#tazmuir how are you doing this

[brightchrysaor]

So I got The Complete Poems of Enheduana from the library because that's the kind of nerd I am, and I'm on the Temple Hymns, and I get to the Temple of Nanna in Ur and

Nanna is a moon god. His imagery and temple are strongly associated with cows

Ur is associated with cows

Ten thousand years in the future and John is still killing the fucking cows—

[a-flickering-soul]

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Bones: The Harrow Cosplay

Or: I felt like doing a little writeup of the making of my Harrowhark Nonagesimus cosplay because I worked hard on it and this is also basically the first cosplay I actually completed. And I'm also just very proud of it.

I knew from the start I wanted the silhouette to essentially be a triangle, since I deeply believe that Harrow in full vestments is like a little walking cone. This is also deeply influenced by the many years I spent in church choir wearing those dinky little robes.

The first thing I figured out was the headpiece. I knew I wanted the hair to be covered (both in a religious way and also so I wouldn't have to wear a wig), but when it comes to hair coverings, there's a lot of ways it could go. I initially considered mantillas, to go with the whole Catholicism of it all, but unfortunately I was possessed with the spirit of half my ancestors and decided to drape a scarf like a dupatta (I considered making maang tikka to go with it, but had a hard time with the logistics of that). I found a drapy, thin black scarf at a thrift store and held onto it for a while. You can tell from the picture that it's pretty sheer and also a good length.

I szuszed it up by hand-stitching some white lace to it (since I'm very taken with the idea of the Ninth producing lace like all good nunneries did), as well as some seashell beads in a suitable bonelike color and these very cool tiny silver skull beads. These are only on the front of my scarf as a nice little decoration.

For the rest of the jewelry, Sculpey really came through. I used it to make some (outsized) teeth to create a rosary, along with some very cool volcanic rock beads. Individually knotting each bead and tooth was a huge time sink, but definitely worth it visually. Nine teeth for each of the houses.

I also made some bone bangles out of Sculpey (although this was towards the end of things when I was kind of losing steam).

My metamour @benthicbimbo was fucking amazing though and literally?? made thee most beautiful phalanges choker out of Sculpey and velvet ribbon and they're weathered and textured so beautifully and it's such a wonderful piece I genuinely wear it around places quite often.

And because they're incredible they also made these beautiful faux earrings for me that I tragically forgot to wear during Halloween but do look genuinely stunning!!! Like what!!!!!

For the big layers, I genuinely got the best luck at Goodwill in one fell swoop and I have no idea how I got this lucky. The dress is Shein (and once you touch it that fact is very obvious) and the overcoat is a CQ by CQ trench coat someone didn't want anymore (sans belt). These combined with the dupatta really solidified the silhouette and both the pattern of the dress and the brocade on the overcoat really were exactly what I was looking for and it was a sheer stroke of luck that I found both of them in one go.

And now, the big boy: the ribcage corset. I wrestled with this thing for what felt like ages and I'm decently pleased with it, but I definitely have plans for improvement. I started off with a wire frame just to see what kind of shape I wanted-- I took inspiration from the book cover, but slutted it up a little with the titty cups because I felt like having fun. This was made with floral wire and duct tape.

Once I had it to a point where it was reasonably symmetric and fit to my body, I added a very thin layer of quilt batting. The goal of this step was to add bulk without weight or necessarily a gajillion layers of plaster or paper mache. As a friend of mine described it, it looked like low-poly gore.

From here, I added two layers of paper mache since I really wanted it to be rigid-- I did not want this to flex with me as I moved or really flex at all. I wanted to really sell that this was made of bone.

It was at this point I realized I fucked up enormously because the bottom was very asymmetric and I never did a final fit to myself, but it turned out okay anyways, especially combined with the overcoat. I slapped a few layers of acrylic paint over it and used a black ribbon to just tie it around my back-- it was going to be covered by the overcoat anyways so I didn't think too hard about that part.

And that's pretty much it! The black leather gloves are my usual winter gear, and the shoes are my everyday officewear black heels. The face paint design was a mix of the book cover, some fanart I'd seen, and some mockups a friend of mine made for me.

