#< harrow lobotomizing herself

[bees-n-bones]

do you ever remember a song exists, add it to a caracter/ship playlist without listening to it, just to discover later that its an Even Better fit than initially thought?

[deviousdayz]

I kind of hate seeing people say that the locked tomb series has no romance because like no there’s not kissing and fucking but it’s about love and almost nothing else

when you love someone so much you die to become a part of them but they love you so much that they ruin themselves to not accept your sacrifice

when two people love each other so much that they willingly lose themselves becoming one another so that they never have to be apart

when the body you’re in belonged to a person who loved someone else so much that you can feel that person’s warmth

When you love someone so much you’re upset at the fact that they didn’t love you enough to consume you so you could be one, but they only couldn’t do it because they loved you too much to lose you.

that series is so chock FULL of love it’s just that a lot of it is. not straightforward

[unreachedgalaxy]

can't stop thinking about how tamsyn muir regularly includes foreshadowing in the most bizarre and mundane places (like harrow threatening to make bone meal explode out of gideon, and then she does do that to a Different Gideon).

anyway on a totally unrelated note, remember how they're fighting in GTN and harrow says "when I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it"? and remember what harrow knows now about the meaning of lyctorhood and cavalierhood, and the fact that she likely no longer wants gideon to just be her cavalier? and remember that there's almost no way they won't have at least one blowup fight in Alecto the Ninth?

yeah. thinking about it.

[katiebell]

I have Thoughts about harrow and gideon both seeing their relationship as romantic, actually, but they both think it’s unrequited

for gideon in particular she totally married harrow (“if aught but death part me and thee”, “sure cam, marry a moron then die, I get the urge”) EXCEPT she sees it as a one sided marriage (girl lol) and in this case death joined them rather than parting them….. so harrow’s refusal to eat her soul is a double rejection - she gave harrow her life in the physical and metaphorical sense, and from her pov harrow basically went “fuck u here’s our divorce”

[twobitsandanibble]

Are we going to talk about how fucking weird these instructions are?

Harrow, you definitely know that's not how you care for a sword, right?

[yisanged]

sorry it's embarrassing liking lincoln because tiktok alt lites like lincoln but well i like lincoln and also this song is griddlehark

[frontlinet1tties]

.

[the-velvet-worm]

actually one of the craziest things about harrow and gideon's relationship is the fact that they're like, unhealthily obsessed with each other but also both think the other does not care as much as they do. gideon literally died for harrow and thinks that harrow hates her so much that she erased her from her memory. harrow lobotomized herself because she couldn't allow herself to destroy gideon's soul. and they're both still just like, "she could never love me." ARE YOU BOTH FUCKING STUPID??????? (the answer is yes)

[ace-and-ranty]

No, but the thing is, when I was reading Harrow the Ninth, I thought it was gonna be an Orpheus situation. I thought Harrow had fucked herself up as a means to an end, that she had a plan to bring Gideon back, that the lobotomizing and everything else was her way of getting into hell to get Gideon out.

It really made me feel some type of way when it finally dawned me that she never thought that far. I mean, you'd think it makes sense that, if GOD tells you something can't be done, you accept it can't be done, BUT IT'S HARROW WE ARE TALKING ABOUT. It is INSANE to me that she just accepted she couldn't undo Gideon's death.

The trauma of living in a death cult really got to this girl. She was so awash in it she couldn't even conceive of living a life with Gideon; a more acceptable death is as far as she could go. Absolutely insane. Harrow is not Orpheus because Harrow never tried climbing back up, she couldn't look back because she never got that far, she went into hell to sit there with Gideon forever, and it just didn't occur to climb back up the stairs.

[gideonisms]

I don't think John gets harrow, really at all. I think he is constantly misjudging her and her level of attachment to him. She's been indoctrinated to love him but she's literally always put her unhinged lesbian crushes ahead of him in her loyalties. She tried to release the girl she thought could kill him age 11. She lobotomized herself out of being useful to him because she thought he was wrong that she couldn't do anything to save gideon. She hates the food he gives her and she finds his interpersonal relationships distasteful. She's been trained to put him first but she doesn't actually like this guy. Imo

[elfieafterdark]

I don't think I'll ever be able to stop thinking about how fucking misguided Gideon and Harrow are when it comes to their feelings for each other.

Gideon's convinced that the love of her life is only capable of feeling the way she wants her to feel about herself, for the Body. Harrow loves Gideon in a way she could never love the body. She covets the body, she childishly adores Alecto.

But she isn't willing to destroy herself for Alecto, she isn't willing to shatter her mind to ensure Alecto's survival. She lobotomizes herself to save Gideon, and I don't believe that she would do the same for Alecto.

Harrow meanwhile, is a complete disaster zone at expressing and communicating her feelings. Her note to Gideon, her letter, the one that would be given to Gideon with the assumption that Harrow was going to get Gideon into a body at some point could have explained it all plainly.

How she feels about Gideon, how she loves Gideon more than anything. How she's going to do everything she can to get back to her. How she needs her so badly.

Instead she hides that all behind the cryptic message, their message for sure, but Gideon misses it. "One flesh, one end."

Girls please?!

