it feels quite presumptuous of me to in any way compare myself to a terminally ill cancer patient, but I have to talk about my love for Cytherea the First - or at least her façade. all her talking about suffering and dying prettily struck such a chord with my hateful instinct of losing weight and making myself tiny and cute and elegant to fit an ideal, to have people around me more easily accept my chronic pain and fatigue… not to talk about the long parenthesis of suicidality driven by aestheticism, the plans of poisoning myself in père-lachaise the art of suicide nightgowns and hair curls flying every which where - it just makes me feel, a lot. the truly, deeply earnest “I didn’t want to die”. I ache
harrowhark nonagesimus is the character of all time. she’s 3'6 and made of soggy pipe cleaners and will hiss at anyone who gets too close to her and yet she is almost universally beloved. palamedes sextus is like this is my best friend and my special guy. ianthe tridentarius is like i WILL marry this nasty smelly woman. gideon nav devoted her soul and body to her after hating her for 17 slutty, slutty years. god himself was like you are the wildest and saddest bitch i’ve ever met and you are a daughter to me. and harrowhark is just sitting there with ¾ of a brain and vomit on her robe
you ever think about how harrow’s 18th birthday passed without anyone noticing, not even harrow herself, but the fact that it’s been narrated in htn means Gideon Remembered
tamsyn really did something with the dynamic of jod and the lyctors she was like i’m gonna take just some guy and his friends and make him god and them immortal but ten thousand years later they still kinda treat him like hes god but also like a guy they’ve been stuck being friends with for Ten Thousand Years but you can never tell which one it is because they’re all ten thousand years old and have moved far past normal human expression and communication structures and they’re all also kinda psychosexually obsessed with each other and have and Do fuck .. mercy alters her own dna at will to turn her hair pink for funsies . god makes a none pizza with left beef joke . g1deon is actively attempting murder for most of the book . god has a threesome on the dinner table
harrow the ninth is easily the funniest book ive read in years. its an exercise in madness and misery and confusion and you as the reader don’t know what’s happening until late in the story, and in that sense its so so intriguing to read, and of course the absence of a character from the narrative forming its shape is so cool. however the plot??? god and his besties fuck about on a space station. harrow is throwing up blood while ianthe watches hornily. nobody has a real plan to deal with the major threat aside from uhh defensive manoeuvres i guess. god and his besties have a threesome on the dinner table. one of them is trying to murder harrow at all times. everyone is sympathetically ignoring how harrow is completely deranged. harrow makes murder soup. what is happening in this book??????
God. The thought process that led to Harrow doing a back alley diy lobotomy with Ianthe operating. Her cavalier died and her solution was to make herself have a seizure and throw up on god’s floor whenever she hears Gideon’s name. She must have known going into it that there would be side effects like that, that she would no longer be 100% herself. Harrowhark Nonagesimus willingly lobotomized herself because she would rather lose her mind, which she prided herself on and was a major factor in her survival growing up, than live with the loss and guilt of Gideon. She gave up her entire sense of self because she couldn’t kill Gideon. Gideon gave Harrow her entire life and she didn’t even want it. Because she truly could not conceive of a universe without Gideon in it. If you need me I’m crying in the corner.
tbh I didn’t even like reading the first 60% of harrow the ninth, since I detest second person narration, but my god do I admire the way tamsyn muir worked with her medium to make you FEEL gideon’s absence, to make you ACHE for her to be back in the narrative… and the twists?? I adored gtn for how it handled worldbuilding, feeding you scraps and pieces in the most natural way, and does it pay off in htn when surprises come naturally from learning piece by piece, which even the characters are doing with us at this point! this book is such a lesson on novel writing
tlt is insane it’s like what if there were a love story between a girl who is a lock and a girl who is a key. okay now what if it was a love triangle with the thing in the fucking box
everyone in the notes is saying like “ianthe is the lockpick” “ianthe is the hammer” and is IS funny BUT I stand beside the fact that it is sooo much funnier that she has no part whatsoever in that whole dynamic. she couldn’t give less of a shit about the tomb. if gideon is a key and harrow is a lock then ianthe is a lesbian who is sexually interested in locks
no bitch has ever gone as hard as commander wake, actually. like:
take over and unite a disorganised insurgency group to become one of the greatest threats ever presented to an immortal god
learn about, identify, locate and somehow KILL??? a monster that multiple lyctors have died trying to kill, then make said monster’s body into weaponry for better god-killing abilities
identify the saint of duty and make him violate his duty, sexual-style. it’s okay, because the ‘duty’ really refers to his cavalier, who you are also dating. succesfully two-time two people who are sharing a body. how do you even do this.
