phalangemedes

[phalangemedes]

saw someone say they were disappointed at the lack of smut in… gideon the ninth… booktok has truly bred some of the weirdest people, why does the lack of smut disappoint you? ik damn well no one recommended it as a smutty book. can you not just… enjoy non smutty books??

[phalangemedes]

[phalangemedes]

It's been a year, a year, since my last re-read and I still can't look at a bleach bottle and not viscerally upset myself about the implications of Pyrrha necking it and Palamedes being angry about it

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Campal isn't problematic because they're second cousins or Necro-Cav. It's problematic because Camilla is three months older

[phalangemedes]

so I gave in and watched Conclave and I have to say Deeply enjoyable! Cried!

Not too brutal a play time, well edited cause there was still breathing room in the script without it dragging; and the pauses made it tbh. The juxtaposition between modernity and tradition in the cinematography is delicious (always been a bit weak for nuns in asics but the lifts and mini buses? delightful), some slightly heavy handed metaphors but hey it IS catholicism, and I think Tucci let it down pretty badly considering how prominent he was, but Fiennes was a tour de force what a PATHETIC wet little man?? Koman too!!!

Highlights: Sister Agnes' lil curtsy

Adult Normal Cardinal Turtles

Old dudes just fuckin sobbin

The cuddliest Jesus allegory in cinema??

Adequate display of how grown men are petty teenagers

Daddy issues the size of a small sovereign state

8/10

[phalangemedes]

Campal isn't problematic because they're second cousins or Necro-Cav. It's problematic because Camilla is three months older

[phalangemedes]

Paul and Pyrrha matching AtN fits

[phalangemedes]

Firstly, when you get this, you have to answer with 5 things you like about yourself, publicly. Then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool)

I'm so ill right now and the dribble of steroids down my throat is making me nauseous, so a silly LJ style meme is definitely what the doctor ordered

1) I'm really good at gathering information for fun, which may not sound useful, but after the enshittification of Everything Interwebbial, is marvelous. I get so many bug and bird pictures from family and friends asking what the fuck it is, it's a delight. My best was a vague memory someone had of a photograph of John Lennon they saw at a gallery in 2004 and it took me TWO YEARS to find the photographer and where to purchase a copy but I fuckin' did.

2) I will be passionately abnormal about shit, I will cry. It's great. Sad? Happy? Angry? Spotted the glitter of a meteor shower? The existential forever of space hung beneath us? The symptoms of love? The undulating texture of a brush stroke portraying a specific shaft of light? (this might out me to certain fandoms if so heyyy guysss) The snick of a blade to ice, the heave of breath and control of limbs? Moths trusting you to land on your hand??? MOSS???? BOGLAND??????

3) I've gotten much better at just having fun when it comes to hobbies. I don't have to be a savant, I can just enjoy it?? Who knew?? I can't sing well, but I do because I want to. Am I the best artist, the best writer? No. But I love the act of creation. (Also sometimes "having fun" can be getting better at a craft or rigorous analysis or being a big fat nerd but the gentility is not being hard on myself for never hitting some untenable "quality" marker with it)

4) Sometimes I remember it's okay to be - and *like* being - negatives. I'm allowed an ego that's earnt, I'm allowed to be smug over a job well done. I'm allowed to be a bitchy little hater in private and partake in the kind of gossip our wretched little species has lapped up since the first breath of shared speech. I'm allowed to shout and be angry, be messy and illogical and peculiar. Laugh too loud and in an unpretty way and cry so hard I'm half snot. I'm cringe, I'm ugly, I'm a fat, hairy, crippled dyke. I am multitudes of ickiness and fluids and terrible habits and that's actually very cool.

5) Broke the generational curse of not being openly and vulnerably loving. I will tell you I love you 85 times a day, there's no use limit. I'll tell the ROOMBA I'm proud of him and love him. Haha GET LOVED ON, BITCH.

if anyone wants to do this, go for it! but I don't have the mental capacity to tag y'all lmao

[phalangemedes]

If I forgot your fave reblog em! Multi-paragraph justifications for their warcrimes always welcome :)

[phalangemedes]

Something I think people don't acknowledge or appreciate enough about Paul is that they existed before their full official birth. They were test run temporarily. In (chapter) 9, in the beach flashback, Camilla becomes Camilla-and-Palamedes, not quite with Paul's eyes but with one of Cam's and one of Pal's, and Nona recognizes them as a new person who smiles at her with a new person's smile.

Afterward, Camilla-and-Palamedes return to being Camilla separated from Palamedes. This happened at least once, but despite the horrific toll it takes on Camilla's body after the fact, the way Pyrrha yells at them at times also implies this happened a more than once.

