love how the series is called ‘the locked tomb’ when we find out in book one that the tomb has literally been unlocked for like 10 whole years before book one’s timeline even starts
thanks for everyone who gave accurate renaming suggestions. we wouldn’t want to misrepresent our books to outsiders here
I think the romance is doing something narratively in tlt, even beyond just being Fun To Think About. Like I don’t read gideon’s devotion to harrow as a straightforward love story even though you could enjoy it on that level, because it’s also about the ways love & devotion can be fed back into systems that are out to exploit people. like imo gtn specifically is challenging the idea that love is automatically this empowering revolutionary force & working towards the idea that in a deeply flawed society people sometimes hurt each other not because they want to but because they don’t know how to stop, because the whole framework is one where certain people are seen as expendable. And I think htn is asking, if someone wanted to stop the cycle in their own personal life, how would they? Would it be recognizable as a victory to anyone else, if it meant giving up on the whole structure by which your life had been lived? I don’t think the next books are going to like nail down the answer to all the societal ills of the tlt universe but I am interested to see where gideon’s story specifically goes bc I think there’s setup to explore her whole Deal with self sacrifice more deeply
thinkingb… about the
evolution in the power dynamics in harrow’s dream bubble AUs and what it tells
us. we go from first completely replicating the original power imbalance
between her and gideon except in reverse in the cav/necro switch one. this one is devastating
to me because it feels so… stuck, like harrow can’t even conceptualize a
world yet where their individual existences would not somehow be at the expense
of the other. it has the same cast as their actual childhoods, and the
characters play themselves out like they did in real life even with their roles
reversed, and with the same logic.
but THEN in the one where
they’re at the party and gideon is the emperor’s daughter/the ~*princess*~
something starts to happen! we bring in ‘new’ characters in a mirror of coming
to canaan house in the real world, with only aiglamene left representing the
ninth with her. gideon is still above her in status/power in this one, but in a
setting where the possibility of being raised to her level – BY
MARRIAGE! by gideon’s choice alone, should she want to make it!!! – is
literally baked into the entire point of the structure of the event she’s
conjured up, societally and emotionally. it’s expressed in terms of politics by
way of romance novel structure. (also makes me wonder how harrow actually
thinks inter-house politics function fdshkfjas she’s just been out there on a
cold rock on the outskirts of the solar system, her understanding of what a
party is seems wholly academic.) that power imbalance subconsciously still involves
giving up(/enforcing, yay codependency) all your agency and emotional wellbeing
to someone else, just like harrow is doing in the pool scene in a way –
“I’ve lived my
whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die
at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
but it’s getting there. in any
real structural sense harrow has always, always had the power in their
imbalanced dynamic and I think that’s part of what she’s trying to process here
by putting herself on gideon’s side of it, but on the interpersonal/internal
scale it’s been much more complicated and entwined than that and it echoes that
too.
it’s the guilty, repressed
thrill of ’…but what if griddle would still choose me if she had every
freedom and all other options before her. what if she’d choose me and stay with
me even if I didn’t forcibly keep her from going?’ (which is like… what a lot
of their dynamic in the first part of GtN is partially about, when you go back
to it with HtN in mind. gideon feels more threatened by the idea of harrow’s
indifference than by her cruelty and possessiveness, because harrow hating her
always meant more than anyone else loving her, and harrow keeps saying ‘please don’t
leave me’ in the most violent and toxic of ways. because gideon only exists via
harrow, and vice versa, and they’ve been stuck like that so long. oh boy.) so
like. in the same type of situation where harrow decided ‘I must no longer
accept being a stranger to you’ in the real world (having left the ninth house
for the larger world of all the houses) she has made them actual strangers in
the dream, but with hope that they might not continue to be? idk it feels like
there’s a lot going on here.
and then in the coffee shop
AU they meet as equals, as two people completely outside the dark dreary
confines of the ninth and the power imbalance that raised them, and that’s
where we finally get to actually see gideon in harrow’s mind’s eye – and
see feelings about gideon harrow normally doesn’t let herself look at directly
(it involves strong arms ~*dewy with sweat*~ and a lovingly enraptured
description of her crooked smile haha. harrow is not good at handling romantic
or sexual feelings normally but it rises so sweetly and uncomplicatedly in this
one, like it doesn’t anywhere else in either of the books to my memory. her
attraction to The Body is more like reverent despair, and her attraction to
ianthe is……. deeply emotionally ambivalent let’s say lol, but this one time
it’s a description more like the normal belly butterflies you’d get from being
in love without quite so much dread or disgust getting twined into it). I think
this one is the closest to what harrow actually desperately wants for them as
her wildest fantasy – not that she wants to join the cohort or anything, but
to be able to meet as whole, individuated people who have a fighting chance not
to break each other.
like… harrow the war
crime who feels like she has to live her life in debt to the 200 souls that
ensured her existence, harrow who’s a lyctor and servant of god and has been in
love with a dead woman since she was ten… and the dream inside her that’s so
strong it almost pulls dead souls back from the river is just to meet gideon
somewhere they haven’t hurt each other yet, where neither of them has to
hurt each other anymore. (or hurt themselves for the other, or use the
other as a means to hurt themselves, which is its own endless ouroboros because
of their enmeshed state – everything they do to each other hurts them both as
the gideon-harrowhark harrowhark-gideon unit they’ve been attachment-wise for
so long even before lyctorhood made it literal. it’s all gideon thinks she is
good for, an idea harrow finds so utterly horrifying and repellent that she
*waves at entirety of HtN* did THAT essentially to disprove it.) which is still
a huge step away from managing to process, accept and live with the ways they
HAVE hurt each other and that they might still find a way to touch without
doing so again. tellingly this fantasy is still within the power structures of
the empire, even if it’s no longer claustrophobically contained to the ninth
house and their past in it. God knows they’ve got so, SO far to go before they
even theoretically could get there but like… again, I really do believe that
is harrow’s dream. give the poor kid a break and let her have this coffee shop
AU for now, she’s literally dying and holy shit has she Been Through It fjskdafsda
