onefleshoneendonebraincell

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

I want to go on a rant for a bit so bear with me.

I've been waiting for the German translation of "Nona" for a long time now just to discover there won't be one?! I mean, I understand that it's a sales thing, but tbh the German publishers did absolutely nothing for the books in the first place. Except photoshopping the skeletons out of the cover (I guess they're too scary for the German audience?) and change the titles from "[...] the ninth" to "I am [...]" (in German of course) for whatever reason.

There has never been any advertising, nothing. And this is so sad because I want my friends (who can't speak English) to enjoy the books too, but nope, now they can't, because they won't even translate it. Generally, the German book market seems to only contain straight-people-romance-books with the occasional thriller (probably written by Sebastian Fitzek) sprinkled in. Where is the diversity? I absolutely cannot be the only German person reading Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Seriously, what's going on with the book market in Germany??

Rant over.

#gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #the locked tomb #ich bin gideon #ich bin harrow #tlt #this is so disappointing #I love these books so much I have been gifting these books to my friends #luckily everybody speaks English #but it’s just so disappointing that a whole region will be excluded from this story #especially with these books it is important to read them in a language you know well #they are already confusing enough without a language barrier

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

Can we talk about Juno Zeta?

You're living the dream, Master Archivist of the Sixth House. The Archaeology department hates you. The secretaries love you. Your son has risen to the very top of the absolutely unproblematic meritocracy of the House to become Master Warden. Sure, you treated him as a colleague when he was 7 too, but this is much more intellectually satisfying and much better for your publication record (suck it, Archeo). You sit on the Oversight Body, making decisions for the 3 million strong House of the Sixth.

Then the Master Warden gets summoned by god to become a Lyctor. (No civilian has seen a Lyctor for thousands of years. But the information you do have speaks of astonishing power. Are you intrigued? Do you regard it as an even more stellar opportunity for the Master Warden? Do Lyctors have access to interesting material for the archives? Does the possibility of your son becoming an immortal finger and gesture of god ever feel strange?)

A few months later, some fragments come back in a box. There's nothing left of Camilla at all. No one will tell you anything. Every House but the Third and the Ninth has lost its head or heir (the poor girl your son loved is dead. You're never going to get another overly-formal letter from the Fifth begging for Lyctoral documents from your archive.)

Then the Master Warden makes contact from beyond the grave to tell you that the saintly founder of your House left a plan in place in case it ever became necessary to betray god. He tells you why god should be betrayed.

Suddenly, the Oversight Body has to make a decision. To take your home and 3 million people away from the Dominicus System (away from its thanergetic soil, no more necromancers will ever be born). To break the contract of tenderness made on the day of the Resurrection. Do you have time to call back your soldiers in the Cohort? Do you have to leave them behind? Has the Oversight Body ever felt unanimously about something before? And how frank can you be with the House? You have visiting scholars from almost every House, and who knows where the Bureau have eyes and ears.

There are calculations to make. How to transport a whole House? How do you work out that it takes five hundred and thirty-two obselisks? That there are deleterious effects past five hundred and sixty? How do you find a stele that would anchor such a big thanergy transition? (Only the Fifth make stele. Do you try to do it yourselves? Who do you trust on the Fifth to help with that? Is that why Kester Cinque left Koniortos?)

The Master Warden, who is dead, lives inside the body of Camilla, who is not. He picks you - in your capacity as Master Archivist - to be one of the negotiators. How do you integrate 3 million people into a completely alien society with whom your people have been at war for millennia? How does negotiating with terrorists feel compared to academic committees?

What happens then? One day you just...lose it? The sun rises too bright and too blue and you are in agony, unconnected from yourself, screaming and writhing. And when the thing in the sky is at its furthest orbit from you, in some exhausted moment of clarity, you nearly kill yourself using necromancy to restore your sanity. You blind yourself. Do you think beyond that moment? As someone who deals in documents and artefacts and forms in triplicate, do you mourn your sight alongside everything else you have lost? Your son, your home, your god, your sanity...

