I keep seeing people complaining about the memes in TLT as some kind of crappy authorial impingement on the narrative.
And I do get why they might feel like that when you’re suddenly getting nerfed by ‘none Houses, left grief’ in the middle of John being Awful.
But I’ve yet to see anyone complain about Abigail calling something unique “a holy grail”, despite the fact that surely this is also a jarring thing for an evil space necromancer to be casually using as a reference point.
Obviously the inclusion of the memes is a choice on Tamsyn Muir’s part. But they very much have meaning in universe: the thing about every single person in this society casually referencing Tumblr memes from the 20-teens is that can only come from one place: the man who ended the world those memes came from, but hangs onto them as a little esoteric connection. And 10,000 years of his shitty little jokes and unexplained references filtering out into the society he created mean that Harrow can sarcastically talk about how Gideon “studied the blade” or Ianthe can reference SNL as easily as Abigail can name check the holy grail.
In retrospect, “none Houses, left grief” sits alongside “how many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?” as part of the chilling trail of breadcrumbs towards the realisation of what John Gaius is, what he did, and just how awfully casual he is about it.