Overall, I had a ton of fun putting together what I feel like is my first con-worthy cosplay, and it was a massive upgrade from last year's cosplay. I'm not 100% satisfied with the ribcage-- I believe I can do better-- but this method was pretty solid (I'd recommend overestimating spaces between ribs though when making the frame). The face paint also wasn't my best work-- thick cream paint is a huge bitch to work with and I didn't have any brushes, but it got the point across. Either way, this cosplay was enormously fun to put together, actually quite comfortable to wear and move around in, and very satisfying to look at. As a reward or perhaps punishment for reading this far, a mandatory couples' cosplay with my beloathed Gideon (my dear @laserlesbians). Happy belated boneday!

[jadedbug]

how much of john is alecto and how much of alecto is john?

[lockedtombbrainworms]

Next TLT question I hope we get an answer to: why does Gideon the First have an anti-necromancy field as one of his major tricks in a fight? Augustine literally says that the only reason you'd need Mercymorn's anatomist powers is for killing Lyctors, but why would you need to be a thanergy void and bleed any nearby necromancy dry in a setting where your side is the only faction using necromancy?

Pyrrha refers to what he (or they) do as "bleeding" the thanergy, and it doesn't seem to be used to bolster G1deon or anyone else around him, like second house necromancers usually do when they drain thalergy. Lyctors don't need to steal energy for that sort of thing anyway, they have basically unlimited thanergy to draw from.

Having all the thanergy sucked out of the room doesn't seem to actually harm Harrow, who doesn't have lyctor healing to protect her from any horrible effects it might cause, so presumeably it's not much use as a weapon against BoE or anyone else from outside the Nine Houses, because they don't use wards or constructs for it to destroy. It might have some use against heralds, but the Saint of Duty already has a very effective defense against heralds in the form of stabbing the shit out of them with his gigantic fuckoff spear, which is probably easier to do when you're suffering from Herald Brainfuck Shit Your Pants Syndrome than advanced necromancy. And besides, the lyctors themselves generally aim to be in the River when the heralds show up, leaving their non-necromantic bodies behind, so in terms of necromantic skills to perfect, there are probably more useful ones for taking down heralds.

Augustine says he learnt the skill John asked him to perfect. Did Gideon the First do the same? Was he John's ace in the hole against a faction within the Nine Houses turning on him?

I am ROTATING this entire series in my mind!

[fkapommel]

Rereading tlt is sooo dangerous bc im so scared everything is foreshadowing. Bc it normally IS

[nonagesiiiimus]

i wish i could take the cut out of this reblog and force all to read

i wrote a big long essay talking about tlt and how it engages with describing the skintones of brown characters its under a read more bc it is so long.

I already left a long comment about this on someone else post but I wish I could study tazmuirs odd little habit of dancing around the fact that Gideon and Harrow are women of color when she describes them, and how this kind of extends to other brown characters

We get a million descriptions for how sickly pale ianthe Silas and cytherea are, what a lovely golden tan corona has, the odd tannish yellow hue of colum, all imagined by her, in her own words, to be white. Then when it comes to Marta and Judith they're called dark like Once in the text. I don't think it's even mentioned for Jeannemary and magnus in the entirety of gtn though I will gladly stand corrected if I missed something. It's such a non factor for them, which normally I would overlook if it wasn't for the aforementioned specificity of how white characters are described on Top of one of the major themes of the book being how John, a Maori man, resurrected a largely Polynesian population and then proceed to rule them using the exact same methods that actively colonized new zealand. Like I just think it's really interesting that in many ways, the story is about two young Maori women completely stripped of cultural heritage, they can't even speak te reo maori they cannot even conceptualize the scale of that kind of loss. Theyve been to earth once and during her brief time there Gideon literally died on it's soil it feels so poignant

Back to them specifically being Not Pale, this is not me saying they would be "less" maori if they were light-skinned that's total bullshit and the entire paradigm exists as a product of European bullshit. My fascination is more with the fact that tamsyn has clearly thought of them as midtoned to dark skinned. I'm going to be really generous and disregard the Tommy Arnold covers- he is a talented artist but he's not the author and Taz stated in an interview that she didn't envision Gideon with an undercut either so he clearly has little liberties he can take and I'm fine with that get your coin dude. For these two I'm going to have to focus on Nona the Ninth, bc for the entirety of gtn, harrow is described as grey, and while I understand that's bc she's constantly under a mountain of white and black facepaint, we basically never get an objective description for either of them. Gideon stand out features are her build, hair and eyes, like a lot of characters, but it could have been pretty easy to throw in a line about how she seems less desaturated than what one might expect from a ninth cavalier, like a rich warm brown, possibly hinting to other characters that she isn't a ninth native