Now please consider that alongside Camilla crying with absolute relief. Camilla who knows what it feels like to be Paul, or at least a proto version of Paul, and so deeply enthusiastically proclaims, "Palamedes, yes. My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long." Camilla who has addressed him by name on-screen exactly once before this moment (as a child in Doctor Sex, when they finally dropped all professional airs and let themselves be stupid kids laughing until it hurt) breaking that out here of all places. Palamedes who has suffered so much guilt about the burden she's taken on in his name, knowing full well she wouldn't stop even if he begged her to, who also knows what if feels like to be Paul and how much they can do when they're like that. Camilla and Palamedes who understand that accessing that power in half measures will also kill them both, but in a way that makes them useless to everyone else they love, and without doing so at all they can be of very little use, but going all in will make them a nearly unstoppable asset.

Would you truly tell me you would have rather had them suffer being forever divided by a matter of seconds? "Love and freedom don't coexist" but Paul is the closest thing they will ever have to it. Is your attachment to who they were worth hating who they've become, even knowing that they made this decision fully informed, having tested it and decided together it's what they both wanted more than anything in the world?

You can miss them and still be happy for them. You can be sad that they're no longer the same and still recognize the beauty and triumph in what they've become. If you loved Camilla and you loved Palamedes, how can you not love Paul? Would you really look at them of all characters and proclaim without irony that you're taking your love away?

[phalangemedes]

I can't find the post!!! but I can't stop thinking about it

it was about silly Canaan war games and I just want to say that Dulci would not pick Pal as her knight, she'd fight for herself.

She'd look up with her big watery eyes and say that, as she's enfeebled, could she use Pro as her legs? (she would put her hand prettily on her dress hem when she said this, as if wistfully longing to be able bodied and her voice would be sweet but quiver-some as if the whole question was so very hard for her) would that be okay? she doesn't want to be a bother but she is so looking forward to their games

they'd fold like a deck of cards

and she'd get Pro to full speed her into their shins with her foot rests and snap some poor necro's ankle

but then they're be suspicious, right? they know her game now -- and Pro would be banned

but they also still see poor Dulcinea, who during the other bouts would've been at the sidelines, exhausted and pale, sipping tea with a tremor in her hands

so for the next one she'd "accidentally" fall out of her chair when they came at her. Dolloped to the floor in a pathetic hacking puddle... and when they, on instinct, came over to help her up, she'd gut stab them with her little fake sword

so now the finalist has a REAL issue, do they go hard at a weary disabled woman, one for whom even the greatest necromantic physicians can not cure, who, if they DO win against her it's kind a toss up between guilt and success... or do they trust the evidence that she's a sneaky little bitch?

And that, of course, depends who she's up against...

But I like to think the final person got bitten

[phalangemedes]

They're new parents. They're widows on the rebound. They're trapped in the wrong bodies. They're t4t (unrelated). They argue over breakfast proteins. They've almost certainly danced under the light of a murdered planet. They're roughly a third of a burgeoning terrorist cell. They have a 9,980-year age gap. They met at the perfect time. They just missed each other. They even got to kiss goodbye.

[phalangemedes]

((This isn't enough TM to whack on ao3 but thought some of y'all might enjoy it. I'm still balls deep in Steering the Craft and had a 'head empty, only CamPal' day so, lazied my way into using them for an exercise.

Brief, silly, just an average morning on the Sixth with tweedledum, tweedledee and hints of Dulci being a long distance menace.))

Cam opened the door as a necessity over a nicety. Parried it with a jaunty half step and a shove of her palm, because Palamedes’ nose was the rose-brown ribbon in the centre of a book, buried with his attentions.

He didn’t glance up until his shoulder clipped the frame, sneered at it in equal parts perturbation and chastisement. Irritability clamped in the tightness of his jaw— Until he realised it was a door, wherein he course corrected. Shoved his thumb between the pages of his research and rubbed at the bruise with the heel of his hand.

‘Where are we off to again?’ Palamedes asked, having paused when there was a gap beside him, and spoken only when it was adequately re-filled. A hand in his, around his, a callused cage of fingers.

‘Natalis.’

Palamedes’ mouth drew into a marvellous and wretched set of angles.

‘Ah, forgot to tell you. I’m desperate to carry your heir; translaticie.’ Camilla said, with a hard line to her mouth.

Palamedes made a few abortive gestures, one so sweeping he almost lost his book.

‘Camilla,’ he begged, in a tone suited for a word with four letters,

‘It’s too early for this.’

Cam grinned.

‘You’re meeting some baby-mancers who worship the ground you stumble on.’

