#tlt live commentary

[lady-harrowhark]

It's @starberry-cupcake's first time reading Gideon the Ninth and I'm getting the most incredible live commentary

(No spoilers in the tags/comments/reblogs!)

[thewertsearch]

Mega-Giga Ask Comp: Part 3

@manorinthewoods asked: I'll be honest, I wrote the Locked Tomb ask having not read the Locked Tomb series. I literally only know the starting and ending strokes of the first book. That being said, I do like the half-soul-Sollux idea, and it works pretty well with the Locked Tomb's general theme of Lyctorhood, and how knotted the whole situation with Alecto, Gideon, and Harrow ends up being. (What is even going on with Nona) ~LOSS (4/13/24) @manorinthewoods asked: You know, if you hadn't already read Gideon the Ninth, I'd have recommended it as a good second liveblog. It really does fit your preferred sort of mystery. From all the clues presented, you could probably hit very close to the ultimate solution to the Lyctoral puzzle - as close as anybody could be expected to get. ~LOSS (25/4/24) @manorinthewoods asked: The Locked Tomb's prose is pretty good. On occasion, it happens to chime with a sound of 'Homestuck', but I only recall that twice so far in my reading. I like the skelebook. ~LOSS (27/4/24)

Once again, I'm glad my hidden agenda - convincing this blog's entire readership to check out The Locked Tomb - is bearing fruit.

I agree! TLT does occasionally give Homestuck vibes, presumably because its author is a fan. For the most part, though, its prose style is all its own.

Anonymous asked: Reference to American culture: the sphere of Jade's home dropping and the timer that preceded it are references to the Times Square Ball, an annual event held every New Year's Eve. A giant ball descends down a pole at 11:59 PM and reaches the bottom at 12:00 AM, January 1. I believe that you can figure out why the reference was included in the first place. Anonymous asked: btw the gamzee page was released on new years. ‘the miracle of a new beginning’ is the new year and the lab dropping is supposed to be a reference to the ball dropping in times square

Some America Lore here that I wasn't aware of.

I was wondering exactly what Gamzee meant by 'a new beginning'. Maybe Alternia practices the tradition as well.

@omnilew asked: the way you speculate and go indepth into sburbs features and how it affects the kids, made a silly headcanon that your kidsona is reading the comic while playing out their session though this is mainly because "Eventually, we were bound to cross a couple of wires that should never have been allowed to touch" kinda references chargerkind

I like it! Maybe my 'sonas have access to a more in-depth version of Rose's walkthrough, and are adding their own commentary in quiet moments during their own adventures.

@manorinthewoods asked: Your excitement over the resurrection of Dream Jade gave me a form of suspenseful mirth. Seeing how happy you were at her resurrection, while also knowing exactly what came of it, is perhaps textbook dramatic irony. If only you'd read a panel further… ~LOSS (26/4/24)

She looked so happy to be back, too! That certainly didn't last long.

She was prototyped with a smiling corpse, though. Maybe that was just her 'default' expression, and it vanished as soon as her actual feelings asserted themselves.

@thetinygladiator asked: 'I hadn’t really thought about Sally’s ectobiological parent - but now that I am, I think the funniest possible option is that it’s her landlady.' okay but i just gotta say… this immediately makes me think about how that relates to the house-building aspect. Like, with the giant tower, are they gonna charge the Imps for rent? That might work, honestly. Where do imps even live? Bet they don't have good AC or Wi-Fi, lemme tell ya.

300 GRIST/DAY NO CRUXTRUDER NO ALCHEMY NO PETS

@manorinthewoods submitted: How many computers would you have on your person if you were playing Sburb? Jade recommends at least 5. I say I'd have a laptop, phone, a spare of both of those, and computer gloves if I need to compute really fast. Also spare gloves. Speaking of the phone - is it possible for people to put phones in their pockets? Given Karkat (and a minor gag in Act 6), we can assume that it's difficult or uncommon to carry items without using the Sylladex - or maybe it's just tied to your dexterity, and you have to hold things gingerly to avoid captchaloguing them when you pick them up. On the other hand, there's no issues with accidentally storing something you've unstored and are using - so how does the Sylladex actually work? Do people just instinctively store their items once they're done using them? Is it difficult to avoid storing something you aren't using anymore? Can you stuff phones in pockets? If not, then why develop a PDA in the first place? Given the Sylladex, it should be much more commercially viable to make a tablet. ~LOSS (24/4/24)

Since Karkat can physically pick up a book, you can probably pocket your gear - although maybe there's a difference between holding an object and trying to add it to a physical 'inventory'. Either way, the issue is easily circumvented by employing wearable tech, like the kids do.

As depicted in my alchemy binge, my primary computing device would be the Pocket Holodex, which can remote into any computer in my sylladex.

In addition, my Modular Ring shirt is also a computer, which can presumably be augmented by adding extra mod1ules over time. I'd probably also captchalogue every computer in my apartment, of which I currently have six.

I'd be exploring the Medium with a minimum of seven computers, plus one pseudo-computer, plus a phone. Jade would certainly approve.

@iris-in-the-dark-world asked: the tension in act 5 act 2 is perfect, i love it. maybe even moreso on rereads, the foreshadowing and generally ominous vibes always get to me @heliotropopause asked: You're getting to the part where the comic really starts hitting its stride. This'll be fun.

The ever-present countdown certainly adds a degree of urgency to the situation.

I'm really liking the pacing of this current act, as things slowly progress towards some critical point - one which, for now, is still shrouded in mystery.

Anonymous asked: Forwarding another ask for the person with no account ~DJ: Eridan's deal seems to be based on Wizardry Herbert - a proto-Homestuck work by Hussie. A parody of Harry Potter dealing with whether magic is real. [] But Methods of Rationality began in February 2010, so "Harry Potter but obsessed with science" might have also been an intentional reference to that.-RM @heliotropopause asked: Eridan Ampora and the Methods of Rationality sure is an idea for a fanfic. He'd be so bad at it.

Eridan would be an extremely funny choice for a ratfic protagonist. He'd be so smarmy about it - and thus, a perfect addition to their ranks.

What would the definitive Homestuck ratfic be called, do you think? I think Tool-Assisted Speedrun would be a decent choice.

@killedthekat asked: An interesting thing about doomed timelines is how they serve to prevent stable loop metagaming. As a basic example, in a typical stable time loop scenario, if you observe yourself unharmed in the future, you can throw yourself into high danger high reward situations and know that probability will twist itself into whatever improbable knot it needs to do to keep you safe. But in homestuck if you lean too hard on predestination you just get shunted into a doomed timeline for your trouble.

It's true. Timehopping just isn't fun in Homestuck, as you're constantly walking a tightrope, desperately trying to stay in the one timeline that might not get you killed.

It's a good way to prevent time-travelers from becoming overpowered - something which is probably necessary for a comic which makes such heavy use of the concept.

Anonymous asked: Now that you're updating while HS^2 is, I've realised that while I'm barely keeping up with ^2, I just yelled "Oh! Upd8!" out loud when I checked your blog, so to me? You're the real continuation of Homestuck

What an honor!

For veterans of the comic, this blog is more Homestuck: Revisited than Homestuck 2. As a woman who would much rather watch video essays about old Simpsons episodes than new seasons of the show, I completely understand why some would prefer the latter.

@manorinthewoods asked: I've since finished Worm. I think Sophia's by far the best Vriska candidate. Lisa, Amy, and Colin are less so, I think. ~LOSS (21/4/24)

Oh, nice, you got all the way through it! Worm is an absolute behemoth, and I know a lot of people who started it, and gave up halfway through.

Sophia is likely the closest match to Vriska in personality. I agree with an earlier comment, though, that the most Vriska-like character in terms of audience reaction is probably Amy.

Anonymous asked: Cannot believe someone would propose a Homestuck/Locked Tomb scenario and leave Gamzee as part of a spare pairing, when the Homestuck fic The Serendipity Gospels, written by the author of The Locked Tomb, stars Gamzee and Terezi in the proto-necromancer/cavalier dynamic. Absolutely appropriate to have Gamzee as Ninth though, since his facepaint is the direct ancestor to Harrow's. Gamzee and Terezi is such a funny pairing to go with. I'm certainly looking forward to checking out The Serendipity Gospels when I'm done with the comic - both to compare it to Homestuck and to the Locked Tomb.