[sleeplessgoldfinchfixation]

Corona crying over Ianthe eating Babs instead of her because she's misconstrued this act of love as rejection vs. Gideon saying "I gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it" in response to Harrow lobotomizing herself to preserve Gideon's soul.

The object of love can't imagine any better end than being consumed, but the one who loves can't bear to do it

[sunnytobio]

the tagline of harrow the ninth: the necromancers are back and they’re gayer than ever!

the gay necromancer in question: lobotomized herself, violently throwing up, hallucinating, someone is literally trying to kill her, hasnt slept in 6 days, putting her own bone marrow in soup, hiding under her bed and sobbing, in love with a corpse, wanting a hallucination to kiss her, bleeding out of her ears, haunted by her lesbian situationship’s mother (in a sword), will literally not let go of said sword and sleeps next to it like a lover (actual quote from the book), watching 3 10,000 year olds fuck, watching a man who has tried to kill her 10+ times make out with a corpse (different one—not the one she’s in love with), thinks sugar water with a drop of lemon has too much flavor, was stabbed in the hand by another lesbian, hallucinating her past completely incorrectly in order to cope terribly, having several meet-cute hallucinations with her previously mentioned lesbian situationship (who is dead), and killing planets

[best-nun-tournament]

Semifinals Match 1

The Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus (The Locked Tomb) vs Sister Beatrice (Warrior Nun)

Harrow is a nun of the Ninth House. She's been described as a space goth necromancer fantasy sci-fi bone nun.

Sister Beatrice is a secret Demon-Fighting Warrior Nun of the Order of the Cruciform Sword.

The Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus

She’s great. She has so many fucking problems. She’s been running the goth space convent since she was 10. She’s puppeting her dead parents around. She doesn’t like tastes. She is extremely passionate about bones. She’s locked in a twisted bond of love and violence and devotion and sacrifice with her childhood best enemy. She lobotomized herself to preserve the best enemy’s soul. She’s been in love with the corpse of the Devil all her life. She goes around in bone jewelry and skull face paint. She’s a sad wet cat who was born in a cardboard box all alone, etc. She chopped another woman’s arm off and regrew a skeleton arm, in a sexual way. She has awkward little fireside chats with God where he makes millennia-old meme references at her and she does not drink the proffered tea. She saw God make a your mom joke and it “destroyed some cavern of her reverence”. She’s even gay. She’s everything.

Sister Beatrice

Sister Beatrice is perfect in every way. She had to be. When you're taught to hate what you are, when what you love, whom you love, brings you nothing but pain, all you have left is to be perfect. To hope that, if you excel enough, in enough ways, then you might be found worthy. Instead, her wealthy, bigoted, British diplomat parents shipped her off to boarding school in Switzerland for the crime of being a lesbian. From there, she joined the Church, married God, and became part of a secret order of demon-fighting black ops nuns. Being married to Jesus wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that she's fallen in love with a woman who rose from the dead, a beautiful bisexual savior with golden retriever energy and a heart of gold, and for whose training and protection Beatrice is responsible. Her best friend, no less. And roommate. Their apartment only has one bed. Maybe it is bad after all. But maybe Beatrice doesn't mind being bad anymore. Maybe she would rather worship her love, her Ava, than any God of any church. Maybe she would kill a dozen men who stood between her and her love while Ave Maria plays in the background. Maybe Beatrice would burn the world to save her. Maybe it wouldn't be enough, in the end. Maybe she would have to send Ava through a portal to Heaven, or Hell, to save Ava's life, moments after learning her love was returned. Maybe she would wait for her Ava to return too. Until, one day...

[multitude-of-eels]

Ianthe in Harrow the Ninth is sooo convinced that this is her enemies to lovers story with Harrow but little does she know that Harrow is already taken by a corpse and a woman she fell in love with so hard she lobotomized herself for her (which Ianthe saw her do, so I don't know why she thinks she has a chance in hell).

[oliveshark]

Griddlehark definitely seems like the endgame, but I think Muir could (if she so chose) write a believable rejection of the idealized romance inherent to these kinds of stories.

Harrow and Gideon despised one another and repeatedly and deliberately harmed each other. In Harrow's case, she abused her authority and allowed crux to torture a child, to the point that Gideon nearly lost her fingers and toes to hypothermia. And there's the aspect of Harrow using violence to prevent Gideon from escaping her "servitude".

Then, in the span of a roughly a week, they form an intensely codependent platonic/romantic bond with one another due to their severe shared trauma in life or death situations. They've never had anyone else that they could form social peer relationships with, they were forever linked to each other regardless of what they wanted, and they were both abused by Harrows parents and by the demands the ninth house. It's not surprising that they would so quickly reverse their feelings.

But I feel like there's a decent foundation for criticizing that. Harrow and Gideon's direct interactions are near-zero post GtN. Gideon killed herself just so she could feel useful for the first time in her life. Harrow went as far as lobotomizing themselves. In the real world this relationship would be seen as insanely toxic and insanely unhealthy. It might even be seen as predatory due to Harrows power over Gideon. Its the type of love born out of unhealthy coping mechanisms. And Muir could write a version of Alecto where they both realize this.

That being said I still read Griddlehark fics every night before bed.