palamedesnutz

[palamedesnutz]

everyone shut up

[palamedesnutz]

[video description: a minute and a half sketchy animatic of a scene from Harrow The Ninth  book where Mercymorn hates everyone because they mockingly interpret her scribble of the Beast in not-beastly shapes. ]  I got procreate and I thought: what if I draw mercymorn like fifty times. and then i did. edit: audio is from the audiobook! voiced by Moira Quirk! 

[palamedesnutz]

when I was a kid I wished I had nosebleeds. I had some friends who had them and I was like. that looks so fucking cool. you're just sitting there and suddenly you're covered in blood. it looks so dramatic. it looks so... and here my language failed me. at such a humble age I did not have the vocabulary to describe the sublime. I just sat in incomprehensible jealousy. I turned out totally normal by the way

[palamedesnutz]

So last month I got hit by a car and died right. Which I didn't initially realize until I watched some guy haul my body into his pickup and drive off. Which, being that it's deep in rural Michigan, I assume means my body will make some venison jerky and maybe some wall decoration, and I'll be resigned to being one of hundreds of deer ghosts floating around Saginaw, which is w/e. But then I find out the guy works at a taxidermy shop or something, and he's actually pretty good at stuffing and mounting deer carcasses, which I come to find out when I find myself face to face with my old body in the shop window. So naturally, I figure since ghosts need to possess something to interact with the living world and etc etc etc the most logical thing to do is to possess my own body, since it's basically a statue of myself. And a little surprisingly, it actually fits like a glove. Like, since it's my body, it feels like stepping right back into place. So I get out of town and back to my herd, eventually. And that's where the trouble starts coming into it, because after I get settled again, I don't know how to explain to everyone else what feels so weird. Like since I can move my body and do everything I used to do, it's functionally the same, like nothing happened. Or it SHOULD be, so I don't know how to explain how it's NOT. But it's just hard to explain it to someone who's never been hit by a truck I guess

[palamedesnutz]

Oh to be the sword beside her.

[palamedesnutz]

tlt is such a wild ride to experience first read through bc you’ll scroll through fanart and memes and see popular fandom jokes and go ahhhh fanon.. my beloved. AND THEN ITS NOT FANON. ITS CANON. YOULL BE LIKE huh. What a weird inside joke meme they’ve created. Then you turn the page AND ITS FUCKING PLOT RELEVANT. LITERALLY 9O PERCENT OF THE TIME A RUNNING GAG IN THE TLT FANDOM IS GENUINELY REFERENCING THE SOURCE MATERIAL “let me guess you take it black” KILL YOURSELF. Just kidding. Keep doing it. I love you all.

[palamedesnutz]

Announcing Alectopause the Ninth: A Collaborative Fic Project

Still waiting for news about Alecto the Ninth? Stop waiting! We're writing our own!

In honor of Alectopause Day 999, @carys-the-ninth and I are announcing our plans for a collaborative, fan-created version of "Alecto the Ninth," inspired by the game "exquisite corpse." This event will be an AO3 collection in which creators work from chapter prompts, and the whole is revealed to everyone at once. We plan to release the collection on Sep 13th, 2025, the third anniversary of the Alectopause.

You can sign up to be a part of the event here! The best way to stay updated is through our discord, but we will be announcing everything on tumblr as well, tagged "alectopause the ninth 2025." You can also view the prompts, rules and deadlines, and AO3 collection. @carys-the-ninth, @wifegideonnav and I will be the main mods, but we would be remiss not to thank @theriverbeyond and @arithmonym for their help in putting together this event! We hope to eventually release this "book" in a limited-run, non-profit zine format as well.

Happy Alectopause Day 999, everybody! Let's keep making things weirder and more incomprehensible from here ❤️

[palamedesnutz]

This really contextualized the Seventh House for me.

[palamedesnutz]

Modern TLT AU where they live in a super cold rural town filled with old catholic ppl and Harrow is the Reverand's daughter and Gideon is a foster child who sees the military as the only way out of the hyper religious town

[palamedesnutz]

okay I just finished Nona too! I know there's a couple short stories I still gotta work my way through, but people really weren't wrong--I've loved each new book more than the last (and very glad I pushed through my iffy feelings about Gideon herself).

That was exactly how I felt about them. I wasn't so sure about GTN, but loved HTN, and NTN was one of the rare books I could see myself reading over and over.

HTN I think gets overshadowed by GTN by fans because of Gideon's larger involvement and her personality coloring the story more, but I thought it was the better written of the two, as Muir grew more comfortable writing this cast and this setting. And also from I think Gideon actually working a little better as a narrator of Harrow's story than as her own first person perspective.

And Nona I thought I was just superbly written as a novel. It was a very haunting slice out of the lives of a small group of survivors, detailing the last of days before the end of the world, and it functions so well as just a quieter more intimate story than its predecessors. You almost don't even need the other two books before reading it, it does a really phenomenal job at conveying everything that needs to be said, and I think it would work very well as a stand alone science-fiction novel.

And it gave me a lot of new appreciation for the first book, which I'd gotten from HtN as well, but after Nona there are a lot of little details about the Blood of Eden and John's actions where I just had to stop and look back because so much of the plotting of this series turns out to amount to "what did Harrow know, and how long as she known this" and Muir does a great job of advancing the story and the characters without really ever giving the full picture of what informs her co-protagonist's thought process, or giving too much away from the few characters like Cam and Pal and Gideon herself who seem to be in the know.

[palamedesnutz]

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

[palamedesnutz]

My humble suggestion for a Gideon-raised-by-BoE name:

You're Standing Face To Face With The Man Who Sold The World For Ninety-Nine Bottles Of Beer On The Wall, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. shortened, of course, to "Bomb"

[palamedesnutz]

Your child... Alecto's eyes.' A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, 'Don't call her--'

(7/13)

[palamedesnutz]

tfw "popular" fanon becomes so embedded in a fandom & discussions within fandom spaces that people just start treating it as the default and all interactions with others are coloured by this interpretation. have you considered that I actually don't subscribe to this take, which is nowhere in the source material? wait nvm, clearly not.

[palamedesnutz]

Yeah, this is why it does feel believable in The Locked Tomb. Everyone is resurrected anyway, so I guess they all just Came Back Gay. And they're all about artificial reproduction.

Now, what would be fascinating is to learn about the gender and sexuality norms in places outside the Houses, like New Rho.

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

[palamedesnutz]

you've already gotten several notes to this effect but this is genuinely the locked tomb

i'm genuinely having so much fun writing a jock protagonist. can't believe i never tried this before. all these years i've been limiting myself needlessly

[palamedesnutz]

it sucks that you can only die once and its permanent.. imagine the kinda sex we could be innovating if that wasnt the case