harrow and part test of Gideon’s strength. but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t regret it!

> > > > > okay, so, i agree re: cytherea being sincere, and, i think there’s something in that scene we don’t understand yet! it’s going to be the focus of my reread tbh. here are some thoughts without conclusions yet:

> > > > > - why does cytherea want the avulsion key so bad? who’s study was that again? she does ask palamedes first, so it can’t have been achieved only by gideon/purely to test gideon’s power. also there are (as we see) way easier ways she kills someone she wants dead, so i don’t think we’re just Here For Murder or to Test Gideon Out.
> > > > > - she could have done it herself. she not only could literally do it as-is, but she can make bone matter as small as she describes that situation needing (see: the fifth’s wounds). so she doesn’t need someone else to get that key, but she needs someone else to go through that trial… why?
> > > > > - and the two she picks are palamedes and harrow. why is that? what sets them apart - and what makes her prefer palamedes? his likelihood to agree with her because of his obvious crush on ‘dulcinea’? and he declines. so she goes to griddlehark. but why palamedes first?

> > > > I think Palamedes first for the same reasons as she killed Abigail. He knows a lot and he’s great at finding things out. Same with Harrow. Both are incredibly observant that way. And she is definitely trying to kill them both, and it may be easier to avoid a whole Agatha Christie style situation by arranging it to effectively be an accident, death occurring in the course of trying to ascend.

> > > > The avulsion trial is the 8th house trial. I don’t think she particularly wanted that key, so much as she wanted to use the trial to achieve some murder. Like you say, she doesn’t need to get into that lab. This whole scene, like most of her scenes, is a set piece where she performs for others.

> > > I also kind of wonder if it has anything to do with testing the new crop to see if they are as willing to kill their cavs for their own advancement as a way of still grappling with the fact that she did, when it came to it, possibly trying to kill the ones who she is most horrified about becoming lyctors first (Abigail and Magnus’s bond, the kids being, well, kids, something about Pal being Too Good and then her projection of Loveday onto Gideon, because I do think she sees lyctorhood as worse than death), and the potential to rip the blinders off of the participants about what this Really Requires and what that says about jod. Because this trial kind of… Is lyctorhood. The necromancer uses their cav’s life force for power, killing them or permanently damaging them in the process. You want this so bad, kids? You want to be good and do what jod wants? Well this is what he will make you do. Still feel good about it?

> > > I agree her main motivation is to cause chaos, kill the candidates, and get rid of people who can stop her. But as a cyth apologist I think there’s hidden depths.

> > ALL OF THIS, YES

> These points are so good!

> Does Cytherea know or suspect Gideon is John’s kid before the avulsion trial? Is this trial a way for her to test that hypothesis?

whoa, great point! I think Cytherea knew from the moment she saw Gideon’s eyes (this is more or less confirmed in HtN when Mercymorn says as much) and I think it makes a lot of sense that she would want to see what Gideon could withstand? And I think it’s complicated in such interesting ways by the idea that she sees Loveday in Gideon, which I think she does.

Still kinda wondering why she asked Pal first, but I like the idea that she wanted to know whether this crop of potential lyctors would be as willing to sacrifice their cav, even in smaller ways.

2022-05-06 22:39:48 ¶ ●

anyone know any other good fantasy/ sci-fi centered on queer women (lesbians, bisexuals, butches especially) or that discusses queerness in a deeper way? the locked tomb filled an emptiness in me that I think I gave up on so long ago that I didn’t realize it was there. now I need more

2022-05-12 22:45:15 ¶ ●

I wrote like a ten page paper for my sci fi class on the locked tomb series, looking at how it deals with hierarchies of gender and power through the lens of queerness… would anyone be interested in me posting it

2022-05-13 5:58:48 ¶ ●

## Queerness and Hierarchies of Power in The Locked Tomb

I wrote this essay for my sci-fi class and a few people expressed interest in reading it, so I’m posting it! Bear in mind the initial audience I wrote it for isn’t familiar with the series (I cut out some of the straight-up summarizing because if you’re here I’m assuming you’ve read the books, but if the tone seems weird or like its explaining things that are obvious, that’s why). I do use the term “queer” throughout the essay as an umbrella term for LGBTQ experiences, as well as to refer more broadly to non-normative interactions with gender/ gender-like hierarchies. Also, this has spoilers for Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth AND for the first chapter of Nona the Ninth, so watch out for that. Essay below the cut :)

Though there has been an increase in LGBTQ representation in popular sci-fi and fantasy, representation that ends at same-sex attraction fails to actually explore queerness as an experience or identity, or, most importantly, as a lens through which to see the world. Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series, however, is impossible to read without exploring that lens, and as such it is able to explore queerness on more than one level. I intend to analyze those explorations through the lens of queer theory and apply that analysis to how we imagine normative power hierarchies as a whole.