As am I. Apparently it was left unfinished - but considering how long this liveblog is taking, maybe Taz will have updated by the time I'm done!

Wishful thinking, of course, but I live in hope.

@bladekindeyewear submitted:

(I started Dragon's Dogma 2 a couple weeks ago and did my best to a Gideon Nav pawn (NPC ally), facepaint and two-hander and all, and the "Jaunty Straightforward" voice selection has been EXTREMELY distracting / game-improving because her voice and attitude chatting beside my player all the time sound almost straight out of the audiobook.)

Damn, you really captured her essence. Pawn is a very fitting title for her, too :(

@manorinthewoods asked: On the topic of blood color names - Blue through Purple were renamed in Hiveswap. Originally, Vriska was Cerulean, Equius was Blue, and Gamzee was Indigo - which I like more than their modern incarnations. I think 'bronze' might also be a Hiveswap thing, although I won't dispute it, and rust might have been renamed to burgundy? Maybe burgundy is a synonym. Idk. ~LOSS (4/13/24)

I think I prefer the likes of olive, indigo and bronze over more generic terms like green, blue and brown, which would quickly lead to confusion.

Vriska's blood, for example, is also a shade of blue, so it would be a little strange if blue blood was an official term, but it didn't apply to her.

@mxamericanblue asked:hi i have been absolutely BINGING your live blog rn and i gotta just get this out this is so so cool watching you react has been giving me so much joy, i don't have a computer so i can't really experience homestuck again casually when i want to but watching you read it and react and THEORIZE??? omg your theories have been so fuckin killer it's given me a new appreciation for Hussie as a story teller and how spectacular this comic truly was thank you for this, i've been having a grand ol' time, and it's all cuz of u

Thank you! I feel like I've been theorizing a lot less since I came back from my hiatus, mostly because the comic hasn't introduced many big mysteries recently - aside, of course, from Aradia's unexplained explosion.

(Pre-posting update: Since first drafting this ask, my statement above is no longer true, as Gamzee has been revealed as Homestuck's most important character. What the actual fuck.)

@lilietsblog asked: re fifth house aradia: she's an archeolodist :)

Oh, shit, you're right.

Maybe she'd be in more danger from the Lyctor than I thought.

@ben-guy asked: Vriska's ascension to god-tier is, in my personal opinion, one of the most visually striking scenes in all of Homestuck. Also, one of the panels you didn't include (which is understandable w/ Homestuck lol. Sacrifices for the sake of brevity) specifically the one where she has him write "[…] plenty of time for that l8r" above her head… Think about the position she would have had to move him to to write that.

…jesus, Vriska. You can't just do that!

@martinkhall asked: "What is treasure but a fortune, waiting to be found?" Or stolen if you're the THIEF of Light.

Son of a bitch. That's why she's a pirate, isn't it?

Because a Thief of Light is someone who steals fortunes!

@manorinthewoods asked: Eidolons. A species purpose-built to play Sburb, while breaking every mechanic you can solely with biology. Eidolons don't sleep, and live in a hive mind. Their psychologies are very poor at recognising distinct things, with Eidolons seeing the world more in terms of a blur of colors and shapes. They thus have a very difficult time understanding Classes and Aspects, never mind that their mythology never involved deities, and they never invented chess, or games of any sort… ~LOSS (15/4/24)

The idea of a species engineered from the ground up to be Players does raise the interesting question of whether there was a first species to play Sburb.

Of course, with all the time-loops we've been working with, there might not have been a first species - unless Sburb was 'created' in some sort of metatemporal space, 'before' any loops were put in place.

@manorinthewoods submitted: You are very good at analysing Vriska's psyche. Vriska's character was executed very well, I think, and I would hate her with a burning passion platonically but to a high degree if I knew her in real life. She's just… really horrible. She's a horrible person. And half her shtick is that she keeps evading consequences in spite of that. All of her mental torture of Tavros, for instance, ends in her becoming the most powerful player in the session. What sort of justice is that, Terezi? ~LOSS (15/4/24)

She hasn't entirely evaded consequences, but it's undeniable that none of the consequences she's experienced have actually stopped her from doing the things she does.

She's lost an arm, an eye, she's been beaten up, she's bled to death, and literally none of it has caused her to let up on Tavros, even a little. Letting up on Tavros, to her, would be worse than any physical harm, because it would be an attack on her worldview.

@sanctferum asked: "Has anything come of this since, actually? I haven’t heard anything about this new comic – although I do scroll in the opposite direction any time I see a reference to Homestuck, so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t." - The general feel I've gotten from the community has been largely positive re: the new Homestuck 2 updates, which have indeed been happening. It's being updated once per month for now, so a lot slower going than non-hiatused OG Homestuck. But I'm enjoying it so far!

Once a month seems more sustainable than Hussie's original barely-believable pace for the comic. With Hussie no longer at the helm, expecting daily panels seems like a pretty big ask - most people don't have the time, money or energy do what Hussie did.

Anonymous asked: I don't know if you read UTDR fanfiction, but this Tavros and Vriska situation reminds me a little bit of Flowey Is Not A Good Life Coach. she's trying to push him to his limits and torture him into being someone who will kill, and he just won't. say, what's your read on comparing Flowey : Vriska?

Flowey does what he does because he's lost his emotions, but Vriska does what she does because she's consumed by her emotions.

If anything, Flowey has more in common with Aradia. They're both time-travelers whose ability to feel is somewhat compromised.

Anonymous asked: WHATTTTTT HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN BACK???????? I THOUGHT YOU WERE STILL ON A LONG ASS HIATUS BUT I JUST JOW DISCOVERED TUMBLR ISNT GIVING ME POST NOTIFICATIONS FOR YOU ANYMORE EVEN THOUGH I HAVE IT TURNED ON FOR YOU AND IT WORKS FOR OTHER BLOGS???? WHAT THE HELL. IM GOING INSANE.

This has happened before - but before, I was also removed from Tumblr's search function, which doesn't seem to be the case this time.

Is anyone else having issues with Wertsearch post notifications?

@elkian asked: So has anyone mentioned the godhood joke yet? (The God Tiers costumes have hoods. God Hoods. Badum-tish)

LOL, I did miss that.

Anonymous asked: Fun Homestuck fact! After writing Karkat, someone brought up that the writer of the 'Programming For [Expletive]s' book sounded a lot like Karkat. Andrew responded by telling them to imagine that it was actually written in all caps, basically canonizing that the 'Programming For [Expletive]s' book was written by Karkat. At least, I think that's how that went? ~LOSS (28/2/23)

And it could be any Karkat, too. Maybe one of the Karkats from a doomed timeline actually learned to code from Sollux, and became a famous ~ATH developer.

@morganwick asked: So with conversation 8=8 apparently taking place in the immediate aftermath of Rose destroying her gate (even technically during Descend), and Rose's attitude towards Kanaya in the part of it that we see, does that change how much you think her attitude in their previous conversations reflects her genuine mental state?

Oh yeah, no, I’m pretty sure she was genuinely in a bad mood here. Not really so much because of Kanaya, and I think the anger directed at Kanaya specifically was inauthentic, but the bad mood itself was real. She'd recently been injected with several months of traumatic memories, after all.

@manorinthewoods asked: That panel, of John in Vriska's 'fabulous outfit', is actually pretty neat, because you can see from the proportions how young John really is. He's small, not even fully a teenager yet, and he's been thrown into this chaotic world of humans and trolls, quadrants, violence and danger. Everyone in the game must be scared, in some degree, but none of them ever show it. It makes you wonder just how strong Skaia's children really are. ~LOSS (29/4/23)

Seriously. In what universe are 13-year-olds the people most qualified to make universes? Sburb has some very funny ideas about the optimal way it should be played.

