#none the ninth

[lenjaminmacbuttons]

70 pages into nona the ninth can someone pls tell me who We Suffer is. I am racking my brain but I cannot for the life of me remember who it could be and it's driving me CRAZY...HELP??

[oneidiotwithasword]

bored af at work so pls send recs for my campal playlist <3

[littlemossbugsblog]

do i have to read the whole Locked Tomb series to understand Nona The Ninth? Saw it at a bookshop and it looks v interesting but if i have to read the first two aswell i might pass

[taylorrama]

The Locked Tomb + mewithoutYou pt. 16/17

Today a thousand years Of strained affection and prayer "Out beyond ideas of right & wrong is a field" Will I meet you there?

Song: Julia (or, ‘Holy to the LORD’ on the Bells of Horses) Album: [Untitled]

For the last two posts in this series, we'll be looking at a couple songs from mewithoutYou's [Untitled] LP. Overall, this album has a dark, heavy, and ambient sound that matches well with The Locked Tomb, but many of the songs are admittedly beyond my comprehension. That's probably intentional, though, given that the tone of this album is very much whatever the fuck is leftover after the apocalypse.

Today's song, "Julia," is one of my favorites on this album and most of the connection I see with The Locked Tomb is in its sense of religious doubt.

Today a thousand years Of strained affection and prayer "Out beyond ideas of right & wrong is a field" Will I meet you there?

We start off pretty strong, though, with an image that's more literal when applied to TLT: "a thousand years of strained affection and prayer." This is easily the Lyctors' POVs, but it can also apply to the Ninth House and how devout they are, yet they have always somewhat been the outcasts of the Empire.

The line in quotes is from Colman Barks' Rumi. The actual line is something like "Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." mewithoutYou's song, however, flips the certainty of the last part into a question.

In a TLT context, I feel we get some aspirations of these lines–there's the hope that Gideon and Harrow can somehow be together or that there is some better version of the universe that could exist. There is also, of course, the River and the way it inhabits this place that's separate from reality.

The summer garden blooms With autumn soon replaced Another harvest moon— So many ways to lose So many faiths

These lines tie the changing seasons to a change or loss of faith. Though blooming gardens aren't typical TLT imagery, what they represent here is the beauty of a particular idea/certainty of faith. The summer garden is where everything about the universe makes sense, but autumn comes. We gain new understanding and some of our notions die. Plenty of faiths are lost throughout TLT: faith in the Lyctorhood process. Faith in the righteousness of the Nine Houses. Faith in Jod. Faith in the Body.

The chorus.

"Holy to the LORD" on the bells of horses Safely on the shore we sank like stones To the bottom of a made up ocean

What we have here is a Biblical reference followed by this oxymoronic image of sinking despite being on a safe shore to the bottom of an ocean that doesn't actually exist. So again, we have this representation of certainty (the Bible) juxtaposed with this unraveling of certainty.

In a literal sense, when characters in TLT enter the River, their bodies technically are safe, but the River engulfs them entirely and it's a very real threat that they could get lost in it forever, but it's not a real place in the sense that other real places are. In other words, this is like the 10th time a mewithoutYou song has described the River.

Skipping to the third verse, we have these lines.

In case your plan falls through To mispronounce my name

This is just every single moment in Harrow and Nona when someone's full name is dashed out, or when "Gideon" is replaced with "Ortus."

To curse You-Don't-Know-Who And bow before the same

"You-Don't-Know-Who" likely refers to God, so in TLT we'll say it refers to Jod and what an interesting title that is for him. Arguably, we still don't really know who this guy is even after Nona. We get his backstory, but it's his version of it and his version of himself, but is that all really true? And as many people hate John, at the end of the day, everyone loves him, bows to him.

I'll meet you there

This is now the definitive answer to the question from the first verse. The implied "we" will meet in this place that curses You-Don't-Know-Who while also bowing to them.

The chorus repeats one last time to end the song, cementing this sense that the certainty of faith is no more, even though there's a glimmer of finding something outside of its constraints that makes sense. This is an underlying feeling I get from TLT, especially Nona the Ninth. Camilla and Palamades seem to have generated a united existence that isn't Lyctorhood. One of my theories is that, because we're given Nona as a concept and a character, we're right to believe that this universe contains a possibility for something besides the rage of Earth's soul.

---

TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 1; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 2; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 3; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 4; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 5; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 6; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 7; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 8; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 9; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 10; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 11; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 12; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 13; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 14; TLT + mewithoutYou pt. 15

[ajcrawly]

Here's the thing about all the memes John uses in TLT. Sure, Jod is horny for the 2010s, but I can't believe that after 10,000 years he hasn't bothered to get down with any fresh new material. Never mind a myriad of human culture developing its own linguistic quirks - I'm betting the original Canaan House 16 had plenty of time to come up with some of their own. For example:

Skeleton construct #230 (Scotty Boneman) and skeleton construct #39 (Grunkulous Prime) and their long-running feud

Excessively anatomical descriptions for normal actions e.g 'don't you elevate your supercilium at me, Valancy. Stop oscillating your cephalon in my direction.'

