#the unwanted guest spoilers

[juno-infernal]

feeling normal in the club tonight

[felidaefatigue]

more buckwild tlt nontheories;

cytherea mentions she 'kept' dulcie up until the furnance but that she was dead before the shuttle landed. what if she kept her as a... hideous corpse as they called it? like tethered her soul to the body and just had little chats. She could have used pro to power her? which is fun just for the idea of the two of them continueing to chat abt gideon flirting n what not the whole time. but then the wild part; its always bugged me how fuckey ianthe is in her lyctorhood. I assume the flaw is more related to babs n corona factors but also what if its not. Especially after getting to the unwanted guest. And why the fuck pal is chatting with dulcie in ianhes mind. sure, fond hallucination may be. weird ghost attachment to pal sure. But also what if she'd been clinging to ianthe the whole time. Cyth mentions her eyecolor is different to dulcies. what *are* their eyecolours? i forget if it was ever mentioned. I think gideon noted abt it once. but given how often ianthes eyes are wobblin, which ik are in babs colours so its excusable as that. and also ehy the fuck ianthe.

but anyways. not a real theory i just like how absolutely ridiculous the possibilities are when listening to these cause aNYTHING IS POSSIBLE with all the weird magicks

[sosei]

God she is so awful, I love her.

[commander-wakemeupinside]

she was cute and perfect!

(close ups under the cut)

[proustianrevelry]

wait, when Palamedes finds a romance novel in his post-explosion river bubble . . . was that Dulcie's influence????????

[notedchampagne]

Rereading The Unwanted Guest has made me soooo unwell about Dulcie and Palamedes I love them so much

im so delighted t.u.g. put dulcie in!! it really adds on that new layer of depth and love between her and the sixth - love was complicated and easy for them all at once. unrequited edating ftw

[utilitycaster]

[scarletkaoru]

i just finished The Unwanted Guest and OH MY GOSH

spoilers follow

okay so like first of all damn tamsyn never disappoints or at least not for me because everything shes ever written is like my catnip. I started and I was like ‘WHAT is going on’ and then palamedes asked for the body and I was like ohhhhhhhhhhhhh okay okay this is the fight from ntn with ianthe for naberius’s body, duh, but also not. FLIPPING DULCINEA!?!?!?! I was not ready for that at all!!! Oh my gosh I love her so much though. “I didnt just want to be beautiful, I wanted it to last”? Hello? Why would you hurt me like this. “That merely by loving you, i added to your torments”. “AND ALSO MY AGONIES”!?!?! HOW am i supposed to be normal about this!?!?! How dare this book encapsulate so much of my emotions in such evocative language? How dare you make me laugh and cry over ianthe, naberius, and palamedes’s joint extra low budget theater production?????? What is this??????

tamsyn really said ianthe in leather pants and she was right for that. All lyctor theory goes right over my head. The ending reveal though. Hot damn. in all of maybe 20 odd pages I have had six interactions ive dreamed off since the start of this series, had my understanding of these characters immeasurably deepened, been so confused, had two seperate aha moments, laughed out loud several times, and once again had an ‘oh i need to reread that’ moment for THREE SCENES

alecto is going to hit me like a freight train. I am so excited

[locked-in-the-tomb]

Maybe projecting my personal opinion here, but the "worst" part of the Ianthe-Babs situation (from their point of view) is that Ianthe Naberius is just cooler than Ianthe Tridentarius. Babs was an immaculate, stylish, cocky showoff and monching on him has given Ianthe a sense of theatricality that is so fucking fascinating. I know she had some flair for the dramatic all her own (can you grow up on the Third without it?), but Babs has still clearly given her just that added touch of piquancy, a certain je ne sais quoi. They are brilliant together and they would both hate that fact SO much.

[lockedtombbrainworms]

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

[eridan-ampora]

they're the same picture.

[ossifer-bones]

I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do.

it's interesting how often lyctorhood is described in terms of burning the soul when gideon—who, with harrow, achieved a half-baked form of lyctorhood that preserved her soul, which still granted harrow access to the lyctoral well of power—describes it as drowning and surfacing.

Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath.

there's obviously too many souls in the river in this scene, five instead of the four it should be, with the extra being beneath harrow. is that gideon? is gideon beneath her because of their unique take on the lyctoral bond, or is that what every lyctorhood is like?

“What happens to your body when you go under, Harrow? When you go into the River?” “The body enters a senseless state. The Lyctor doesn’t perceive anything around them in any sense; even their necromancy fails. Instead, the secondary soul comes to the fore—the protection mechanism—that can wield a sword even if their mind is gone … without conscious thought or awareness of its own, but with a perfect sword-hand.”

where does the secondary soul lie, really? ianthe says “Step three, remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process” but we know via permeability that you cannot take it into yourself without consuming it, without contamination.

“I saw it! I saw it, and it is blue like Loveday’s eyes! It knows what you did to its kin, and it sees my cavalier’s mortal soul burning in my chest!”

if lyctorhood is dependent on the soul being burnt within, how did harrow derive power from gideon's? tamsyn did say that harrow ate the cheeseburger from the happy meal of gideon's soul, but how could her soul be compartmentalised from harrow as it was, yet still be consumed? where was it

where does the soul lie

what is a soul? we know it arises due to the sufficient thalergetic complexity in a human body, and that a kind of communal soul can arise from the thalergetic complexity of a planet, but it's strange in that the soul is both implied to arise from thalergy but also be necessary to regulate thalergy as we see with anastasia's tripod principle: “The body needs thalergy and a soul to keep the lights on. Anastasia’s tripod principle. Body plus thalergy, but no soul, is basically a very weird vegetable … after a while it gives up and shuts down.”

is the soul a product of thalergy and a regulator of it? which came first, chicken or the egg?

[vaguely-concerned]

Thinking about the symbolic weight of smoking in the TLT universe that comes to the fore in The Unwanted Guest -- the way it moves through from person to person: Pyrrha smoked, and Augustine wanted to impress her in all her stone cold fox MILF James Bond glory (and tbf who wouldn't) so he started too. and even though as far as he knows she's been gone for a myriad and is never coming back, he keeps the habit. Ianthe sees something in the hollowed-out Faberge eggshell of Augustine that resonates with her, all that gilded eloquent emptiness and disdain through the ages, so she picked it up from him to try to emulate it. She picked it up so hard that Palamedes -- the exact spiritual antithesis of the 'smoking! on a space station! what a powermove' ennui Ianthe so admired -- spontaneously unnerded enough to even known how to, simply from a sort of contact contamination of the soul.

G1deon and Augustine sharing a jittery smoke after their near-Harrow experience during soup night, and it's the closest thing to any real sense of brotherhood that remains between them. Pyrrha going ten thousand years dying both literally and for a smoke (and then Camilla sold her fucking cigarettes (for a third of what they were worth, probably Pyrrha's own good, and also more importantly grocery money). what an entirely haunted time to be alive etc.). Augustine and Mercy trading a cigarette back and forth in the middle of their collusion over the love and murder of god.

An act of small and measured self-destruction in the name of something a little bit like connection when you're stuck somewhere in yourself where love itself dares not or cannot tread (ritualized, transmissible)..........

[chthonic-mommy]

Everyone speak about how cavalier’s name should be compatible to necromancer’s name, but the most compatible names out there are Coro-Nab-eth and Naberius. And they weren’t meant for each other, cuz Coronabeth isn’t a necromancer. But Ianthe and Naberius? Do not go well together. Some thought is hidden in there….

[mjdrawsalot]

the unwanted guest brainrot is real

[rain-rome]

OHH i get it the unwanted guest is literally palamedes but its ALSO naberius.