I suppose this is something that had to be true, though, for Homestuck to be the coming-of-age story that Hussie wanted it to be.

Anonymous asked: My interpretation has always been that "the Blind Prophets" are actually just Terezi herself, in a time loop-y/predestined way. She's blind, her class is Seer, AKA prophet, and those are her numerals. Also, on an unrelated note, but to weigh in on your last ask, according to Latin conventions, the plural of lusus is lusus. Does Homestuck follow those conventions? Well…

Or, since there are two Seers in Homestuck, maybe they’re Terezi and Rose. She’s a Light Player, so a blinding would be suitably ironic.

Anonymous asked: re: captchalogue codes and the states of objects: it takes a relatively small change in the physical arrangement of atoms and whatnot to turn a ghost dad poster into, say, a little monsters poster, but the two have a relatively large difference between their conceptual nature. on the other hand, it would take a relatively large rearrangement of atoms to make the slime pogo ride be anything other than a slime pogo ride. perhaps this makes the former change state more easily than the latter? alternatively, maybe the captcha system just knows that all it would really take to make the slime pogo ride stop being covered in oil is soap and water and it's happy to do that on its own, but paper is harder to clean so it wants you to jump through more hoops for that one new question: if john had used his posters for alchemy before he was able to see their defacement, would the resultant objects also be beclowned? evidence seems to suggest that players with unawakened dream selves Will draw on their walls in their sleep and not see it until Ready, so there not being mechanisms in place to deal with that seems less likely than the alternative to me, but especially considering people who aren't them Can see the drawings, how??? would that even??? work??? what would've happened if john had done alchemy with the arms cake. i think it would be funny to see that

I think he’d still get the clown posters.

The kids keep accidentally making magic items, so It's clearly possible for someone to alchemize an object with properties they didn't foresee. Therefore, I think John would make what appears, to him, to be a normal poster - but Rose would still see it as it truly is.

Anonymous asked: any thoughts on what the horrorterrors are? beyond their (admittedly vague) intentions?

I think they’re a sign of the wider cosmology beyond Sburb - and, more specifically, a sign that there is a wider cosmology beyond Sburb.

I don't know if we'll necessarily get more expansion on them than we've already had, because their whole shtick is that they're unknowable. Needless to say, I'd love to be proven wrong.

[thatneoncrisis]

oooh ok feel free to ignore this since it isn't the ask game technically, but how do you feel tamsyn pulls punches with john? where do you think that could improve? i'm curious and i love hearing ur analysis of this stuff

ok so this is just my own personal opinion. but after reading the series like three times ive basically come to the consensus that tamsyn is much more in tune with writing john as kiwi and not as maori

and its not that is completely erased from the text. but you REALLY have to hunt for it as opposed to him being kiwi which is incredibly obvious in the way he talks about his old life in ntn. i dont think i would have even known he was maori if she didnt say gideon was and i was actively looking for it. but she kind of treats characters being indigenous as like a cool fun fact rather than an active part of their identity. and this is related to a much longer and more draining conversation about how race/ethnicity even WORKS in the empire which is set 10000 years in the future. we as a society Right Now cant even agree on what race cleopatra was do you like. get what im saying

anyway what im trying to get at is the empire, designed and run by One Guy, the Only person who remembers earth culture, actively deciding to model its systems of government, religion, military, language and aesthetics after staples of western imperialism (like most of the names are pulled from greek or roman or biblical figures) is one thing. because i understand the books are actively christian, tamsyn is catholic theres like Commentary on those elements. but there is no commentary as to why a polynesian guy would Actively gatekeep his own culture from a world HE made. they are clearly speaking english, gideons name had to be TRANSLATED to kiriona, theres a decent chance shes not even pronouncing it correctly. thats fucking insane. the characters in tlt are living in a cultural genocide by magnitudes that we cannot even comprehend and they cant even like. talk about it they cant THINK about it. the text hasnt given them time to. does he think theyre not worth it? why not? these are questions the text isnt interested in asking let alone answering

even when theres an opportunity for contrast, ie new rho, its all done in broad strokes of vague descriptions of Other cultures. we suffer speaks in accented house. what accent? pyrrha can speak 4 languages including house to varying degrees. what languages? she makes pikelets in the morning this is obviously a very nz/aussie thing, so this wartorn city Also has them theyre just a universal constant. new rho is just kind of described as Apocalypse Desert City, it could look like fucking LA for all i know and nothing would change

tldr tamsyn wrote very good kiwi characters and im obviously talking as someone who isnt kiwi but Is not white but her like aversion or indifference to writing inarguably indigenous characters in a way outside of their physical appearance wrt how it informs their ideals and motivations could be more. just More. this is literally one of the most insanely cruel things john has done and nobody in universe can even call him on it because hes scrubbed all traces of it from existence what if we exploded

[lepertamar]

idk whether i would love or hate it if The Lives That Argue For Us became a big? well-known? enough Thing that people can refer to it as an example of 2020s cultural commentary/gestalt like TLT. it's so flatly 'yeah, this is not brought up in any way and therefore not a topic to be addressed here' about stuff like the overwhelmingly global Climate Anxiety or Surveillance Anxiety. but on the other hand it's hugely and brutally blazingly non-avoidant and digs right into the center about 'when Knowledge that contradicts or overturns the expectations of civilization gets let out of the genie bottle and can't be put back in or reverted in any way, how can that be dealt with, in the short term? is there any way to justify suppressing the truth without it rebounding back twice as harshly?' etc which is actually.....a broader and deeper anxiety than climate or surveillance anxiety even if the articulation of it as An Anxiety has not afaict really entered common consciousness.

[riddlerosehearts]

🐍No worries! I'm likely going to be slower at responding too since school's getting busier again, but I always enjoy reading your answers!

Oh man I didn't even remember that part about Athena kids (it's been really long since I last read the series) but yeah that'd make things even more complicated... especially if like, Jamil has to learn to fend off these monsters on his own since a young age and be able to take care of Kalim, I'd think he'd have to quickly learn to be just far away enough from Kalim so that if any monsters attack, he'd be the only one harmed instead of Kalim, which is just awful. I love your suggestions for their godly parents though, they all fit so well but nemesis kid jamil is like extra angst: he's a child of revenge, he probably wants revenge for his life being the way it is, yet he's bound by his position and can literally do nothing about it unless he snaps from the pressure.

I went through your valdangelo tag and there's so much good stuff there! The heavy focus on romantic relationships in HoO felt like Rick just really wanted to pair everyone off before everyone had a chance to develop as an individual or explore other types of relationships with the rest of the cast. I found myself disappointed in several characters and longing for what could've been, even though the pjo series is dear to me. But the beauty of fandom is people can fill in those gaps or rewrite things and the valdangelo stuff definitely counts.

I think Leo wouldn't be putting tons of outward accessories on his uniform but he might add several secret pockets to stores things in, since in this AU I assume he doesn't have the toolbelt. If it's hotter outside he might just wear the vest unbottoned and no blazer, just bc I don't think they allow students to wear zero dorm colours haha. I do think he's likely the type to roll up his sleeves a lot though! And he likely enjoys the PE uniform far more than the usual one. Speaking of which I think Leo'd enjoy the lab classes more since they involve getting hands on and making stuff! And Nico might enjoy the ceremonial robes while Leo'd find them too bulky and stuffy and be on his way out to change the moment any ceremony is over.

