#nona rambling

[99pm-e]

Made these sillies cuz I'm too tired of having to choose their color palette and fuck up the colors when I'm painting, so yeah

Also ill be adding (slowly as i go) the other mercs too cuz I love them all and prob will draw them all :3

[tina-rocket]

Uh oh it’s the problem women!

[nymphofnovels]

An Ace Attorney reference in my Locked Tomb short story??? It’s more likely than you’d think.

[featherbreak]

USE ME. (a cinematic Camilla Hect cosplay music video)

notes & TWs:

TW for fake blood. heart crimes abound. I filmed all of this during 3 days of intense hyperfixation in October/November 2023, and after much Life Happened, edited it all together in June/July 2024. it is a labor of love, an embarrassing love letter to the more-unhinged-than-she-lets-on codependent cavalier exemplar that is Camilla Hect, and an intense appreciation for the "psychosexual mess of roleplaying and bad meals" that is Nona the Ninth.

i hope you enjoy it. i have more thoughts & stills to share, but i need to fling this into the internet before i continue to overthink it and utterly lose my nERVE AFTER ALL THESE MONTHS AAJFSkdhgfdhg

[scalierpepper]

The locked tomb wiki is perhaps my favorite fan wiki to be on and it's because of this:

[theygender]

Nona is the most character ever. She's been alive for 6 months but her body is 19 years old and her soul is 10,002 years old and her soul's original body is 4.6 billion years old. She's existed long enough to know everything but she hasn't been alive long enough to understand it. She knows every human language but she just learned to talk last month and she still can't read or write. She knows humans better than they know themselves but she's still figuring out the being human part. She's unfathomably old and incredibly young all at once. Her birthday is in five days and she wants you to be there

[darlingian]

The locked tomb books just keep showing examples of true love in all its extremes. In a couple examples: Abigail and Magnus who would have died rather than go through the lyctoral process. A sweet and tender sort of love. Ianthe and Coronabeth who keep making decisions to come back to eachother for better or for worse (usually worse) regardless of who they hurt or use in the process. Palamedes and Camilla who are two halves of one whole, who show over and over the meaning of real loyalty and absolute commitment. 

And then there’s Harrowhark and Gideon. Messy, mean, awful, hurtful, beautiful, scathing, riotous, bruised, devoted, desperate, and despairing, to the ends of the universe, sort of love. These books show all kinds of love outside of the romantic, often easy, sort of love. I absolutely adore what Tamsyn Muir has explored in these books. That in the life and death of it all, who wants to kiss who is not nearly as important as who would you kill god for? 

[lishenkaaa]

i think something we sometimes ignore when we talk about tlt's themes of love is its incredible focus on familial love, like the books' romantic and sexual themes are very clear but also it truly is a series that questions what a family is from the very beginning. gideon's lack of both a biological and chosen family (at least in her eyes) and harrow's almost decade-long attempt at maintaining the illusion of one in gtn. the fifth and the fourth, filling in the missing parts of their own families with each other. coronabeth, ianthe and even naberius' entire deal. the focus within silas and colum's dynamic of their biological compatibility as a necro/cav pair. john's desire for a daughter in harrow and then discovery of one in gideon, as well as pyrrha's desire to find out why her kid had to die only to find out 1) not her kid, 2) didn't die originally, 3) still died in the end. nona and pyrrha and pal and cam, which tazmuir herself has specifically highlighted we should question if it even counts as a family at all, but has also made sure we know they loved each other anyway. kiriona as her mother's daughter and her father's son but ultimately neither and how it kills her even as a corpse. and anastasia, the series' godot who despite making no appearance is felt in its every corner, who pyrrha painted a nursery with and who started the lineage that opened the legendary tomb.

can't wait to see how this is all explored in atn, especially when nona's family is only a "dress rehearsal" for the real horrors of love.

[eskildit]

i think a lot about hot sauce and jeannemary. two young girls so ready to kill and to die. a comparison made all the worse when you recall that hot sauce lost all her family to the cohort, that she can specifically recall fourth style necromancy (using corpses as bombs). a fourteen and thirteen year old that could easily have been on opposite sides of the same front line. 

[fandom-oracle]

I appreciate a lot the way that Nona is intellectually disabled. She cannot read, is consistently incapable of matching the intellect of fourteen-year-olds. And yet, Nona navigates the world with no major curtailings of her personal autonomy by her family, aside from the occasional coercive encouragement to eat. Nona is treated with a degree of kindness and respect that is rarely found in the world today regarding intellectually disabled people. Her friends adore her, her family loves her despite the tragic circumstances of their arrangement re: Harrow being unresponsive and Nona’s death being necessitated for Harrow to wake up, her surroundings find a place where she can be active and feel fulfilled while respecting her limits. HOW often do you see an intellectually disabled character be given this level of empathy, of humanization by a narrative?