And now you are a hostage. Sixteen of you in the back of a sweltering truck, held at gunpoint, always moving. The only thing keeping you alive is the possibility of selling you back to the empire that you've betrayed. Your captors have signed a 'no torture' clause, and perhaps they do stick to that. You're needed for providing proof of life and are probably better off than most. But it's too hot, there's not enough water, you can't see, and the only way out is either that the Master Warden gives Blood of Eden a Lyctor or being released to the mercies of the Kindly Prince. You sit in the dark and do mental maths with each other to stay sane.

Somehow, the Master Warden has done it. Without a Lyctor, he's turned his own cell commander against her fellows and you have been released. Most of the Oversight Body can't even walk out of the truck without help. But you're free, and the Master Warden - now in the stolen body of a Lyctor's cavalier - has the sort of mad scheme only he could come up with. Those mental maths will come in handy. The cell commander isn't bad either...

You can't see your son die again (the last time he speaks to you, from that borrowed body, he calls you 'mum' instead of 'Master Archivist'). But you can smell Camilla’s flesh burn. Perhaps the Commander, holding your arm, describes it to you. You follow this new person, your child, now something else, back into the truck where you were held captive and watch as they drive it into the River.

The Tomb is open. Your child is part of a being of strange and unimaginable power. The House Formerly Known as Sixth is on the other side of the universe. You are on the Ninth with a dead cavalier in the body of her necromancer, the Emperor’s construct, legions of demons, and a very mysterious dog...

Anyway, I'm very excited to see what havoc Juno gets to cause in ATN. She's there to be snarky, do psychometry, and be a romanceable MILF. Let her yell at god. And for goodness sake, let her get some peace at the end.

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #juno zeta

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

I want to continue pushing my 'Magnus Quinn wasn't actually a terrible swordfighter' agenda.

Obviously, he wasn't on the same level as professional duelists Babs or Pro, or soldiers Marta or Jean. He was a guy who did some kind of fencing in high school and then picked it up again in his 30s, presumably with some degree of seriousness.

When Gideon joins the other cavaliers in the training room, Magnus and Jean are sparring. He jokes about how badly Jean is beating him, but he must have some degree of competence for aspiring soldier Jean to find him worth training with. Babs then mocks him for getting beaten by a teenager and Magnus jokes, describes himself as "absolutely no good", and praises Jean's abilities...before giving Babs such a death glare he gets obviously embarrassed.

It's worth bearing in mind that there's some degree of tension between the Third and the Fifth. Babs will have know Magnus since he was small and has almost certainly seen him fight before. But the Fifth, their relationship, and the relative freedom that Magnus has to not be a perfect fighter (because his necromancer values him as a human being) is clearly something that rankles the Third. In TUG, when Ianthe talks about Babs, she explicitly references Abigail and Magnus. And what's interesting is that she makes a comparison not just between Abigail's husband-with-a-sword and her perfect tool to be moulded and used, but also to Corona's aspirations to swordcraft:

IANTHE (Playing a card) She’s not here, so let me be fully honest, Sextus: my sister is not a swordswoman. She loves to wear big boots and wave a sword around, and she looks wonderful doing it, but her actual competence … well, put it this way: she’d lose to Magnus Quinn.

PALAMEDES Magnus Quinn was a cavalier primary.

IANTHE No, I mean Magnus Quinn now.

There's...a lot...to unpack here: the comparison of Corona to the husband-cavalier is intriguing in and of itself on a psychosexual level, as is the contradiction between Ianthe and Corona's own versions of Corona's competence. But Palamedes' response is also interesting, suggesting that Magnus was up to an acceptable standard for a cavalier, which Ianthe's joking response seems to back up.

So Babs' rudeness towards Magnus and Jean may have a lot to do with the internal dynamics of his own necromancer-cavalier relationship and not necessarily be an accurate reflection of Magnus' abilities.

