#like… jod loved to the point of destruction but nona loved to the point of existence

[frogseasons]

theres something so incredibly painful and meaningful about nona deciding to live just because a dog is in the truck. just noodle, this weird little six-legged dog that nona only knew for a handful of months in her already short life that she loved so deeply. tazmuir goes to painstaking extents to illustrate all the horrible things that come as a result of love (paul, jod’s backstory, pyrrha/g1deon/wake, ianthe and corona, gideon and harrow, etc) but this little, pivotal moment illustrates the beauties of it. nona is all about love, she loves without reason, she loves her little life and her little family and her school and her friends and noodle. noodle, who is just a dog, who can’t speak or express his love like humans do, but shows it nonetheless. because noodle is a dog, and dogs love without reason, just like nona (just like the earth). when everything and everyone that nona loves is falling apart, when she’s lost in all those horrors of love and chaos and destruction and her brain is breaking down and she’s losing what it means to Be Nona, noodle is still there, loving her regardless. and because she’s still nona, she loves him back. and she lives for love, even for just a few minutes longer. for a dirty little six-legged dog that wasn’t even hers, because she can’t let what she loves die if she has the choice (the power, for once). it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and the last decision she ever made was to live with her horrible, painful existence so that a dog (who couldn’t choose) wouldn’t die.

#g txt #tlt #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #GOD…. god…….. #ntn just spends its whole time showing how drastically different nona and jods love is #like… jod loved to the point of destruction but nona loved to the point of existence #when everything was tumbling down around them jod watched his friends die without remorse and used them to kill the earth #he killed all he loved and wiped clean the slate #but nona sees everything she loves dying and changing and wants to go too. but she stays. #because who is she if not someone who loves and wants to be loved #she’s terrified of not remembering that love. but jod erases the memory of love for the sake of his own ease #nona lives with pain for love. and jod kills everything he loves and gives no choice in it. #those tags arent worded exactly right BUT U GET MY POINT YEAH. #g

[softness-and-shattering]

My current Locked Tomb theory, though it might rely too much on formula that these books like to fuck around with. So Tamsyn Muir has described the first and second books as ‘question books,’ and the third and fourth books as ‘answer books’. We also know that Nona takes place over “ten thousand years and one week”. Given the amazon chapter this week, it’s pretty clear to me that this is the book in which we learn about Jod, and the Lyctors, and how everything came to be the way that it is. (It’s gonna be a fun/stressful contrast of minute-by-minute and eternity-by-eternity, though, the backstory might be condensed into ‘earth’ and ‘houses time’ for the most part).  And as the story goes, we have a lot of the pieces, a lot of the players, but we dont know Jod’s plan, we dont know BOE’s plans, we dont really know what we’re rooting for to happen, what a good ending (or a worse one) looks like. Hell we’ve already had our two viewpoint characters die, Nona probably doesnt survive as Nona after her book (I assume she re-becomes Alecto; we’ll see), and destruction of everything in existence is so much less personal than these books are: sure they take place over millennia and galaxies but they are at their hearts personal intimate stories about love and grief and humanity. [does Jod need to grieve for Earth?] That a lot of ramble to get at my main point: The three quarter mark in most stories is where everything is ramped right up. In three act structure its the point where everything goes wrong in every possible way, and then the hero realises the power was inside them all along and they fight back from the brink to save the day. (A lot of the time in less-good stories this is where the characters all have a big fight for no good reason because the formula says Tension Here). So I think that Nona The Ninth is going to give us all the background, and the stakes, and put everything into position such that when we start Alecto, there are still some mysteries, but for the most part we know what we want, what could go wrong, what Jod wants, almost all the pieces on the board and in position; and then Alecto is gonna be a rollercoaster start to finish with just a few climactic mysteries left as the universe goes to hell in a handbasket.  Which also means Nona is probably going to end on at least one cliffhanger, but will also be so full of lore and wonder. 

#oops I got rambling #dont feel like editing so just uh enjoy the enthusiasm? #the locked tomb spoilers #nona the ninth speculation #alecto the ninth speculation #the locked tomb meta #locked tomb spoilers #nona the ninth #alecto the ninth

[thewonderfulsticherofoz]

