queeoretician

[queeoretician]

Yes! She's such a good character!

On my first read-through I really disliked her (in the "this is a person I would hate to be around IRL" way, not the "she's badly written" way). This line from NtN sums up my initial feelings about her -

Camilla said Captain Deuteros thought the solution to every problem was to act like the problem had one solution that nobody else was tough enough to take, and then to pursue that solution as hard as possible.

She's so sure that her idea of how things work is right, and everyone else is too soft or ignorant to get it, but she's wrong over and over again, to the detriment of everyone at Canaan House (but especially Marta, who I've always had a soft spot for). People who are like this in real life are just. the. worst. And then in NtN she's being put through the absolute wringer, which certainly gains her some sympathy points, but she's still so certain in her loyalty to the Nine Houses that she dismisses the possibility of BoE having legitimate grievances out of hand.

And yet. And yet.

At the root of it I see her as someone who is just trying so incredibly fucking hard to believe in the system that she was indoctrinated into as a child, and I think back to my own relationship with religion as a kid, and how hard I tried to internalise my conservative relatives' beliefs, and I wonder how I would have turned out if I my parents were also religious in that way. In a sense I've come to see Judith as who I might have been if I hadn't had that bit of space to question and form my own view of the world. And reading how Judith reacted to Marta's rejection in As Yet Unsent, it feels almost like an alternate-history version of myself where my own capacity for accepting my transness was snuffed out, and I came to believe that the shame I felt was right and just, and that chills me to the bone.

And recently I was thinking about the "Is Judith butch?" poll from a while back and I came across this bit about Corona in AYU:

She asked me if I remembered the first season my father came to visit her mother and father, when I’d been nine and she and Ianthe had been just a year younger. I said, Yes (because I haven’t ever forgotten). She said, smiling, You were so hard to play with! I only got you to unbend by the end of the visit. I remember running … falling headlong, smashing flat on my face … You came over to help me up, so I pretended I was hurt much worse than I was. I always used to fake to Babs that I was about to die to make him cry when he was little, but he’d stopped really buying it, and I found myself doing it for you … I couldn’t believe you fell for it. It was wonderful, like being in a play. You were so cute, so chivalrous. I’d thought you would be boring to the core, but there you were, playing the sad soldier when I pretended I was like to die.

And then it struck me - regardless of how Judith's overall gender presentation relates to contemporary ideas of butch and femme, in this situation Corona is pretending to be vulnerable in order to draw out protective, chivalric, butch-aligned reactions from Judith. Corona, who pretended to be a necromancer while in reality seeing herself as a cavalier. And in this sense their dynamic is the exact opposite of Gideon and Harrowhark, where the physically-formidable one is protective and butch and at odds with societal norms. So in Griddlehark, butchness aligns with the cavalier role, while in Jodybeth it aligns with the necromancer role, and I think there's something very queer and compelling about that.

I feel like there's a lot more to say on this topic (including more on Marta, who really should get more attention here), but it's late and this is about as much as I can coherently write for tonight, so I'll have to come back to this topic another time.

can we talk about judith deuteros? i would love to talk about judith deuteros pretty please

#the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #judith deuteros #marta dyas #coronabeth tridentarius

[queeoretician]

Thinking about which Houses are on which planets, and particularly the question of whether the Third or the Fourth is on Saturn.

Mythologically, it could be both: the infant Zeus, son of Saturn, was raised on Mount Ida and Ops (the birthplace of Jeannemary) shares a name with the Roman equivalent of Rhea, the wife of Saturn.

But House order might shed some light on this. We know the House numbers are in order of foundation. The Second, on Mars, was established first. Mars is near earth, but it also had some significant infrastructure present pre res:

What about the Mars installation, what about the fusion batteries? We’ve still only got room for five million tops up there, guys, and we haven’t worked out how to feed them either.

As long as the early Second kept the numbers down, they were probably pretty good to go.

So what might the Third have grown out from? What other major infrastructure gets mentioned in NTN?

Even when they were constructing the other ships we got told straight-up that it was nothing, they were being sent off to the Kuiper installation to be on point for the full-population evac...

The Kuiper installation is mentioned alongside Mars as rejected possiblities for evacuating large numbers of people from Earth.

So where was the Kuiper installation? Probably near Neptune.

The other pre-res installation that gets mentioned is a "shell" being build at Uranus, presumably incomplete at the time of the Resurrection. If fan theories that the Eighth are Uranus are correct, they may be living somewhere very sci fi indeed. Perhaps by the time the last 'proper' House was founded, they had the time and tech to complete it.

If the Third are Neptune, originally the Kuiper installation, then by process of elimination that would put the Fourth on Saturn. There's no mention of any infrastructure near Saturn predating the Resurrection, but perhaps there was some kind of mining on its moons?

