#griddlehark ruined my life

[harrowharksoup]

It should be illegal to put sentences like these in the same book and every day I thank Tamsyn for my life 😭

[mistystarshine]

Favorite f/f ships (whether canon or fanon)?

Oh man...

Chaggie for Hazbin Hotel, of course.

Yumihisu from Attack on Titan. Mikannie, also from Attack on Titan.

Togachako from BNHA, aka the only good thing to come out of that series.

I am alone on a raft for Makima/Himeno for Chainsaw Man.

Korrasami from legend of Korra. I have also grown soft toward Katara/Azula. (I have a short fic that I still need to write for them for Fandom Trumps Hate, actually.)

I want to say Willow/Tara, because I love Buffy and they're a cornerstone ship, but I... Honestly never had any interest in them? I DO, however, absolutely love the thought of Willow/Faith. 10/10, would read in a HEARTBEAT.

And that's... Pretty much all I can think of off the top of my head? I am very much a lesbian myself, but I don't have a ton of yuri ships because a lot of them, especially fanon ships, tend to be highly sanitized UwU wholesome representation, which is just. Deeply boring to me. I'm also generally more interested in gen fics and gen with background romance where fandom is concerned, because there are a lot of really common things (namely jealousy, a canon love interests being demonized or erased from the other character's life to make way for a fanon ship, or rushed pacing for a ship that would realistically take a long time, on top of my normal characterization nitpicks) that will make me click out of a ship fic immediately. It stops being worth searching after a point.

(Before anyone brings it up, The Locked Tomb has been permanently and irrevocably ruined for me by being held up as the best media of all time by some of the worst bullies I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. I gave the first book a shot, got called an abuse apologist for saying that I was more interested in Gideon/Cytherea than Griddlehark, so. No. I'm sure it's good, but the associations are strong and bad enough that I wouldn't read it if paid by this point. The same group got Arcane too, although not to the same extent, so I may be able to give it a chance one day.)

[clacing]

Do you think the fandom will continue to stan Ianthe through ATN? I feel like Tamsyn has been pulling punches with her for a little bit. The worst she seems is in NTN imo--the way she kind of leans into the weird relationship between her and Coronabeth possibly contributing to why she has her own trigger tag now 😭

Maybe it's just me, but nothing she has done so far has really made me think "wow, I can't stand her" I mostly feel excited to confused when she's around, but I have yet to see her as someone I am supposed to hate

This might be because of the history of male characters and men in general, but I hardly think she's even the worst character in the series. John takes the spot pretty easily. So I wonder if Tamsyn is really going to push the envelope in ATN with her. Maybe she'll be the reason griddlehark doesn't get a happy ending, and then there will be calls for her removal from the ballpit.

I think if anyone is the "girl who's perfectly fine it's everyone else who's wrong" character in the series, it's Ianthe, and I'm struggling to think of a reason that would change. Mostly because I know no one actually believes she's right about anything to begin with lmao so she'd have to do something absolutely outrageous for people to feel uncomfortable even ironically stanning her. Again, in the series where John is a character. Personally I think of Ianthe less as an actual threat and more like someone who'll ruin everyone's life for funsies and then fuck off to save her own skin, but I'm ready to eat my words

As for Gideon and Harrow not getting a happy ending, I'll be real I don't even conceive of that as a possibility. Like why are people even discussing the idea. I never had a single doubt they'd end up together because of how the whole thing is structured yet people are writing thinkpieces about how "Griddlehark doesn't need to be canon for it to be a good series" "if Gideon and Harrow don't end up together that's fine because it's not their story" mf if Gideon and Harrow don't end up together the whole story makes no sense and it just never registered to me as something I had to worry about

[captainimprobable]

Discovered a Griddlehark college AU that I started last year.  I have no memory of writing this and probably won’t finish it, but I thought it was funny ~ All things considered, Gideon is having a pretty good day until It happens.

She arrives at the school just two hours after her projected arrival time, which she takes as a complete win.  She unpacks in record time, which basically just means she puts away the few articles of clothing she owns, stows her fencing gear in the closet, and artfully places a dirty magazine on the bed across the room from hers.  