I feel like I'm running out of interesting questions to ask about the AU (curse my lack of writing creativity) but I'm starting to work on some doodles and hope to show you eventually! In the meantime if you have any more headcanons for either of Leo or Nico or literally any other PJO characters in TWST please feel free to share them/make posts! I don't get lots of posts on my dash these days so it's easy to find yours, I'd love to hear more of your ideas. (Did I mention I was living vicariously through your PJO reread since I want to do it too but just can't make the time? Your commentary is great ❤)

sorry this reply took even longer LOL, if you've seen me keep posting but not replying i hope it didn't seem like i was ignoring you. just gotta find the time/energy to answer asks and messages sometimes.

yeah, annabeth talks about it when she's telling percy how much she hates her dad and her stepmom in TLT and it lowkey made me feel sympathy for frederick chase on my reread, just because i really don't know what i would do in the situation that athena put him in lol. of course, he still should've done better to make sure annabeth felt loved and secure even if he hadn't wanted a baby. but i also got to thinking about how that would affect riddle and i feel like it'd be so rough because it's like, at first his mother might think it's good that her child is blessed by the goddess of wisdom because he'll be a natural genius and easily be able to become a doctor just like she wants. but then monsters would start to attack and she'd see it as him bringing danger to their family and anyone else around them. just imagine what it would be like if when he sneaks out with trey and chenya, they get attacked and she finds out about it... also agree with what you said about athena kid jamil. nemesis kid jamil would also be crazy though, because just look at the list of powers we know nemesis herself has:

and while we've only ever seen two nemesis kids in canon, one of whom we know basically nothing about, we do know that ethan nakamura may have tychokinesis because as also explained by the riordan wiki: "this might explain his lucky hit to percy's weak point, which nobody but percy knew at the time."

so like, imagine if jamil inherited that ability too and he knew that in theory he could give himself just a little bit of good luck or give kalim a little bit of bad luck, just to get a tiny bit of revenge, but he doesn't know what exactly might happen and his position makes it too risky to try anything.

honestly, i think i would've been happy if every single romantic relationship in HoO (aside from percabeth of course because it was pre-established. and i guess maybe jasiper too just because it has relevance to piper's arc) had just been developed as a friendship, with hints of it becoming romantic toward the end. like how blood of olympus hints that nico and will like each other, but they really aren't clearly established as actually dating until trials of apollo. and speaking of trials of apollo, i know all of rick's post-PJO series are kind of contentious in the fandom, but i love TOA and this is a big part of why: while there is some solangelo and caleo stuff and of course apollo's past romances are discussed, the platonic/familial dynamic between apollo and meg is by far the most important relationship in that series. and i wish the friendships between the seven were written as well as i feel like theirs is. they all just don't feel nearly as close as they should for the most part.

this discussion about how nico and leo would wear the school uniform reminded me that i once came across a chart of how all the canon students wear it. i went back and found it just now: link. and from the looks of it, yeah, everyone, even kalim and jamil despite how much extra stuff they've added, wears either the blazer/coat or the vest so that their dorm colors are visible somewhere... except for idia lol. even ortho basically wears it post-book 6 but idia is the only student who literally wears just absolutely none of the uniform except for the pants. i agree with everything you said about leo! also, i love the cermonial robes, they are peak aesthetic. i had ceremonial robes idia on the home screen for weeks when i first started the game.

if you wanna ask me about anything else related to pjo or twst or other things i post about feel free to! i'm glad you don't have trouble finding my posts because i usually post so much that i worry about anons i reply to getting buried haha. also, glad you're enjoying my silly little commentary on my reread LOL. i've been going a bit slower than i'd like because i've had some stuff going on irl + started reading another book at the same time as well. but i'd been wanting to reread the series for a while and finally got started because i felt disappointed at all the stuff the tv show left out or changed. somehow the lightning thief musical still prevails as the most accurate adaptation.

hmm, as for other thoughts about the crossover... i just remembered that in one of my earlier replies i said i wanted to sort luke castellan and alex fierro into dorms but couldn't decide where to put them! so, here's some thoughts on that now:

luke - based on the dorm analysis i linked before, i keep getting the vibe that savanaclaw makes the most sense for him. he certainly has the tenacity, ambition, and athleticism to fit in there, and with how admired and respected he was at camp half-blood prior to his betrayal, i could see him becoming dorm leader. i also feel like to mirror PJO canon he would eventually overblot... and probably die from it in an incident that the school would absolutely try to cover up.

alex - she's genderfluid and is a girl most of the time but again we'll let her into NRC for AU purposes. alex is very clever, cunning and sharp-witted and is even associated with snakes. so i initially wanted to place her in scarabia before remembering that she's also pretty reckless and hotheaded lol. not exactly the embodiment of scarabia's emphasis on careful planning and deliberation. he even canonically hates big parties. i actually think he'd also fit well into savanaclaw! i can see him getting along well with ruggie.

and another random thought i had about nico: i bet he loves what a big deal halloween is at NRC. whether he stays in ignihyde or goes to ramshackle, he's going to be so ready to go all out with decorating the dorm and picking out costumes. and i can imagine him hanging out with the ghosts, trying to give them the best halloween they could have.

[maecelyth]

Too many TlT posts make no sense so I now have to read nona and harrow to figure out why one of the biblical apostles is there. you can bet your ass bone I'm going to be adding great commentary and quips with the funniest hottest takes oh yeah it's live blog, I am going to earn so much admiration and moots. Think of me as the commentary track.

[familyabolisher]

thank you so much for such a thorough answer! i love all of this, and am going to tack a few of my own thoughts on also:

i love the attention you paid to order and symmetry and pattern-seeking; i’ve written a load before about this related process of circumscription and containment that takes place in the novel - humbert has to, essentially, entrap and localise dolores, and he does so by relegating her to the ordered structure that eg. the nuclear family unit (metonymically encoded in the ‘white-frame horror’ haze house) encodes, and of course by making sense of her through the language of the dominant literary landscape. & how such appeals to order, patterns, regiment, containment, circumscription, are mechanisms of fascism both in terms of art & how we legitimise it (’real’ art exists within a set criteria; ‘degenerate’ or false art violates or disregards this notion of ordering and correctness &c.) and in terms of, as you discuss, discourses of social order. & how the critique of psychiatry that the text articulates (and as is made v clear in the john ray ‘preface’!) is the idea that these social orders can be reformed and reconstituted rather than destroyed.

re. your commentary on the relationship between psychiatry and broader medical practices - YES & i’m reminded of this passage (the one i lifted the quote in my bio from, lmao); a v succinct enmeshment of rape, horror (and the discursive creation of lolita as a horror figure; here a ‘complex ghost,’ elsewhere a ‘small ghost,’ a haunting presence, a doll), the vague and changeable subject position of The Wife relative to humbert (lolita/valeria/charlotte all merging into one another....) appeals to europeanness as the language of an elevated class, and rape as a kind of medical violation (’recline in dull invitation [...] with flesh ajar like the rubber valve on a soccer ball’s bladder,’ ‘vivisecting parties’). and the reference to (i assume?) gas chambers at the end! really just an absolute Passage.

also v. much love your commentary on what the movement west & mimicry of a frontier expansion is doing---nothing to add because you very much Covered it but, just imagine me pumping my fist and yelling Yes!!! Yes!!!!

since you brought up the tennis scene i NEED to say that one of the most interesting parts of that scene (for me!) is the part where humbert laments having never gotten a photograph of dolores; the suggestion that a photograph could, essentially, ‘freeze’ her in time in the same way that the whole notion of the ‘enchanted island’ attempts to ‘freeze’ her; the implication, then, that lolita as a memoir is performing the function that the photograph ought to have performed, that (as goes the ethos of the book writ large) the very process by which lolita comes into existence is a reaffirmation of the boundaries that we see dolores spend the whole novel trying to escape. reading lolita as photographing dolores as returning her to humbert and humbert’s aesthetic terms. delicious.

