#over the way posts about john gaius seem to have very little connection to the background muir actually gave him

[ignitesthestxrs]

there's something about the way people talk about john gaius (incl the way the author writes him) that is like. so absent of any connection to te ao māori that it's really discomforting. like even in posts that acknowledge him as not being white, they still talk about him like a white, american leftist guy in a way that makes it clear people just AREN'T perceiving him as a māori man from aotearoa.

and it's just really serves to hammer home how powerful and pervasive whiteness and american hegemony is. because TLT is probably the single most Kiwi series in years to explode on the global stage, and all the things i find fraught about it as a pākehā woman reading a series by a pākehā author are illegible to a greater fandom of americans discoursing about whether or not memes are a valid way of portraying queer love.

idk the part of my brain that lights up every time i see a capital Z printed somewhere because of the New Zealand Mentioned??? instinct will always be proud of these books and muir. but i find myself caught in this midpoint of excitement and validation over my culture finding a place on the global stage, frustration at how kiwi humour and means of conveying emotion is misinterpreted or declared facile by an international audience, frustrated also by how that international audience runs the characters in this book through a filter of american whiteness before it bothers to interpret them, and ESPECIALLY frustrated by how muir has done a pretty middling job of portraying te ao māori and the māoriness of her characters, but tht conversation doesn't circulate in the same way* because a big part of the audience doesn't even realise the conversation is there to be had.

which is not to say that muir has done a huge glaring racism that non-kiwis haven't noticed or anything, but rather that there are very definitely things that she has done well, things that she has done poorly, things that she didn't think about in the first book that she has tacked on or expanded upon in the later books, that are all worthy of discussion and critique that can't happen when the popular posts that float past my dash are about how this indigenous man is 'guy who won't shut up about having gone to oxford'

*to be clear here, i'm not saying these conversations have never happened, just that in terms of like, ambient posts that float round my very dykey dash, the discussions and meta that circulate on this the lesbian social media, are overwhelmingly stripped of any connection to aotearoa in general, let alone te ao māori in specific. and because of the nature of american internet hegemony this just,,,isn't noticed, because how does a fish know it's in the ocean u know? i have seen discussions along these lines come up, and it's there if i specifically go looking for it, but it's not present in the bulk of tlt content that has its own circulatory life and i jut find that grim and a part of why the fandom is difficult to engage with.

#tlt #the locked tomb #i don't really have an answer lmao this is more #an expression of frustration and discomfort #over the way posts about john gaius seem to have very little connection to the background muir actually gave him #like you cant describe him as an educated leftist bisexual man #without INCLUDING that he is māori #that has an impact! that has weight and importance! #that is a background to every decision he makes #from the meat wall to the nuke to his relationship with the earth #and it also has weight and importance in the decisions that muir makes in writing him #it is not a neutral decision that he's known as john gaius lmao #it's not a neutral decision that the empire is explicitly of roman/latin extraction #it's not even neutral that this is a book about necromancy #it's certainly not a neutral fucking decision that john was at one point a māori man living in the bush #when the nz govt decided to send cops in #like that is a thing that happens here! that is a reference to nz cultural and political events that informs john's character and actions #and with the nature of who john is in the story #informs the narrative as a whole #and i think the tiresome part of this experience is that #in general #americans are not well positioned to understand that something might be being written from outside their experience as a default #like obviously many many americans in online leftist & queer spaces are willing to learn and take on new information #but so much of the conversation starts from a place of having to explain that forests exist to fish

[spushii]

LITERALLY SO GLAD THAT THE FEELING INSANE OVER THIS SERIES IS MUTUAL FR ITS BEEN ABSOLUTELY TEARING ME APART id love to hear your thoughts!!!! *_* I have been itching to read more posts about it but also trying to avoid spoilers rbdbdbjf