Htn also gives very little to work with, again harrows primary colors are the blacks whites and greys of facepaint and her hair and the reds of constantly sweating blood. The character who's darker skintone is Most remarked upon (also one of the few ever constantly headcanoned) as black, is g1deon. I've actually spoken to a few people about this and there seems to be some actual Mandela effect shit going on where people remember Taz saying he's black despite me never once finding evidence for this. However, this is not a case where I'd be overjoyed to be proven wrong, because g1deon being the one black guy in this entire cast, the one who's dark skintone is commented on the most, being the guy who barely speaks, tries killing harrow with a spear 14 times and then dies offscreen. Not good. Bad, actually

Finally onto ntn, in the beginning chapters Nona remarks her (harrows) skintone is the color of an egg carton. I assume she means the light tan, desaturated brown of the cardboard used in certain cartons, which is fitting for harrow, girls lived in an ice cave for 17 years. This is basically the only word we get on it. I believe a few times the text will say something about pyrrha's (g1deon's) brown Everything; brown skin, russet brown hair, rich brown eyes. that character gets to be viewed and constantly affirmed as a brown character in teh way gideon and harrow arent, it kind of others pyrrha. to contrast camillas hands are called tanned way at the beginning while recording nona's dream, then at the way end it says, "Her face still looked grey beneath its nice normal olive," olive being used to describe her once before in gtn as far as i can see. pyrrha's (g1deon's) skintone is one of her most notable features, its brought up to a noticeable agree the text wants you to keep it in your mind when you think of the saint of duty; "Most of Pyrrha was the colours of the building site: deep dried-out browns, dusty hunks of clay, rusted metal." "Pyrrha wouldn’t burn any colour other than her deep cool brown." "Nona took the water from Pyrrha’s brown, work-chapped hand and even sipped it" "Pyrrha had carried Camilla to bed in her big brown arms like Cam weighed nothing" "Pyrrha said, “Thanks, Nums,” and drained the whole thing. Nona,fascinated, watched the brown column of her throat move as she swallowed." its just notable to me when alternatively with nona you'll get a line like "Camilla didn’t say anything to that either, only rubbed her wrists where the tape had been. Nona’s skin was already back to its nice normal colour." like just the vagueness in nice normal color, we get one line about what shes supposed to look like in the beginning and thats it

towards the end during the broadcast, nona gets her first clear look at kiriona, described as: "warm-coloured skin that should have been a similar brown hue to Nona’s, except that there was something wrong with it." break out the champagne its official

Obviously, dying takes some color from you. If anything, gideons desaturation should make them More comparable given the egg carton comment and harrows general state of constant anemia. Has Nona gotten darker during her time on new rho? Was Gideon lighter than the cover led us to believe? We don't know. We well never know, which is odd, bc these books fucking love purple prose about people's appearances. We have like seven different synonyms for the shade of ianthes hair. New words for black have to be invented in order to convey harrows eyes which are Black, not the dark muddy brown of someone like ortus. It's less that I'm bothered by the text not hyperfocusing on their skin and more it picking and choosing when it will laser focus on a detail like that, and how often it's skipped over to the point that I like, constantly see people draw harrow as incredibly pale, which is very different from being light-skinned

Finally, I know people can dismiss this as like an audience interpretation thing. I know I actively draw harrow darker than Gideon which I know isn't canon. But this is less about Fandom response to the text and more the text itself and how it's like. Afraid to say brown. near the end of ntn i found One instance of it referring to gideons "slim brown hand" on nonas cheek and that is direct as it gets. even her other like, strongly non european traits are sort of danced around. her nose is "a nose that was the complete opposite of Nona’s nose, one that put her in mind of those big poison desert cats Born in the Morning was crazy about." a very fanciful description, you have to infer that nona means that its probably flat and wide, also giving us the information that harrows is most likely narrow and straight, possibly downturned. im not opposed to this, especially given the character talking about her is nona, but then you get the following paragraph:

"Her skin was very much dead-person skin, ashen and tinted the wrong colour around the nostrils and the mouth. But even if she hadn’t been dead, Nona was critical. Her eyelashes were very dark, but short and curly, whereas Nona thought all eyelashes should be long and straight (her own eyelashes were long and straight). The corpse had too much mouth and a dimple (nobody in her home had a dimple). You could not, at least, see the veins in her eyelids, which were heavy and cold and deep-set. But Nona thought it was going to be a shame to go from being so lovely as she was to being so—redheaded."