YEEEES re. tlt & bodily discipline; i would love to see that close reading. v much interested in, you know, the body as an instrument in need of disciplining / the state of death-not-death that needs to be imposed for that to be made possible (necromancy as resurrection, lolita as a novel of resurrection and reanimation, alecto, kiriona.....), marxist ideas of death as a continued site of discourse to which we owe consideration & deference in our communism (tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare etc etc); obviously tmuir takes these ideas around bodily instrumentalisation / the body itself as the weapon for the imperialist and absolutely Runs with it (how much of her work around the more obviously ‘body horror’ affects of necromancy can be traced back to lolita!! i lost my MIND finding the line about ‘parading living lolita’ as arguably prefiguring the whole beguiling corpse thing the other week); all of which is to say, yes, dolores haze playing tennis handshake meme gideon and Sword.

feel free to ignore because i know you get one million asks per day but if you have the chance i would welcome any + all thoughts on lolita 👀

no please im dying to talk about lolita

so, i feel like i have to start with the critique of psychiatry, specifically psychoanalysis, that runs through the entire book. humbert tells us that he revels in making himself obscure to psychiatrists by lying to them; the extent of the actual deceit is ofc unclear because he's an unreliable narrator, but certainly it's true that psychoanalysis fails to 'fix' humbert or to save dolores, most obviously when the beardsley teachers believe she's psychosexually underdeveloped and approach humbert to discuss it. humbert delights in pointing out that the patterns the analyst seeks in human behaviour and desires simply fail, again and again, to correct or prevent his preying on children; also, obviously, psychiatry operates within / continuous to the institution of the family, and so is often categorically incapable of preventing or even perceiving violence that occurs as a result of a familial relationship, as in humbert's use of the father role to enable his rape of dolores.

and like, sure, humbert has plenty of self-interested reason to disdain psychoanalysis, as a science that positions itself as potentially aiming to prevent his sexual abuse. but the reasons he generally gives for his criticism are clustered around the idea that psychoanalysis seeks patterns where there are none to be found, and makes meaning out of nothing (eg, "the scholastic rigamarole and standardised symbols of the psychoanalytic racket"). of course, in truth humbert himself seeks patterns and order constantly, from his emphasis on his european morals and the contrast to the unruly america (particularly the western states), to his supposed talent in seeing the stratagems of chess laid out neatly on the board in contrast to gaston perceiving "all ooze and squidcloud," to his use of tennis as a kind of disciplinary measure with dolores, aimed at making the "symmetry" of the court bring out the "harmonies latent in her." and, nabokov goes out of his way to tell us that humbert also retains belief in those two other viennese sciences of pattern-seeking par excellence: phrenology (historically more inclusive a science than how we think of it today, and very much growing from and encompassing physiognomy, to which humbert makes at least one explicit reference and on which he implicitly relies constantly throughout the book) and mesmerism (encountered in this time period as the 'hypnotism' humbert speaks highly of numerous times, along with the fact that at the very end of the book he tells us that one pseudonym he considered using was "mesmer mesmer", a reference to franz mesmer).

this got me thinking about what nabokov was trying to convey by giving us this very clear picture of humbert as someone who, though hostile to psychoanalysis in particular, is generally not only amenable to this type of pattern-seeking and narrativising but often actually dependent on it. and then i thought, well, it's not really about order or patterns in themselves at all. what's at stake for humbert, and for us as readers, is the power relations underlying various discourses of social order, and the pattern of control thus enabled. humbert's problem with psychoanalysis is that it positions itself, however ineffectually, as trying to create subjects who are sexually 'developed' and 'healthy', which he encounters as being directly oppositional to his own interest in preying on girls, and his attempts to make dolores into lolita, whom he wants to be cultured and mannered rather than unruly—but the sense of rule and order needs to come from himself, not from the abstract and distant authority that the analyst speaks on behalf of. so, the critique of psychoanalysis is twofold. 1) analysts fail to see the danger of humbert or the rape of dolores even when it's occurring almost in front of them; but, 2) even if they were to perceive these things, what the analyst can offer is really just an alternate version of the same sort of disciplinary ordering that humbert tries to subject dolores to, only with the definition of order or normality or health coming from a whole social matrix rather than from one man. analogously, humbert can wield the threat of child protective services against dolores, because although it would remove her from his control, she would be at the mercy of a different source of violence, namely the state. in this way, of course, humbert's abuse and rape of dolores is not actually oppositional to but metonymic of these broader structures of violence, control, and coercion, which fits also with the way we can read his use of the father role as pointing to the violence inherent to the patriarchal family structure and specifically the father-daughter relationship.

this sort of interrogation of the relationship between institutional violence and coercion and humbert's rape of dolores is pushed even further, i think, when we consider psychiatry as a subset of medical practice, and medicine's role in the book. most obviously, there is humbert's use of psychotropic drugs in his attempt to rape dolores the first time; drugging her is something he previously fantasised about and practiced by administering sleeping pills to charlotte. but the book is also littered with medical intervention that humbert perceives as akin to, or symbolic of, sexual violation. when humbert visits quilty's dentist uncle, for example, he says that the uncle perceived his mouth as "a splendid cave full of priceless treasures", but that humbert "denied him access". his arrest he describes as "surrendering like a patient". describing the moments of "paradise" he experienced sometimes after raping dolores, he compares her to "a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation". this obviously recalls humbert's own willingness to drug dolores in order to rape her; however, it also suggests that there is a very real way in which medical intervention—frequently coercive, invasive, authoritarian, &c—is itself already a site of bodily violation and violence. once again, the institution or the social ordering of a relationship—doctor–patient, father–daughter—is an obfuscatory device. the relation creates and enables violence, then defines it out of existence. in 'lolita', humbert's ultimate use of this process is through the re-naming of dolores and his continuous efforts to force her to become the 'nymphet', a figure that replaces 'child' and re-defines her as seductive, otherworldly, &c.

i think this is also something nabokov plays with in humbert's and dolores's travels westward. humbert sees america generally as coarser, less well-mannered, and more unruly than the continent. thus, he perceives their travels as taking them outside the bounds of the social limitations and norms that could prevent or frown upon his rape of dolores: the school, the neighbours, and so forth. but this is clearly at odds with both his continued reliance on the father–daughter relationship in order to abuse dolores, and the fact that westward expansion never simply meant encountering a 'wilderness', but overruling whatever did exist before and installing the very social forms and institutions that, in the novel, enable humbert's rape and abuse of dolores: the state, the family, and so forth. in other words, humbert perceives his movement west as escaping some strictures of modern sexual mores and interference; in his mind, then, the 'conquering' of land is continuous with the sexual abuse of a girl. what nabokov points out is that, although humbert is not in fact 'escaping' into a wilder world, he is in some ways correct to perceive this broader project of expansion west as enabling rape, situated in the context of the broader violence of such expansion. for nabokov this can all be contextualised, i think, as part of the overarching centuries-long post-enlightenment discourses of ordering, controlling, and disciplining nature (which itself is often spoken of in the feminine), where humbert embraces and extolls such acts of discipline and control so long as he is their director, and opposes them only insofar as he perceives them as challenging his own authority—as in the case of his fear and disdain of psychoanalysis.

also: since you are the person who introduced me to tlt–lolita readings, i'm not sure if you've written about this, but it did seem to me like the narrative use of swordfighting in 'gideon the ninth' is expanding on how nabokov uses tennis in 'lolita'. i'm thinking of tennis as a measure by which humbert tries to discipline dolores, hence the emphasis on symmetry and, eg, his pride at having apparently taught her the "continental method" of retrieving a tennis ball with her racket/foot: again, trying to instill refined and ordered european manners over what he sees as her unruly american nature. in comparison, for gideon, refining her swordfighting and learning new techniques is essentially training her body to be first a soldier in the cohort, then a cavalier destined for the 'cannibalistic' death of harrow's lyctorhood. so, the way that humbert is trying to destroy dolores and replace her with lolita, gideon is being trained to become a weapon and a tool of empire (also re-named), with muir again suggesting that these forms of violence are continuous, can represent one another in a narrative, and exist in a causal relation where imperial expansion creates sexual violence. i also suspect there's a close read to be done here comparing the passages that describe dolores's movements on the tennis court to the ones in gtn focussing on gideon's and the other cavaliers' exact fighting techniques; i'm not sure what a person would find exactly lol, but i suspect there's something interesting there.

[cripp-tid]

you've got to be fucking kidding me

[sendme-2hell]

Ranking the books I read in April

aka just ranting about the books I read in april pls ignore me

1. The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson 

I cannot believe this book wasn’t nominated for a Hugo! I like the Hugo list (of the books I’ve read) but cmon. This book is like if you combined the social commentary in The City We Became and the queerness of Harrow the Ninth. Seriously this book had everything I wanted: parallel universes, great character development, social commentary, woc sapphic slow burn, satisfying ending. Also I feel like the title is paying homage to W. E. Dubois which is cool. “Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: How does it feel to be a problem?” Like there is just this very cool idea of talking about other worlds as in literally other universes but also different worlds due to social and racial hierarchies. 

