opheliamoder

[opheliamoder]

John's disbelief in the possibility of forgiveness is certainly a core part of what has gone wrong with him (and, thus, with the universe) in The Locked Tomb.

But we repeatedly see big forgiveness moments (Harrow's "Have you really forgiven me?" and Mercy's "I forgive you, Lord!") precede shit going extremely sideways. Forgiveness heralds big, climactic reckonings--reckonings that pointedly don't come with any kind of healing or absolution.

When someone in The Locked Tomb says "I forgive you," you are about to see acts of violence.

[opheliamoder]

So a version of this quote from Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil has been doing the rounds recently.

And regrettably, because I am never not rotating The Character in my brain, this immediately made me think about the way Cytherea responds to Abigail Pent, and the way patriarchy is deeply embedded in House culture, for all the freedom women have to be despots and war criminals.

At the anniversary dinner, Gideon tunes into a conversation in which Cytherea has apparently asked whether the Fifth have children. Abigail's answer focuses on her academic interests as a through-line of purpose in her life, predating her (late, by House standards) marriage to Magnus:

Later, when Palamedes asks Cytherea why she targeted the Fifth, she is strangely dismissive of the interests that apparently scared her enough to provoke her to murder:

Palamedes immediately calls her up on this. And Judith's intelligence report later confirms that Abigail is very much a well known and professional historian.

But Cytherea devalues her work, even as she kills her for it, and puts her infertility in the spotlight. As if her historical research is both a silly womanly endeavour and also evidence of her failure to properly embody womanhood; an "unwholesome" distraction, almost a moral failure.

There have been a lot of very good discussions about how Mercymorn's actions on the Mithraeum often excuse or enable the awful treatment of Harrow and Ianthe, even as she is belittled and ultimately also subject to violence. And in Cythera too, we see a female Lyctor's complicity in upholding the patriarchal values (supposedly absent in this society) that affected her own life.

After all, Cytherea's own story is beset with questions of fertility and purpose:

[opheliamoder]

Ahmed Moustafa (Egyptian, 1943) - Horses Frolicking (1993)

[opheliamoder]

marrow

[opheliamoder]

Macabre carvings at the Aître Saint-Maclou in Rouen, France

Photos by Charles Reeza, October 2021

(See my adjacent post for information about the aître.)

[opheliamoder]

Do you like Doctor Who?

Do you want to get deeper into the EU?

Do you want to keep track of all those audios you've listened to?

Then do I have the site for you! It's called tardis.guide and let's you complete, track and filter pretty much any Doctor Who story out there. Books, serials, episodes, audios, comics, short stories, everything!

It's all completely free and run by fans! (Though there are a few extra features for patrons to help with site upkeep)

And that's not even the best part! The best part is the amazing forum with a community of wonderful welcoming and kind fans! It's genuinely a wonderful place! (If you're already on there but haven't checked out the forum yet, please, I am begging you on my hands and knees, I promise everyone is nice and welcoming)

So you should all check it out!

(Also I'm Jae over there come say hi!)

[opheliamoder]

i like boldini better than sargent. there i said it

[opheliamoder]

Read all of the locked tomb books this summer… harrow my girl who has experienced 10,000 horrors

[opheliamoder]

the first saint to rise to lyctorhood killed his brother to do it and the first sin that's committed outside the garden of eden is Cain killing his brother Abel. is this anything

[opheliamoder]

not enough fanart for this horrible woman. I love her sm

[opheliamoder]

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

[opheliamoder]

Love that the locked tomb is an in-depth exploration of the complexity of human relationships, love, grief, co-dependency, devotion, identity; all encapsulated in a profoundly queer, eco-feminist narrative, but when I have to explain it to my friends I just go: okay now imagine if nuns were goth and magic

[opheliamoder]

Note: I’m writing this only because I haven’t seen anyone else touch on these specific points. I’m not Māori, so my understanding may be mistaken; if so I would be very grateful for correction and elaboration from tangata whenua. (And I’ve only read Nona once so far, and we all know that’s a scratch upon the surface of it.)