Likewise, Judith's comment in the Cohort Intelligence Files that the Fifth is 'undoubtedly chagrined" to have "schoolboy fighter" Magnus representing them had to be read against the fact that we know from the Sermon on Necromancers and Cavaliers by Second House stooge M. Bias that the Cohort has a very low opinion of unranked "social cavaliers". And Judith Deuteros may have her own reasons for being disdainful of a cavalier who is so...cavalier...about his intimate relationship with his adept.

Magnus' own self-deprecating comment on his ability is:

"I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”

But again, there's a difference between becoming cavalier primary because you're the best sword fighter and getting up to a vaguely competent level once you've become cavalier primary (guys in their 30s with high powered jobs tend to be scarily into their hobbies...) He is definitely the worst cavalier there (or would be, if Pro were actually alive), but on a general standard he probably isn't as terrible as people like to joke.

Another important bit of context here is that all of his comments about his own ability occur in the context of Corona trying to get him to fight Gideon. The shy, silent 18 year old from the cult planet whose practice of cavaliership is generally acknowledged to mostly consist of carrying buckets of bones.

She gets paired with Magnus because they assume she's not going to be much of a fighter and Magnus - neither a professional duelist nor a soldier - would therefore be the fairest opponent. Magnus is clearly uncomfortable. And Gideon is certainly Intimidating. But when you consider that most of his previous interactions with her have been trying to coax her out of her shell and clearly feeling rather sorry for her, his comments take on a bit of a different tone.

Does Magnus worry Corona has dragged along this poor kid out of interest or curiosity, and that she's going to be humiliated and never want to interact with them again? As Corona says “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers," Magnus is politely dissembling, telling exactly the sort of jokes that would appeal to a teenager.

As everyone else mocks or is intrigued by Gideon's knuckle-knives, Magnus is trying to look her in the eye through her sunglasses, bewildered that she doesn't know to take off her robes or glasses to fight and then...suddenly realising that she is dead serious and perhaps he has dramatically underestimated her.

After his defeat, we hear him saying to Jean "I'm not quite that out of form, am I?". Gideon's abilities were totally unexpected: she severely tests a top duelist like Babs, and Magnus is surprised to be beaten in three moves. That suggests he's been holding his own rather more comprehensively in previous sparring.

And while he certainly wasn't up to Gideon's standard, he may have managed to draw his sword before Cytherea took him out...

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #magnus quinn #gideon nav #gideon the ninth #tlt #very interesting #i love reading five pages about a tiny detail in these books

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

harrowhark has suffered more than jesus

#tlt #cw blood #cw mild nudity #the locked tomb #htn #harrowhark nonagesiums #ianthe tridentarius #gorgeous #so lovely

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

this one part from harrow the ninth always made me really upset. so i made a four page comic out of it!

#tlt #pretty art #the locked tomb #gideon nav #harrowhark nonagesiums #i love it #also the layout is phenomenal

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

the penumbral lady of the ninth

#harrowhark nonagesimus #harrow the ninth #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #gtn #tlt #htn #fanart #jacketpart #i love art

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

let me paint you a picture.

harrowhark nonagesimus is seventeen years old. a young seventeen. a horribly old seventeen. she has known one home in her entire life. she exists wholly and completely to protect it, and she has never treated it with anything but complete and ardent love. these people are not good, they have not been good to her or for her, but they are her family and she is their gaurdian, and it is home. she is a creature of habits and routines, and drearburh is everything she's ever known. she is seventeen.

and she recieves a letter. it offers her everything she needs. a way to protect her family, to save her home, to ensure that everything she knows and loves is safe and prosperous, and that they will never again need as desperately as they needed her. but she has to leave them. she has to leave them for the first time in her entire life, and she may never come back.

she is permitted to bring one person from home. only one. she may not bring the man who raised her, or the woman who advised her, or the vulnerable elderly whose lives she has been carefully extending since she was a child.