its a very frank description. dimple, curly lashes, red head, dead skin, probably a wide mouth. her nose is contrasted against nonas nose, which is also never directly described, and then compared to a fantasy animal we have never heard of until right now

kicks rocks. there isnt a point to this. the series is almost over, there is zero reason to like, knock on taz's door and ask why she did this or that. it doesnt stop me from loving the series, and the insinuation that noticing this means i must dislike the series is frankly insane (real thing that happened). if someone got the impression that harrow was white given how shes described i wouldnt blame them honestly, its most apparent she isnt in the third book (with the cover art being incredibly ambiguous) and a single blog post from taz mentioning shes maori, immediately followed by an "oh i dont care how you see the characters" addendum, which i think is like. an odd thing to tack on bc them descended from kiwis is like, very integral to the story, and gideon being the daughter of the maori man who took everything from her she didnt even know she could have and the (presumably, given her name and a very brief description) maori woman fighting to get that world back its like. damn. it feels a little important. that the audience knows theyre maori. like a little. it feels intertwined with the whole thing about john using european standards of imperialism and general aesthetics to hurt his own kid. actually.

[diesatoru]

i think mercy is sooo fucking hilarious for showing harrow how to keep her cortisol going instead of the more obvious way to lengthen the time u stay awake (SCN or EPG) < this is what i would do

mercy: oh you want to stay awake? let me show you how to do that but also make u so fucking stressed

idk if this is bc tazmuir isn't like. a neurologist so she chose cortisol but still i would like to think its bc mercy hates harrow

[billyshakesp]

One for his Lyctors

Something that will never cease to amaze me is how well TazMuir writes the Lyctors. So I'm making it your problem ;). CW: Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth.

Let's start off by stating the obvious: the Lyctors are old. Whenever I mention "the Lyctors" in this post, I'm referring to Jod's original crew of eight Lyctors, and, more specifically, Augustine the First, Mercymorn the First, Gideon the First, and Cytherea the First. Those four are the ones we have met at the time of writing this. And they are old. They are each ten thousand years old. However, ten thousand is a number which may not mean much to you since you (presumably) have not even reached the age of two hundred. To quickly contextualise how colossal a number ten thousand years is, just remember that written history only extends as far back as five thousand years. In not so many words, my bbygirls are not actually very baby, and are, in fact, fucking ancient.

We, as humans, do not have any living reference for a ten-thousand-year-old being, aside from an occasional tree or a sponge, or perhaps a condiment bottle so deep in the back of your fridge that it would warrant a paleontological dig, but I digress. So how does Muir write her Lyctors so effectively?

Vicious dehumanisation

One of the most striking things about the Lyctors is the dehumanisation they have suffered over the past myriad. The first thing I noticed while diving into this subject (and by diving into, I mean I took a long shower one day and pissed off my family) is that the Lyctors do not have last names, and their first names function more as titles. Furthermore, the Lyctors are referred to as the hands, fingers, and gestures of the Emperor. In short, the readers and the characters of the Locked Tomb, including the Lyctors themselves, don't see the Lyctors as individuals anymore. Rather, their sole purpose in life has been reduced to just a soldier of the Emperor. Muir really shows the effects of the Lyctors' age; they are ancient, to the point where they have lost their own humanity and the only reason for their existence that they still hold onto is to serve the Emperor.

2. Their morals

Are extremely fucked up. Like, I cannot emphasise enough how fucked up the Lyctors are as people. Their morals are twisted in a way which can only come about from ten thousand years, rotting in deep space. For example, G1deon probably makes like 56 attempts on Harrow's life, and he doesn't give a second thought about it. When the other Lyctors find him, they don't really condemn his actions the way a human would expect another human to condemn attempted murder. To the Lyctors, life and death are both abstract concepts: life has lost all its meaning to the Lyctors, and thus, they do not see value in others' lives, especially the life of another Lyctor. Especially the life of a "Half-Lyctor." Additionally, Cytherea's plot to destroy the Nine Houses, while technically noble in its intent, is just insanely messed up. Yet, it makes sense in the context of her being a Lyctor, and, furthermore, someone who has suffered abuse for the last ten thousand years. She wants to bring justice to Jod, and for her, a small genocide is completely insubstantial. These people do not value nor understand life the way a human would, because they are unbelievably old.

