the locked tomb is such a special series because where else are you going to find a character like harrowhark nonagesimus. she’s a repressed goth camp mean lesbian space nun necrophiliac immortal teenage saint. she’s a war crime and the greatest necromancer of her generation and she’s bad at making soup. she’s the deadpan depressed leader of a death cult and she fell for a horny jock who makes “your mom” jokes at every opportunity. she tried to have sex with a hallucination of a 10,000 year old corpse. she’s a strict conformist to liturgical tradition and also a heretic who almost killed god when she was ten. should i continue
her first kiss happened when she stuck her tongue down a woman’s throat to make sure she had the correct jaw. she spent her whole life in solemn dedicated worship of the emperor and then got annoyed that he wanted to have tea parties with her. she cut out part of her tibia and gave herself a lobotomy. she kept a dude’s head in a box in her closet. she’s a scrawny virgin who’s a bit of a sadist and she narrowly avoided having the birds and the bees talk with god. she put a bunch of skulls outside her quarters in a shared home, scaring off the other residents, for “ambience.“ she’s a beauty guru and a workaholic and apparently her thumbs are delicious. she left some bread in a drawer.
Very funny that for most if not all of Gideon the Ninth there are only the barest most vague indications that they’re actually on future Pluto/Earth and not some random fantasy setting with any similarities to Earth/Christianity/the Solar System/Latin being either coincidental or the result of localization in “translation” for readers’ benefit,
… and then John gets introduced in Harrow the Ninth
and by Nona there’s an entire subplot that’s just a bunch of researchers in near-future New Zealand making comparisons to Twilight and X-Men while livestreaming the invention of necromancy
painting of Angel Gabriel as Messenger announcing the birth of Christ to Mary
Photos of various (relatively cheap-looking) capes, as for Halloween costumes
child's drawing of an elephant
poster for the movie Freaky Friday
picture of miscellaneous colorful friendship bracelets
various bottles of hot sauce
screenshot from homestuck beginning with "sir are you familiar with jupiter" and ending with "earth is literally under seige by planet fucking jupiter"
cropped tumblr post reading "i came out to have a good time and i'm honestly feeling so attacked right now"
he’s god. he’s a millenial. he resurrected an entire solar system. he eats peanuts in meetings. he started a nuclear war. he’s 10,000 years old. he makes none pizza with left beef jokes. he’s a slut. he killed and then anthropomorphized the earth to look like Barbie. he has threesomes with his besties who want to kill him. he’s a deadbeat dad. he listened to evanescence. he locked his ex up in a block of ice in an unbreakable tomb on pluto because his friends didnt like her. he hated billionaires. he wanted to adopt a psychotic bone nun who lobotomized herself. he likes tea and biscuits. he controlled the body of the dead US president. he’s from new zealand. he wears baby fingers around his head. his name is john of all fucking things. he killed the whole solar system. he was a tumblrina. his only comment on destroying melbourne was “shame about the tram service”.
You are Mercymorn. You have scattered memories of a world pre and post-apocalypse. You know few and many things. You know you love Cristobel. You know you hatelovehate Augustine. You know what parts are supposed to be in a body. You know that John is God.
You sit down at the canteen to have your peas and your cannoli. A looming shadow drifts over to sit across the table from you. An image from your past that seems to sit on the tip of your memory. Blonde, teased out hair, a small nose, small ears, wide pink lips, and luminous yellow eyes. An eight foot tall Barbie doll setting her tray down to eat. You see she has cannoli and peas too. You nervously take a bite and watch her mirror you. She wrinkles her nose at the taste of food and begins eating the fork instead. You watch in fascination and horror as she starts chewing the tray next, mechanically moving a jaw with far too many sharp teeth. She blinks at you and tells you, “It wouldn’t make you happier if you kissed Augustine, but it would make you less tense about it.”
i really enjoy that ianthe has clearly, after the death of augustine and mercy, decided that She’s In Charge Now. Shadow Leader is Back Baby. god and gonad are too mopey and weird so i have to keep the show going. Lights! Camera! Action! it’s time for Prince Ianthe Naberius to shine
ianthe in harrow was trying to adapt to lyctorhood and learn from her elders, augustine mostly, and try to fit into this new structure she’d found herself in. she spends a lot of it trying to create a relationship with harrow that resembles what she interprets as the older lyctors relationships to each other.