He breathed in a way both measured and theatrically loud, with a mote of wheeze at its end.

‘You can’t keep doing this to me.’

They stepped off in tandem.

‘Waking me with graphic erotismus then frightening me with—’ He grasped for words that would do his misery justice, and when he failed, spat a nonsense of defeat,

‘Vah!’

She patted his hand, pitying and amused.

‘I’d just arrived at the possibility you’d woken with a nasty subarachnoid, that only propaganda had been left behind the clotted dam of it. No-no, I am, instead, subject to an assault from both the minds I hold most dear. One in florid, ink penned vagueries and the other vile, fleshy threats.’

‘It’d be effective.’ She glanced at him. Saw how his book was forgotten, cuddled to his chest, fingers light about dog-eared corners.

‘If I’m ever captured.’

He raised a brow, shoved his glasses back up so he could squint through the bokeh of smeared fingerprints.

‘Beg you for babies.’

Palamedes miss-stepped. The toe of his boot stubbed on a floor grate whose dented edge told a tale.

‘Yeurgh. Monstrous, an imaginative and razor-edged defense in your already enviable arsenal.’ He admonished, and with a quieter flightiness,

‘Also, gross.’

Cam, in wonderful spirits, dragged them through the bustle of The Sixth. Navigational led through the tripping hazards of hour long conversations with bright eyed peers, and any hostile architecture that saw fit to leap out and kneecap the Master Warden.

By the time they had traversed across, and delved deeper within, the Library, primed at the hatch of the relevant wing, they’d neatly disentangled.

Palamedes given time to lie that he’d managed “a light but satisfying breakfast”, whilst he smoothed down his tunic and rifled through his memory. Wondered if there was anything in there viable for under 10’s.

‘All set?’ He asked, with an astringency of nerves only Camilla could diagnose and a beautiful showing of teeth. A dimpling in the poorly shaved angles of his cheeks.

Cam nodded, stepped back. Lingered at the ideal and respectful three steps of a Cavalier.

The Master Warden of the Sixth was greeted by an assemblage of cross legged, floor sitting babies and a smattering of polite applause.

Wherein he forgot himself and tradition. Spun on his heel and held the door open so Camilla could slink in behind him, beside him.

And only once accompanied, settled, did he begin.

[phalangemedes]

Ianthe spends all of Gideon lurking in the shadows being mad she's a secondary character, then she briefly gets to have her villain reveal and cunty little speech, only to be immediately upstaged by a much more impressive villain. Like, she finally gets the spotlight for one chapter and an hour later she's getting her ass beat to dust, and that's so funny to me.

[phalangemedes]

i think harrow "skull paint" hark should get to have moko kanohi and i KNOW thats the one for men thats on purpose. assume all harrows i post about are butch

[phalangemedes]

seeing a lot of Jod discourse (nice) but just wanted to add that his inerrant sin is Self Obsession

because if he wasn't too busy bumbling around his own head, tits covered in biscuit crumbs, soggy with self pity... there were always Clues to his caesaric betrayal

FOR EXAMPLE: at some point in the myriad, when he lamented with teary eyes "I miss heckin doggos" he would've seen Gideon the First convulse with hateful recognition and realise Pyrrha was still alive

[phalangemedes]

Hot take, but I'm not sure the text gives us much reason to believe Jod loves Alecto.

In Nona, we get basically nothing about his feelings about pre-Alecto Earth. He never thinks to mention it. (In fact, there's a surprising silence around his motivations for starting the cryo project.)

The closest we get to him appreciating nature is him talking about hearing the sound of moreporks and possums. But we immediately get a clarification that he's talking about U- and T-. "They were my moreporks and possums."

And that's where we get extended description of his rapturous devotion: his love of those corpses. His eye color changes when his connection to *them* gets strong.

He sits for hours and listens to "their bodies in all that silence, all the bacteria that weren't growing . . . what wasn't building up in the gut, what wasn't pooling at the joints. They were my silent night."

This is the guy who always hated change. The one who liked the thought of the Milky Way anchored down. He adores stasis. He wishes he'd mastered time.

Post-Alectohood, Alecto says *she* loves *him* a lot. And he's jokey or evasive wherever you might expect him to say it back.

So why his rage at the FTL project? Why his hatred of the people who halted his attempt to freeze all of humanity? Well. I've clearly answered my own question there, but I do think there's more.

Jod implies to Harrow that BoE, having abandoned Earth, believe they still have a claim on it. And Aim clearly has something BoE feels they must protect from him at all costs.

Maybe something that's key to resettling Earth? Maybe something that would reintroduce growth and change to a dead and static world?