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I like when people like a character so way too much that it transcends even self shipping or kinning and becomes more of a patron saint that you pray to type of deal

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Have another TLT WIP.

What if Alecto adored her reflection as the descendent of Anastasia?

“When she had been earlier born, and less self-conscious, sometimes she would rest her face against the mirror's face, and try to reach her reflec-tion. Camilla had caught her kissing it once, and had written about six pages of notes on that, which was humiliating.” —Nona the Ninth

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:( do you ever think about how Camilla loved and missed Palamedes so much that the whole Paul idea had her crying with sheer relief even though it meant giving up her entire personhood........ man.

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I want more female characters who are just so bad at comforting others. Not for lack of trying or caring, they just get so so awkward when someone's upset, and they try to repeat things they've heard even if it doesn't necessarily apply to the situation, or they accidentally say the wrong thing and make it worse. If someone cries they panic and throw every single comfort technique down at once and it only helps because it's such bizarre behaviour

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am i the only one who found harrow the ninth almost comforting?

part of it was definitely that i saw an indirect spoiler that didn’t flat out tell me but made me suspect gideon wasn’t forever dead dead. but it wasn’t even just that like i hear sometimes people talk about having to drudge through the first 75% of the book because they were told it all comes together and makes sense after that and then it’s all worth it, but the ending of gtn wrecked my shit and something about htn soothed that hurt and was just genuinely enjoyable the whole time even before that 75% mark to me

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when will we get a movie with the exact same premise as babygirl but with 3 lesbians? can you imagine? wish i hadn’t thought of this since it doesn’t exist ruined my day

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uh oh! one of your organs has mysteriously vanished! Spin this wheel to find out which one!

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Dulcinea Septimus and her frivolous hat...

~💚🤍💚~

(For more cosplay content check out my Insta)

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edie, king, stand up. you deserve so much better 😔

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genuinely believe your top 3 the locked tomb women could say just so so much about you

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tumblr irl meetup but we won't say who is who, instead you get a list of all the blog urls that are attending and you have to try to match each person with their blog. You can ask questions but you can't ask for the blog name directly.

it's like crime dinner but instead you gather clues by observing who laughs at which dick jokes.

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every locked tomb character is one of the characters of all time but ortus nigenad really is The Character Of All Time my guy brought a fanfiction to the gun fight AND WON

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I’ve been loving your IWTV stuff but I haven’t watched the show or read the books. What is it about Anne Rice’s writing that makes it so insane?

Okay, I'm going to do a relatively long post probably.

First off, I want to make it clear that my love of her writing is completely unironic. I genuinely think that she is great. So I do want to lay that down because it's foundational to everything else I'll say.

Her writing is insane for a few reasons. The most basic of these reasons is that, I really think that she was intrinsically out of step with contemporary standards of mental wellness. On the other hand, I am not convinced she was as chemically or... neurologically?... insane as she's generally described. She had a lot of Experiences and those experiences fed into a perception of the world that is notable and characteristic, if borderline indecipherable, and it comes through in what she produced.

These books are steeped in very real trauma, and very real trauma that the world directly rewarded her for experiencing. I'm not sure if the rawness of that trauma was why she was so brazen about exposing it in IWTV, but whatever the reason, "story about how my child died and my marriage can't survive and I can't see any reason for living" made Anne Rice a bona fide recognizable author and commercial success. If "vampires are made from trauma", well consider that metaphor to have carried into the real world. Vampires did in fact give Anne Rice power and wealth (and furthermore, I'd argue, for her, they became essentially household gods).

There's that post that goes around about how Van Gogh made his best work (and really most of his work, period) when he was most stable. I'd posit that the world told Rice the opposite in explicitly material terms, and maybe there was a feedback loop there. Hard to say.

