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#that’s my girl

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so you dated the wrong person and learned a hard lesson. you chose the wrong major and had to start over again. you cherished a friend who backstabbed you. it sucks, but it’s also going to work out. that’s life; you learn, hurt, love, cry, laugh, and keep going. you experience setbacks and you grow and it’s all okay.

#amen

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Okay but regarding a TLT adaptation the ideal form is actually a muppet movie BUT the only characters who are muppets are the lyctors. We go into GTN with absolutely no idea it’s not a standard adaptation until we land at Canaan and we meet Dulcinea Septimus and she’s a muppet. (If we’re assigning Muppet actors I’m thinking Gonzo, he’s the best ingenue but I’m open to suggestions.) No one addresses this. We get no more muppets until near the end when Ianthe becomes a lyctor. A pivotal moment, she’s sitting under the ‘you lied to us’ message, blood dripping down her arms and face and also she’s made of felt and just a little guy. The Cytherea Ianthe fight at the end there is brutal and visceral and also borderline very funny. Harrow turns into a muppet momentarily at the end of GTN but is a person in a spaceship full of muppets for the entirety of HTN.

#INCREDIBLE #SHOWSTOPPING

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You know when you're at a dinner party with God and things start to get...weird...? It's Maundy Thursday, and it's time for more Bible study for fans of weird queer necromancers!

It's currently Holy Week, the week where liturgical Christians reenact the events of Jesus' death and resurrection in real time. And today, it's Maundy Thursday, which commemorates the Last Supper, where Jesus ate with his friends before he was crucified.

Before we get to the Locked Tomb, what's so special about the Last Supper?

There are actually a few significant things that happen during the Last Supper, but this is where Jesus introduces the concept of communion:

Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood. - Matthew 26:26-28

This isn't actually the first time Jesus has told his followers they will need to literally eat him:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. - John 6:53-56

If you're thinking that sounds a bit intense, you're not alone - the Bible says that "many" of his disciples left after being told that they were apparently going to have to eat Jesus to be saved and resurrected.

While many Protestant denominations take this symbolically, Catholicism teaches transubstantiation: that when the priest prays over the bread and wine at mass, they really do become Jesus' body and blood.

With this in mind, let's circle back to necromancers:

"Overseas to Corpus. (She likes the word corpus; it sounds nice and fat.)"

This is probably Corpus Christi College, Oxford (named after the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, where the church celebrates the real presence of Jesus in the eucharist). The symbol of the college is a pelican - there's even a fabulously gilded pelican atop the sundial in their main quad.

What do pelicans have to do with the eucharist? Quite a lot, actually... The pelican is a really old symbol for Jesus, because it was believed to feed its young on its own flesh and blood in times of famine. The pelican on the Corpus Christi sundial is pecking at its own chest.

The pelican, like Jesus, was believed to give its own body to save those it loved.

Okay, so we've talked about Jesus, and weird cannibal birds, but why is this relevant to necromancers?

Specifically, the necromancer, the Necrolord Prime. John Gaius styles himself as "the god who became man", echoing Jesus as "the word became flesh". His entire pastiche of divinity is a sort of bootleg Catholicism. But while Catholicism posits Jesus' offering of his own body as foundational to the salvation and resurrection of humanity to eternal life, John's godhood relies the exploitation of other's bodies as the foundation of an empire of eternal death.

I've mentioned before in discussing Lyctorhood, how vampires have been understood to represent a sort of inversion of the eucharist because instead of consuming Christ's blood to receive eternal life in heaven, they consume other people's blood for an cursed eternal life on earth. John, and the Lyctors who followed him, gained power and eternal life from the consumption, body and soul, of another person.

In Catholic theology, Jesus offered his own body to degradation and death for the eternal salvation of humankind, but John forcibly consumes someone else's in service of his own apotheosis and immortality, dooming humanity in the process. He wants to be a Catholic flavoured god, but without the suffering that entails. But he's perfectly willing to outsource that suffering to others.