she has a cavalier, though. he is the very model of a drearburh cavalier. he is precisely what her competition will be expecting, and he will do whatever she asks of him. she knows he will try to escape, of course, because she knows they've got a shuttle coming. he and his mother will try to steal the shuttle, inevitably, if it arrives.

the solution is simple. cancel the shuttle. bar ortus's mother from the room when the announcement is made. there's nothing the mother can do.

but harrow doesn't do that. she doesn't cancel the shuttle. she wants them to take it. she doesn't want ortus. instead, she spends an entire night wrecking her hands in hard dirt, doesn't even use a shovel in her desperation. she doesn't want ortus.

harrowhark nonagesimus is going to be alone, in an unfamiliar environment, for the first time in her entire life. she is going to be barred from her only home, perhaps forever. she is seventeen years old.

and she wants gideon nav.

#harrow nonagesimus #griddlehark #the locked tomb #tlt #well #you are completely right #thank you for breaking my heart

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

Don’t get me wrong I love Gideon. But I do find as a fandom, or even as casual readers, a big focus on Gideon and Harrow’s relationship is the power imbalance that is weighed heavily in favour of Harrow - and how Gideon is a precious selfless himbo. This leads people to wonder what part of Gideon even likes Harrow. Which is fine, and valid.

But I find there’s actually a little more of a balance of power that makes their relationship even more fucked up and great to read when we realize the inherent toxicity of Gideon’s martyr complex.

Gideon, whose sole goal is to put herself in harm’s way for the express purpose of providing spoils and resources to Harrow and her house (which is essentially just Harrow herself) by joining the cohort. Gideon, who wants to see the look on Harrow’s face when she realizes how talented she is, how brave she is, and how much Harrow now relies on Gideon to be a provider within a very dangerous situation. Gideon, whose sole goal can be broken down to the basic premise of, “fuck you, you need me.”

Gideon, who trots right into a room with a beast and has no qualms about fighting it for Harrow because “it’s arms kinda look like swords”, and who is reduced to a gaping-mouthed mess when she’s genuinely praised for it.

Gideon, who, without thinking, offers her life force to Harrow, despite having should have died from the process of Harrow utilizing it and then offering it again even after what she went through. I find people are thinking in a more of a “this is my love for you” kind of way instead of a “see? You need me. And the way you need me will hurt me or put me in danger and it’s only me who can and will do it. Look what I’m doing for you, you miserable bitch”

Gideon, who flops onto a piece of metal to fully sacrifice herself and is absolutely livid when it doesn’t go her way and Harrow decides without Gideon to try and preserve her. To that Gideon simply says, “all I wanted you to do was eat me.” She’s SO mad with the thought that Harrow doesn’t want or need her.

Which basically translates to, again, “fuck you, I’m going to make it so you need me and it will be under my terms, and it will be so satisfying to see you have to admit it”

And like, yes, we know that the way Harrow’s parents treated Gideon and how that behaviour trickled down to Harrow absolutely has something to do with Gideon’s problem, but also we know that she totally gets that from her dad.

Anyway, I love Gideon but something about viewing her actions this way that helps shift the power imbalance makes reading griddlehark much more satisfying in that one of the parties may not be as helpless and innocent as we think

#tlt #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #gtn #griddlehark #gideon nav #harrowhark nonagesiums #yeah #you’re right #it is even more fucked up

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

There's something really hauntingly familiar about the way Gideon phrases it, when she's describing the torn-open vulnerable feeling of having opened up to Palamedes and been forced to confront the fucked up rotting parts of herself. Something. Hm.

Hey, Kiriona, honey? Do you wanna like.... talk about the chest hole thing? Maybe in connection to how escaping from the Ninth didn't change as much as you thought it would? No? Maybe a little?