3. The ways they break

Every one of the original Lyctors we see has a point in which they break, and when they break, we see a glimpse of the humanity peeking through. I could do character analysis on all of the Lyctors, but that would take a really long time. In short, we, the reader, get to see shreds of the people the Lyctors once were, and yet this only demonstrates just how shattered they are under the inexorable weight of time (yes, I use inexorable excessively now that I've read these books). Muir feeds us these pieces of the Lyctors' former selves to show just how buried that former self is.

In short, Muir does such a good job writing her Lyctors. They really are some of the most beautifully tragic characters I've ever read. I'm really just compiling some of the elements which I think Muir used to achieve the effect of "this character is bloody ancient." Feel free to add anything you feel that I missed (and I'm sure I missed a lot of stuff), and thanks for reading!

[familyabolisher]

haphazard assortment of thoughts on the unwanted guest:

firstly, it really does have to be said—crazy good, probably my favourite of all the tlt short pieces, and i say that as someone who lost my mind over as yet unsent for like a week. excellent conceit and excellent execution, just a really gorgeous piece of writing. the play format of course reminds me of what abigail says to harrow in htn—that the river bubble is a ‘play [she’s] directing’—the inside of one’s head as a stage in which other actors can intervene & whereby mileage can be gotten out of Symbolism as immediately “real,” tangible presences that the kind of realist baggage that a more quotidian prose form would usher in would probably falter in accomplishing. it’s a lot!! i think even if i wasn’t already a tazmuir writing style defender (contra the insistence that she’s yknow homestuck fanfiction serial numbers filed off hack) then this would have had me floored anyway. 

the play format also works in the way that muir’s general dexterity in form and willingness to really make use of craft as a technical space where discourse can be generated always works—i’m talking about the ‘fanfictiony’ voice in gtn which manages to say something both about fanfiction and about the text itself, the use of the dramatis personae as a space where atmosphere can be established and plot points hinted towards (thus blurring the lines between what is and is not diegesis), the drastic shifts in style between different close thirds, the shifting from third- to second- to epistolary first-person, the use of poetry both diegetic and not (the noniad, the epigraph poems…), the mimicry of the ‘voice’ of the king james bible in the nona epilogue—she never stays in one place for too long and she never seems to stick to one central style or form, and it really works in her favour. insofar as tlt as a whole is a very ‘patchwork’ kind of work, building itself up from its big big index of references and intertexts and memes with hugely variant levels of ‘prestige’ or legitimacy attached to them, the ‘patchwork’ use of form really works in muir’s favour. however i am also fuming because i was right in the middle of writing a tlt fic which jumps into a play format two-thirds of the way through and now my idea doesn’t look ORIGINAL but ANYWAY—

& i really do need to flag my good friend vee’s mercy/augustine fic, which makes use of a similar conceit and pulls it off masterfully—i am deeply jealous of vee’s talent and i think the unwanted guest makes this piece (from 2021!) shine even more, if anything.

i am DYING to see where muir is going with the use of hamlet, of all things—dulcie quoting it to palamedes immediately catapulted my mind back to abigail’s reference to ‘that undiscovered country’ in htn. obviously muir likes to drop contemporary (or contemporarily canonical) references and turns of phrase all over the place, but the attention drawn to the quote as diegetically referential (“I like that. Is it from something?” / “Yes. It’s complicated.”) has me wondering about a) the survival of ‘pre-res’ literatures ~over the river and like WHY and b) what a thematic interlocking of tlt and hamlet can do, here…….real aveheads remember cytherea ophelia theory where i tried to use ophelia as a point of reference for teasing out some arguments about cytherea and death and aesthetics and white femininity and whatnot. all of which is to say i need to sit with this hamlet reading a lot more but i love it, i am so here for it.

