The parallels when gideon realizes she has to die in Gideon the Ninth, and when Harrow realizes she has to live in Harrow the Ninth

I just realized that all kids except Gideon dying is actually the massacre of the innocents. In the Bible, king Herod orders to kill all male children under two because he wants to kill Jesus. In the end, all kids are murdered except Jesus (in this case, Gideon)

@literatureisdying

the locked tomb x homer: a not particularly comprehensive guide that no one asked for put together by a brain-fried uni finalist and it's all probably already been said but whatever

(previously discussed by me here (insane diagram linking everything) and here (paris, hector, gideon))

(sorry 4 dodgy photo editing... tried to add Visual Interest but. well. graphic design is my passion dot jpeg)

Imagine you’re some little evil woman sitting in Hades’ throne room when Orpheus walks in to make a deal to get Eurydice back, and Hades is like “yeah ok, just don’t look back otherwise she has to stay here” then walks out of the room. Almost immediately after hearing the conditions, Orpheus breaks his own neck so that is is physically impossible for him to turn it, and then demands that you gouge out his eyes for good measure.  Eurydice then gets really upset because she’s convinced this is a sign that Orpheus hates her and never wants to see her again, and Orpheus is completely convinced that this was a normal and logical thing to do.

You are literally the only person in the universe who recognizes this as an act of love. They both then insult you to your face for thinking this is anything other than very normal (Orpheus), or petty hatred (Eurydice).

You are Ianthe Tridentarius.

big fan of the locked tomb's version of the virgin mary. her first appearance is in a hazmat suit with a gun. her name is nineteen words. god's nickname for her references evanescence. her niece has blue hair and pronouns and several guns. she stole god's sperm. after she dies she fights a popular folk hero warrior from pluto. she and her newborn baby fell from space into a cult, a bit like a comet. she was planning to sacrifice the baby to open the locked tomb and start the apocalypse and kill god. she is not a virgin, and is bisexual. her skeleton is farming snow leeks to this day.

you people keep posting those goth space lesbian necromancers and i keep thinking theyre gamzee makara

You say that as if Gamzee isn’t a goth space lesbian necromancer

yknow what? ill let you have that. who is to say he isnt.

Instead of continuing to use "animals" to refer to non-human animals when we KNOW humans are ALSO animals, we should just start using "beasts". "Animal Other than Human" is ALREADY one of it's established meanings:

paradoxcase:

this is TOTALLY NOT one of my reasons for wanting to normalize it >:( >:( *casually but firmly pushes behind me smaller snake nervously clopping two coconut halves together*

Ok, now, but thinking of the word "beast" in context of King Arthur has reminded me of that part of the Once and Future King where Sir Grummore and Sir Palamedes disguised themselves as the Questing Beast to cheer up King Pellinore, and then the actual Questing Beast subsequently fell in love with Palamedes and now I'm wondering how I can make this relate to the Locked Tomb somwhow

HMMMM I don't think you could, but the line that immediately recommends itself to me would be Camilla and Palamedes as Grummore and... Palamedes, with Nona(happy personality) being Pellinore and Alecto(angry personality) the Questing Beast, since Nona is Harrow's body and Harrow and Alecto are lovers ala Pellinore and the QB.

It's certainly not a 1 to 1 with Camilla, Palamedes, Grummore, and Palamedes(tho tbf: I know literally nothing about Grummore; I've never read TOaFK), but I think the Pellinore=Nona, Alecto=QB line's a bit more solid(except that, in White's telling, the QB was ALSO not really dangerous, if the wiki is any judge).

I'd be surprised if Muir didn't consider the Arthurian connection at all, tho, even if the classical Greek association was the major one.

All this talk about Princess Maker 2 Hell had me curious, and I-

Now hang on a second....

No way...

TAMSYN!!!

So in Harrow the Ninth, right, after Wake-piloting-Corpsetherea strolls in and blasts Mercymorn with the shotgun, looks Gideon in the eye, and then leaves: Gideon reflects on her feelings for Cytherea and stresses to Harrowhark that “like, it’s complicated. Just saying.” And I, as a re-reader, I know that ohhhh, Gideon, honey, there’s a horrible, awful, no-good very-bad additional complication here that you aren’t aware of, and you talking about how Cytherea’s still kinda hot to you is causing me, the reader, a moment of Dramatic Irony—

and then I remembered that Gideon is Dave, and. That one time. That pesterlog where Dave is telling Rose how hot Rose’s mom is, and Rose is being snarky about the Oedipal complex, and Dave retorts that it’s fine, it’s not like she’s his mom, and the reader gets to experience a moment of Dramatic Irony, because—

Well anyway hey guys guess what I found another Homestuck parallel in the Sapphic Necromancy Catholicism Books, I get to put another sticker on my little chart

Rare parallel alert: Harrow and Augustine.

Harrow, on the deaths of her parents:

Augustine, on the death of Alfred:

Both of them have spent the rest of their lives thinking they could have stopped their family member's suicide, if they'd just been able to talk for a few minutes.

Happy 4/13 to people who wear aviators and wield swords, short angry perfectionists, bitches with one arm, nerds with glasses, people stuck in dream bubbles, angsty teens on spaceships, people who have ascended to godhood by tragic means, annoying men with perfect hair, unstoppable eldritch horrors, people in alternate universes, platonic soulmates, ghosts, apocalypse survivors, and everyone else in The Locked Tomb series

Gustave Doré’s “Andromeda” (1869) as Alecto The Ninth from The Locked Tomb

canonically inaccurate but we’re here for the vibes

photographic prints here

collecting a list of ways that mercymorn and harrowhark parallel each other. the way that they're bitter and unlikeable, both VERY good at what they do (arguably the best), probably because the guilt they have from the cost of their creation is too enormous for them to be anything but the best. how mercymorn hates harrow from the start, I've seen lots of people arguing that it's because she reminds her of herself, and I kind of agree. their names are the only ones in the series that follow the conventions that they do (mercy-morn, harrow-hark. no one else's names are like that.) both of them are trapped for essentially their whole lives in a place with people who despise them, but who they are bound to by necessity and resentment and a lifetime spent despising each other. mercy and augustine HATE each other, but who else do they have? no one has seen what they've seen or been through what they've been through, and no one will ever feel as strongly about them as they do about each other. I think until canaan house, the exact same thing applied to harrow and gideon.

and the thing I just thought of yesterday that I can't BELIEVE it took me so long to realize- both of them are so consumed by grief that NEITHER allow themselves to hear the name of their cavalier. mercy treats names as sacred and HATES when people use cristabel's name. harrow rewires her own brain so that she can't hear gideon's.

I think mercy functions as a version of harrow, one much older and like, much more trapped in her grief? I think she would have lobotomized herself in an instant if she'd thought of it, or if she'd had anyone to help her, or who knows if she even could do that sort of necromancy so soon after she ascended. instead all she has is this bitter, myriad long revenge plot.

this post is getting away from me and I'm just kind of waxing on about mercymorn now. I think they're versions of each other but they're living in different narratives.

i realized something after going back over some little echoes between gtn…

htn…

and ntn…

to nona, camilla’s smile is just as powerful as necromancy 🥺

Nona’s POV hits over and over again, but this part about trauma and abuse sweeps the knees.

Read it next to Tamsyn Muir’s The Magician’s Apprentice