Tazmuir has received fandom flack for saying in interviews that Gideon and Harrow are both Māori without mentioning it in the text — which understandably reminds sf/f readers of a certain other author’s tendency to dispose of the difficult bits outside the actual work. I think it is clear by now that the reason it wasn’t dealt with explicitly earlier on is that Tazmuir sticks religiously (ahem) to the flawed and limited knowledge of her point-of-view characters, and in the Nine Houses they have no concept of pre-Resurrection races and ethnicities, because Jod has not allowed them knowledge of any world but his. (Besides, explaining Gideon’s lineage in a Doylist aside would have been rather tricky without revealing, before their proper time in the narrative, juicy details about Jod himself.)

My prediction is that we will find out Anastasia was also Māori. Maybe, probably, from the same iwi as Jod and/or G1deon.

Which makes Harrow, her last descendent, Māori as well.

No matter how many generations separate them. No matter how much other blood.

“Mixed Māori” or “[percentage] Māori” is kind of a pākehā concept. The more important question is, do you whakapapa? Do you know who you are? Do you know where you come from? All it takes is one verified ancestor and you’re in the club, no matter how long it’s been or what brand of egg carton your skin looks like on the book cover. I think Harrow is descended not just from a line of Tomb-keepers but a line of kaitiaki, guardians of the land, who through Anastasia’s private pact with Alecto are sworn to protect her — Papatūānuku, the earth mother born from salt water — and who have been holding on for ten thousand years to right Jod’s wrongs. We know salt water is sacred to the line of the Ninth House; we know that Alecto was called “the saltwater creature”; we know that it’s Nona’s natural element, which calms and renews her; all this links Alecto/Earth specifically with Māori creation myths, more than any others. And we know that preserving the ancient bloodline of the Ninth, Anastasia’s bloodline, in Harrow’s own improbable and desperately yearned-for person (that Alecto can recognise at a taste), was the goal Pelleamena and Priamhark pursued at the cost of the Ninth House’s entire future.

Yes, this series is portraying an indigenous man as the destroyer of Earth. We know that Earth chose him as her saviour and he betrayed her, imprisoned her, set himself up as master of an empire that was her antithesis, then imprisoned her again — arguably worse sins for someone who was born into that special relationship with the land, whom the Earth loved and trusted so much and still loves even now because love past understanding is her gift.

But here’s the answer to that. Here’s his opposite number. Harrow, who fell in love at first sight with the Earth, who found in that love her reason and her drive to continue living and to hold to her goals through intolerable trauma, who has a unique combination of bloodline and genius and Jod-and-Alecto-derived power (through her Lyctorhood with Kiriona Gaia, wherever that ends up going) with which to fulfill this sacred pact entered into by her tipuna Anastasia.

Harrow being Māori is not a trendy convenient afterthought. It’s an integral point.

Harrow knows who she is. She knows where she comes from. She knows where she’s going: Hell itself, to get to the bottom of all this shit. So I think we will be hearing more along these lines.

[opheliamoder]

my favorite thing about john gaius is that i often need to be reminded that he's evil. like i'll be trucking along engaging with him as a normal guy who's just a bit of a dick. i don't like him much, he makes some bad choices, says some insensitive things, but he's just john. he's just john who's a bit of a dick. he could be your manager at any retail job, a teacher with an annoying grading policy, a relative you don't like visiting. sometimes illogical, sometimes insensitive, sometimes failing to read the room, as people sometimes do. and then something happens. he says something, does something, and the john normalguy facade slips for just an instant, just a moment, and i go "ohhhh right he's an evil wizard who wiped out all life on earth and then crowned himself god-emperor of a warmongering necromancer space empire and he's currently wearing a crown made from the bones of human babies. i had. forgotten."

[opheliamoder]

clara oswald HAS to be gods strongest soldier bc she was in a situationship that started with him saying "you look at me, and you cant see me. do you have any idea what thats like" and ends with him saying "theres one thing i know about her. just one thing. if i met her again, id absolutely know." also featuring the lines "do you think i care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference" and "clara, im not your boyfriend" "i never thought you were" "i never said it was your mistake"

literally for every version of the doctor there is a clara. their souls are intertwined. i can't i can't even think rn im dying

[opheliamoder]

A selection of animals from various 17th and 18th century calligraphy copybooks which were drawn with single lines to practice (and show off) penmanship strokes.

[opheliamoder]

Franz Von Stuck - “Sin” (1893), (details)