It’s a cradle creature
Just bought the paperback of Harrow, and uh…new conspiracy just dropped.
Five pages earlier:
Valency’s description from her portrait:
QED red hair and martial prowess runs in the family 🤷♀️
harrow the ninth is really like. what if orpheus didn't turn around. what if he wasn't going to turn around. what if he kept his face pointed resolutely ahead and trusted that she was there even not knowing what he was hoping for. what if orpheus had to be cajoled and threatened and eventually forced to turn around. what if eurydice hadn't been told the rules and also had a crippling fear of abandonment and spent the whole time pleading with him to look at her. what if orpheus trusted that she would follow him but eurydice couldn't trust that he would care. what if orpheus was told point-blank that eurydice was almost certainly not actually behind him and he chose to keep walking anyway. what if eurydice touched sunlight again and orpheus wasn't there. what then.
twitter got it first, but happy late Father’s Day to pyrrha “never could help giving the girls what they wanted” dve
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ALT"It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”
- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)
i feel like we, as a fandom, gloss over the scene where palamedes brings “dulcinea” tea.
he knows the real dulcie dislikes it when people bring her tea!!! he’s judging cytherea’s response! he’s starting to figure things out before abigail and magnus are even killed!
an excerpt from dulcie’s letter in the mysterious study of doctor sex (which everyone should read, by the way):
in conclusion: WHAT A MAN
Further adventures in TLT brainrot
(Like, hyuuge spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Go read them, then report back here for indoctrination.)
I've got a theory about the missing days between GTN and HTN, why Harrow instructs her future self to use blood on the sword, and how Blood of Eden ties into everything.
Two puzzle pieces that have been rotating in my brain nonstop since last September:
- We Suffer saying they had thought Wake's mission to the Ninth House was a failure, "Until the posthumous contact a year ago."
- Pyrrha saying, "Why the hell did John let her bring the kid’s body? He must have known that Blood of Eden would go apeshit the moment they saw it."
So here's my theory:
Did we do a whole mini photoshoot?
Yes.
Is this random picture we took in the bathroom of the restaurant we ate at afterward the best picture?
Absolutely.
Today in The Locked Tomb brainrot
Was discussing wall paint colours with friends today and we got talking about when "hospital green" becomes palatable enough that you can call it "mint" or "seafoam" and...
Seafoam green...
![Screencap of a line from Harrow the Ninth: "House ribbons of pale [emphasis added] seafoam green".](https://64.media.tumblr.com/211c072e9ecf6ba5f86791cd6cfb8f70/0d82ebe0e5881b2d-59/s400x600/d84e7ba3d9c0fd8bbe61c2c8f6f14403e9d5f47c.png)
ALTOH MY GOD
ALTI don't know much about Tamsyn Muir's life experiences, but SO MUCH of her writing gives me the vibes of someone who's made brief, intense, ride-or-die week-long friendships with the other people in their hospital ward. Big "Hey! How's day two with your colostomy bag?" energy. As a crip: she just writes like a crip, you know what I'm saying?
ANYWAY. Back to seafoam green!
This shade is important because it's the opposite colour of blood. If you're, say, a surgeon, and you've been staring inside a human body for so long that seeing fine detail is hard, you can make your eyes re-adjust more easily by feasting your eyes a lighter version of red's complimentary colour: green.
Thus, seafoam green became the default colour of surgical theatres and surgical scrubs for a good long while, and since hospitals had so much green fabric and paint lying around... pale green has kind of become the official background colour of the alienation and disorientation of being a patient in a medical institution.
Great branding, Seventh House!
Oh and THEN
ALTGOD DAMMIT PYRRHA
Anonymous asked:
How was John supposed to use necromancy to save Earth? It's much broader in scope than necromancy in other fantasies, but there's still nothing I can think of that would reverse climate change or clean up the environment. I guess he could take over the world with a massive resurrection cult and force people to stop polluting, but that seems slow for such an urgent problem.
racefortheironthrone answered:
Heh. Yeah, there is something of a disconnect there that I feel gets brought up in the text of the John sections, that it’s not entirely clear how John’s magic is supposed to help beyond a general messianism, although at least Cassiopeia asks if its possible. I’m not entirely sure within the paradigm of bone-flesh-spirit magic, but then again we know from HTN that John’s not entirely constrained within that paradigm.
It’s hard to grok what non-destructive world-saving ends necromancy might have because John’s awful imperial engine emphasizes the terrible parts of it.
It seems to me that the necromancy we see in the books is very nearly a sideshow; it’s only possible for people who are absolutely marinating in thanergy all the time, which is a situation that only occurs if its made to do so via atrocity. The fancy bone constructs, the supercharged Second House cavs, the rending peoples souls from their body, the Beguiling Corpse, soul siphoning, it all relies on what for lack of a better term I’m going to call a perversion of the natural world. Using it to heal is considered such a weird outlier that in Gideon the Ninth the term “medical necromancy” is treated as a but absurd.
The necromancy that John gets, on the other hand, is very clearly rooted in thalergy, with the thanergy stuff being a weird outlier. He manipulates the stuff of life. He cures cancer! (And of course the fact that he can do that makes Cytherea’s ten thousand years of torment truly ghastly.) His corpse manipulation involves him warding the bodies against decay and making them clean again, which means he’s doing a LOT of stuff with bacteria. His big show with turning the cows into a meat shield? Yeah, that’s gross... but you know what else it is? It’s him taking a huge amount of living biomass and reshaping it to his own ends.
