2022-11-02 11:56:08 ¶ ●

I think one of the reasons The Locked Tomb hits so hard is because of its message that getting help can only make you greater than what you were before. So many narratives nowadays reinforce the belief that you need to be completely self-sufficient in order to have true value as a human being and that admitting you need help is in any way a burden to the people around you. Not only is this ableist, but it is also an extremely sad and lonely notion. Harrow is no less of a necromancer for needing Gideon to pick her up when she falls, and Gideon is no less of a fighter for needing Harrow to watch her back. At the end of the day, the very concept of being a Lyctor (however damaging it is), encapsulates the fact that we’re only truly whole when we work together, and I think that’s beautiful. Even when we see Harrow lose her mind completely and fall into a state of utter helplessness, she is still not a lesser necromancer - quite to the contrary. Her skill is still very much there, and more powerful than ever, but we can see that she is undone. As the reader we know that all she needs is a push in the right direction by someone with enough kindness and understanding so that she can stand back up. Ironically enough, as it is for so many people in real life, that’s the one thing she can’t get. We see her treated with contempt and disgust, we see her gaslighted and disregarded as the weakest of the Lyctors, we see her thrown aside as something which deserves to be dead. Not only does this narrative feel wrong to the reader because of love for the character and because we’ve seen what Harrow is like when she’s “relatively healthy”, it also serves as an extremely strong point in defense of people with disabilities (both physical and mental), since it gives an intimate look into what this kind of treatment feels like. I don’t know. I think about that a lot lately.