I made a joke ask about Harrow being restored like St Peter through feeding cows instead of sheep and now that I’m thinking about it I feel there is some merit in my demented joke. Listen. Nona starts with Pyrrha wanting to take her family and go to a farming planet away from the violence. The notion that this is something Pyrha really wants- that she could ever truly stomach a life of peace, a life without conflict or violence, without anything to fight- is something that is questioned multiple times throughout the book. This leads me to believe that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we’re going to swing back around to the farming planet topic. Now, obviously Harrow is a character who has been nothing but death and destruction her whole life. Her necromancy and her very existence are only possible because of the murder of 200 innocent children and she hates herself for it. The fact that her hatred of the sacrifice that lead to her power, and by extension herself, is so central to her character has led many (including myself) to believe that for Harrow’s arc to be complete she will have to in some way give up her necromantic powers. So how does this relate to Pyrrha and her farming planet? Harrow is also a character who cannot conceive of herself outside a world of death. And not only that, she feels that she is obligated to pay for the sacrifice necessary for her existence. She orginally tries to do this by becoming a lyctor and having Jod repopulate her house, but she’s still miserable and all the new people became zombies so obviously that didn’t work. The series presents us with the idea of life and death energy, thalergy and thanergy, as two opposite forces. But in reality, one cannot exist without the other. And if you look at it through the lens of nature, they are not even separate forces, but one continuous cycle. New life can’t exist without death and decomposition. (I think this idea of thalergy and thanergy actually being one force has something to do with perfect lyctorhood but that’s a different post.) If you want to cultivate plants and living things, you have to sustain them with products of decomposition. Seriously, you can go to any hardware store right now and buy a 3 pound bag of powdered blood or bone to give your plant. Plants LOVE decomposing organic matter. They need it to exist. Which brings me to my main point: you know what’s a really good way to reclaim your origins of death and destruction and transform them into growth and life in a very symbolic, narrative way? FARMING. And we’re going back to Canaan House which is ostensibly on Earth!! Taking our necromancy and using it to introduce new life to the planet whose death and rebirth started this whole thing would be, IMO, a gorgeous way and thematically consistent way to end this story. Also, as an ending it has very strong medieval religious allegory vibes. How do you live the perfect spiritual life? You have love and family and a farm. Very Voltaire. (I know Candide’s not medieval but as a philisophical text it has very strong roots in medieval moral philosophy don’t come for me!) Anyway all this to say that I now want nothing more than for Pyrrha and Gideon and Harrow to end the story with John and Alecto in the tomb, zero necromancy, and a farm where Harrow literally feeds Gideons cows (that she raises in order to reclaim the legacy of violence she’s inherited). I choose to believe this until I am directly contradicted in October. 

#tlt #meta #harrow

[taylorrama]

The Locked Tomb and mewithoutYou pt. 2/17

Song: The Soviet Album: Catch For Us the Foxes

God is love and love is real, But the dead are dancing with the dead And whatever's charming disappears While all things lovely only hurt my head

These first lines express a conflict between faith in God and a perceived reality that contradicts this faith. Big mood for Harrow "What does it mean for a child of the Ninth House to love God?" Nonagesimus. My girl lobotomized herself because Gideon's dancing with the dead and God's a bit too real.

As the night-time shined like day It saw my sorry face and hair a mess But it liked me best that way... Besides, how else could I confess? When I looked down like if to pray Well, I was looking down her dress... Good God! Please, catch for us the foxes In the vineyard... the little foxes

If Harrow ever once had a sexual thought, this is how she'd react to it. Here, the narrator in the song is conflicted between this appearance of piety (praying) and an inner experience of lust. The supplication to "catch for us the foxes" functions here as a plea to God to root out this sin.

I'll have to pay more attention on my reread with respect to how much purity culture made it into Jod's new paradigm. We see a familiar prudishness in side characters in the Ninth House, but it doesn't seem like a widespread religious expectation in the same way as purity culture in our world.

So, I'm not sure that Harrow would be horrified of having sexual thoughts because those thoughts conflict with any sense of piety. Instead, as we see a few times in Harrow the Ninth when she's circling around remembering Gideon, the potential horror of these thoughts is that A) she has no idea how to process attraction/love/romance/etc in general and B) they threaten to trigger memories of Gideon, which would render Gideon's destruction.

Meanwhile, the song works with a fox metaphor, which is interesting on its own, but not connected to anything I can think of in TLT. Unless we take Ianthe as a fox, which could work with this imagery, but I'd have to think about it more.

So turn your ears You musicians, to silence Because they only come out when it's quiet Their tails brushing over your eyelids Oh, wake up, sleepers And rise from the dead! Or the fur that they shed That's gonna lay on your bed In a delicate orange-ish cinnamon red... Ah, but I don't need this! I don't need this! For I have my loves... I don't need this

"Wake up, sleepers, and rise from the dead!" is from several different Bible verses and I wouldn't be surprised if Tamsyn Muir uses it at some point. It's possible she may have and I just missed it the first time around. In the TLT world, this has all kinds of fascinating implications. Since I just finished Nona, I'm thinking about John and his choices about who he resurrects. In the Bible, it's meant as this hopeful declaration, but in the song, it has this dark tone to it, and when applied to TLT, well, what does rising from the dead really mean in this paradigm and is it good?

I said in my last post that this line from Nona pinged a second mwY reference in my brain. This is that reference–the desperate repetition of "I don't need this!" carries the same energy that Nona has here when she's saying "We don't need it."

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TLT + mewithoutYou Part 1; TLT + mewithoutYou Part 3

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #mewithoutyou #the locked tomb spoilers #Youtube