She did write shamelessly and almost aggressively. Her writing doesn't feel carefully tailored or polished for "an audience". It rejects many of the patterns you see in modern fiction (despite being wildly influential for several genres!). It highlights patterns you take for granted in other fiction because of how fundamentally it violates them. I'll splice together bits of a conversation I was having in another window:

me: And I do think that there's an interesting point to be made that the self-infatuation and the people-pleasing actually go hand-in-hand

Because there's a congratulatory aspect to having written something that you know will please other people

Like congratulating yourself ahead of time for the good person that other people are going to tell you that you are

3rd: and that also means you're afraid of writing anything that challenges or stretches the audience

which means you're writing pap

a friend and I were discussing R.F. Kuang whose book Babel was pitched as a 'response' to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and ... is not only not in the same league as that book but isn't even playing the same sport

This wasn't us discussing Anne Rice at all, she just feels relevant to it. We're getting increasingly streamlined stories which hit the "right" beats, but they're unsatisfying because they have no authentic skeleton. Why do people still respond to Toy Story but Inside Out is nearly forgotten? I despised Inside Out on its release because it perfunctorily landed all of its beats, but it's only pretending to have something to say. What it does pretend to say is... palatable. But it isn't interesting. It won't change you and it won't inspire a change in you, or give you the material to change yourself.

I go back to this comment over and over by @fofoqueirah because it's genuinely perfect. Peerless distillation:

But people often genuinely cannot write this way! It's overly revealing. We reflexively balk. How or why she didn't is hard to say, but it's gallingly, often horrifyingly, unapologetic. It's unapologetic for things it should probably be apologetic for.

Anyway, her writing is also maddeningly inconsistent, book-by-book, page-by-page, paragraph-by-paragraph, but it's thrilling in part due to its inconsistency. But when it's on, it's so fucking on. However, it's not didactic in any comprehensible way. There are quotes about how she trusted her meaning to come through in the end, which is hilarious because...?? I think you can derive more thematic meaning from a random pattern than you can from these books!! These books are less thematically straightforward than nonsense!

And she herself would regularly dump comments and lore and various things which made it all even weirder. God, I don't even feel like I'm scratching the surface here.

This woman had some kind of relationship with power, capitalism, BSDM, gender, family, religion, brain-eating, and dolls and God help us because she tried to tried to explain it to us and held back nothing and some times you're still. just. a wee babe in the woods.

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because we love overthinking in this house - i am thinking tonight about how gray is the colour of the sixth. and how intentional it feels. it is a cool, contemplative, boring colour. they are librarians, calm and collected nerds. and yet it is also the colour of enmeshment, blurred boundaries. palamedes and camilla are both incredibly capable and self-sufficient in their selves - a dangerous fighter and a brilliant mind. and behind their faces a visceral desire to become one. they refuse to speak the eighthfold word and become not quite a full lyctor, not quite a usual person. a lump of gray matter, two souls blurred into one. life is too long and love is too long.

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I think  the main reason everybody underestimated Palamedes at first was because even though he was a necromancer that knows a lot about the medical and healing part of necromancy, he didn't use it to fix his eyesight! Which, I must emphasize, is easier to do than treating symptoms of cancer (Dulcinea) and helping the kidneys remove all the toxins from the body (Judith).

Harrow probably guessed it was a misdirection. Pal trying to appear less powerful than he actually is. Gideon mentions that when he takes his glasses off is a form of a threat, not vulnerability or openness.

I think fans will say it's him just sandbagging.

But the interpretation that I like is that it highlights his biggest flaw. When Palamendes sees the solution to a problem, he elaborates a plan, and doesn't stop to consider other alternatives. With that approach he corners himself.  Pal learned medicine to help Dulcie so he didn't consider that he could've used it on himself. He discovered who the killer was and thought only his abilities could take them down, when it was a combined effort that killed the lyctor. He wanted to discover who Nona was but didn't realize that she wasn't neither Harrow or Gideon, and because of that, she was killing the body she occupied the same way he was killing Cam's body.