#the unwanted guest spoilers

[cutetanuki-chan]

the unwanted guest made an unrepairable damage to my soul

[whimsicallywiddershins]

So we found out from Palamedes and the Unwanted Guest that lyctorhood is not perfect and leaves a mark on the necromancer. The necromancer devours the cavalier's soul, and unintentionally gains something from it, mostly emotions or new urges or something like that. Like Ianthe getting Babs' hatred/distaste of Gideon.

John devoured Alecto. For a little while, John and Alecto were one, two souls intermingling like two pieces of flesh bleeding together. Then John created her a body and poured her soul back in, unintentionally creating a perfect lyctorhood.

John didn't really know what he was doing. He was running on guesswork and instinct. So I think he and Alecto shared and gained something from eachother.

Alecto is always described as angry. Which makes sense, considering the circumstances. But when John killed and devoured the earth, he was furious. He was raging. He hated.

What if Alecto got most of her anger and hatred and rage from John? Some of it was hers, yes. But hatred? A never ending anger? What if Alecto got what John was feeling when he ate her, made her?

And John. What did he get?

The thing is, we don't know what Alecto's personality was like. She was a planet, not exactly a person with feelings.

But we do know what Resurrection Beasts are like. They are relentless. They hunt and hunt and hunt John. Angry, yes. But mostly unstoppable and stuck in a never ending cycle of hunting John no matter the cost.

John won't forgive the Trillionaires. He doesnt even seem that angry anymore. But he won't stop hunting them, not for anything. Augestine begged him to stop. John doesn't let his lyctors tell him to stop. John doesn't care how many worlds he kills, how many people he displaced. He doesn't care about the cost to the Houses. He is relentless. He hunts and hunts and hunts.

John acts like a Resurrection Beast. And Alecto acts like John.

[naomistares]

the unwanted guest spoilers

tamsyn muir when i catch u. tamsyn muir when i catch u tamsyn when i

(yes i died for a while but i came back exactly the same)

[chillyweirdoinacoffin]

“The Unwanted Guest” short story from the Nona the Ninth paperback is now live on Tor’s website!

[sydneysageivashkov]

nona the ninth / the unwanted guest

[tio-trile]

So that unwanted guest huh

[sofipitch]

Souls are permeable-> The more you interact with a person the more it changes you. This is obvious when it's in friendship, and or it is a chosen change. But even if you don't want to change, knowing others will change you will regardless, in ways you may not be able to predict. That is the nature of all relationships, we are not static things. Yeah. That's it, just gonna think about this one all day

[theriverbeyond]

Nona the Ninth was like you are loved. whatever happens next, we did it it's done you can't take loved away. you were loved once and so you will always be loved. you were changed once and so you will always be changed. and let this cradle you, let this be your lifeline, let this tie you down when you feel like you're falling apart.

and then The Unwanted Guest came and was like.... love changes you. people change you. we change each other, just by existing right now together we rub against each other we bleed we mingle. we leave pieces of ourselves behind. you are the sum of the people who have changed you and sometimes you don't get to choose sometimes you don't want it to have been them. and you can try to run away from that, from them, but they will chase you they will haunt you they ARE you.

if this is the wind up move. i am fucking terrified of the horrors of love

[waterlilyvioletfog]