The queerness of the series is overt and unmistakable by the beginning of the first book. The protagonist, Gideon, is a butch lesbian. This is a characterization that makes this series distinct from many others of the genre; LGBTQ representation often takes the form of attraction and relationships between characters of the same gender, but does little to explore other nuances of queer identity and experience. From the beginning of Gideon the Ninth, however, Gideon’s queerness is clear by her personality alone, outside of any relationship. She is gender-nonconforming both as a woman and as a cavalier; she is muscular, her narration is blunt and often crass, she resents the elaborate sacramental face paint that she is required to wear, and her attraction to women is shameless and unmistakable. Swordsmanship is what she excels at, but rather than the delicate rapiers that cavaliers traditionally use, she prefers to fight with a huge two-handed sword. Even outside of Gideon, there is an overt queerness to the setting and many of its characters. Of the first book’s ten central female characters, at least six are attracted to other women in some capacity. Not only this, but their attraction to one another is framed as normal and assumed; there is no circumstance where anyone needs to come out.

In this setting, traditional and patriarchal gender roles take less precedence in the power dynamics between the characters. But that does not mean that other parallel or allegorical hierarchies are absent. Though the series has checked more than enough boxes for queer representation, it continues to explore queerness by a broader definition, by establishing new normative hierarchies of gender and power and exploring the ways in which they are subverted. In the absence of traditional patriarchal heterosexuality, the characters in the book exist within the dynamic of necromancer and cavalier. Initially, we will explore how Gideon and her necromancer exist within this dynamic, and the degree to which her treatment of the dynamic is non-normative.

Gideon was not trained as a cavalier, but when there is no one else to fill the role, she has to hastily learn those traditions and behaviors. Already, she is in the position that many queer people find themselves in—she must learn to successfully imitate conformity to a role she doesn’t identify with. In order to do this, she must learn to fight with the delicate rapier, as opposed to her heavy, military-grade two-hander. She has to learn to apply daily the sacramental face paint of the Ninth House, which it is made clear that she hates wearing. She pretends to have taken a vow of silence, as her crass jokes and mannerisms would make the ruse immediately obvious. All of this she does at the command of her necromancer, Harrowhark, who is the heir of the Ninth House, who conforms fully and perfectly to the standards of a necromancer, and whom Gideon hates. When Gideon does conform to these standards, she performs exaggerated caricatures of devotion to Harrowhark in ways that highlight her nonconformity, such as saying things like “I am your creature, gloom mistress, I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady…I am your sworn sword, night boss.” (GtN 151). She pairs exaggerated, ironic declarations of loyalty with nicknames that make fun of Harrowhark’s necromantic pretentiousness. This reaction is a familiar one—for many people forced to embody gender roles that they don’t identify with, irony is the most comfortable solution.

No power hierarchy, least of all a patriarchal hierarchy, is simple. Hierarchies that deal with both power and identity are at risk of being oversimplified into a win-or-lose model, but I think that that is a misrepresentation. To imagine patriarchy as a game in which men oppress women for their own gain assumes that men are the winners in the dynamic. In reality, I would argue that there is no winner. I think the most helpful way to imagine patriarchy is as a hierarchy, but not one with men at the top. In fact, I would argue that no one is at the top, except for, perhaps, patriarchy itself. In a patriarchal model, women are trapped as the objects of desire; their bodies exist to be exploited and consumed. The objective ideal of patriarchal femininity is characterized by smallness, by the ways in which women are available recipients of power or sexual desire. Men, however, are trapped too. They are trapped as the desirers, divorced from emotion and intimacy, except in those instances where they are desiring women or engaging in violence with other men. The objective ideal of patriarchal masculinity is characterized by the ways in which men exert physical and sexual power over both women and other men, with varying degrees of associated violence. Both men and women are rewarded for the ways in which they conform to these ideals and punished for the ways in which they fail. Critically, however, those objective ideals cannot be reached. Judith Butler, in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, describes gender as “a performance with clearly punitive consequences…” explaining that “those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished.” Butler continues, arguing that “there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact…” (Butler 552). There is no way to successfully embody normative masculinity in ways that will not cause oneself harm, just as there is no way to successfully embody normative femininity, because both of these standards exist somewhat divorced from the complexities of real personhood. Though queerness, by nature, defies definition, I am defining it in part as the instances in which people fail to conform to these hierarchies, and how, in doing so, they construct and embody non-normative models of gender.

