katakaluptastrophy

[katakaluptastrophy]

Heeeeey I'm curious. As the world's leading Colum Expert, do you have a solid theory about which of three brothers he was age-wise? (I ask because I just had a thought myself, but I'm curious if you've already thought the same or something different! 👀)

i wear the badge of World’s Leading Colum Expert with pride and honor. thank u.

my genuine hot take on this: the only thing that matters about the asht sibling birth order is that it truly does not matter. it does not matter whether colum was the oldest or the youngest or the middle child. it does not matter when he was born at all, except that it was crucially before and in expectation of silas’s birth. in the eyes of the eighth house, his personhood began and ended upon his vows to his necromancer. his sole purpose in conception and in life was to be as compatible as possible for the eighth’s eventual heir. all identity or circumstance beyond that is irrelevant. this is the central theme of his presence in gideon the ninth; it is the punctuation of his absence in harrow the ninth. the fact that ram and capris are mentioned only in passing (and, on an even more metatextual level, the fact that the valentine the ninth epistolary au that apparently featured them will likely never see publication) serves this narrative further. if colum is barely a character as it is, ram and capris are whispers of thoughts of background extras. the three are and would be interchangeable except that colum’s use to silas makes him just slightly noteworthy. this is both structural narrative design on muir’s part and the truest peek that we as readers get into the world and culture of the eighth house, begun a myriad ago by mercymorn and cristabel and eventually culminating in the tragic beige car crash of holy devotion and eugenics that is colum asht.

but let’s say gun to my head you’re making me choose anyways: middle child. just to really rub it in

[katakaluptastrophy]

A gentle PSA to the TLT fandom:

Ortus Nigenad (35) is not middle aged. Colum Asht (32? 34?? 37???) is not middle aged. Abigail Pent (37) and Magnus Quinn (38) are not middle aged. Protesilaus Ebdoma (39) is the oldest person at Canaan House that isn't several guys shoved into a trenchcoat one guy, and he still is not quite middle aged.

On the other hand, if she had Ortus before she was 30, Glaurica could be middle aged. Juno Zeta, who looked "anywhere from forty to sixty" seven years before the events of TLT, is middle aged. We Suffer is "an elegant middle-aged person". Admiral Sarpedon, who is so horrifyingly in his fifties or perhaps sixties, is "of middling age".

[katakaluptastrophy]

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

[katakaluptastrophy]

I don't understand the comparison people make between Gideon the Ninth and Hunger Games or with the Dark Academia genre. There is no Battle Royale, and the only academia is Gideon coming up with a joke about them having to attend to Doctor Skelebone's classes.

If anything, the plot is more like a task from Taskmaster:

"Become a Lyctor. You may not enter in a room you don't have permission to enter. Your time starts after your Cavalier got the key ring."

Everybody panics, some die, and Cytherea is the stage task.

[katakaluptastrophy]

“Why have not we an immortal soul?” asked the little mermaid mournfully;

“So I shall die,” said the little mermaid,

“and as the foam of the sea I shall be driven about

never again to hear the music of the waves,

or to see the pretty flowers

nor the red sun."

Pre-Myriad John and Alecto

Jod is @worldfamoustroll

Alecto is me 🖤💀

📸 gfxsoulstudios

[katakaluptastrophy]

"A married couple bullies a teenager for being illiterate"

Also known as one of my favourite scenes from htn.

"The text is small 😰" "Do you think so? 😊" is just the funniest interaction ever. Harrow gets tossed around this whole book, yet for some reason, this is the most diabolical to me.

No smoke version here:

[katakaluptastrophy]

I’d like to live through a week that’s not a whole new verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

[katakaluptastrophy]

Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.

[katakaluptastrophy]

[katakaluptastrophy]

Oh, ok, this is a fascinating suggestion...

Here's Cytherea explaining how soul siphoning works to Harrow and Gideon:

When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive.

And here's Harrow and Palamedes discussing what the challenges at Canaan House are meant to teach them:

"As we saw in the entropy field challenge, continuous siphoning..." "...These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They've hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that's the true prize." "Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth." She bristled. "It's a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we've got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower."

The Emperor is apparently on record as saying that "siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up".

In Harrow the Ninth, Abigail, asked to summon Nonius, says:

"I think our chances are very small. I think we've got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that's significantly less unlikely, as I've come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than — never mind..."

Which seems like a lot of detail for an apparently irrelevant digression.

Abigail also tells Harrow that there is "something terribly wrong with the River" and Alecto later describes it as "yet dead". Why does it feel like John in part runs on some metaphysical equivalent of a hydroelectric dam? Generating phenomenal power from something that interrupts the natural flow of a river, preventing things from moving through it as they should, upsetting the natural rhythms of the ecosystem...

um for the locked tomb folks that have their books memorized—do we believe that Jod committed the resurrection?

like, through Nona we get the story leading up to the end of the world. his genocide, anger over the trillionaires, the degree to which he manipulated his friends in order to keep them on his side. but he doesn't talk about the resurrection, all he talks about is what leads up to it: nuclear extinction, the death of the solar system, trillionaires escaping, crafting the body for Alecto, etc.

when he's asked about the resurrection he talks about how "the cost was too great" and even the neo-niners were just kept on ice for the myriad. plus, "John is a lying liar who lies". he doesn't even resurrect his daughter (though the issues of invulnerability serve him more), but instead grasps whatever is left of her soul and shoves it in a corpse, like his creation of Alecto's body. the most he demonstrated was the ability to create a revenant.

there's something that nags at me over this, because John's power isn't his own, it's Alecto's—given and stolen, the ability to wield it for massive solar system level extinction events by consuming the soul of the earth isn't the same as a practiced skill.

this is all for fun, but I do think John is taking credit for the resurrection as part of his myth, his ego. I'm tempted to say Alecto pulled it off and he took the credit.

also, I'm probably wrong and someone's gonna slam down some citations. please do it, hit me with some theological parallel for funsies too.

[katakaluptastrophy]

when I say “Let me ask my husband”, one (or both) of these things is taking place:

1. I am in a loving, happy relationship where we value and respect each other’s opinion

2. I am using this as an excuse to get out of something I don’t want to do (sorry habibi)

what is not happening here: I am being oppressed

[katakaluptastrophy]

So as many of us know, Admiral Sarpedon is almost certainly named for the Sarpedon of the Iliad, a soldier who fought for Troy during the Trojan War. (Wikipedia provides a potential alternative: Sarpedon of Thrace, who was not a soldier but a victim of Heracles in the Herculean myths. I think this is unlikely in this context.)

This namesake has caused a lot of confusion re: Sarpedon's House. He seems almost like an exception to the general rule, given a personal name in lieu of a numerical name.

However, Sarpedon is in fact also a functional arithmonym, drawn from the ancient Sanskrit word for the number eight, sarpa. This suggests that Sarpedon almost certainly hails from the Eighth House.

Do with this information as you will.

[katakaluptastrophy]

Look, I don't necessarily expect people writing historical fiction to rigorously research the language of the period, but I recently bumped into a story where a guy who was ostensibly born in the year 1805 uses the word "parkour" in his internal monologue, and there are limits.

[katakaluptastrophy]

fuck terry pulling no punches in this one

[katakaluptastrophy]

Ortus Nigenad appreciation post!! I finally decided to post them all in pencil doodles

[katakaluptastrophy]

Fern-enthusiast necromancer from space (oil on canvas).

[katakaluptastrophy]

I want to [remembers that suicide jokes only further damage my mental health] fuck you like an animal