of course ‘kissing or feeding, we can’t be sure’ calls to mind ‘how meat loves meat,’ alecto biting harrow’s mouth by way of a kiss…and the general thematic throughline of, you know, certain practices of love as practices of consumption, naberius later being figured as the ‘meat’ in question contains echoes of this eroticism which ofc guides the contours of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, eroticism as a currency of power, we know all of this stuff because it’s all over the text but i am just thumbs-upping it from the sidelines

the coffins had me thinking of utena’s black rose arc, which is a fun link to make considering the equivalent moment in the main body of nona is also referencing utena, ie. with the ‘rules’ of the duel being that cam has to get the handkerchief out of ianthe’s pocket as kind of an equivalent to skewering the rose. i feel like the tlt/utena overlap is pretty self-explanatory but it’s just fun to see the fingerprints all over lol

i think a lot of this was treading old ground thematically (erotics of consumption, dog motifs, we’ve seen it already!) but i will say that i did Yell Out Loud over ‘who's she got dawdling behind her but that creature—tugging visibly at her leash like an overeager dog.’ reminded of the other memorable use of ‘leash’—’even the devil bent for god to put a leash around her neck’—and, of course, the endless parade of commonalities between gideon & alecto. anyway there’s not really anything in this line that we didn’t already know about gid as a character, thematically speaking, but i point it out because it inflicted +100 psychic damage when i read it. gideon as a ‘creature’ is particularly slimy, & sort of puts me in mind of ianthe's tendency to talk about what appears to us as 'butch masculinity' (as opposed to the more effete masculinity of augustine or even babs) with a notably derogatory slant (the 'hurtful threats of sexual violence' line comes to mind); i don't know that i have much to say about it here specifically but it's an interesting one that i think informs the kirianthe dynamic pretty heavily (especially when held up against, like, harrianthe ... ianthe has a kind of respect for whatever harrow's gay and stupid gender is Doing (at least insofar as she can mould it to her own desires; i'm thinking of the dios apate forcefemme scene lol) in ways that i don't think she has for kiriona? but this is v off-topic, lol).

i have never been especially taken by dulcie as a character but i think this may finally have forced me to fold and admit that she’s great. her haters!!! her agonies!!! camilla would have to cook!! the balance between levity and sincerity was really well-managed. & i love the double meaning of “unwanted guest” as both palamedes intruding on ianthe’s mind palace and naberius setting up shop inside of her.

i need a week to sit with where this idea of the consumed soul as being literally ‘digested’ such that it can begin to ‘inhabit,’ however immaterially, the host body, or like to alter the characteristics of the host body such that to carry out such a consumption is to kind of kill yourself as well, slots in with lolita theory. or like, i need alecto right now. i am however reminded of chew, a short story that muir wrote in 2013, which also plays with these ideas of sexual assault as a forcing of a part of yourself meaningfully ‘into’ another person, and cannibalism as the reenactment of such a process, figured in the story as kind of a reclamation or at least an assertion of permanence—“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.”—which the unwanted guest seems to kind of, play with in reverse? i don’t know, but i’m interested—as ever—in where muir wants to take these ideas of rape and consumption and absorption that she’s got in her hands.

i keep returning to…i hesitate to say ‘parallels’ because i think that imposes a narrative onus that i’m not actually that convinced by, but these, like, commonalities between babs and gideon. gideon is played off against so many people (cristabel, loveday, alecto being the big ones) that it feels kind of inane to add another person to the pile, but like…they’re the two who get got in canaan house, they’re both ironically ‘false’ cavaliers and expressions of the ‘truest’ or most paradigmatic form that cavalierhood ‘can’/’should’ take, they both have unconventionally gendered names (‘babs’ is a shortened form of ‘barbara,’ it is a typically feminine name imo) and (by our standards) somewhat unconventional genders (gideon is butch, babs effete)—and of course the unwanted guest places a lot of emphasis on the coercive ‘making’ of cavalierhood (the reference to babs being ‘fixed’ were he to have a disability! ianthe’s glib ‘society really is to blame’ comment—ironic, obviously, but not wholly untrue) not dissimilar to the emphasis that gtn puts on cytherea moulding gideon into the state she comes to be in at the end. babs and gideon as the two possessed corpses in nona, obviously. two wildly diverse but ultimately converging trajectories! a dialectical tension between their fundamental ‘opposition’ (as by-the-book cavalier vs whatever gideon is doing) and their fundamental ‘sameness’ whereby the dialectic is resolved in their mutual deaths. also just, of course, continuing the throughline that muir has had going for a while now, of gender/gendering as a set of coercive enforcements loyal to a hegemonic structuring of the world.

that’s all i’ve got, i think. just. really good everyone say thank you tazmuir

[jackayline]

>> I did end up writing a total divergence when I was writing Nona, back in 2020, because I wanted to make sure my clockwork made sense — I wanted to make sure that if you wound up Gideon and Harrow and put them on a slightly different route the laws of the universe would still flow accordingly. (I stopped writing because when your editor asks how you’re doing and you’re like “I stopped to write 30k to prove a timeline” he’s legally allowed to shoot you with a crossbow.)

tazmuir wrote 30k of AU fanfic for her own series to make sure everything made sense and I truly hope to see it published as bonus content one day!

