Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.
Harrow is "rather small and feeble".
Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.
Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".
Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."
Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"
Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."
In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.
In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"
Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".
And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.
Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.
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I don't wanna further hijack that poor poll, but the thing about Harrow's schizophrenia is that it's canon. The author has confirmed it, and shared that it's based on her own experience.
It's a pretty obscure bit of canon, so of course there's no shame in not already knowing, but that's why I'm so obnoxiously persistent about letting people know.
Whatever else is up with Harrow, autism or cptsd or any number of likely headcanons, she is also schizophrenic. I feel like that's too important to be handwaved away as a difference of opinion.
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thinking about a whumpee on a forced march through rough terrain
hands tied in front of them, on foot while their captors are mounted, sleeping out in the open, forced to beg for adequate food and water
maybe they're barefoot, a captured royal in silken robes
maybe they're in a torn suit or soldier's uniform
maybe they were stripped at the start, increasing the exposure to the elements, the humiliation
are they a terrified mess from the beginning, or do they try to endure with dignity? how long before they're stumbling, barely putting one foot in front of the other? how long before they fall?
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