So I like kind of mentioned this in a previous post but like. It’s weird?? Right?? That when Harrow re-constructs the bubble over and over again at the start of HtN Act V she does 1) role-reversal AU 2) Arranged marriage AU 3) Coffee shop AU. Because those are FANFIC TROPES. (The arranged marriage AU being especially unhinged to me because she doesn’t even know John is Gideon’s dad at that point!! Her brain had to come up with “what if Gideon were royalty omg??” ON ITS OWN.) And like the fanfic-ness always was insane bc of course yeah that makes sense from a Doylist perspective, ie, Taz Muir’s an author notable for her inclusion of internet humor and culture, and she has personal experience with fanfic. But it didn’t make sense on a Watsonian level because sure, Harrow’s clearly a Romantic, but this isn’t a genre language that I think Harrow naturally speaks. Harrow doesn’t read smutty romance novels!!! She’s a repressed little nunlet obsessed with bones, her only options of sexual interest in her adolescence being 1) GIDEON 2) a corpse she views as holy and sacred— no really safe options for exploratory crushes or sexual experimentation here. So how is she thinking in fic/romance tropes? Either A) Harrow is significantly less repressed than everything I’ve ever read about her would lead me to understand, B) fic tropes are so transcendental that the agonized, wounded, thrice-haunted mind of Harrowhark Nonagesimus could, in its death throes, find itself in this specific genre of text she has no personal reference for, or C) according to the Sex Pal Theory of Permeability, Harrow has gained an understanding of romance tropes via soul osmosis, from Gideon/Alecto/Wake/Palamedes during the bubble visit???, and that explains why she dreams in fanfiction. I’m going with option C. Thank you Unwanted Guest for solving this little mystery for me 🙏🙏🙏

[bostondanya]

God how I wish there was a theatrical play of The Unwanted Guest

[scholarhect]

palamedes: Is the natural state of the soul quiet or chaos?

ianthe, wearing a taco bell cap and headset, leaning on the counter behind the register: Look buddy, it’s transient, shifting like water

[b1cr1ptic]

Something something Battle in The Centre of the Mind

[smapis]

backstage not so quick change

[astrid-beck]

Ianthe is special bc she has finally achieved the perfect, beautiful, most annoying lovechild synthesis of "I was expecting a battle of wits but you appear to be unarmed" and "your mom suck me good and hard through my jorts"

[lockedtombbrainworms]

I think Ianthe has to meet some horrible fate in Alecto, to be honest. That's not because she's a bad person and deserves punishment, that's not what I'm on about - this isn't an aesop's fable and I don't want it to be one. No, Ianthe has to end up dead (or worse) because lyctorhood is a horror story, the premise of which is "what if there was a way to be unimaginably powerful but it came at a terrible, terrible price?". We've seen lyctorhood as the horror discovered in a moment of overwhelmed panic by a terrified person in out of their depth (John). We've seen lyctorhood as forced by the person who is the price (Cristabel and Alfred's suicide pact). We've seen lyctorhood as mutual agreement (G1deon and Pyrrha). We've seen lyctorhood as a last desperate attempt by one person to pay the ultimate price to save someone they love (Loveday Heptane) and then we've seen that reflected differently in Gideon and Harrow as Gideon makes her own sacrifice. We've seen lyctorhood (or something adjacent) shown as "the best and truest and kindest thing we can do in this moment", as Camilla and Palamedes, who are already doomed at that point, die, and Paul is born. And we've seen Ianthe. Someone who thought she'd found a way, in her brilliance, to avoid paying the price. A way to attain lyctorhood without the person she loved most in the world having to die. And in keeping with the fact that this is a horror story, there's a flaw in her logic, because nobody, no matter how brilliant, can have the power without paying the price. It's not about the narrative punishing her for cheating (or at least trying to cheat). It's not about the narrative punishing her for any of the other things she's done. It's just another exploration of the ways people respond when the option of gaining power at a terrible price is presented to them, and the ways in which that will fuck them up. Lyctorhood has already destroyed Ianthe Tridentarius just like it's destroyed everyone else. She's a fascinating character and I can't wait to see how they tie up her arc.

[syl-stormblessed]

oh my god. Everything is a show to Ianthe. Everything is a show to the point where even in her own mind she is giving a performance. She needs everyone to know that she is Ianthe Tridentarius and she is The Best. She is Ianthe Tridentarius and she is a lyctor and she is going to live forever. So she acts like it. Except she has convinced herself so thoroughly that she is Ianthe Tridentarius that she completely failed to see how she's changed. She cares about the rules in dueling. She knows how to smoke. She knows that Gideon swung her sword like a racket. The performance in her own mind worked too well, and now she is Ianthe Naberius who refuses to believe she is anything but Ianthe Tridentarius. Tamsyn Muir is so sick and twisted I want to live in her walls.