I just started nona yesterday, I finished harrow few days ago but god that one fucked with me good I needed a bit to just let everything that happened sink in. like ITS SO GOOD it’s so much darker than the first book and I still don’t have the words to express how much I genuinely enjoyed the second one it’s literally so fucking great. I was almost tempted to reread harrow after I finished it but I wanted to read all three before any rereads lol but the attachment I have to these characters is insane I just fucking cling to them so badly I am so unwell. love gideon, my best friend gideon I miss her sm…

SQUEEEEEEEEEE IM SO HAPPY YOU LIKED HARROW!!! its such a phenomenal book its so. um. Harrowing. lol. im going to have a really hard time articulating just all of the Shit That I Think About with this book series because there really really is so much.

getting right into the meat of my thoughts i guess. i really love how Gideon's bit with Ianthe at the end of HtN recontextualizes the bit of the pool scene where Harrow talks about the first time she saw The Body. where it really does feel like in that moment Gideon simultaneously realized that she was in love with Harrowhark and that Harrow would never feel the same. And i think it allows you to glean some of the genuinely a little bit selfish motivation behind Gideon's suicide. There were a lot of things that motivated Gideon to kill herself so Harrow and Camilla could live, but i think a significant portion of it was her not wanting to live a life indebted to Harrow in a way she would never be content with (Connecting mostly to Harrow asking her to return to the ninth house and care for it ((and by extension, The Body)) in her stead, in the event of her death), which is to say in the grand scheme of things, the choice between Living for Harrow and Dying for Harrow was a very easy one to make for Gideon Nav.

I dont have as much analysis for this but god i think all the fucking time. About Gideon the First attacking Harrow in the bathroom. and the subsequent Everything. It's just so fucking. Bleak. Reading it is physically exhausting. It's so. oh my god. I don't even know what to say. Fucking "Harrow, do something normal." I'm Going To Kill Myself. Im Going To Kill John Gaius. The fact that she KILLS him and it doesnt even KEEP. THE FUCKING. THIS. HARROWWWWW

HARROWHARK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE NORMAL IN MY LIFE AFTER IVE READ THIS

I do love John. as much as i hate him i love him as well. He's such a fucking coward. such a worthless piece of shit. such a suffocatingly interesting character. I love when Harrow tries to ask him about Alecto and he goes on about fucking "You'd make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I sometimes indulge in the wish that you'd been mine." LITERALLY FUCKING WHAT. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOTU WHERE AM I.what if you had a crush on a girl but you had an even bigger crush on her dad's dead ex-girlfriend and then her dad told you that he wished you were his daughter. i feel so fucking abnormal

EDITING THIS POST BECAUSE I FORGOT I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT WAKE. WHAT THE FUCK RIGHT???????????????? god i think forever about how much Gideon Nav loved her mother. how much she clung to the belief that she was loved. Has Gideon Nav ever been knowingly loved by anyone, in her life? Maybe Aiglemene loved her, in a way. But Gideon wouldn't have known that until it was far too late to treasure it. Harrow certainly loves her, but Gideon can't believe that. Not with The Body in the way. Not with Harrow, to Gideon, seeming so disgusted with her final act of devotion that she destroyed her own mind to be rid of the knowledge of it. Magnus treated her kindly, but kind is a far cry from love. But she loved her mother. Held the belief so desperately-yet-gently close to her chest, that her mother loved her too. Loved her enough to come crashing and burning through the Ninth planet's atmosphere and dying herself on the way down. Loved her enough to protect her life at the expense of her own. Imagine, then, for Gideon to learn that she was a tool. A key. Her destiny in life was to die within the first days of her birth; a blood sacrifice, as her mother willed it. Her mother hadn't brought her to the Ninth House in an attempt to save her, she'd brought her there on her way to kill her. Its So. God. Fuck this fucking book. Has Gideon ever been loved? Every truly been loved by anyone in this world? If she has, she doesn't know it.

#ask #there's so much more i could get into. i think so much about ianthe shes such a slimy bitch i love her to pieces #i kind of want her. girl can you emotionally manipulate me into having sex with you next ^_^<-JOKE #im so excited for you to get deeper into nona. for like the whole last third of the book i felt like i was going to start pulling hair out #<-GOOD THING