A very creatively minded person might start asking John “Does that scale? If so, how high? You did it with cows, can you do it with plants? How many plants? I have some very smart people in a lab who are working feverishly on a new kind of fern that grows rapidly and traps carbon; if we can produce a single example of it and give you, like, twenty million tons of moss, can you make hundreds of thousands of the ferns from them? Can you regrow coral? If this is limited to living fleshy biomass, like the cows, can you do things like alter various animals to resist climate change or even turn into little bio-reactors that mitigate it? I have some crackerjack geneticists on the line here, if they show you a DNA molecule can you replicate it? Can you alter human lungs to breath methane?”
John might have literally been able to walk through a blasted desert and have flowers bloom from his footsteps. We don’t know because trying that doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.
Part of the tragedy of John’s little cult is that its a bunch of MDs, engineers, artists, and a couple finance people. Where are the ecologists? Where are the geneticists? The zoologists? The botanists? Hell, he could have benefited greatly from an expert in political economy!
Instead we got what we got.
I think you're quite right - but if we're talking thanergy, my mind goes straight to Cyanobacteria, the things that kicked off the Great Oxidation Event, i.e the single biggest transformation of CO2 into 02 in the history of the planet.
I have further thoughts I'll elaborate on but the simplest one: There are two things stopping us, right now, from stopping climate change. One is capitalism, and one is inertia. The dog-and-pony-show of necromancy can help with the latter ("oh gosh you know i'd LOVE to bring mammoths back but we'd need to secure space for them to live" etc etc), and just let the trillionaires leave john. just let them go. they can leave and we can fix the earth without them.
anyway.
I'm not an ecologist but I am ecology-adjacent (ie, animal welfare) and I think we can boil down the drivers in the environmental crisis to three main things:
- Energy production. Extracting or using most of our energy sources right now is a huge, huge driver in CO2 etc. Solution: Sustainable energy.
- Food production. I am not saying we have too many people, I am saying agriculture right now is incredibly destructive and inefficient. Massive amounts of food are produced to either a) never get eaten or b) be eaten by livestock at a rough 90% loss of energy. (And I'm not saying 'go vegan' either, I'm saying eat less animal products. Not none, just less. Source it locally and/or from producers whose animals are fed on things inedible by humans.) Our monocultures are phenomenally destructive to the ecosystem on micro and macro scales. Etc. Solution(s): Reframing of how we produce food and what foods we produce; increased local/community food production; diversifying food, etc.
- Ecosystem fragmentation/extraction of resources/housing. This one's hard to sum up but it all fits together: Just because there is greenery in a city (which is A VERY GOOD START) doesn't mean it's suitable habitat for native wildlife. Especially in the US, urban sprawl is a very real thing and it very much continues to fragment already piecemeal habitats, driving wildlife into conflict with humans. Tree farms are great for problem #1, but are horrible replacements for old growth forests and aren't so hot at carbon sequestration either. Not only where we live but what we make our buildings from affects ecosystems, and we're not putting nearly enough thought into either. Solutions: This is the big one. #1 and #2 might be solvable in a capitalist framework, but this one involves completely overhauling how humans (especially western civ humans) interact with everything, including each other.
Coming back to tlt:
- It's not that I can't come up with necromantic energy solutions it's that a) we very much have the ability to switch over to sustainable energy and b) John himself seems to be a perpetual motion machine. Hook him up to a generator.
- I 100% THINK FOOD PRODUCTION IS GOING TO COME UP IN ALECTO. But anyway, John can cure cancer, can John cause cancer? Runaway muscle growth with no obligatory increase in food? Lab grown meat? Percentages vary based on what you count as "carbon emissions due to livestock" but if we could massively reduce our reliance on animal meat, that would be huge. John plays with bacteria, does John play with fungi? Can John tap into the mycorrhizal networks and make them, well 1 be massive carbon sinks, but 2, provide much more nutrients to our agriculture? Disease resistant nutritionally complete rice????
- Yeah no I'm still on revolution for this one.
But yeah. From fairly early in John's chapters it becomes clear that he has no real interest in saving Earth. Cool Sexy TM Activism TM, yes. Actual earth saving, no.
It's not that John couldn't save Earth with his new powers. It's that he doesn't.
I am an ecologist and my theory is that Alecto gave John his powers so he could cover the last gaps in his cryonics and get humans into space. The Earth can break down pollution. It can break down CO2. It can regrow environments and evolve creatures that will thrive in the new one. Earth’s been through multiple mass extinctions and has shaken off every one. The problem is that Earth needs time to do each of those things. What we’re doing right now is essentially turning all the faucets on full blast while the Earth tries to mop. So I can see why Alecto would go for “just get humanity off Earth for a bit” as a solution. It’s not like she knows what industrialization is, or capitalism. She’s just in pain.
Frankly, I don’t think they even needed to leave Earth. They could have just used necromancy to patch the gaps, set up a bunch of cryo labs across the globe, and waited it out. A millennium or two of radically reduced emissions, and Earth would be down to pre-industrial levels by the time the ten billion were ready to come back out. All John needed to do was buy time.
It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems causing climate change, because Alecto doesn’t know what those are and didn’t give him powers for that, but if we’re talking about things John’s powers can do to reverse the process it’s a valid option. Just turn off the taps and let it dry. And he couldn’t even do that right.
So I have been listening to these books at work so have a work doodle of my favorite pains in each other's asses 💜
look i love the nova au but i am firmly of the opinion that it wouldn't work realistically because gideon would still be the same disaster idiot she is now, just with added baggage. can you imagine being harrow, a person who has never not taken things seriously in your entire life, and having your sacred office usurped by gideon nav? i would bet money that gideon doesn't make it to 13 years old. she makes one too many boner jokes and harrow nova fully snaps and kills her with her bare hands.
if the locked tomb had a live action or animated adaptation, i think season 2 should start with “previously on the locked tomb…” and just show a false recap of scenes that never happened
tfw ur buddy varun the eater promises not to do anything weird but then something weird happens anyway