and then everything including several people explode and die and all she has left in the fall out are in her eyes a broken john gaius and a broken gideon nav. and she’s like okay, i got this, i’ve spent my whole life managing two idiots. and we see her try to replicate aspects of what she had with corona and babs. she goes matchy matchy with gideon, becoming her shadow instead of corona’s. she’s hiding that gideon is a corpse instead of hiding that corona isn’t a necromancer. she appoints herself as a sort of caretaker of john, sees him someone whose moods and actions she needs to track and monitor for his own good.
rereading gtn in preparation for nona and like. there was NO rule saying the whole canaan house shindig had to be competitive. the invitation specifically said that jod would be happy to have EIGHT new lyctors. theoretically everyone could have treated the lyctoral trials as a group project (other than you know who, who obviously would have intervened if this had happened), figured it out together, and all become lyctors if they so chose. but half the houses have chronic Shady Bitch Disease so they jumped right to treating it as a race and keeping secrets from each other. this perhaps should have been jod’s first sign that this wasn’t the best group to pick new lyctors from if he wanted to avoid another 10000 years of weird infighting.
In this age of spoilers “ruining the story” and all that, I just have to say that The Locked Tomb series did it right cuz I have seen so many spoilers about those books but they are absoLUTELY incomprehensible, like I have probably seen or read MASSIVE spoilers for those books but its basically like “she rode a skateboard pulled by cats while drinking soup from a skull” so like what am I even supposed to do with that
The rampant emotional dysfunction in the Nine Houses can be tracked in part to the fact that, despite the strong cultural presence of moirallegiance (in the form of the traditional necromancer/cavalier bond), and the presence of both flushed and pitch romantic and sexual relationships (appearing in numerous places throughout the series), absolutely no one in the entire setting is willing or able to auspictize for anyone else. In this essay I will…
John, after letting his polycule destroy the galaxy for 10k years: you know what maybe it’s unethical to decide who I promote based on who’s in the polycule. Time to message some rich people’s kids on linkedin
hey whats up everyone it’s John, thanks for tuning in. i’ve got Ulysses and Titania here and we have a great update for all of you, but first i’d like to thank this video’s sponsor: Nord VPN. Now if you’re a regular viewer of my channel, you know I can post some pretty controversial stuff on here. I’m pretty private about where our facility is located, and thanks to Nord VPN I can feel safe uploading these videos to the web without worrying about getting tracked or blocked by my ISP. with over 5000 servers in 50 countries worldwide, Nord VPN protects your data from prying eyes and lets you bypass browsing restrictions. check out the link in the description to use the code COWWALL for 20% off your first 6 months and thank you to Nord VPN for sponsoring this video.
shoutout to judith deuteros for, in a series full of people simply not having a good time of it right now, being in probably the top five people consistently simply not having a good time of it right now. again I cannot exaggerate how stiff the competition she’s up against is, but for three books now nothing good has ever happened to judith deuteros and no one but corona seems to worry overmuch about it
john: i have got to kill the trillionaires who abandoned earth
john: kills literally everyone, including his friends and every person and animal on earth and also the soul and normal viability of all the planets in the solar system, EXCEPT and i cannot stress this enough, the trillionaires who abandoned earth.
imagine being varun tho. your little sister calls you in the middle of the night, crying hysterically and asking for you to come pick her up, and when you scramble to go get her, more terrified than you’ve ever been in your entire planet ghost life, she just rolls her eyes and tells you that you overreacted and you’re being so embarrassing oh my god varun all my friends are here and they’re going to think you’re like weird!!!!… I think I would be a little miffed too honestly
while we all love Ianthe’s vileness it is important we not forget that Coronabeth is also a freak (affectionate). Ianthe might have bit chunks off of Naberius but at least she did it bc she needed the thanergy, Corona bit him literally just for fun and/or as a personal emotional outlet. sir this is my emotional support chewboytoy. and we cannot leave out how juicy she thought Gideon’s extremely megadead corse was while she&Cam&Judith were BOE prisoners. there is a reason why Ianthe thinks necrophilia is pasé and imo that reason is Coronabeth. not to mention how she canonically only falls in love with people who are somehow incapable of returning her affections: corpses. Judith. third house boys with a special interest in shuttles. she had a mental breakdown bc her sister did not murder and eat her.
ALT