In the power dynamic between necromancer and cavalier, even the most normative, conforming participants find themselves punished by the ways in which they have failed to conform perfectly, often by the inevitable incompatibility of that perfection/ideal and their personhood. The hatred between Harrowhark and Gideon is mutual and codependent, and is perhaps one of the only ways in which Harrowhark fails to conform to her role. This power dynamic continues to function as an allegory for patriarchy, in which Harrowhark benefits from the power she holds over Gideon, but nevertheless is both trapped and harmed by her role in it. Because Harrowhark’s existence as a necromancer depends on her exploiting people like Gideon, she is consumed by and beholden to the guilt of her position. She resents it, and because she has no one except for Gideon, she has hated her for her entire life. Likewise, men benefit from their position in a patriarchy, but nevertheless are trapped within it, and harmed by the roles they are asked to embody.

Even the first Lyctors, who worked alongside God since The Great Resurrection, who created the framework and thus should conform to it perfectly, are hurt endlessly by it. The first Lyctors are characterized as bitter and hateful in general and toward one another. Though many of the details of their history and origins are vague, we know that the love they had for their cavaliers has taken the form of ten-thousand-year-old grief, even as their necromantic power continues to feed on those souls. One of the Lyctors says, referring to another, “I never saw her cry except once…the day after…When she became a Lyctor. I said There was no alternative. She said…We had the choice to stop.” (HtN 121).

How else are these dynamics complicated in the other houses, and within Lyctorhood? We see several examples throughout both Gideon the Ninth and its sequel, Harrow the Ninth, but some stand out more than others. Putting Gideon and Harrowhark’s Lyctorhood aside (for they do, tragically, achieve it), there are several other characters that stand out and complicate our understanding of the dynamic. The characters that most clearly subvert the dynamic of necromancer and cavalier are the pair from the Sixth House: Palamedes and Camilla. Throughout the first book, they are depicted much more as equals than many of the other duos. They are lifelong friends, and though there is no romance between them, they are close and familiar in a way that makes Gideon uncomfortable to see, as her own necromancer-cavalier relationship is so fraught. In the first book, the characters face a series of tests which introduce many of the component parts of Lyctorhood. In several of these tests, the necromancer is not yet asked to kill their cavalier but is required to use their body or soul in some way, and the cavalier is required to submit to that process. Palamedes is one of the first necromancers to realize what Lyctorhood will eventually require, and refuses to engage with any test that has the potential to harm Camilla. When she does come to harm, he cares for her wounds. At the end of the first book, he sacrifices himself to save several of the other characters, Camilla among them. In all of these instances, he refuses to conform to a dynamic which would put him in a position to hurt her. Though neither of these characters are explicitly queer in the traditional sense, the way that they subvert the dynamic of Lyctorhood functions as a queer-ing of the normative hierarchy.