She does this as both an extension of friendship and a challenge.  

She’s been imagining what her roommate might be like, and she has some hopes: first, that they like working out.  It’s not that she can only be friends with gym rats, but she’s in serious need of a gym buddy and it would be so convenient if her roommate was too. Second, they needed to have a sense of humor.  Gideon had what a teacher had once lovingly referred to as a “disgusting excuse for a crude sense of humor”, and she simply could not entertain the idea of living with a dullard.  (RIP Mr. Crux.  As far as she knew, he wasn’t dead, but he was old as balls and if she didn’t know any better, she’d think he was a zombie or something.)

And third, and most importantly, they had to like tits.

This one did not need explanation.

So when the door opened and her roommate walked in, it was with a hopeful “hey, stranger,” and a smile that Gideon turned towards the door.

And then her life was ruined.

“No,” was all Harrowhark Nonagesimus said, which pretty much summed up Gideon’s feelings.  She sighed.  “Harrow, what are you doing here? Missed me so much that you followed me all the way to college? I’d say that’s cute, but since it’s you it’s more creepy.”

“No,” Harrow repeated again, and swiftly turned and left.

Okay, so that was…strange.  She should probably follow Harrow and ask her what the hell she was doing at Gideon’s school, but she was so hopeful that maybe it was just a stress induced hallucination that she let it go.  

Unfortunately, Harrow returned ten minutes later, positively fuming.  Without saying a word to Gideon, she hauled a medium sized bag into the room, slammed the door, and plopped face first on the other bed.

“Griddle, get this third rate smut off of my bed,” she said icily.

“Aw, come on Harrow, you know you love the-did you just say your bed?”

In response, Harrow cracked an eye open to glare at Gideon.  “God,” she said forlornly, and then plopped her face back down.

“No, actually, I’m Gideon.  But I know you’ve always worshiped me, babe.”

“Can you shut the fuck up for maybe two seconds?”

“Can you maybe get the fuck out of my room?”

Harrow sighed in the deep, dramatic way only Harrowhark could.  “Unfortunately,” she muttered into the bedsheet, “this is my room as well.”

Gideon blinked.  She blinked again.  “I’d ask you if that was a joke, but you have a truly shitty sense of humor.”

Harrow groaned.  “Why me?” she said to the ceiling.  “I do everything right.  I’m a good person-” Gideon snorted at this “-and I don’t know what I did to deserve this.”

“What do you mean this is your room too,” Gideon said slowly.

“I mean,” Harrow intoned, “that I was assigned this room, just like you were assigned this room, and the dean has informed me that no, there are no other available rooms and nobody else wants to switch, which means I am stuck with you for a miserable year.” “No, no, no, no,” Gideon said, shaking her head quickly.  “This can’t be happening.  You’re supposed to go to college and shed your childhood, not have it sucking on your elbow like a leech, what the fuck?” “Why Griddle,” Harrow said, now scrolling through her phone, “that was almost a coherent simile.”

[loserbutch]

griddlehark/gtn ruined my life

not the quite exact scene as in the book but Gideon realizing what she has to do while bone shield cracking up

[chicoqore]

then harrow was drowning in salt water. gideon’s arms were around her.

[saltwaterconfessions]

okay y'all i'm over on twitter here and i make quite a few mini threads about headcanons or things i'm thinking about, but i wanted y'all to have them too!! so here's the collection from this past month.