#tlt #tlt spoilers #incredible analysis #especially the tags #but I did think you meant that it was a familiar feeling to you #and honestly yeah #it absolutely is

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

See, the ending I see for John and Alecto is. They're not going to both die. No one is going to kill Alecto just so they can kill John. Talk about reenacting the cycle of violence. Nah, I think they're gonna do the Paul thing. The lyctor thing. Complete the eightfold word. but instead of a merging of two equal souls, John will be subsumed by and become a part of something greater than himself. absorbed completely into the world he loved and fought for and changed and killed and resurrected. I'm not sure he'd even fight it. On some level, I think he's wanted it for ten thousand years, just as badly as Gideon wanted it from Harrow

#the locked tomb #emperor john gaius #ntn spoilers #alecto the first #alecto predictions #interesting #i think i'd really like that

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

My favorite part of Gideon the Ninth (a sentiment that changes frequently) is the Camilla and Judith fight, and my favorite moment of that is when Harrow steps up and warns off the Eighth with 'death first to scavengers' because the reactions around the room are always so funny. There are comments like there's an alliance, like Sextus and Harrow have talked about this, like it was carefully orchestrated that the sixth house appeared weak when it was actually co-leader of one of the strongest blocks at Canaan House. These comments are so hilariously off the mark, and its so wild because all anyone really had to do was go talk to the 2 goth introverts like 3 times with a polite manner and they also probably would have gotten some of the most ride or die motherfuckers you could find in that spooky ass house.

I love that compassion, mutual respect and just plain equal footing are what ends up being key to so much of the series. I love that all it really takes is 4 different nerds ending up buddies to completely change the path of history. I adore team 69, a name they would have fought over heavily if they ever discussed the team up name.

#gideon the ninth #tlt #the locked tomb

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

#this is so tlt coded #literally half the characters #i love it #actually i was thinking about this stuff yesterday #oh to be completely devoted to somebody #to be consumed #to exist only for them #very healthy #i get gideon #good vibes

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

There are so so so many little things that pile up to make me find John Gaius such a damn fascinating (and favourite) character but I think my favourite little thing has got to be how desperately, viscerally, he wants love and forgiveness but also how I wholeheartedly believe that if he told someone all his sins and they did forgive and accept and love him that he both wouldn't be able to accept it for a second AND would probably see that person as awful for accepting him. He both wants total forgiveness and love and DOES NOT believe he deserves it in the slightest. I think, anyways.

#tlt #the locked tomb #john gaius #exactly my corner of tumblr #you get it op #he is so fucked up #i love him

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

hey, kid. yeah, you. commere. now look, the order of the deaths in gideon the ninth isn't an accident, okay? they all mean something. look me in the eye. listen. abigail and magnus first, right? and that causes a dramatic shift in tone from which the series never truly recovers. magnus and abigail were Kindness, you get me? capital K. they're the lighthearted, the feel-good, the healthy relationship. they make you feel like everything's gonna be ok. but everything's not gonna be ok, so they die first, right, and that's the moment when Kindness leaves the situation. then jeannemary and isaac. they're Innocence. stop looking around, look at me. their deaths dispell the notion that anything is sacred or that anyone is safe. they're just kids, they didn't do anything wrong, and that's---don't back away, stay right here---that's why the brutality of their deaths is so shocking. Innocence died screaming, right? it's got to. and judith and marta are meant to be Order. this is important. their deaths represent the loss of stability and the dissapation of understandable rules, signaling the beginning of a free-for-all in which the previously understood conventions no longer operate. but here's the thing, kid. judith fails to die. she doesn't finish the job. she gets right up to the finish line and refuses to cross it. and the thing-- the thing you've gotta understand is, that doesn't mean Order isn't dead. that means Order was never alive in the first place. the rules never actually existed. there was no stability, there was no script or formula, the whole time it was just a bunch of people dying for no reason. no fucking reason at all, and everything i just said was absolute horseshit. i'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

alright, i'm finished. run along now.

#gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #no no no you don’t just get away to walk away from #you have a point #this is really good #yes judith doesn’t die #and it does mean that order was never there #but it doesn’t mean that Abigail and Magnus weren’t kindness #and that Jean and Isaac weren’t innocence #it’s just that order in the way that judith represents and wants never mattered #she appeals to an authority to come and save her #the way the audience may hope that John shows up and magically solves everything #but that order never existed #and judith represents that #we repeatedly see judith try to appeal to John (or his lyctors) and fail spectacularly #in fact nobody gives a single fuck about her and her appeals to loyalty and honor #it shows us that the empire doesn’t work that way #there is no reward for her loyalty and adherence to the rules #anyways I loved your analysis and I’m not ready to let it go

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

i looove cytherea as a "nicest* person here was secretly the villain the whole time" reveal cause like. my problem with those is usually that they do a complete 180 in terms of personality and suddenly they're a totally different person. they absolutely do not give a shit about these people they just spent so much time cohabitating with. they developed absolutely no empathy or compassion or remorse for the people who worked with them, trusted them, confided in them, tried to help them. it just never seemed realistic to me. i always end up wishing for more nuance. it feels like the authors tend to go for shock value over the actual substance of the character, unless they're angling for a redemption arc.

cytherea, though.

cytherea is 10,000 years old and she's been inches from death the entire time. these people's lives mean something fundamentally different to her than they do to them. she kills jeannemary in a shocking and brutal and unnecessarily dramatic fashion, and then she offers gideon genuine compassion and comfort in the aftermath, and both of those things are true and authentic and both of them are motivated by the fact that lyctorhood is fucking terrible.

the way she was interacting with gideon was always a little weird and the fact that she does genuinely understand never goes away. she's fucking old and weird and bored and in pain and she will gore a 14 year old in front of you and then she will hold your hand and give you well-meaning advice while you process the trauma. she will tell you how terrible it is that people are taking advantage of you, she will cradle you and pet your hair and tell you that you're worth more than this, and then she will kill you like she killed all the rest of them. and it really is a shame that you don't understand how that's a mercy, too.

cytherea is scary because the kindness was never fake. and that's why i love her.

#cytherea the first #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt spoilers #and that’s what’s so brilliant about her #she isn’t some crazy twist villain without any motivation #she was kind and giving and always volunteered and that’s why she murdered them #(actually it makes sense to see the murder as another kind of volunteering #you know for the ugly act of saving the prospective lyctors from their fate) #the great thing about these characters is that for many of them their flaws come out of their strengths/characters #cytherea is kind and so she does the people at canaan house the kindness of killing them #john is the man that became god and because he never stopped being either of those things he also sucks at being god and a human

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

well, you see, it's very simple. coronabeth always wanted to occupy naberius's position but was forced to occupy ianthe's. ianthe got jealous of corona's position and dealt with this by fusing her own soul with naberius. naberius liked coronabeth better but had more in common with ianthe, with whom he shared roughly zero common interests. coronabeth and ianthe spent every day together for 21 years, and during that time developed absolutely no ability to empathize with each other. no one really understood corona like naberius did, which is to say that no one really understood corona. corona tried to understand ianthe, except no she didn't. no one even attempted to understand naberius. naberius was corona's cavalier in his heart, and she was ianthe's cavalier in her heart, and ianthe said fuck you both and became her own cavalier. they had all known each other their entire lives. none of them knew each other at all. they were all sworn to protect and uphold at least one other member of the group. none of them particularly liked either of the others as people. the only one taking this seriously was ianthe. the only one taking this seriously was coronabeth. the only one taking this seriously was naberius. and they all, most importantly, fucking sucked. but god, who wouldn't?

#ianthe tridentarius #coronabeth tridentarius #naberius tern #the tridentarii #the third house #tlt spoilers #tlt meta #these fucking books #whatever these people have going on #its so fucked up

[onefleshoneendonebraincell]

palamedes & harrowhark: Gideon the Ninth // Harrow the Ninth // Nona the Ninth

#tlt #locked tomb #the locked tomb #palamedes sextus #harrowhark nonagesimus #nona the ninth spoilers #god damit you're making me sad #is there a single not sad relationship in these books?