2. Plain Bad Heroines - Emily m. Danforth 

Horror, Hollywood, boarding school, everyone is gay, the narrator talks directly to the reader and it is hilarious, copious footnotes, have I mentioned how many sapphics there are? It’s hard to keep track. Plus polyamory. I just really loved this book and I felt it all came together in a way that was worth it. 

3. Steel Crow Saga - Paul Krueger 

This godamn book. I loved this book so much. I was so ready to yell about it on tumblr and tell people to read it. But apparently the author is someone who has harassed a lot of women so...uh...yeah. Nevermind I guess.

 I do want to say it is the most accurate depicition of a Sherlock Holmes superfan that I have ever seen in media. 

4. The Tiger’s Daughter - K. Arsenault Rivera

What if we went on a long trip on horseback and we were both lesbian warriors...jk unless…

Yeah so I loved this book so much. A lot of it is about navigating familial responsibility, fighting literal and metaphorical demons, fighting the patriarchy, fighting your anger, fighting tigers, etc...and yet I kept thinking to myself “this is the most romantic book I have ever read” and honestly I am gonna stick by that. It also has the “you think me a monster so I will become one” trope which is great. It is set in an Asian-based fantasy world and I did read a goodreads review that said it was as accurate to the countries it draws inspiration from as Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse is to the Russian and Scandinavian cultures it takes from. So that’s not great. 

5. Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo

Speaking of! A few months ago I tried to read Shadow and Bone in preparation for the tv show and I could not finish it. The writing was...bad. Anyway I really liked Six of Crows and even though, yeah it’s tropey (I’m looking at you, Helnik backstory), there’s a reason those tropes work. Plus you cannot go wrong with a heist. About halfway through I did realize that there are six mcs and three couples so its kinda just like a giant triple date, which really changed how I read the whole story.

I’m very glad I did read it before seeing the tv show because I was able to be appropriately excited for the Crows and catch the Wylan reference and everything, but I also got to see the Alina stuff without having to read about it. 

6. Crooked  Kingdom - Leigh Bardugo 

I think I somehow liked this even more than Six of Crows, but for narrative simplicity I’ll put it after. I really like it when you put people in an impossible situation and see how they figure it out. Especially if they get out in a clever and reasonably possible way that ties together many different plot threads and has a few good fake-outs. This did all of that, and also developed every character in a way I found satisfying (except [redacted] *cry emoji*). 

Kaz pulls a Baru Cormorant with some money stuff and now I wonder if they would be friends. 

I read this after watching the show which was good because I knew who Zoya and Genya were but bad because there is a point where Nina is like “here is how shadow and bone ends.” She’s just talking to Mattias and casually spoiling everything for me. So there goes my dreams of living spoiler free until the end of the show. 

7. The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Emily m Danforth

My expectations for this book were....very different than it turned out, and I’m glad for it. After reading Plain Bad Heroines I shouldn’t have been surprised at how well written it is. I really appreciated how nuanced it is. It doesn’t spell out its ideas or themes and therefore lets you really sit with them. I would rank it higher but I don’t really enjoy reading about high school. 

8. Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennett

I love a good found family, especially if at the beginning of the book they are on opposing sides. Enemies to friends = best trope! Also it’s sapphic that’s always good. But the best part of this book was the worldbuilding which was so cool. 

9. Malice - Heather Walter

Remember what I was saying about “you think me a monster so I will become one”? This book is the definition of that trope. Women becoming unhinged after being treated like shit, we love to see it! Especially if it’s gay. I do have to say, authors who write duologies where the first book ends on a cliffhanger, I see what you’re doing but yes, I will be preordering the next book. 

10. Fugitive Telemetry - Martha Wells

I don’t have much to say because Murderbot is so consistently excellent.  uh why is it so cathartic when xenophobes disrespect Murderbot and it’s humans step in and shut that shit down. Gets me every single time. 

11. Queen of Coins and Whispers - Helen Corcoran 

This book was like half romance half politics and unfortunately I did not find the politics that interesting or well written. But the romance was A+. It reminded me of Priory of the Orange Tree a LOT. Though significantly less dragons and I’m taking many points off for that. 

12. The First Sister - Linden A. Lewis

I wanted to like this book a little more than I did. There was just maybe too much body horror for me. Interesting characters and world though. There was  a location named Cytherea that they mentioned a lot and it was very distracting. I guess I still have tlt brainrot. 

13. Shorefall - Robert Jackson Bennett 

I think this book was well plotted out but it didn’t quite have my attention like Foundryside did. Also yet another book where a woman’s girlfriend ends up in her head. This time no one had to die so that’s nice. TM and SD take notes! 

14. The Deathless Girls - Kiran Milwood Hargrave 

Ok I LOVED the Mercies by KMH so I was a little disappointed in this Dracula retelling. It got interesting in the last 50 pages, but unfortunately that is not enough for me.

proud of myself for not reading a single straight book this April 

[ghostmartyr]

/clears throat/ so, Immi, I hear you like the locked tomb, which is fantastic! from one person also escaping the snk series into TLT to another, what did you think of the characters and plot in HtN? are there any things you're most excited to see when Alecto comes out in 2022?

-pats lifeboat- This baby can fit so much trauma.

SPOILERS, naturally.

With another paragraph informing the curious that unspoiled is the way to go into HtN, since if you aren’t lost and confused, are you really reading Harrow the Ninth?

I read it all in one day, and that was a choice. It does mean my memory and understanding of what all went on is slightly dependent on someone else on the internet exploding over a particular set of paragraphs and explaining their significance to me, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

HtN disappointed me on one front in that I was hoping seeing more of Harrow 1.0 would help out any future fic endeavors. On everything else, like the first one, being told the story is such a good time that I’m willing to wait on a full comprehension of where it’s going.

I also really like second person.

What I loved most about HtN is how even without Gideon mentioned until very, very late in the book, you can feel her absence everywhere. In the wrong bubble flashbacks you’re commanded to examine the strangeness, but even in Harrow going about her day, the isolation and the wrongness of it decorate her every action. She’s alone, and she shouldn’t be, and the loss she’s unaware of bleeds into a constant echo of grief.

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated absence as a narrative tool so much. Obviously griddlehark hours go hard once they start in HtN, but even before then, there is so much power to their connection that looking into a world where it never exists still manages to punch you in the heart with how much each one inhabits everything the other is.

The whole series is amping me up with a few thoughts on loneliness, honestly. Gideon and Harrow grow up alone on the Ninth, save for each other. It takes leaving for that to be any kind of good thing. The first book is tag team Among Us with everyone in their little clusters, slowly learning what other people are about as they all drop dead.

The second book has a different vibe and different plot things going on, but it’s similar in that the protagonist gets thrown into a world they don’t fit and have to put on a show. Only now there are even fewer people to familiarize with, with that number correlating directly to how they all killed the person closest to keeping them from being alone.

Lyctorhood is taking the person dearest to your heart and trapping them there forever while they’re stripped of everything that made them who they are.

...Also Ianthe is there.

Gideon, Mercy, and Augustine are the last Lyctors standing after 10,000 years. There were only seven, starting out. Sixteen acolytes who came to the First. The only pair who didn’t succeed in condensing themselves is separated from the pack and sent to live away from their peers on a tiny planet that no one has anything good to say about.

Alecto is John’s -- who even knows, past A Lot, and he puts her to sleep and locks her in a prison no one but he can get past.

God has seven friends. More if you want to count the people in the Cohort, but realistically, he has seven friends. Then they keep dying.

Harrow spends HtN in a spaceship with five people.

One is trying to kill her.

One ordered that one to try to kill her.

Two could not care less about the useless baby Lyctor.

One is Ianthe.

There is no real endgame. There is surviving life, and life has become a game of running as far away as possible so you don’t share your ruin upon your inevitable death.

It’s bleak and sad.

