an underrated harrow line that goes hard is right before the lobotomy when she's telling ianthe she sucks compared to palamedes and says "You are not even so worthy of that brain as to wipe its bloodied remnants from the wall." like god damn
happy valentine's day who wants to throw themselves on a fence spike for me while reciting biblical wedding vows as your last words so i can consume your soul and gain immortality but after confronting god who says he cannot bring you back i become so overtaken with grief that i lobotomize myself to erase my ability to conceive of you in any capacity to prevent my body from absorbing and using you as an eternal battery after which i send myself to a purgatory dream state and you surface in control of my body and defend it from the alien bug soldiers of a murdered ghost planet that are trying to kill me for the sins of the emperor i worship and then i stay sleeping in hell while you end up back in your own body and then my body kisses your body but it's while being inhabited by the soul of the earth and eventually you try to sacrifice yourself for me again but you can't because you're dead now and then i wake up in my own body finally in the same room as you but i faint and get carried off by eldritch barbie before i can hear you assert your devotion to me by calling her a slut. either that or we could get coffee
i can't stop thinking about gideon joking around saying "do you really have the hots for a corpse" and getting pushed in the pool for it, and then being awake in harrow's brain watching her beg a hallucination of said corpse to fuck her and realizing that comment actually uh hit very close to home. because yeah harrow was constantly hallucinating The Body, but outside of that how often was she having sexy thoughts about her that by the time gideon's arguing with ianthe she's fully convinced harrow is 100% a necrophiliac with no desire for any living flesh, gideon's own self-proclaimed impossible-to-turn-down rockin' bod included?
everytime a post about this series comes across my dash it’s truly the most unhinged shit i’ve ever heard what the HELL are these books about???????
this was just meant to be a quote board but now it's a whole post so here is
harrow's whole life is haunted by the desire to be forgiven for her existence and the war crime she didn't commit that made it possible. this quote really gets me:
i'm sure nona is referencing having worked with kids but is the harrow part of her thinking of the 200 who will never "forgive" her?
all of this contrasted with the man harrow worshipped her whole life, john "there is no such thing as forgiveness," "there can be no forgiveness," "people don't forgive, not really" gaius... harrow doesn't think she can ever be forgiven but desperately wants to believe forgiveness exists; she'd have nothing to live for otherwise. john doesn't think he can be forgiven either but he takes that to mean forgiveness can never exist for anyone; that's the only way he can live because he did do something truly unforgivable. and enforcing the idea that forgiveness is just something that doesn't exist is easier than accepting that it does but everyone he loves would prefer to deny him of it.
which makes THIS quote even more interesting (i'm assuming this is john speaking but the pov in the poem is a bit confusing):
john really only implies that forgiveness is possible when it helps him trick alecto into walking to her death, but i wonder if that's meant to show that he was lying or if it's some of his secret deep-buried hopes coming through.
They’d seen me fuck up once, killing the cops, and once people see you do something and come to an opinion about it, there’s nothing you can do. People don’t forgive, not really. Once they doubt, you’ve already lost them. That’s what was scaring me about the others. Had I already lost my best friends? The only people I needed?
John's definition of forgiving seems pretty fucked. It's very results oriented. Kind of a YouTuber's definition of forgiveness. More like forgetting than forgiving.
You can forgive someone for something, and set new boundaries. You can even forgive someone and never want to see them again. But to John these would not count as forgiveness.
NOT TO FUCKING MENTION. Harrow admits a detailed accounting of her wrongs, ceases harming Gideon, and even then she barely hopes for forgiveness, because she knows it doesn't actually stack up against the years of abuse. There's been no time to really make amends.
John doesn't do ANY of that stuff. He avoids consequences as much as he can. He's not even asking for forgiveness in any serious way.
The case of Nona and Hot Sauce is more puzzling to me because IIRC Nona is in trouble for who she is, not something specific she's done:
"you’re on Kevin bathroom duty forever for being a zombie. That’s fair.”
Maybe the crime was not mentioning it? When she stops by, Nona acts very considerately to Honesty and Hot Sauce (telling Honesty about some resources, giving strategic intel to Hot Sauce). But she doesn't apologize for being herself. Hot Sauce forgives her pretty readily, I think clearly because they love each other so much.
(This is brought to you by an interview with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Vox Conversations. She said there was a specific Māori tradition structuring how repentance and forgiveness work, but hasn't gotten into it so far in the podcast. Obviously it would be interesting to learn about that and see if Muir has reflected it in the books at all. Rabbi Ruttenberg has a book out, On Repentance and Repair.)
I think the big problem with John is that HE doesn’t forgive(as the book, and he, tell us repeatedly). It’s not that he’s trying to normalize other ppl not forgiving him by saying forgiveness is impossible; he’s trying to normalize HIS Flaw, HIS Wrath, HIS refusal to forgive or even just to prioritize anything beyond punishment(and thus HIS [justifiable]anger and thus HIS [destructive]Egotism and thus HIS replication of all the worst aspects of Colonial-Capitalism, committed BY its victims TO the descendants of its authors) by saying “people don’t forgive”. If “people dont forgive”, then it’s entirely normal that HE, a Person, chose vengeance over salvation; even seeing it as a mistake, which he does, it’s an understandable mistake and thus one that can be rationalized aside. Humans dont forgive, Humans just consume, They were lying and WE were the only ones who could see it They were Getting Away and Only **I** Could Stop Them(no he couldnt and no he didnt and no one asked him to and he Only Made Things Worse) so it’s Perfectly Natural that, instead of Changing Things the way Earth wanted, he just Replicated in microcosmic Speedrun all the crimes which brought humanity and Earth to that moment in the first place. He’s only Human, afterall.
THAT is his cop-out. THAT is his rationalization. THAT is his escape. The Earth can Love and Forgive Everyone but HE cant because he’s not divine(funny how and when and why that changes). And so, ironically, THAT is also his plea for forgiveness: “people don’t forgive, not really” is his way of saying “can you blame me?”
He doesn’t forgive himself, he’s convinced himself forgiveness is Impossible because HE Refuses to forgive, but maybe you can understand him and, maybe, Love him Anyway??? Thus his Desperate Hungry NEED to be Loved.
Which honestly makes John one of the Best and most Successful examples and deconstructions both of the Gothic Hero in literature, Period.
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.