oh god. it could be canon or au. gideon who carries tissues or a hanky for harrow's stress/necromantic overload nosebleeds....... yeah 😭

working this hc into my fic but y'all..... harrow painting her nails, sitting on the floor, minding her business. gideon coming home & plopping down next to her, offering her hands. harrow likes to get a little fancy w her nails - she's grown them out, she likes dark jewel tones but for gideon she does a straightforward black. takes her hands, preps her nails, bites her tongue on a joke about how short she keeps them, listens to gideon's stories about her day as she applies the nail polish. gideon won't care if the paint's messy but harrow makes them neat and pristine, carefully wipes away any excess. her own nails are almost perfect so gideon's should be the same. nothing but the best for her best friend ❤ meanwhile she's viciously ignoring her impulse to lean up and kiss gideon's temple or cheek or jaw. it's right there and gideon is just such a stunning person. harrow hurts when she thinks about it. this is what they have and she won't change it for anything. but God, the empty hollow of her wanting is. it's hard to manage. she knows how to live with the ache, though. it's fine. she's fine. (gideon loves her, of course, gideon is made of love and it colors every relationship she has. she would do anything for harrow. anything, but especially keep her feelings locked down tight. this is what they have and she won't ask for more. that'd be a dick move on her part.)

it ruins my life that all harrow ever had to do was OPEN HER MOUTH. TRY TO TRUST SOMEONE. ASK FOR HELP. COMMUNICATE. her relationship with gideon blooms as soon as they leave the Ninth. gideon's capacity for loyalty was ALWAYS THERE HARROW JUST DIDN'T DESERVE IT. it ruins me. this is also so fascinating to me because it's a duality. at the same time that their relationship becomes something New and Lovely away from their trauma, gtn is also a corruption arc and the cav/necro dynamic that gideon sacrifices herself for IS AWFUL. HORRIBLE. EXPLOITATIVE. and honestly this deserves like, a whole fucking essay, but the capacity for duality in this series is. like it's so stunning to me rn and i think it's so valuable. the text has room for both things to be true. (ALSO!! i do want to write about this at some point but i need to sit with it and figure out how best to express what i mean!)

im sorry to be problematic but i think possessiveness is sexy. the idea of harrow HATING cytherea from the very first second she gets her hands on HARROW'S CAV. harrow wanting to rip that bitch apart the whole time they're at canaan. resenting the fuck out of gideon's attachment to her. knowing the cav is dead but not knowing For Why. not being able to express her fears or gain gideon's trust until it's way too late. finally saying STEP OFF BITCH as her and her cav bring hell. it's just so fuckin g TASTY.

muir's use of character voice just. like i KNOW it's a very basic aspect of her writing style but i'm so enamored with it. gtn vs the end of gtn. the 2nd pov of htn vs the canaan chapters vs the end of htn vs the epilogue. as yet unsent. the catnip of her writing- IT GETS ME!

i will and first love / late spring by mitski are griddlehark songs

honey by halsey is a griddlehark song and i'm not a woman, i'm a god by halsey is a Harrow song but Spicy. maybe even a Harrow Nova song. first of all, "i am not a woman i'm a god" feels like a Gender Mood for our local "best necromancer of her generation." good enough reason for me! but secondly, the chorus is defiant in a way that feels like a Harrow who would push back against the war crime of her existence. a Harrow who doesn't carry the obligation to her House and role as the Reverend Daughter.

[mayasaura]

I posted 3,672 times in 2021

348 posts created (9%)

3324 posts reblogged (91%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 9.6 posts.

I added 5,681 tags in 2021

#the locked tomb - 1672 posts

#harrow the ninth - 729 posts

#gideon nav - 690 posts

#gideon the ninth - 620 posts

#htn spoilers - 552 posts

#harrow nonagesimus - 549 posts

#griddlehark - 330 posts

#gtn spoilers - 194 posts

#critrole - 183 posts

#tlt - 162 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#you said i killed you—haunt me then!be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in the abyss where i cannot find you

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

I'm so mad I was just reshelving my books and I noticed that Gideon's personal crest on the spine of the first book incorporates elements of both the Ninth House and the First House

See the full post

1847 notes • Posted 2021-07-02 01:41:24 GMT

#4

Thinking about the dynamic of the Ninth House just makes me crazy. Like we've got Crux trying to murder Gideon in increasingly obvious ways, and Gideon assuming it's Harrow trying to kill her and feeling like it's only fair because she did kill Harrow's parents and ruin her life. Meanwhile Harrow is scampering around like an evil little wraith, knowing NONE of this, repairing crumbling infrastructure and plotting new cruel and petty ways to ruin Gideon's day for no reason so maybe she can feel something. Aiglamene is presumably just looking directly into the camera while yakkitysax plays at 0.5x speed on a pipe organ in the background

