#gotta track down that one untagged post...this is going to drive me nuts

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

I posted 5,504 times in 2022

440 posts created (8%)

5,064 posts reblogged (92%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@itsallwearecalledtodo

@marzipanandminutiae

@carys-the-ninth

@lilaccatholic

@nikosheba

I tagged 5,503 of my posts in 2022

#the locked tomb - 487 posts

#give me love give me memes - 364 posts

#fanart - 340 posts

#art - 259 posts

#dracula - 202 posts

#clothing - 195 posts

#gif - 184 posts

#animorphs - 176 posts

#reblog bait - 169 posts

#umineko no naku koro ni - 167 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#my roommate on the rosa canina arc: c'mon shimako! you have to run! you embody the body politic; you're the leviathan! this isn't up to you!

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Between the text of the first three Locked Tomb books themselves, the back matter in Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, and a few interviews, I think that Tamsyn Muir has provided us with enough information to semi-confidently predict at least one major plot element in Alecto the Ninth. It has to do with Harrow, the Resurrection, and what’s beyond or underneath the stoma.

In the Gideon the Ninth back matter Tamsyn says that Harrow is “named very specifically for the harrowing of Hell” (GtN p. 468 in the paperback). The harrowing of Hell is an event in the traditional Christian theology of Jesus’ death and resurrection where He descends into hell and brings salvation to righteous people who died before His time. As Kate Mary Warren’s “Harrowing of Hell” article in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907-1912 puts it:

This is the Old English and Middle English term for the triumphant descent of Christ into hell (or Hades) between the time of His Crucifixion and His Resurrection, when, according to Christian belief, He brought salvation to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world. According to the "New English Dictionary" the word Harrowing in the above connection first occurs in Ælfric's homilies, about A.D. 1000; but, long before this, the descent into hell had been related in the Old English poems connected with the names of Cædmon and Cynewulf. Writers of Old English prose homilies and lives of saints continually employ the subject, but it is in medieval English literature that it is most fully found, both in prose and verse, and particularly in the drama.

The Biblical citation for this is I Peter 4:6, which describes Christ preaching “even to the dead.” Historically the way this was understood was that people before Christ who had died without “deserving” hell but for whom Jesus Himself hadn’t died yet went to a morally and hedonically neutral underworld space like we see in Ancient Greek religion. It was this particular space in hell that was harrowed. More recently the view has been advanced that He just emptied the place and gave out salvation like Oprah giving out cars, and there is some early evidence for this understanding too (Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom; I Corinthians 15). In the interview that Tamsyn did on the Nona the Ninth release day, she tells us bluntly that “Harrowhark is in Hell”.

So that establishes--in my opinion--that Harrow is, is or is going to go, beyond the stoma and release someone, or something, trapped there. One might think based on what we’ve seen of the stoma so far that this would be a very bad thing. “[W[here the things are that eat us,” as Ianthe puts it (GtN p. 382), seems like an awful place filled with awful people, or beings--the thing that possesses Colum in the climax of Gideon the Ninth, the horrifying-looking stoma itself, and of course the devils that the Empire is fighting on Antioch and that have made it to the Ninth House by the end of Nona the Ninth.

But hell is by definition a weird and horrible place with weird and horrible things in it. What if, in the case of at least some of the “things that eat us,” that isn’t their fault, and isn’t how it’s meant to be?

I’m indebted to my IRL best friend and Locked Tomb pusher @mayasaura for pulling these quotes and page numbers for me, as well as realizing a certain numerical discrepancy in the first place:

Twice in the first two books, “ten billion” is given as a figure of people being “avenged” by Blood of Eden (and a certain evil cougar well-known to us all). Cytherea declares herself the “vengeance of the ten billion” on GtN p. 405. Wake gives the same figure on HtN p. 465. Yet suddenly in Nona we get a figure of eleven billion as the capacity for Jod and the OG Lyctors’ cryo ships (p. 13), and ten billion as the figure that The Trillionaires “le[ft]....behind to die, having stolen financing and support and materials” (p. 395). There are a few possibilities here: either The Trillionaires took a billion people with them in their own fleet, Jod is very bad at math for a scientific and medical genius, or the eleven billion capacity for the cryo fleet was supposed to give extra room just to be safe (this is what I think is likeliest). Either way there’s a slight ambiguity about the pre-Resurrection population of the Solar System in general, which, when I noticed it, got me thinking about the other big ambiguity with population figures in these books: the fact that the Nine Houses ten thousand years in the future do not have a population in the high ten digits or even close to it; even the mid-sized individual Houses only have a few million people each (NtN p. 30; the Seventh and Eighth Houses sum to nine million), and the total population is maybe a hundred million at the very most.

So where is everybody?

Jod did not resurrect everybody who lived in the Solar System when he and Alecto “went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar” (NtN p. 409). We know this for a fact; this is where the neo-Niners came from when he fulfilled his promise to Harrow to repopulate her House (HtN p. 35-36). As Jod puts it, “I set many aside, for safety.” Whose safety from whom?

Here’s Jod describing what’s beyond the River in Harrow the Ninth (p. 340-341):

"A genuinely chaotic space--chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable...located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch--somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless. You'll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That's what we've been using it for, in any case. That's where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin...with all the other dross."

Note the deeply dehumanizing and condemnatory language. Rubbish, dross, trash. “Very few ghosts” are down there, supposedly--but do we really think John Gaius would do that? Just pontificate to his Lyctors and tell lies? Lies about the number of pre-Resurrection people whom he’s hated and dehumanized for ten thousand years, the proportion of the human race that for whatever reason he thought couldn't or shouldn't hack it in his brave new thanergy-powered world?

I do. And I came away from Nona the Ninth with a more sympathetic view of his original intentions than did most of the fandom!

I think that at least some of what's on the other side of the stoma is, or are, the souls of the people Jod in his infinite wisdom decided not to resurrect. The world below the bed of the River is directly associated with hell both in the text of the series and in interviews with Tamsyn, and furthermore I think that Harrowhark is going to replicate her namesake's "triumphant descent” and free at least some of these souls, who are in turn at least as likely--probably likelier--to wreck up Jod and impose real consequences on him as Alecto is. I think that this fits the plot, the themes, and The Locked Tomb's overall structure as a story from its cosmology and theology right down to the names of its main characters.

In ten months we’ll see if I’m right!

290 notes - Posted November 3, 2022

#4

I should read those low fantasy Byzantine girlboss books. Half a dozen zillennial Catholic feminist mutuals of mine can't all be wrong.

352 notes - Posted April 29, 2022

#3

Reblog this and tag it with whether you say “aunt” to rhyme with “haunt” or with “cant”.

636 notes - Posted January 18, 2022

#2

People who haven't read Dracula before and aren't familiar with its reception history should be aware that Jonathan crowing about how "up-to-date" shorthand is starts a theme that will continue for the rest of the book. Stoker is very interested in pitting then-cutting-edge technologies--the train schedules, the shorthand, and later on things like recorded sound, blood transfusions, and electric lights--against his folkloric vampires. The book is such a great encapsulation of its period today because Stoker set out to make it an encapsulation of his own time when he wrote it.

742 notes - Posted May 16, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

The P in Quincey P. Morris stands for Pardner.

813 notes - Posted May 25, 2022

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