#and then gideon being the other primary character making those jokes rings the same

[evergoesmyway]

i feel like some readers misinterpret the meme lines in locked tomb as just tamsyn trying to be funny and modern, like they're breaking the fourth wall just to get a chuckle or a cringe out of you. but many of those lines primarily come from john, whose fatal nostalgia for a dead world has mentally destroyed him - and just like he remembers everything from that world, he remembers its memes and repeats them ad nauseum to comfort himself over what was lost. but no one remembers that world but him. he's telling these jokes to no one but the reader - because it's the reader who occupies the world he's remembering. these are memes from our time, because john is from our time. we, the reader of the story, are essentially long dead ghosts peering into the grim future being laid out in the narrative - the future that john created. he's telling those cringe jokes for us. they're fossils.