take a hike

a stained glass living room design by Harris Armstrong

MEGAN THEE STALLION (& TINA SNOW) HISS, 2024

i hope you are being compassionate with yourself today. you are your oldest childhood friend

Heather Ihn Martin, Baking, 2020, Gouache on watercolor paper

— Arabelle Sicardi, from “The Year in Ugliness.”

“I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.”

Wedding Dress

1900

Mrs O’Donovan of New York

Fashion Museum Bath via Twitter

Snowboarding in hanfu

#this is what cultivators flying on swords should look like @xcziel

YES

@blackkatmagic for some reason I feel like you’d like this.

Pansexuality activated.

Abeny Nhial at Schiaparelli Haute Couture SS 22  

[leaning over the back of my chair at a mid-range burger chain] so anyway bestie john’s subsumption of his lyctors’ personal identities is empire writ small. think of harrow and ianthe offering each other the comfort of using each other’s surnames  — and knowing it’s a comfort

knowing how deeply harrow has always thought of herself as ninth, how much she sees herself as not just of her house but synonymous with it. knowing how ianthe shares a name with her sister—something rare and unique, as per the gt9 extra materials—around whom her life has always revolved. 

and john takes that away from them! unless they are talking to each other in private, they are no longer Nonagesiums and Tridentarius, but the First. he has taken away their association with others and replaced it with association to him.

for his other lyctors, it’s been like this long enough that their names are forgotten!

cytherea wanted to be called ‘cytherea loveday’, but john wouldn’t even let her have that memorial to the grief she suffered in his name. to him she could only be cytherea the first. it’s mercymorn who asks him to honour cytherea’s wishes, after her death:

there’s just something about how cytherea’s choice in name, harrow and ianthe’s given names. these things that memorialize love and community and culture and family, and john takes them away and redefines them in terms of their association to him

and the disdain is even more apparent when applied to his enemies. awake remembrace of these valiant dead is even more obviously than ‘nonagesimus’ or ‘tridentarius’ a name that very directly represents a link to an extinct culture (very possibly extinct because of john)

he at first refuses to say it, calls it “genuinely sad, bordering on very funny”, then abjectively mocks it! wake’s name is explicitly a connection to a long-dead, near-totally extinct cultural tradition, and he entertains himself stomping all over it!

not to mention alecto: alecto, a name john also denies, a name he refuses to even speak. it’s her “real name” but he “buried it with her”

he instead calls her ‘annabel lee’, a totally passive figure that exists to be loved and mourned with no agency in her own story. a name that quite literally renders her inanimate. ‘annie laurie’ is less egregious, but it’s a love ballad. he’s defining her not by what she did (or what he did to her) but by his own emotional attachment and pain. 

note that alecto was also the first one he called First. it comes full circle. he took her name and replaced it with her relation to him (“my Adam”) and now he’s done this to everyone around him

john devours everyone’s identity: he replaces them with his own, with how they are defined in relation to him, their opposition to him or subservience to him or his affection for them. harrow cannot be nonagesimus aboard the mithraeum because that would mean acknowledging that she is ninth more than she is john’s servant. cytherea cannot be loveday because that would acknowledge that the grief of what she did at his demand is greater and more powerful than her devotion. he must come first. he must always be at the center.

this is what empire does: it renders externalities internal. it creates new definitions of the periphery by erasing all meaning about it that doesn’t relate it directly back to the core. and john does all this too, only interpersonally, on a human level.

[i sip my milkshake for a weirdly long amount of time until im just making gross sucking sounds through a straw] so yeah fuck that guy

[image description: text from harrow the ninth, with various sections highlighted and cut off mid-sentence:

…frequent visitor to her den. You took such a pitiful pleasure in “Nonagesimus,” now that you had spent months being Harrowhark the First. As God said, you might be the ninth saint, but you could never be Ninth again—except when you closed Ianthe’s door. “It’s down to your want of ambidexterity, Tridentarius,” you said, giving her the same sickly pleasure in nomenclature. “It’s not exactly mathematics. You are trying to fight with a…

All three of them fell silent at the altar. The wasted body in front of them would no longer laugh too much, in any case. Augustine said, “Does anyone remember her name—her actual House name? Didn’t she have one?” The Emperor suggested, “Heptane,” but Augustine said, “No, you’re thinking of Loveday. We’ve forgotten it! That’s unnatural. Who would have ever thought we could forget—a thing like that?”

…wanting. “Call her Cytherea Loveday,” she said. “That’s what she wanted to be called—and I found it unbearable and glutinous then, and I find it unbearable and glutinous now; but…

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?” “They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”

“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. “Wake—Mercy—Augustine.”

A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her—” “Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she…

…mostly. I often called her Annabel Lee. AnnieLaurie. When I first met her I just called her First, One. She had a real name, but I buried it with her, and nobody says it anymore.]

have absolutely ZERO reason to be getting emotional over herring at 10pm on a monday night but alas lads here we are