#also muir

[elfieafterdark]

I am suddenly struck with dread terror, down to my very marrow. My heart freezes like the waters of the tomb, my soul trembles under the staggering pressure of this new burden I bear.

I have to wait for the last book with everyone else.

And I must scream.

[blondie-drawings]

can't stop thinking about those skeleton lesbians (pt 1)

[onebigsword]

Sad wet nun be upon ye

[specialagentartemis]

Reading (listening to, as Homer intended) the Iliad making me go oh. Ohhh. I should have done this before I read Gideon the Ninth. I get it now.

Particularly thinking now about the tidbit that in early drafts, our beloved gray-eyed Necromancer Warden of the Sixth House was named Diomedes Sextus. For Diomedes, king of Argos, young, brave, noble, heroic. Favorite fighter of Athena, bestest friend of Odysseus. And, notably, fought gods and—well he didn’t win exactly. But he got them good.

And specifically, he fought and wounded Aphrodite; Aphrodite, who is also called Cytherea.

And then of course Tamsyn Muir said she decided to change his name so she could make the Sex Pal joke.

Palamedes is a less heroic, less fondly remembered character in the Trojan War, but according to Plato, he unrelatedly invented both number and the alphabet, so you keep that connection to scholarship even if that’s not the first association with him. More interestingly, imo, there’s also an Arthurian Knight of the Round Table named Palamedes, best known for his unrequited love for Isolde (and his apparent ultimately gracious acceptance of her choosing Tristan).

I think this is actually a super interesting shift in thematic naming focus: from favored-of-Athena, fought-gods-and-wounded-them to unrequited heterosexual love, but didn’t act like a dick about it.

Also y’know. Sex Pal

[henreyettah]

First tlt comic pls be kind to me

Edit: made a very minuscule change. Might take a trained eye to see it (hint)

[zombie-bait]

i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it

Fellas is it gay to give yourself a lobotomy to possibly preserve the soul of your one and only companion who died to save you? Asking for a friend

[leafspiritz]

III; three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile

[lady-harrowhark]

For me, the thing is that "confusing" just... isn't the right descriptor for my experience reading the Locked Tomb books. I wasn't "confused," I just didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, and I was aware of that fact. I feel like I generally knew what I was meant to know, as a reader, at the point in the book where I was at. And for a very significant portion of the series, what the reader is meant to know is, "not much." I was less "confused" and moreso "searching for the explanation that will connect everything." This is absolutely a series on the very high end of the "unknown quantities" spectrum. They're an intellectual escape room.

But the shorthand way to convey that is just that yeah, no, these books are super confusing.

[arithmonym]

re-reading the locked tomb, and i'm thinking about how harrow identifies alecto as a "girl" rather than a "woman."

obviously, john had other sources of inspiration... but did you know that the original barbie doll was only supposed to be nineteen years old?

[dustykneed]

is this how tsfs went? i think this is how tsfs went. source? trust me bro. he chose the danger

unintentional coincidence but thinking about it this sorta reminds me of this post by @muirmarie! if you enjoyed the comic you should absolutely go read it. i'm insane about it

[theriverbeyond]

asking for COSPLAY purposes.... when you read about Ortus' Ninth House "panniers" for carrying bone around..... which one springs to mind?

[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.

[eviefrie]

hello locked tomb fans. have i got a book (books) for you.

more archive undying propaganda, if this wasn't enough to convince you:

(but also if you've decided to read the archive undying, i don't know if i would recommend the libby edition? i have my libby set to "legible" and there are some font changes in the print version that did NOT show up in the ebook. obv i liked reading the ebook enough to buy the text, but as @urban-sith put it, he was lost and i was in jumanji)

[historical-misfit]

do you ever think they. i do a lot too

[clonerightsagenda]

I am not going to say TLT is about fossil fuels because it's about a lot of things and it's reductive to boil it down to anything, but a society fueled by necromancy/death magic/corpses is reminiscent of our society fueled by and built with petrochemicals (oil, natural gas, plastic), and given that within the necromancy framework the role of the cavalier is to be metaphorically, literally, and/or spiritually consumed, it's interesting that the first cavalier was the planet Earth. This new world is still based on devouring the planet.

Does this make Paul a metaphor for nuclear fusion I'm joking but I suppose the question Alecto must resolve is whether we can escape needing to consume to survive.* And maybe we can't - stop trying to make your carnivorous pets vegan - but can we find a method of consumption that's less destructive?

(Some people may see Paul as that answer but I am a Hater who isn't into ego death.)

[affectionatecorpse]

I have no justification for this