#nav: trauma

[boxesforsys]

This alter has trauma caused by an alter from another system userboxes! Click for quality, and leave a note if you save/use them!

[Text: This alter has trauma caused by an alter from another system]

[kosalus]

combining the two things im obsessed with bc the brainworms are real bad

[mayasaura]

Harrow got so unbelievablely horny dreaming about Gideon's rolled up sleeves exposing her lean, taut muscle, a little dewy with sweat and steam but you know what.... thinking about it. Gideon does not disrobe basically ever, except in private to bathe. A tantalizing glimpse of forearm may legitimately be the most Harrow's imagination has to work with

[brungeons-and-bragons]

Me starting GTN after hearing about it from a friend: NEEEEEEED the bone lesbians to kiss

Me finishing NTN: love is all around me and god needs to die.

[fidelishaereticus]

so, old news obvious news blah blah, but i keep seeing people not getting this about my girl gideon nav so have to say: i think at first blush, people get the impression that Harrow’s got all the convolutions and layers and hidden vulnerability whereas gideon wears her heart on her sleeve and is just brazenly herself (a loveable rowdy himbo) & that’s the contrast. and yes, that’s there, but that’s not all. that dynamic itself is a part of their mutual (codependent) front, and like everything else in this book, it gets peeled back. 

i think the real contrast is that they’ve both got masks, and those masks are complimentary. they’re both kids who never got a childhood. they grew up tortured in the same place from very different angles with no one but each other to butt heads against. they both had to play-act grown up versions of themselves with few models for what a well-adjusted adult even looked like. so it’s cartoonish. gideon is the plucky hero of her own adventure story that will totally have a happy ending some day, far far away from her nemesis whom she’s totally not in love with. harrow meanwhile (to grossly oversimplify) has to imagine herself as someone cruel and cold enough to cope with being alive at the price of 200 other people. these two things fit very well together. gideon can play the hero to harrow’s villain, and harrow can enact cruelty toward gideon to make herself feel strong and mean (and generally just to vent anguish). the way they hate one another is a kind of mutual protection - it re-enforces the self-image that each of them needs to get through the day. but that’s the coping mechanism. harrow the ruthless bones overlord. gideon the hapless swords idiot, who thinks of nothing but tiddies & sweet sweet vengence (harrow’s corpse in various states of disgrace ) all day. and behind that they’re both tearing apart at the seems beneath caricatures of themselves that are deeply unsustainable and neither of them feels safe letting on the extent to which that’s the case. their hearts are a goddamned mess. neither of them is wearing that shit on their sleeve.   so yeah, there’s a lot more to gideon than being a swords himbo but that’s not the wild thing. the wild thing is she’s so convincing that she somehow manages to sell people on her no braincells act while being the pov character of entire first novel.

- 

[cryptidotter]

I know it's always "being sad about these kids" time in The Locked Tomb but, uh, I just put all these Harrow quotes together and need to share the sadness with everyone else:

So the Reverends told Harrow about the child genocide when she was THREE? jfc

Tamsyn why do you give us distressing facts like this?

And as I sit here with this, it makes me think of how many times I've seen people be frustrated or confused by Gideon being kind to Harrow in the pool scene after this revelation. Where for me, also a religious cult survivor, I would have expected nothing else.

Because it's not that Gideon thinks this new backstory EXCUSES what Harrow did. That's not the kind of forgiveness happening here. It's the realization that neither of them deserved to have their childhood stolen like that. Neither of them deserved to be so dehumanized, treated as nothing more than tools who should feel guilty for never being good enough.

But before that moment, Gideon clearly hadn't realized how fucked up Harrow's life had been, so she hadn't ever seen them on a similar level of victimhood.

Harrow lived an exaggerated form of the standard religious trauma that kids like me and Gideon experienced while growing up. The whole, "you, yes you, toddler, are sinful and deserving of eternal torment unless God shows you undeserved grace" experience.

I think it's easy for a fellow victim of that to sympathize like Gideon does, knowing so intimately how that kind of trauma fucks up a person. Even when a person turns their trauma into a weapon against others like Harrow did for so many years. It doesn't make the bullying acceptable, obviously, but it does make it worthy of sympathy instead of pure condemnation. Gideon finally realized that Harrow didn't act out of personal sadism, and that meant a lot for Gideon and how she sees Harrow.

Anyway there's just something inherently relatable to me when one victim sees another one, even and especially an imperfect victim, and still chooses to humanize them. Because that act of compassion is a rejection of the system that broke them both.

[creetchre]

[elfieafterdark]

Gideon's extra special fucked up during the end of HtN. Noticed it right away, but I've only been reminded of it just now.

She's talking all macabre like, "I'm not fucking dead, which isn't even true." Girl, you breathing, you talking, you walking... If it swears like a duck and all that.

Her internal monologue is so fascinating, obviously we've been listening to it the whole time but when she's fully aware of herself?

Damn there's a lot of put Downs in there. There's a lot of anger. A lot of bitterness. "I wanted you to use me." And such. She's mad that Harrow "didn't want her".

She's such an idiot.

She knows that SHE loves Harrow with everything she has. She just hasn't quite put together that it's a mutual feeling.

I expect her to come to this realization during Alecto the Ninth. And I can't wait 💖

Gideon, Harrow might be in love with a barbie girl corpse, but she didn't bury a hundred bits of bone in a hundred holes on the landing pad for Alecto.

[ourg0dsal]

Trying to learn to love Nona in the same way that I try to get a little better at loving little kid me.

Who was very naive like nona- who could never fully understand what was happening to her. Let alone why.

[procrastinationaccount]

Early hint that Nona couldn't have been Harrow or Gideon

[nonasemporium]

you know we talk about the weird relationship and implications between harrow and ortus and how they considered pairing them up anyway, but one of their huge points of contention was it would fuck up a cav line, but you know who else was there and who else they probably considered pairing with him--and might have even been planning to force if not for harrow's intervention--to have jock babies for sacrifice? gideon.

and I think this haunts ortus.

[boxesforsys]

This user holds family trauma userboxes! Click for quality, and leave a note if you save/use

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[the-crystal-femmes]

Mutuals sometimes you make me want to cry but in a positive way how are you all so understanding

[deconstructthesoup]

Between my recent foray into the wonderful and weird world that is Locked Tomb AU fanfiction and weekly Fantasy High episodes I’m being very fed when it comes to chaotic dumbass ginger butches

[nonasbirthday]

ok listen this is terrible but you know how when britney was freed from her conservatorship everyone was like “well just be prepared for her to make some bad decisions, people who never had control over their lives will do that sometimes to assert their independence.”

that, but for kiriona gaia.

[thermodynamic-comedian]

[stands up] [slams hands on table] kiriona gaia gets to be an asshole to everyone BECAUSE she's funny about it.