I actually have a theory about the Fifth. Why is the Koniortos Court an installation in the atmosphere of Jupiter? A cryo project for 10 billion would need a lot of helium 3. That's not hugely plentiful on earth. But it is in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

The Sixth seems to have been built ex novo. The Seventh on Venus I fear might be evidence that John is perfectly capable of fixing global warming when he so chooses.

And the Ninth? A drillshaft sounds rather like mining again.

#great analysis! #i really hope we learn more about what the other houses actually *are* in atn... #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta

[queeoretician]

like i do get why we say john was puppeting the corpse of joe biden but also i’m pretty sure tazmuir doesn’t make it explicit WHICH world leader it was. there are other countries with nukes out there. john could’ve been puppetting rishi sunak

#i can't read this without imagining #John doing the Milo Edwards “hey you guys” Rishi voice #oh shit #now I'm imagining my parasocial podcast people having beef with a fictional villain #left on read tlt episode when #the locked tomb #tlt #john gaius

[queeoretician]

kill us twice, shame on god

#what an icon #if social media existed in the nine houses she's be an s-tier poster #the locked tomb #tlt #dulcinea septimus

[queeoretician]

not everyone is either butch or femme actually. That's a false dykeotomy.

#lmao #but also so true #see also: “is Harrow butch or femme” discourse

[queeoretician]

I'm giving Anastasia a try, on the fence

#amazing #love to see art of og characters who aren't around any more #the locked tomb #tlt #anastasia the first

[queeoretician]

Hot take time!

Gideon isn't nearly as obsessed with breasts as the fandom makes her out to be.

This is something that's been eating at me for a while now, but over the weekend I actually got around to digging into the texts, and as best I can tell Gideon barely ever focuses on breasts in particular.

Just looking through GtN and HtN for references to breasts, all I come up with is (a) her offering Crux a copy of Frontline Titties of the Fifth, and (b) the narration mentioning in passing that her comics tend to feature necromancers with unrealistic amounts of cleavage.

And of course looking at the women she attaches herself to, neither Harrow nor Cytherea have much going on in the chest department, and when Gideon does express appreciation for Corona (and in HtN, for the portraits of Valancy), she doesn't focus on their breasts at all. Consider this excerpt from chapter 11 of GtN:

[…] she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight. “The Ninth!” she said. She sauntered over. Gideon had risen to stand, remembering the pale eyes of her pissed-off twin, but instead found a beringed hand proffered in her direction: “Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius,” she was told, “Princess of Ida, heir of the Third House.” Gideon did not know what to do with the hand, which was offered to her fingers out, palm upward. She touched her fingers to it in the hope that she could grip it briefly and get out that way, but Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, took her hand and roguishly kissed the backs of Gideon’s knuckles. Her smile was sparklingly pleased with her own gall; her eyes were a deep, liquid violet, and she spoke with the casual effrontery of someone who expected her every command of jump! to be followed by a rave.

Note the focus on her hair, and her eyes, and her smile - it's a very different kind of attention from what you might expect from the memeified version of Gideon that fandom sometimes reduces her to.

Similarly, in HtN she simply describes the nude portrait of Valancy as "bangin'", without any particular mention of her breasts or any other part of her body.

As for her magazines - they clearly do have a significant focus on women with big breasts, but I view that as indicative of the kind of smut that's easy for someone on the outskirts of the Nine Houses to get a hold of, rather than specifically expressing Gideon's own preferences. And as a lesbian who grew up in the 90s, I don't need to imagine what it's like to have to make do with media created with a different demographic in mind (though I couldn't say how that exact phenomenon plays out in the Nine Houses).

So far, I've focused on GtN and HtN, where we're following Gideon's perspective. NtN is a bit of a different beast, since (IIRC) the only relevant information we get is very indirect, but it's worth examining nonetheless. We know that Nona has some level of fascination with breasts - it comes up often enough that she's developed a sensitivity to Cam making notes about her mentioning breasts - and we're led to believe that Cam and Pal treat this as evidence that Nona is Gideon and not Harrow. And if they had known Gideon well, this would be significant (if indirect) evidence that Gideon had a similar fixation. But that's not the case - as much as the Sixth considered Gideon a friend, there were only a few (fraught, chaotic) days between when she first spoke to them and when she died, meaning they didn't have a lot of chance to talk to her that isn't directly in the text.

My reading of this is that Cam and Pal were very fixated on the idea that Nona is either Gideon or Harrow (unlike Pyrrha, who I think was alive to other possibilities from earlier on), and openly expressing a fascination with breasts is entirely at odds with what they know of Harrow, while it's easier to square with Gideon's blunt and crass way of speaking.

