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My thoughts exactly

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This is your daily reminder to never for the love of god please do not sign up to attend an antifascist protest via a website. Do not fill out a form promising to attend, do not give any personally identifying information like your name, zip code, or address.

A list of potential or actual civic protestors is a fascist's convenient hit list. Even if the protest website is legitimate and not a federal phishing scam, federal agencies can subpoena those records

Do not give your information. Do not sign up.

Just show up.

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The pool scene in Gideon the Ninth

okay i lied put your clothes back on we're not having sex i'm fundamentally evil and i need you to kill me

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You belong with me. 💚💛💜❤️🩵🖤

Letter on my site :)

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some kaz to get me out of an art block

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Ninth Saint to Serve the King Undying

Harrowhark the First

Worship at the holy altar// Press your mouth upon the pearly gates// Do they taste how you imagined// When you Hail Mary'd for the fruit you ate?

-“Have Faith, Horatio” Chase Petra

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Gideon is an unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lies to the reader, but in that she reshapes or obscures her own memories to reinforce her perceptions of herself and especially of Harrow. Like how she maintains the vague impression that she duels Harrow constantly, always just barely missing her shot at an offworld shuttle, but also insists that she’s never hit Harrow before, because if she had then she wouldn’t have been able to stop.

Perhaps she means this in the context of never having sucker-punched Harrow or fought dirty. Whatever violence she has administered has to be noble and justified but also almost chivalrously constrained, the bloody details politely brushed aside, because in her own eyes Gideon has to be the unabashed hero but she also has to convince herself that’s why she’s never really won. She has to believe she would have gotten out of here by now if she was willing to actually really hurt Harrow. And she absolutely cannot explore why she’s never been able to take that fatal step. It’s only once she sees Harrow from the inside that she can admit that their mutual suffering led them to inflict suffering on each other.

The payoff to all this, of course, is the reveal she knocked a ten-year-old Harrow on her ass hard enough that Harrow clawing herself free fundamentally advanced the plot narrative.

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ah yes. me. my girlfriend. and her 10,000 year old disembodied planet soul situationship

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Cardan with his wife literally one day after the wedding:

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Lobotomy Harrow my sweet love <3

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I think about Harrow and Crux a lot actually and I need to talk about it a little bit or I might scream. because like- Crux sucks right?? we all agree on this, he is an awful, wretched old man who was abjectly abusive to one of two little girls left in his care after the deaths of their primary care takers.

but then his relationship with Harrow in specific makes me insane bc he loved that girl SO MUCH. that was his daughter!!!! maybe even more so than she was Priamhark and Pelleamena’s she was his!!!

and HE KNEW just like they did exactly what had to be done to create her, he watched her grow up reviled by her parents and he looked at that little girl and just… loved her? no questions asked, no morality hang ups, she was worth every sin committed to get her.

because that’s the thing about Crux i think for me, the moment he conceived of Harrow’s existence she was what he was loyal to, not the ninth or the reverend parents or even god just his kid; the rest of the ninth loved Harrow because she was The Reverend Daughter, Crux loved Harrow because she was Harrow. and because she was Harrow she was literally more important than anyone else.

and what does that do to a person? because I can guarantee right now that it was not good for either of them, like at all. Harrow was traumatised, fundamentally hubristic and a literal actual child, with a very confused moral compass, who by age ten had become fully complicit in the abuse of the only other child she had ever met!!! she did not need yet another grown adult enabling her to become worse!!

not to mention that he did abuse his position as the final arbiter of her reality to lie to her on more than one occasion, including but not limited to that one time he deadass killed two whole people for going even slightly against his special little lady (not to mention the several times he seemingly tried to kill Gideon without Harrow noticing)

an idea I see thrown around a lot when discussing the potential kiriona-John dynamic that I think works really well and is also interesting when applied to Harrow and Crux, albeit in a slightly different way is : what if your dad was the worst man in the universe and also literally the only person who really wanted you? how do you contend with that?

ALSO the fact that in Nona we find out that half his grudge with Gideon is that she didn’t die for Harrow!! her parents fear it but Crux is BITTER about it!! he’s so angry that she, in his eyes, has been failing to do right by Harrow her entire life because she could never die right!!

anyway, all this to say I can’t wait to see Harrow try to navigate her grief over Crux’s death in AtN while contending with the fact that he was fundamentally complicit in her continued abuse of Gideon for years and years, which ultimately led to gideons degradation of self and set the groundwork for her sacrificial suicide.

not to mention yet another person she desperately loved dying in a way that is unquestionably in service of her continued existence, unasked for and without giving her a snowflakes chance in hell of saying goodbye. again.

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omg???

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i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

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ok, the OTHER thing is that Tamsyn Muir's writing style is -- it's exactly everything I've ever wanted or loved. By turns insanely technical, rich, evocative, and also *deeply* irreverent. You have high level vocabulary and an obvious love for language and worldbuilding pressed right up against the memes and sex jokes. There's nothing better. and it's even better that it very much isn't one-note, that she has a strong understanding of character voice, which is *so* important in this story where souls are all possessing each other's bodies. I fell in love with Gideon and Harrow, but I was just as struck and pleased with Nona, so happy seeing the language pare down and simplify, as the tone of the story morphed perfectly to match Nona's own way of perceiving the world around her. what a writer

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Other people already said it but sending immigrants to El Salvador is not a deportation but a kidnapping. Deportation is sending a person to their country of origin. This is something worse.

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made some diagrams to help my friends fully grasp the concept of the River in HtN and NtN

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Holy Terrors would have the most angsty devastating moments and then they’d have this