Harrow’s healthiest relationships are with dead people, and some of them she didn’t know at all in life.

Reiterating it, the most plot significant bit of the world is finding someone else in the world, swearing yourself to them, and smashing your souls together until you’ve lost the connection entirely.

My brain’s not in the best place so I can’t do more than gesture loudly at it, but a few people have mentioned that the series’ thesis is a counter to Ianthe’s statement that love is acquisitive.

Harrow tightens her hold around Gideon until Gideon would rather she just strangle her and get it over with, all things considered. It fucks them both up, and when they start working to get past it, circumstance wraps a chain around both their throats.

The necromancers who become imperfect Lyctors have all acquired their cavaliers, and besides the cav, it kills that bond.

Harrow’s rejection of that is why Gideon’s soul is still in the world of the living (and John blood).

She has spent her entire life eating pieces of Gideon to keep herself a horrid imitation of whole, and when she is finally offered that, she refuses.

Grief and how Harrow just can’t are active elements of the book, and Magnus gives her more therapy in five minutes talking about it than she has ever had in her life, but the reason why that isn’t the end of Gideon is because, unlike all the other Lyctors, Harrow turns the offer down.

With the exception of Babs and Ianthe, the relationship between cavaliers and necros about to do the Lyctor thing is cavaliers promising to burn for an eternity while their necromancer lives off the fumes.

Fuck that is Harrow’s response.

Cytherea says, in the aftermath, that they had the choice to stop.

Harrow stops.

A lifetime of doing exactly what Gideon is telling her to do with her death, and Harrow chooses to stop.

Harrow remembers Ortus’ poetry. She regularly sees her congregation off to their deaths. She keeps Gideon’s glasses. She views Palamedes, head exploded and all, as an infinitely better person than she is because of the quality of his exemplary character. She pulls Gideon the First from the incinerator on the night she plans to kill him.

Kiddo has so many fucking issues, but somewhere, she has learned to respect people for being people. That’s why she and Gideon are the heroes of the story, ultimately, and Ortus saying that they’re heroes worthy of the Ninth doesn’t fall flat. They’re actually trying.

Where that puts us for Alecto, I don’t pretend to know.

Since the first book is the temptation of an end to isolation, only to have it snatched away, the second book is the continuation of isolation with a few promising sparks of human connection that pave the way for hope...

That leaves the third book to shed the isolation and allow the connections to thrive.

With Gideon and Harrow MIA.

I know that the books kick things up into high gear in the final acts each time, but if they’re both gone for the majority of the book, no matter how much fun it is, I’m going to miss them. They’re the core leads, and I don’t want to be without them in the final part.

The 2022 release date has aged my soul. I deliberately planned my GtN read to land a month before HtN came out, then suffered when that was delayed. When really that was nothing at all. I hate waiting.

(Insert note that I’m very glad they aren’t forcing Muir to rush anything out. It’s been a rough time, but also, just in general authors should have the opportunity to create the best versions of their art they can, so the extra time hurts, but it’s obviously for the best.)

What I’m most excited for is probably the cover art. The first two have been awesome, and the artist said he’d likely do print sales for all three when the third’s revealed. My wallet cries but my heart does not.

What I dare not be excited for is the potential for Gideon and Harrow meeting again and perhaps hugging. In their own bodies.

I’d take other bodies, but ideally, y’know.

Also I would love for Harrow to finally meet her popsicle girlfriend.

I doubt it would be a wholly positive experience, but by golly I want it. Maybe they could hug too. It would probably kill Harrow again, but who doesn’t expect several people to die again in the third book?

However it plays out, I’m expecting to enjoy AtN. The writing’s the sort that I’ll happily follow wherever it goes. For everything else, there’s fanfic. The only real worry I have is the whole book will be narrated by Ianthe, and while I mentally groan at that, I actually find Ianthe’s commentary delightful, so even in the worst case scenario I’m having a good time.

Thank you so much for the ask.

[acerbaa]

prologue/chapter 1 commentary

prologue

wonder what bell terciel uses to banish kerrigor. having a hard time matching it to any descriptions

this must be nuts from the midwife’s pov. a woman comes, gives birth, dies. then a weirdly pale man shows up and makes you baptize the dead baby. he goes into death, comes back, and ask you if you see the resemblance between himself and the kid. maybe you can, but only after death has yoinked the color from the baby’s skin

(attached to “i am abhorsen… father of sabriel”) OUGH. parenthood and duty! he is an abhorsen before he is a father. it’s one of the first things we learn about him, and it also comes again directly in the scene where he talks about being an absent parent. also the fact that he calls himself abhorsen— he has been so pulled into his job that he is no longer terciel

chapter 1

THEY HAVE ROME???

GOTHIC???

lowkey want to see one of the abhorsens go into an insane fit of grief and try to bring someone back from the dead, or try tlt-style magic. i wonder if beguiling corpses exist or could be made to exist in this universe.

thinking about lived-in worlds. both abhorsen and the silt verses have excellent worldbuilding but idk if abhorsen feels lived in the same way tsv does

the fact that the narration specifically calls out terciel’s sending as being like a piece of night sky cut so there are no stars. something something ninth gate and the living world. the sending has not passed to the stars

questions about abhorsen necromancy/free magic necromancy, but I think I’m just forgetting things

decided to reread sabriel because i’m on a plane and need something to do, + have been wanting to do an annotated reread for a while. will update with commentary 👍

[just-honey-dewd]

Alastor’s Game Commentary

For anyone interested in Hazbin Hotel or anything from The Living Tombstone, listen to this song if you haven’t already. Got that classic TLT style to it like their older songs.

Now this is more of an attempt at pinpointing fascinating, plausible implications to take from this song, though it’s not confirmed to be canon. Personally, I feel there’s a likely chance that this song got the same treatment that Silva Hound’s “Addict” got -- where Viv had provided them with lore to do with Angel Dust’s character to better write the song.

So this commentary will be focusing on potential lore and will be under the impression that this could provide information about Alastor and his methods of deal-making.

If we were to take that song as canon, it'd imply that:

Alastor can go to the mortal realm and, for some reason, only does his damage by making deals with mortals. Whether it's because it's far more beneficial for him in the long run, heaven would do something if he did anything violent, or he can't actually do anything to them even if he tried is up in the air. How he could have access to the mortal realm is even more unclear.

He refers to himself as their "first last resort". He is a human's first exposure to hell in a sense, and considering he's the type to approach desperate or wanting opportunists, he'd definitely be considered a last resort. Last resorts tend to lead to morally questionable actions, which is the basis of what hell is. So Alastor is simply their first leap into the rabbit hole which is hell. 

Alastor essentially supplies these mortals with endless entertainment for the rest of their lives in return for their endless servitude in hell. Smart, considering with his influence, he'll guarantee they end up in hell to pay off his side of the deal -- so there's no losing on his end. I wonder why people would ever resort to making deals with him considering how upfront the song makes him seem about his intentions and plans for them in the afterlife.

Alastor’s constant switch in tone is an obvious reflection of his two distinct personas: the jolly, endearing radio show host, and the bloodthirsty, sadistic predator. I like the way TLT displayed this by using soft easy-going swing for the former, and comparatively heavy rock and distortion for the latter. The song supports the thesis that the radio show persona is more of a necessary cover to avoid scaring off people with only bits and pieces of his true nature showing, while his predator-like nature seems to display his truer, more sinister character.

To some extent, Alastor is fascinated by how ordinary people could go about living their mundane, “cozy“ lives without dying (of boredom). Alastor, after having indulged himself in his sadistic pleasures throughout his human and demon life, dehumanized himself so far to the point that he lost any semblance or tie to normalcy -- and as a result, lost his humanity. While this line was said more as a way to transition to appeal to his clients’ inner vices, there’s a saying that “the best lie contains an element of truth” and I believe that can be applied to Alastor’s deceptive nature, that a part of him is at least a bit curious of what it was like to be human -- after the eternity of indulging in his vices lost its entertainment value.