There's something just achingly awful about Alecto liking the feel of the word "corpus" - "body" - when she so hates the body that John constructed for her. John describing Alecto as "in a very real way" the mother of humanity and the mother pelican on the Corpus sundial rending her own flesh for her children. John forcing the earth into a personification of femininity and playing Jesus on another's sacrifice. His daughter, unwillingly trapped in her own corpse walking around with the wounds of her significant self-sacrifice like the resurrected Christ but yet again another body exploited by John in support of his performance of godhood. It brings to mind a very different fantastical engagement with Catholicism, where in the Lord of the Rings Tolkien - riffing on St Augustine - suggested that evil cannot create, it can only mock and corrupt. The ethics of The Locked Tomb may be messier than that, but there's something indicative in how John shies away from his creative powers - his abilities to grow plants, and manipulate earth and water - in favour of his dominion over death.

The metaphysical world of The Locked Tomb is clearly not intended to be the same as that of Catholicism. But with hindsight, perhaps John was onto something when he was surprised that he didn't "get the Antichrist bit" from the nun too.

John isn't the Antichrist. But he is, thematically, anti-Christ.

If we're talking about John and Jesus, there's also, of course, the question of Resurrection. But we've got to go through Hell and back before we get there on Sunday...

#tlt meta #god yes

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Exploring

#HOLY SHIT #THIS IS COOL AS HELL

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some griddlehark thoughts post nona

the little sketches not in any chronological order

#the tiny fight #SO GOOD

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boob window showing off the gaping hole in my chest

#kristen applebees #gideon nav #best girls have gaping chest holes

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The Fifth House

Abigail Pent | Magnus Quinn

#mom and dad!!!! #they!!!!

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me: oh man im starving but im not sure what i should make for dinner……

the spirit of a 12th century templar knight that died a horrific death due to torture that started haunting me after i found a sword in the middle of the woods: spaghetti once more, prithee?

me: henry you are brilliant. spaghetti it is

#spaghetti once more prithee?

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Imagine being the Cohort soldiers from the Erebos who were sent respond to Judith's distress call.

They land to find a dead Lyctor, run through with a Cohort infantry sword, and two new Lyctors, one freshly missing an arm. I doubt either of them were particularly coherent by that stage.

And then they go to clear the inside of the building. In the room the transmission came from, there's a dead priest and an enormous pool of blood, but no sign of captain Deuteros. Her cavalier is missing an eye and seems to have been blown open from the inside.

A room down the hall is singed and splattered with blood and chunks of human flesh. Perhaps there are fragments of grey robes, or perhaps some poor psychometrist works out that they're looking at what's left of the Master Warden of his House.

Further into the building they enter a study with the words "YOU LIED TO US" daubed across an ancient and beautiful mural. The Third House cavalier lies dead on the floor, stabbed from behind. The Master Templar of the Eighth is lying dead, his throat slit, apparently by his own cavalier's sword. And his cavalier... His eyes are gone, there is something wrong with his mouth. His wrist and neck are broken. The whole room is dripping and sticky with blood and human fat.

Searching past the kitchen, they find the morgue. There's a bowl of ashes (two people's, dead before the pilgrimage even began, confirms the by now very shaken psychometrist). One of drawers lies open and the sheet has been roughly pulled off the body inside: the utterly shattered body of the Fifth House necromancer is lying there, her blouse rolled up to her ribs, a fist sized hole in her abdomen.

Neatly lying under sheets in the other drawers there are more bodies, and the preserved severed head of the Seventh House cavalier. There is no sign of his body. The Fourth House cavalier has been impaled through the chest, shoulders and legs, precisely, like an insect for display. Her necromancer...it might be easier to list the places where he hasn't been impaled. The Fifth House cavalier is just as destroyed as his necromancer: limbs broken, body horribly mangled.

Later, they find the bloodsoaked bed with "sweet dreams" daubed on the wall in blood. If they get as far as the facility, they discover the outlines of two horribly broken bodies surrounded by necromantic diagrams drawn on the floor in pen. One unremarkable room is splattered in blood and singed with spirit fire.