[olderthannetfic]

Okay, since there are multiple Locked Tomb fans hanging around OTNF´s blog:

How do you lot feel about the eternal "it´s just homestuck fanfic"?

Because I´ve never read Homestuck and while I know TazMuir used to be a homestuck-person who wrote some pretty influential fics, I do tend to believe that TLT is its own thing. (With some obvious nods.)

(But since I´ve neither read Homestuck nor her fics...)

To me it feels kinda dismissive, in the it´s not literature, it´s just fanfic thus it can´t possibly be good style.

Which: 1) I think we can all agree that there´s some high-fucking-quality fanfic out there 2) Doesn´t mean that someone who has written fanfic can never write anything original ever (or that they have to hide their background in fanfic to be taken seriously)

So I´d like some input/discussion, i guess ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ because it does kind of rub me the wrong way.

Thank you and best wishes to OTNF for letting us hang out in her inbox :)

--

As someone who writes original stuff heavily influenced by the fandoms I've been in... yeah, I tend to assume authors picked up some of their tricks and tastes in fandom but not that a major original work is literally just fic with the names changed. A lot of things do start as fic plotbunnies (no clue about Locked Tomb), but they get reworked at the outline stage. It's a very different situation from people filing the serial numbers off of existing fic or even writing a bunch of blatant expies.

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

saw one of these going around a while ago but it didn't include all the (reasonable*) options so

*"reasonable" here defined as: ways which i can imagine a person thinking were correct

[weirdprophetess]

once again just in love with how realistically tazmuir writes people especially since tlt is a totally off the rails with background lore sci-fi/fantasy series. specifically ianthe because i fucking hate her. shes a dick especially to my favorite character harrow and id fucking kill her if i could but also godDAMMIT shes funny. when everybody finds out protiselaus has been dead the whole time and theyre examining his severed head she makes a head pun. when the spaceship shes on is being attacked by unstoppable planet soul monsters she says choke me daddy. when she enlists the old dude shes been sucking up to to help harrow murder one of his friends and he starts making out with god and another one of his friends on the table of the dinner party they arranged specifically so he could do that shes like old people should be shot. in each of these instances and more ive had to stop reading to feel indescribable rage because NO you fucking suck at no point should i be actively reminding myself of that the hatred should just be there but i just have to excuse her antics for a scene because the unfortunate truth is that ianthe tridentarius is a bitch but shes also a comedy gold mine

[naomistares]

Hi I think ur art is so amazing!!! I only read tlt recently and as soon as I saw ur art it was pretty much all I could think about lol I'm obsessed with how u do ur compositions and bgs, and people (and everything about ur art)

Also,,,,,I was wondering where/who u get inspo from when u make ur peices?

No pressure to answer this ask if ur not feeling it!!! I hope ur having a rlly good day and resting before/during uni <3333

hi!! i hope you had a fun time reading them!! and thank you for the kind words 🫶🫶

honestly the answer is really simple! my inspiration just comes straight out of the books.. it does powerful things to me and my head.. (i don't know how after many years i am still not bored or out of inspiration)

and i just try really hard to capture what i imagine (although it has never come out exactly right, save for literally a few drawings) if i were just drawing random people that i am not emotionally invested in, you would 100% notice a lack.

good media is the ultimate inspiration! trying to replicate the way something made me feel, what it made me see, is super fun to me and highly rewarding !

so i guess i do get my inspo from tazmuir (the who) and my mind palace (the where) 😭 !