Responding to one of John's unfathomable inside-joke references with a solemn nod and intoning the words 'glumpus glumpus' to acknowledge Divine and Unknowable Wisdom

Forgotten objects that may or may not have been sex toys (Cyrus and Valancy's nude portraits are a continuation of this)

[pointing at a picture of any animal that no longer exists] 'What kind of dog was this?'

Necromantically juicing up your muscles to insane proportions before e.g opening a jar, turning a key, writing down a note

Referring to any distasteful outfit as a 'sex ward'

'or as they say on the Eighth: if in doubt, slut it up' (Mercy and Cristabel do not approve of this one)

Tendon loving care

Convincing one another of fictitious new slang from the other Houses.

[after summoning a bone construct/flesh monster/skeleton army] I can never get the nose right

How many of your own joints can you dislocate mid-conversation before somebody notices

Wearing your lyctoral cape any way except in the way that it was intended to be worn

And, of course:

Lyctor? I hardly know 'er!

[orangelemonart]

You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere!

[embraceweird]

I love that we can all be unified by the immense amount of psychic damage we all took from "none houses with left grief"

[my-contemplation]

when the tomb gets locked I don’t know I don’t read it

[starlightanddragons]

i enjoy that i started nona very uncomfortable about nona's issues with food and have finished it furiously eating dinner because it would make cam and pyrrha proud

[future-crab]

A funny thing I've noticed about responses to the Locked Tomb is that most people I talk to agree that the memes and references are kind of hit or miss for them, but no one can agree on which are the hits and which are the misses.

I've seen someone whose taste and opinions I really respect say, "Look, not all of the memes in these books work for me and I think overall there are too many of them, but None House, Left Grief is fucking gold," and someone else whose taste and opinions I really respect say, "Look, I don't hate all the memes in these books, but None House, Left Grief is just unforgivable I hate it."

[semipreciousartist]

Locked Tomb Meme Zine

[martianbugsbunny]

Ngl I'm a big fan of those episodes where Rose, Nine, and Jack were in a low-key poly relationship

[transmasc-rose]

I'm thinking about the horror of the Doctor from the perspective of non-companions again, especially as it relates to people those companions know.

Rose? "Ran away" (not wrong) for "a year" (a week) with a "man" (alien) "twice her age" (approximately 50 times her age but yeah, he is Time Lord middle aged), and then gives absolutely no explanation for how or why that happened, except that she was "travelling".

Then when her mum does get an explanation (which, frankly, is only comforting because of the unfamiliarity of the alternative given. The devil you know.), Rose barely checks back in.

She almost dies for him. When she thinks he's dead, she's changed in a way her family doesn't know how to handle. Then she's gone for who knows how long and comes back with the Doctor wearing a new face.

When her original tenure as a companion ends, and Rose lives in Pete's World, she works for Torchwood/UNIT (they become the same organization). She volunteers for the Dimension Cannon. She explains to the alternate earth how to rig up a time machine.

She's changed in ways that no one else can really understand.

Amy? There's everything with River Song of course (though I'm still not there in my viewing), him running away with Amy the night before her and Rory's wedding, and also the connection between the Doctor and the Time Crack being the reason all of Amy's family's dead. Obvious stuff.

However he's also the strange man who broke into this child's house and made a mess of her life that she never got over, that promised to take her away from here, that she wrote about and drew and carved and made her friends dress up as.

And they sent her to psychiatrist after psychiatrist without any help. In their perspective, to work through what she imagined. In her perspective, to tell her that her reality wasn't real.

And then he comes back.

And to some extent, later, when he shows himself to everyone, isn't that more frightening? That the story your child told you, of the strange man she met as a child, of time travel, of nearly being stolen away, hadn't been a lie, or a misinterpretation, or an imagining?

And so he shows up at her wedding. And steals her away again.

Donna I feel like has the least horror until her final episode. I think exploring the in between section of her meeting the Doctor and finding him again would be interesting, but not exactly horror. More an exploration of how obsessive the companions can get about him, how it eats their whole lives with even one encounter, even as it makes them better people.

And then, obviously, the horror of having your mind altered and erased against your will by someone you trusted. For your own good, of course. Because he knows best. How could you know better than him? He's ancient. He's practically all knowing.

Shouldn't you be grateful?

(And he's forgiven.)

[ancientannoyance]

been getting more and more into making art i can touch lately, so here's some locked tomb wristlet lanyards i drew and made to send as holiday gifts for some tlt fandom peeps

[pinksl0th]

Just saw someone say “I could fix Ianthe.”

I couldn’t. I’d let her make me worse. We’d be horrible together.

[inkbirdie]

THIS IS THE LAST GODDAMN STRAW IM SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS BOOK. WHAT.