of all the plot twists in the locked tomb literally NOTHING hits quite as hard as the twist in GtN that the only reason gideon and harrow “”“hate”“” each other is because they hate themselves and assume the other one has to hate them the same way and the second they both come clean about that they’re immediately ready to drop it and die for each other in Grand Displays Of Dramatic Lesbianism. like it still fucks me up every time i think about it
like okay so you’re reading GtN right. for the first time. and these two goth bitches show up onscreen and you’re like “hey aren’t these the space necromancy lesbians people go insane about? aren’t these two like canonically in love in an unhinged way??” only for them to beat the shit out of each other and tell anyone who’ll listen that they hate the others’ guts. so you’re like okay when is the penny gonna drop when are they gonna grow out of hating each other and start developing it into romance
and then!!!!! you read on and you discover!!! that it was NEVER about hating the other and it was ALWAYS about a deep conviction that the other hated THEM and the defense mechanisms they threw up to deal with that, else you have to admit to yourself that you crave the attention and company of the girl who “despises” you. it’s about that one awful traumatic event when they were 10/11 that left both of them privately convinced that the other had seen the absolute worst and most shameful parts of themselves: harrow a witness to gideon’s “murder” of harrow’s parents, gideon a witness to harrow’s “failure” and betrayal of her parents, her house and her god
it gets even worse when you realise that gideon was The Baby That Survived. she lived through the horrific event harrow’s parents enacted just to conceive harrow, she came BACK when she shouldn’t have. harrow considers her own existence a “war crime” and gideon may as well exist to witness and judge and condemn the many ways that harrow “shouldn’t” rightfully or morally exist; harrow may be incentivised to keep gideon on-world to protect her house and her family secret, and to pretend that she’s above gideon’s insults or reproach, but really, she’s lived her whole life at gideon’s mercy
but when the truth comes out and harrow never even CONSIDERED blaming gideon for the death of her parents and gideon’s response to harrow’s backstory is to hold her and say “i’m so sorry” they drop all that bullshit faster than you can say lesbian u-haul
Something I love about Tumblr that you don’t really get on Reddit, is the brief flashes of fandoms I’m entirely unfamiliar with, like some large beast in the undergrowth.
Right now, it’s The Locked Tomb. Never even HEARD of it before coming here, but I see impressions of it everywhere. It’s like, teenagers wearing skeletons? Or something?
idk i do think people are kind of unimaginative when it comes to talking about tmuir’s more fanfictionesque tendencies / i do think this drive to write off the idea that her engagement with fanfiction as a form could be taken as seriously as her engagement with, say, lolita or the iliad or don quixote (or even that her engagement w/ fanfiction cancels out the intellectual seriousness of the latter three) is, like. i mean you do you but that seems boring to me.
like idk it seems very clear to me that she’s a heavily referential writer & how she wields that in tlt specifically allows her to crack open questions about cultural preservation; what lasts for ten thousand years, to what does the work of preservation lend legitimacy and what does it elide, what do we give legitimacy to; these are questions that hang over the whole series and i think exist as much in her “lowbrow” references as in her “highbrow” ones. i find the prose of gideon a little grating at points but it seems pretty clearly deliberate in what it’s doing, so it stands to reason to then ask why that tone is being employed at all. and i’m kind of interested in why a “fanfiction voice” can only ever be a limitation and an indication of a writer’s infantile/shallow/unskilled engagement where eg. a mimicry of nabokov’s voice (harrow, the john chapters in nona) can have intellectual heft behind it. i don’t even 100% agree with what tlt posits around fanfiction, but like, i think it demands and therefore merits engagement lol
it’s less a question of whether tmuir at her most fanfictiony is doing “good” or “bad” prose (sometimes it is kind of bad lol) and more like, the discourse of the text makes it v clear that this style is present for a reason other than her being a writer who cannot write outside of this v limiting voice & is shilling republished fanfic with poor-quality prose in order to make a profit, so we might as well start talking about what that reason is and responding accordingly