[notedchampagne]

i know this is a big ask but you seem knowledgable! i have no idea what homestuck is, wasn't it an online comic that internet (tumblr) went full ham on? i don't know if it's like, monster fantasy or cyberpunk, much less what the plot actually is. (and it apparently goes second person a lot so people just assumed harrow the ninth was Like That and didn't question the Plot Point.) But people like it and apparently it has a recognizable fanartist style lol

anyways my question is, since tamsyn muir is a fan of it and people can tell that from the locked tomb books, do you know how homestuck could have influenced the locked tomb? how different might the series have been if tazmuir hadn't been a homestuck fan? like, i'm kinda confused but intrigued by how the locked tomb fandom is able to tell all this about the author/series and wanted to find out some more about it from people who are in both fandoms.

dw if you don't have a good answer, honestly i just don't know where to start by trying to look it up on my own. Thanks, have a good day!

homestuck is a webcomic set in 2009 about four children that play a video game that ends their world via meteors, and their game session coincides with multiple other player sessions in a way that ends up becoming larger than what it was before.

tamsyn muir wrote promstuck and the serendipity gospels which were both very well known fics from what ive heard. personally i havent read either of them so unfortunately i wouldnt be able to compare either, but there are a few connections between tlt and hs that i can place (htn spoilers):

meme reference: "i warned you about the stairs bro"

homestuck has a thing called dream bubbles, which are post-death spaces where ghosts are able to interact with the alive in a merge between fictional and real spaces. hi harrow hi palamedes hi abigail

homestuck is narrated in second person in the sense of ==> being someone. hi gideon

hs 🤝 tlt god is just some guy

taz said gideons sunglasses are borrowed from homestucks dave strider

[liesmyth]

Why does everyone worships BOE? I mean sure the houses are bad.. but how does it makes BOE good? Have I missed something? Also I would argue that the Houses are not the colonial forces, after all they’ve all left Earth and colonized the space, and the houses at least are still operating within the solar system. Like we still don’t know shit about BOE - only that they are fanatics who speak strictly in hate speech and propaganda. Which is never a good sign. Like NEVER. They have culty names!!!!!!! Hello????

I think BoE are morally fucked and that’s very hot of them! I do think they’re slightly less morally fucked than the other side, ideologically. I think what the Houses are doing is very much imperialism, even though we don’t know enough to have the full details on the scope of it. We have John talking about ‘protectorates’, we have economic exploitation (but in a completely batshit way!) and forced relocation of refugees. BoE are also doing armed occupation of some New Rho segments but they don’t have a whole imperial infrastructure behind them.

I agree that we’re missing a lot of details re: House foreign policy & BoE - some more thoughts under the cut

We don’t know if the occupation is driven by a need for resources, or by pure militarism (revenge + perpetual war keeps the Houses under control) or by some other reason. We don’t know how many inhabited planets are out there and how many are occupied by the Houses and to which extent — the Houses can’t really expand beyond their home system because necromancy, so why are they occupying planets they don’t live in? Also, they ‘flip’ planets, making them inhabitable to native lifeforms, but also that seems to be on a much longer time scale than the human lifetime; can those be repurposed for habitation later on? We don’t know! It’s SO juicy and so much is missing.

We will probably get some information in Alecto. I don’t think we will get all information, mostly because I really don’t think the political background is THAT important to the story Tazmuir is trying to tell. She’s primarily telling a story about emotions, I think, not politics. But I think we’ll see more of where they came from.

Most of what we know so far points to BoE being an irredentist liberation group, but they also 100% do commit terrorist acts, like, on the page. They have the vague ultimate goal of getting rid of the Houses, but their day-to-day goal seems to be only to kill as many necromancers as possible, and they’re absolutely committed to getting there by doing shit like, burning people alive and shooting up public places without much care for civilians getting caught in the middle. Yea, Ianthe’s reasoning for calling BoE terrorism is coming from a place of moral fuckery, but MY reason for saying so is that they are committing crimines to foster a state of fear among the civilian population in the pursuit of political goals. They do that by burning people alive.

BoE also do have a cult-like attitude regarding everything Earth, but I’m not sure yet how we’re supposed to interpret it. There’s absolutely a benign angle to it (connection to a long lost homeland) but also I find it VERY juicy that after allegedly ten thousand years their culture is still mostly rooted on Earth. It doesn’t seem to have moved beyond the myth of their lost ancestral home; why are you still naming your kids after Shakespeare? Who has written the great tragedies in the last millenia? Their lack of cultural advancement (and technological!) is the main reason why I think there could be some time travel theories going on.

You’re right that we don’t know what their ultimate goal is, it could be more malicious than most of the fandom tends to assume, or it could be more benign. I’m very excited to find out but without ascribing any moral intention to who’s stanning who. I’m an equal side war criminal enjoyer, ALL women blowing shit up are hot to me <3