The building is full of collapsed skeleton constructs, seemingly mid task, as if all struck down simultaneously, and as they explore they find more dead priests. They find no sign of the Sixth or Ninth cavaliers, or the Crown Princess of the Third, or of Captain Deuteros. And from what they've already seen, this can't feel encouraging.

It's clear that this building has witnessed necromantic horrors beyond their comprehension. What were the scions of the Houses doing, or what was being done to them? What could possibly cause what they have seen?

And I can't imagine that after seeing the truth of what happened at Canaan House, that John would have taken the risk of those soldiers revealing what they had seen. After all, he's a very careful guy.

#last line hit me like a truck

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God poor Ianthe. Imagine you're her and have been through everything she's been through. And then one dark evening out in fuck all space this sexy scary skinny little bone nun who's brain you've fucked around in kisses you sloppy style and pledges herself to you for the second time. I'd die. I'd simply die.

#yeahhhhh #yeah I feel for her #she sucks but woof

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me: chat what do we think

the angel and devil on my shoulders: can you not call us that please

#finding new ways to be irreverent

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I remember someone theorizing that they can come back to Canaan house in alecto and I've been thinking about it everyday since

all their stuff is probably still there, and just thinking about Harrow being able to get one of her ninth robes from the room they were staying in, not like anyone packed their bags

she didn't really have a lot of conscious time when she was back on the ninth in nona, she finally can get something familiar and hers after the hell that was mithraeum

#AJHSHHS NOT THE FENCE

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something i've been thinking about is pyrrha's herald bullet.

pyrrha has one herald bullet, stolen from wake. and there is a moment where she points it at ianthe and tells her that it isn't meant for her. a real jack sparrow moment. move aside, neither of us wants this particular bullet to end up in you.

and then she uses it anyway. she uses it on ianthe to get past her into the tomb. and i can't stop thinking about that.

it was for john, right? pyrrha had one bullet and she can only have been saving it to, at a crucial moment, incapacitate john.

and pyrrha picked nona. like, yeah, you could argue that opening the tomb is more useful to killing john in the long run, but is it really? that "death of the emperor" stuff is mostly a lie. pyrrha knows that. pyrrha of all people knows it's not as simple as "open the tomb, the emperor dies."

and yet she wastes the bullet on ianthe, with no fanfare. fuck it, fuck john, fuck revenge, fuck any plans she might've had. she's gotta save nona. and if that pasty bitch is gonna stand between her and her nono's best shot at survival, then there's no question about it. no hesitation.

and isn't that what all this is about, in the end? pyrrha - jaded, angry, cynical pyrrha - forfeits personal revenge because nona needs help, and she can't waste time.

i'm having feelings about it.

#aaaaaaa #yep yep #pyrrha my love #she’s such a fun and complex character

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It's hard to put into words the way that Kiriona is still Gideon despite being the saddest girl in the world. The feelings of obligation she has to her friends despite all the ways she's been hurt are still so strong. When Gideon, Harrow, and Camilla are trapped in the bone cocoon at the end of GtN, and Gideon and Harrow are having a little bit of a Moment, knowing that they're going to die, Camilla turns away to give them privacy. In the tunnels under New Rho, when Palamedes and Camilla are going over the last preparations to complete their last ditch grand lysis, Kiriona turns away. Page 430 of Gideon The Ninth (paperback): "Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn't there. It was just her and Harrow and Harrows' bitter, high-boned, stupid little face."

Page 420 of Nona The Ninth (hardcover): "Nona instinctively moved forward, and nearly fell out of the truck; Pyrrha caught her up and they sank to the ground together. Kiriona Gaia was staring politely at the side of the truck, as though there were something really interesting on the paintwork. 'Camilla, we did it right, didn't we?' Palamedes said... "

#what if I sobbed #what then??

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I chime in with a haven’t you people ever heard of locking the goddamn tomb

#INCREDIBLE

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