2103 notes • Posted 2021-08-20 18:21:59 GMT

#3

Gideon Nav has never done anything wrong in her life and I love her

2462 notes • Posted 2021-05-12 17:25:53 GMT

#2

You know maybe we don't want to go there too much but I think deep down there's something very cathartic about a lesbian dying to advance someone else's plot because that's all she thinks she's good for and then the next installment in the series being a drawn out agonised scream of loss at the hole her absence leaves in the universe

3392 notes • Posted 2021-03-24 00:09:04 GMT

#1

Love how when you dig down into it, Portal 2 is a ghost story. Glados is the ghost of a murdered woman who turned around and murdered everyone else back and now she's trapped forever in an empty decaying facility. This is what does it for me. The blending of scifi and horror, the ghost in the machine. I'm gonna marry a dead murderous lesbian in a supercomputer

33271 notes • Posted 2021-06-05 03:28:21 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[ghostmartyr]

/clears throat/ so, Immi, I hear you like the locked tomb, which is fantastic! from one person also escaping the snk series into TLT to another, what did you think of the characters and plot in HtN? are there any things you're most excited to see when Alecto comes out in 2022?

-pats lifeboat- This baby can fit so much trauma.

SPOILERS, naturally.

With another paragraph informing the curious that unspoiled is the way to go into HtN, since if you aren’t lost and confused, are you really reading Harrow the Ninth?

I read it all in one day, and that was a choice. It does mean my memory and understanding of what all went on is slightly dependent on someone else on the internet exploding over a particular set of paragraphs and explaining their significance to me, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

HtN disappointed me on one front in that I was hoping seeing more of Harrow 1.0 would help out any future fic endeavors. On everything else, like the first one, being told the story is such a good time that I’m willing to wait on a full comprehension of where it’s going.

I also really like second person.

What I loved most about HtN is how even without Gideon mentioned until very, very late in the book, you can feel her absence everywhere. In the wrong bubble flashbacks you’re commanded to examine the strangeness, but even in Harrow going about her day, the isolation and the wrongness of it decorate her every action. She’s alone, and she shouldn’t be, and the loss she’s unaware of bleeds into a constant echo of grief.

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated absence as a narrative tool so much. Obviously griddlehark hours go hard once they start in HtN, but even before then, there is so much power to their connection that looking into a world where it never exists still manages to punch you in the heart with how much each one inhabits everything the other is.

The whole series is amping me up with a few thoughts on loneliness, honestly. Gideon and Harrow grow up alone on the Ninth, save for each other. It takes leaving for that to be any kind of good thing. The first book is tag team Among Us with everyone in their little clusters, slowly learning what other people are about as they all drop dead.

The second book has a different vibe and different plot things going on, but it’s similar in that the protagonist gets thrown into a world they don’t fit and have to put on a show. Only now there are even fewer people to familiarize with, with that number correlating directly to how they all killed the person closest to keeping them from being alone.

Lyctorhood is taking the person dearest to your heart and trapping them there forever while they’re stripped of everything that made them who they are.

...Also Ianthe is there.

Gideon, Mercy, and Augustine are the last Lyctors standing after 10,000 years. There were only seven, starting out. Sixteen acolytes who came to the First. The only pair who didn’t succeed in condensing themselves is separated from the pack and sent to live away from their peers on a tiny planet that no one has anything good to say about.

Alecto is John’s -- who even knows, past A Lot, and he puts her to sleep and locks her in a prison no one but he can get past.

God has seven friends. More if you want to count the people in the Cohort, but realistically, he has seven friends. Then they keep dying.

Harrow spends HtN in a spaceship with five people.

One is trying to kill her.

One ordered that one to try to kill her.

Two could not care less about the useless baby Lyctor.

One is Ianthe.