connect with even more lyctors and, rather than getting killed on sight, agree to help kill the emperor. this part contains child murder but okay!
when the relevant material dies, who cares? you’ve got a perfectly good womb, a syringe and seemingly immortal sperm!
inseminate yourself with god’s semen ???
succesfully evade the saint of duty for the duration of your pregnancy. when cornered, succesfully a) get to the right place b) induce labour and c) deliver your child
get kicked out an airlock. this one is a bummer. reroute your oxygen to your child, which would be a sweet gesture if it wasn’t specifically so your child can be killed at a more useful time
refuse all attempts by ninth house spirit-callers, other than yelling the name of the lyctor that killed you. 'sacred forgotten names’ my ass
like. that’s already genuinely insane behaviour! and that’s only stuff that happens before book one!
because then your soul is so bitter and determined and angry that you somehow hold onto your bones for a VERY long time and you don’t go insane, and then you end up in a sword for literal decades and you still don’t go insane, and then some mega necromancer gets hold of The Sword With You In It and you hate her so much you can make her projectile vomit just by being near you- and, again, you are a ghost inside a sword at this stage-
also you simultaneously haunt the necromancer’s brain and fuck up her attempts to rewrite history by being like 'what if i was there and also i had a gun. what if that.’ and you’re so hard to kill that they have to summon the ghost of the coolest bestest big boy soldier who ever lived just to try and step to you.
and also you got the necro to stab a body so you can puppet the corpse around a spaceship, which you use mostly to try and kill lyctors (and, also, to try and fuck)
also, you canonically named yourself after 'lose yourself’ by eminem.
best thing about Ianthe is that the bone arm is so fucking stupid. it doesn’t make any sense. it sounds cool in theory but in reality having her entire right arm reduced to only skinny little bones probably just make her look off-balance and weird. the joint that connects to the shoulder is either surrounded by open exposed meat or has had skin manually grown over it so that her upper arm looks like a corn dog. I assume lyctorhood + bone magic means that her body can do whatever it wants but also how is an arm without muscle going to have any strength behind it. she’s one unlucky landing away from snapping clean through the gold plating and exploding her rapier arm into a dozen useless shards. Yes she can just regenerate it but why go through the effort. Why is she only making herself a Fat Glove on an as-needed basis she is a flesh magician just put the meat back on it. except she never will because it’s her daily reminder of the closest she ever got to having sex with harrow
‘Children as fists!
Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds!’
Mercymorn thinks Harrow and Ianthe are too young to be Lyctors, and she complains about this loudly and often. But she is also voicing the core thesis of the series. Children as fists. Infants as gestures. A child conceived, carried and birthed only for her death to serve as a weapon. Two hundred children murdered to create a single heir, one who is never valued for herself, only as a prop to uphold her failing House. Eight pairs of young people sent to Canaan house to do what sixteen others did ten millenia ago, and reduce their very selves, their friendship their trust their love, down to ever so much nuclear fuel. And in the background, thousands and thousands of young people sent out to the frontlines to kill and die in service of a malignant, metastasized empire. Yuck. Pfaugh.
🎵missing pieces of my skull, i’ll sew on patches of my own soul🎶
palamedes sextus, my beloved! this piece has been in my head for months, and it took so many tries to get it how i wanted. maybe someday it’ll get properly painted up, but for now here’s a bit of my favorite librarian, sex pal.
[image description: a digital illustration of palamedes from the locked tomb series, drawn from the shoulders up. half of his face is drawn as a skull in the process of exploding. he has the roman numeral for 6 written on his forehead and a peaceful smile on his face.]
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