[sofipitch]

Thinking about body horror in The Locked Tomb, specifically how the bodies of the dead are treated. Wake's skeleton tilling the fields, using her to feed an empire she hates even in death. Abigail's death not having anything to do with her but more just the inconvenience that she was there, evidenced by Cyth stashing the key in her as if she were a box. Protesilous is particularly good because you meet him as a person after you have seen his corpse used against his consent in the first book. After Cyth tells Palamedes she tossed his girlfriend and her bodyguard in the garbage she says "Don't look at me like I'm a monster". How ppl's remains are treated matter, when Crux threatened Gideon he threatened her with just that, being treated as parts.

I just have specific feelings about dead bodies and how they should be treated. I could never do anything involving cutting them without thinking this was someone's grandmother, or lover, or best friend. I distinctly remember what did this was going to see The Bodies Exhibit where you get to see a lot of preserved organs and such. I thought I would be fine, I was even super excited, I liked anatomy and physiology. But I remember looking at a sagittal cut of a head and torso meant to show off the brain and spinal cord and Idk why but I turned my head side ways and got level with the display and there was the man's face. That horrified me more than anything, his face mostly hidden so you don't remember this was a person. The ppl in this exhibit never consented to be a part of it, they are unidentified persons, no one came to get their body so it meant anyone could do what they wanted with it. Even worse popular myth for a while was that these were the bodies of prisoners, as if that made it okay to treat them with disrespect. There was writing on the wall as we left saying the bodies had been handled with respect but I would never want to be put on display in a museum, so how could we know they didn't feel the same? I also wouldn't want my index finger on display at the Vatican museum. I understand it's meant for worship but there also seems to be something rude in the piecemeal display of saints.

I feel strongly about respect for remains and idk how Muir does but there's something particularly good about Gideon being aware of her remains after death. The argument for a lot of bad treatment of corpses is "the person isn't going to know". So Muir created a character that becomes BOE's body farm experiment, until finally she has to go back into and haunt her corpse, embarrassed at her wounds and the way others can see her meat. Her first interaction is objecting to someone sticking her corpse with a needle, even though she can't feel

[99pm-e]

today i took a nap after uni and i fucking dreamed with the TF2 mercs going on A VACATION TO A REALLY COLD PLACE AND HEAVY JUST CHOOSES THE UGLIEST SUMMER SHIRT EVER

So I doodled it

[elfieafterdark]

An AU where everything is comfy and everyone escapes the nine houses and Gideon is with Harrow, and Nona somehow has her own body and she actually gets to be a baby and grow up properly and go to school and fall in love with hot sauce.

Pyrrha is mom, Cam and Pal are still around. They live on a free world and eat takeout and go swimming and live in peace and comfort and gay bliss.

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

didn't scroll tumblr for like a week cus i was hella busy and rereading @derinthescarletpescatarian curse words in what spare time i could wrangle from my schedule (great story, highly recommend btw) and i realise now that i haven't missed tumblr at all. maybe i will dip again

[greatandquestionablecontent]

An introduction to narrative styles of the Locked Tomb series, care of me rambling about it on discord

Book 1 is like LMAO BONES. And hot girls 😏 Murder mystery dinner party, with sciency magic but mainly we just understand the swords. Protag has no idea what’s going on but that’s actually very helpful for helping the reader understand what’s going on.

Book 2 is like Psychedelic Celestial Griefcore, with very complex magic Sci Fi that gets elaborated on at length. Dark. We are In Space for most of the book. God is there. Protag has no idea what’s going on because her brain is fucked and it’s… sad? And extra confusing for the reader.

Book 3 is like Sunshine and Rainbows! Too much sunshine for most people actually! All the surrounding characters are living in a shitty urban sci fi dystopia but the narrator is full of love and joy in her city of riots and poverty and sweltering sun. Protag no idea what’s going on because she’s only been alive for 6 months. Love & Light 🥰

[chaos-has-theories]

You know those children's books with see-through pages where you can like. Layer a shark together to learn anatomy?

I kind of want one that goes

The murdered soul of planet Earth

The hollow shell where 200 dead children used to be

The body of an underfed suicidal teen

Six layers of stolen toilet paper

One rude t-shirt