There is no real endgame. There is surviving life, and life has become a game of running as far away as possible so you don’t share your ruin upon your inevitable death.

It’s bleak and sad.

Harrow’s healthiest relationships are with dead people, and some of them she didn’t know at all in life.

Reiterating it, the most plot significant bit of the world is finding someone else in the world, swearing yourself to them, and smashing your souls together until you’ve lost the connection entirely.

My brain’s not in the best place so I can’t do more than gesture loudly at it, but a few people have mentioned that the series’ thesis is a counter to Ianthe’s statement that love is acquisitive.

Harrow tightens her hold around Gideon until Gideon would rather she just strangle her and get it over with, all things considered. It fucks them both up, and when they start working to get past it, circumstance wraps a chain around both their throats.

The necromancers who become imperfect Lyctors have all acquired their cavaliers, and besides the cav, it kills that bond.

Harrow’s rejection of that is why Gideon’s soul is still in the world of the living (and John blood).

She has spent her entire life eating pieces of Gideon to keep herself a horrid imitation of whole, and when she is finally offered that, she refuses.

Grief and how Harrow just can’t are active elements of the book, and Magnus gives her more therapy in five minutes talking about it than she has ever had in her life, but the reason why that isn’t the end of Gideon is because, unlike all the other Lyctors, Harrow turns the offer down.

With the exception of Babs and Ianthe, the relationship between cavaliers and necros about to do the Lyctor thing is cavaliers promising to burn for an eternity while their necromancer lives off the fumes.

Fuck that is Harrow’s response.

Cytherea says, in the aftermath, that they had the choice to stop.

Harrow stops.

A lifetime of doing exactly what Gideon is telling her to do with her death, and Harrow chooses to stop.

Harrow remembers Ortus’ poetry. She regularly sees her congregation off to their deaths. She keeps Gideon’s glasses. She views Palamedes, head exploded and all, as an infinitely better person than she is because of the quality of his exemplary character. She pulls Gideon the First from the incinerator on the night she plans to kill him.

Kiddo has so many fucking issues, but somewhere, she has learned to respect people for being people. That’s why she and Gideon are the heroes of the story, ultimately, and Ortus saying that they’re heroes worthy of the Ninth doesn’t fall flat. They’re actually trying.

Where that puts us for Alecto, I don’t pretend to know.

Since the first book is the temptation of an end to isolation, only to have it snatched away, the second book is the continuation of isolation with a few promising sparks of human connection that pave the way for hope...

That leaves the third book to shed the isolation and allow the connections to thrive.

With Gideon and Harrow MIA.

I know that the books kick things up into high gear in the final acts each time, but if they’re both gone for the majority of the book, no matter how much fun it is, I’m going to miss them. They’re the core leads, and I don’t want to be without them in the final part.

The 2022 release date has aged my soul. I deliberately planned my GtN read to land a month before HtN came out, then suffered when that was delayed. When really that was nothing at all. I hate waiting.

(Insert note that I’m very glad they aren’t forcing Muir to rush anything out. It’s been a rough time, but also, just in general authors should have the opportunity to create the best versions of their art they can, so the extra time hurts, but it’s obviously for the best.)

What I’m most excited for is probably the cover art. The first two have been awesome, and the artist said he’d likely do print sales for all three when the third’s revealed. My wallet cries but my heart does not.

What I dare not be excited for is the potential for Gideon and Harrow meeting again and perhaps hugging. In their own bodies.

I’d take other bodies, but ideally, y’know.

Also I would love for Harrow to finally meet her popsicle girlfriend.

I doubt it would be a wholly positive experience, but by golly I want it. Maybe they could hug too. It would probably kill Harrow again, but who doesn’t expect several people to die again in the third book?

However it plays out, I’m expecting to enjoy AtN. The writing’s the sort that I’ll happily follow wherever it goes. For everything else, there’s fanfic. The only real worry I have is the whole book will be narrated by Ianthe, and while I mentally groan at that, I actually find Ianthe’s commentary delightful, so even in the worst case scenario I’m having a good time.

Thank you so much for the ask.