So in summary, while I think Gideon probably does have a healthy appreciation for tiddy, it's not a defining characteristic of her personality, and the fandom tendency to portray her as such is an overzealous extrapolation from a few (admittedly quite memorable) lines.

In a similar vein, there's a lot to be said about her being portrayed as a dumb jock, when the evidence points to her being extremely smart - but that's a topic for another post.

#nona on the other hand... #nona is absolutely a big time boob lover #and i love that for her #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #gideon nav #nona tlt #tlt spoilers

[queeoretician]

As others have said this is super fucked up on so many levels, not least because of how often sexual violence is a part of those war crimes in real life, even though so many people are happy to blorboize the one but not the other.

And even if one were to choose to only care about inhabitants of the imperial core, this would still be a deeply toxic way of engaging with the phenomenon of sexual violence. The reality is that, at least in the imperial core, the vast majority of sexual abuse is perpetrated by people know to, and often trusted by, the victims - which is precisely the opposite of the popular conception of the rapist and the child abuser as figures of exceptional, inhuman evil. And as I've written before, this exceptionalising mindset towards sexual violence is actively harmful precisely because it makes society at large less likely to believe victims who claim that they've been abused/assaulted by someone close to them, and makes potential victims less likely to understand if they are being targeted.

And that's a big part of why I find it so incredibly aggravating to see the John Gaius Defense Squad get all up in arms about discussing the sexual abuse symbolism/implications of his actions - exactly because he's such a chillingly realistic portrayal of a sexual abuser. He occupies a position of power over everyone around him, and he's charismatic and funny, and generally gives the impression of being a nice enough person if you don't look too closely, but once you do look closely there are a bunch of red flags even from a purely diegetic perspective. And when there's discourse about this there's a vocal subset of fans who act out the exact kind of denialism and defensiveness that lets real life rapists avoid any real consequences for their actions. Instead we get treated to such gems as "um actually TERF ideology is when people are mean about my cis male blorbo..."

its really crazy how people love to blorbopost about how their blorbo is a War Criminal Scrunkly but those same people will act like you ate their dog if you so much as imply that scrunkly has any textual relation to sexual violence

#i promise i've got some posts coming that aren't about fandom discourse about jod #but i had to get this out of my system #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #john gaius #cw rape mention

[queeoretician]

loveday heptane's pre-canon death and zero seconds of screen time have bewitched me body and soul

#so true #never not thinking about that one post about loveday as cyth's carer and the rage she must have felt about that whole situation #the locked tomb #tlt #loveday heptane

[queeoretician]

Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”

#double whammy of john gaius and the emperor bg3 #love it when people fall hook line and sinker for a fictional abuser's shtick #still at least it's not falling for an irl abuser's shtick

[queeoretician]

House Party

#this is just delightful #“mature respectful dinner party” #cyth(?) with a bong #babs throwing up #ABIGAIL DOING A KEGSTAND?! #karaoke protesilaus #the locked tomb #tlt #griddlehark

[queeoretician]

Bardians - Alfira & Lakrissa

And the winner iiiiis : Lakrissa and Alfira on the menu for tonight! Check the full version on our Stachless P.treon

#i fucking love these girls #my favourite two tiefling queens #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #alfira x lakrissa #alfira bg3 #lakrissa bg3

[queeoretician]

the extreme level of body horror ambiently permeating the nine houses is so normalised in-text that we lose track of how off the wall insanely evil these characters must look to outsiders. the people on lemuria are experiencing junji ito does starship troopers while we giggle and twirl our hair about bone arms.

#this is brilliant! #the locked tomb #tlt

[queeoretician]

There’s not a book that’s better than this

#re: prev “has Harrow said 'bitch' at any other point?” #yes she has! #exactly once as best I can tell #"Step off #said to Cytherea in the climactic fight in GtN #the locked tomb #tlt #harrowhark nonagesimus #ianthe tridentarius

[queeoretician]

Every time I remember that Pyrrha has never seen Palamedes’s face I suddenly want to jump into a trash compactor.

#ow #this is like a punch to the gut for my transfem!Palamedes headcanon #so much potential connection channeled through keyhole-slices of time #and then Palamedes and Camilla are gone #pyrrha dve #palamedes sextus #camilla hect #the locked tomb #tlt

[queeoretician]

A Patreon request of Coronabeth and Judith as Miss Piggy and Kermit. This one really got a laugh out of me, and it was fantastic to draw.

#this has broken my brain #kermit!jody is just so weird but so good... #the locked tomb #tlt #coronabeth tridentarius #judith deuteros

[queeoretician]

#this is fucking gold #coronabeth tridentarius #the locked tomb #tlt