Their dynamic exists in contrast to that of the Third House. Long before it is necessary, the necromancer Ianthe uses the body of her cavalier, Naberius, as fuel for her necromancy. “At one point [Ianthe] beckoned Naberius forward and, in a feat that nearly brought up Gideon’s dinner…ate him: she bit off a hunk of his hair, she chewed off a nail, she brought her incisors down on the heel of his hand. He submitted to all this without noise.” (GtN 188). Ianthe is the only one of the necromancers who willingly and intentionally becomes a lyctor. Her relationship with her cavalier is antagonistic, but both of them know their roles; she treats him almost like an annoying pet—dismissing him, mocking him, nicknaming him “Babs”. This hardly matches the loyalty and devotion we see in the other pairs, but as a result, Ianthe is the perfect candidate for Lyctorhood. She was consuming her cavalier before she was even aware of what Lyctorhood would entail. However, though she is rewarded for conforming to and embodying that hierarchy, she does not escape the harm entirely. She has a twin sister, Coronabeth, who is neither necromancer nor cavalier, but who trained in the ways of a cavalier in the desperate hope that her sister would choose her instead of Naberius. When the others find that Ianthe has killed Naberius, they also find Coronabeth, “eyes swollen from crying,” sobbing and “utterly destroyed.” She tells them, “She took Babs,” seeming in every way as if she is mourning the death of Naberius. But then she continues, “And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.” (GtN 394). In the second book, Coronabeth offers her life again to a different necromancer, one who she has loved since childhood. She says, “Save me…bind me to you, or who knows where I will go? What throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me down?” (HtN 551). Again, she is refused because the necromancer in question loves her. Coronabeth is heartbroken by the refusal to take her life because, as someone in the position of a cavalier, the only way she knows how to love someone is through literal self-sacrifice. Ianthe loves her sister more than anything else, but she is divided from her by her refusal to kill her. Even Ianthe, who embodies the power hierarchy perfectly, is harmed by the structure of Lyctorhood and its incompatibility with the complex love she feels for her sister.

The Locked Tomb deals with two notions of queerness: the first is the representation of LGBTQ characters whose identities don’t conform to traditional, patriarchal ideas of gender, and the second is the subversions of the normative power hierarchies that are unique to the story’s setting. These two levels of exploration don’t occur completely separately, however. In fact, as the story develops, we begin to see the interaction between these two kinds of queerness literally embodied in certain characters. In the third book of the series, Nona the Ninth (I will reference only the first chapter, as the full text has yet to be released), there are at least two characters whose Lyctorhood has been performed incorrectly in some way. Palamedes, the Sixth House necromancer who sacrificed himself in the first book, used necromancy to prevent his soul from truly dying. When we encounter him again in Nona the Ninth, his soul is living in his cavalier’s body, alongside Camilla’s own. Again, in normal Lyctorhood, the cavalier’s body is killed, and their soul is consumed by the necromancer, effectively killing the cavalier outright. But in the instance of the Sixth House pair, it was the necromancer’s body that died, and both their souls live in the cavalier’s body, neither consumed by the other. In every way, this pair subverts and outright reverses the standard operation of Lyctorhood.

Likewise, there is another Lyctor who failed to completely consume the soul of his cavalier. When the soul of that necromancer was killed, his cavalier’s soul, named Pyrrha, surfaced and now lives in his body. Palamedes lives in the body of his cavalier, who is a woman, and Pyrrha lives in a body that previously belonged to her male necromancer. Pyrrha is very much a woman whose body would be traditionally thought of as male, and Muir doesn’t shy away from describing her as such. In the first chapter of Nona the Ninth, for example, she is described as “wearing pyjama pants and a string vest and no shirt, so the orange glow of the hot plate ring lit up all the scars on her wiry arms.” Later in that same scene, she shaves her face. In the case of Palamedes and especially Pyrrha, their subversion of the Lyctorhood dynamic results in bodies that embody gender in non-normative ways.

(note: that bit was kind of hellish to write, because my audience is unfamiliar with the series and I’m already cutting out so much of the convoluted plot, so I just did my best to leave out the fact that two essential characters have the exact same name lmao. In any case, that is why I did not name G1deon here.)