He really leans into the gambling aspect of deal-making, with his frequent mentions of cards, poker chips, double-dealing (considered the easiest and most common types of cheating in poker), quite a bit of terminology you'd hear in a gambling house. He always wins, probably because of his dirty tactics and his method of arranging contracts.  The gambling motif is prevalent in his character as Charlie has to take her chances with him -- at the risk of him jeopardizing her rehabilitation plan, but also possibly bringing in some attention (and people) to the hotel -- and his connections with Husk -- who likely gambled his soul away for the impulsive thrill of possibly winning big against Alastor. In the pilot, we already witness him using the shady tactic of impressing and wowing Charlie to blind her skepticism/suspicion of him -- which leaves him currently with the advantage as of now.

When he says "Play your cards wrong, and I'll see you soon", he intentionally phrases it as though the client has a chance to win big on their arrangement. Until the very end where their lives come to an end, does he make it apparent that he has cursed them for life -- and they are forever in his debt.

At the very end of his deals, once he's finished using his victims, he gives them a friendly handshake for the "good game" they played, puts it forward that they were already playing a losing game, calls their life long gamble and loss an amusement, and finally, gives them a quick glimmer of hope -- that he'll still be there for them in hell -- only to disappear on them without a trace. 

This song in itself, could be a retelling to his eternal victims of how apparent his intentions were for them at the very start -- and how blindly they took his offer and hurt others without an ounce of empathy. At this point, he's reprimanding them by sardonically rubbing it in their faces that they truly lost everything all for something so insignificant as earthly indulgences -- toys he calls them. Was it really worth the life of sin? 

[thatneoncrisis]

oh ur tlt characters of colour post is very good. i do have some thoughts, especially as a maori woman who is still living in aotearoa. and rlly like if we didn’t have the nona art, i’d say that there’s so many mixed maori people. i know so many “white” maoris, that it’s who you are, not what you look like (insert the cup of tea metaphor). having said that, i wouldn’t be shocked if harrow being a necromancer is why she’s such a. grey colour. but really i merely wouldn’t take the covers at their art (see rf kuang’s recent ‘i didn’t have the courage to say no about my cover art’). the one thing i wish i could say to fan artists however is stop drawing harrow and gideon like they’re black. we have such different facial features to ppl of african descent. holy fuck. embrace round shapes and softness. embrace warm shaded skin tones and look at actual maori actors (this isn’t specific to you. just this has become me complaining now). i much prefer seeing darker g+h but the amount of like. the person who is drawing harrowhark has never seen anyone maori is unreal (yes, i know a maori and black person can exist, and they do— but statistically, unlikely, considering how heavily polynesian these books are).

however to stress again. not abt ur tlt art. i think it’s super cute. ur nona is adorable.

im gonna post this without much commentary bc youre more of an authority on this than me. i Will make the side comment that when i read tazs comment about harrow and gideon being mixed maori i specifically thought of harrow as maori and indian which is why i draw her and nona with darker skin. when people here mixed they just kind of default to half white and i think thats kinda dumb but its whatever. and obviously it doesnt matter if youre white passing youre still maori, but just going off the text it feels weird how like. tentative taz is about just Saying that they are brown

and yeah in general id say in a lot of fan spaces people will hear a character has dark skin and default to just drawing a black person, it happens with jeannemary, the second and g1deon/pyrrha a lot pertaining to these books but like. we look different! someone whos tongan or samoan doesnt look black! there are differences you can make more substantial in the way you draw their eyes and brows and the color of their lips and skintone.

and actually i got some of my nona art reposted on reddit and one of the comments launching this big argument was "why did op make her african" and it really bugged me. not all africans are black, not all dark skinned people are black, not all black people are darkskinned, you Only said that bc i made her dark brown its so stupid

but ultimately this is only advice someone will take to heart if they Want to learn so its like whatever

[thatneoncrisis]

20 questions for 20 writers!

tagged by @waitineedaname thxx

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

21 works, i feel like thats a healthy number

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

i have 439,385 words, a very large chunk of that is from We Have Always Lived in the Apartment

3. What fandoms do you write for?

right now its the locked tomb, used to be homestuck, i have some crossovers with the magnus archives and one with john dies at the end

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

We Have Always Lived in the Apartment -- TLT horror mystery modern au

Insert Jesus Allegory Here -- solkat focused continuation of karkats pesterquest route, i NEED my new fics to get more popular than this oh my god

Gehenna the First -- TLT houseswap au with harrow as god

the gap between a tragedy and comedy (in this life its just you and me) -- TLT coffee shop au.

What's Eating Gideon Nav?  -- TLT catholic boarding school horror au

5. Do you respond to comments?

not typically, theres some weird thing with my head where i kind of hate that it counts my comments in the total comment amount. i cant explain it i just dont like how it looks, plus just repeating variations of "thank you!!" feels hollow after a while. im more likely to answer direct questions about the story rather than general commentary i do love talking about my thought process and intentions

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

ok so i cant actually tell you this because none of those fics are Done yet but all you need to know is that i consider all of my TLT fics tragedies to some extent. take that as you will. i dont even Like the word angst really it portends a level of melodrama id like to avoid

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I'd say its a dead tie between A Brief Lesson In The Occult and Shit. Let’s Build A Fort. i can barely look at these anymore and if you read them and feel compelled to tell me you like them: dont. i can do better now

8. Do you get hate on fics?

never to my knowledge has anyone ever publicly disliked one of my fics. in fact sometimes i dream about someone posting it in their discord group chat and making fun of it because im so curious about what theyd say

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

yes i have. i do it almost exclusively as satire or character analysis as i find like, the physicality of sex to be inherently kind of goofy. liek the second you have to describe a dick or boobs with words the magic is gone it just becomes weird silly looking flesh. so i like focusing on weird and bad sex, unsatisfying or clumsy sex. sex that changes you in no significant way

10. Do you write crossovers?

yes i have. A Brief Disappearance and Statement of David Wong are both TMA/JDATE crossovers and i DID write a homestuck/TMA crossover but its not on my ao3 i guess? odd

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

no? does that happen?

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

i think once someone asked but i have no clue if it happened

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

@notedchampagne is my co producer in all things forever but ive basically written everything myself and they help polish it up

14. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

shiiiiiiite uh. jade/davepeta still means a lot to me. i think there are a lot of really engaging ships in TLT but i always kind of default to griddlehark i just kind of understand them the best

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

eventually SAM and i would like to circle back to our fanventure Therapystuck but we both got really busy with school, work and a general lull in the HS fandom. also maybe someday ill go back to Insert Jesus Allegory Here i liked the direction of the story i just have to get myself back in that headspace. being into homestuck Does something to you, like psychologically

16. What are your writing strengths?

after asking some friends theyve told me im good at tone, prose, funny metaphors, and dialogue but a caveat for the last thing as "I have yet to see how your Own guys talk and how you'd handle distinct voices from scratch so I'm only giving you about 80%"

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

i hate like. writing Around the important bits of a scene. i love the physicality of characters and what it reveals about them, along with pieces of the scene the narration deems important or interesting enough to mention to the audience. but im always worried im jsut fucking yapping. also i hate like, political scenes theres a rhythm to them that i dont quite understand. people sitting around using specific language that Feels important in a way that doesnt make it clear im bullshitting like 99% of what theyre talking about

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

AHAH. GOD. i actually looked this up the other day because theres an original story i want to write where i want to make it clear theyre basically speaking french the whole time, even though its written in english. i only speak english (i took some french in hs, its left me though i want to pick it up again) so i wouldnt know anything about how it reads to polyglots but i guess theres really only so much you can do outside of literally learning a new language just to write a story for free. ive seen a whole host of tips so i gues sit just matters how you employ them

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Homestuck. my only regret is that i wasnt a better writer

20. Favorite fic you’ve written?

FUCK christ uuuuh. favorite right Now would be The Apartment but EVENTUALLY id like it to be Gehenna the First because its the hardest to write and i need it to pay off. if you havent read it uhhh. hi. hello. you should do that. i think its really cool and fun and junk

CHRIST who to tag i dont follow big writers uuuh @tranquilitybasehotelcasino and @accidentallyadorable sure have fun