The phrase that repeats throughout the series is “one flesh, one end.” It refers to the bond between a cavalier and a necromancer, and it is the oath they make to each other. As Gideon sees cavaliers and necromancers who care for one another deeply and as equals, it is implied that this phrase refers to the epitome of devotion to one another, a dynamic in which the cavalier and the necromancer are equals. However, as the true process of Lyctorhood is revealed, the phrase’s meaning turns dark, referring instead to a process in which the necromancer’s body and power is both the flesh and the end. However, though Lyctorhood grimly recontextualizes this phrase, it doesn’t change the interactions that Gideon sees between many of the cavaliers and necromancers. At one point, the Fourth House cavalier asks Gideon if she and Harrowhark have been paired for a long time. Before she answers, Gideon sees Palamedes bandaging Camilla’s wounds, and sees the necromancer from the Fourth House braiding his cavalier’s hair, and she “contemplate[s] the sight of the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound… [as] Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon…[Gideon] still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.” (GtN 275-6). Though the dynamic between the two is modeled after a relationship built around harm and unequal power, the relationships that occur within that framework do not always emulate that harm or imbalance. This reflects a real phenomenon, in which the ways that we might define gender within a patriarchal framework are disproven by many of the people embodying those identities.

In some ways, the dynamics of gender do exist as a result of the framework of patriarchy; that the ways by which we define femininity or masculinity revolve around their roles within heterosexuality. As with any categorization of identity, however, there are always people whose performance and engagement with the category defy the bounds of its definition. Likewise, though the normative necromancer-cavalier relationship is epitomized by the self-sacrificial, grief-filled, exploitative model of Lyctorhood, there are versions of that dynamic that defy that definition, that subvert it or refuse the harm that is seemingly inherent to it. The pairs that seem to embody the initial understanding (and not the later, darker meaning) of “one flesh, one end” most strongly are pairs such as Palamedes and Camilla, who would refuse to ascend to Lyctorhood once they know the cost.

In deconstructing the patriarchal framework that defines femininity and masculinity, I often feel that the question is: what is salvageable here? Is anything? The Locked Tomb series argues, in part, that we are shaped by our broken cultures, and that to accept the rewards of such hierarchies is to inevitably hurt one another. There is a cynical way of looking at it, and that cynicism is characterized in Harrow the Ninth by a letter left by an enemy commander, a character who hates everything that the nine houses stand for. She says, “The only thing our civilization can ever learn from yours is that when our backs are to the wall and our towers are falling all around us and we are watching ourselves burn, we rarely become heroes.” (HtN 403). This commander, however, is characterized almost entirely by her hatred, and though her letter sums up this argument well, I believe that it is only half of what the series is saying. The Locked Tomb says that there are things here that are salvageable; even if we are shaped by our broken cultures, even with our backs against the wall, there are ways to reject that harm without leaving ourselves and our identities behind. It argues that the nature of humanness is that we, as people, will always love one another in ways that fail those hierarchies. Though the hierarchies of identity, gender, and power only ever give us options to love in ways that hurt one another, our personhood is complex in ways that makes queerness and queer love inevitable.

2022-05-15 20:51:17 ¶ ●

another silly little newspaper clipping for the Alecto-Was-a-Resurrection-Beast file, but the tradition of all the Lyctors’ last names being their cavalier’s name? John’s last name is Gaius. And like it means Earth and we assume it’s bc he’s from earth, which, yeah, but also if Alecto is the Earth’s resurrection beast then in a way he could be named after her

2022-05-15 21:13:22 ¶ ●

you know I don’t think that we talk enough about the fact that harrow’s soup was not good. like it tasted bad. God takes a spoonful and very politely takes a sip of water and then does not eat any more of the soup. harrow’s plot was delicious but her soup was not

2022-05-15 21:31:35 ¶ ●

ok now I can’t stop thinking about the soup scene. it’s SUCH a good scene, I think there’s nothing I love more than a character who is extremely, surprisingly capable, who everyone underestimates (the same reason why the “go loud” scene hits so hard in GtN, because nobody but us and gideon knows how good cam is, and it’s thrilling to see everyone proved wrong). but it’s not just that they underestimate harrow, they straight up dismiss her as like this useless, failed child. and the whole fucking book she doesn’t get a shred of respect, and the entire book we have to see harrow- our proud and sharp and clever harrow- reduced to this trembling bleeding ball of grief, and she has to endure that too. I think she knows that she used to be more. and finally when she’s pushed to her breaking point, lobotomized, hunted, six-days-no-sleep harrow still does what no one else can do, because she’s just that desperate and she’s just that good.

2022-05-22 22:52:07 ¶ ●

they hated her for her itty bitty teeny weeny swagger

2022-05-29 20:43:38 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

foxy-alien:

> Gideon! With her two hander! You don’t want to know how long I held this position