#tamsyn what does this mean

[itslianaiguess]

thinking about tamsyn and her funky little "you have not begun to see the horrors of love" when asked about alecto the ninth

[todd-queen]

this is where I'm at lately

here's all the posts that are making me feel this insane

above and below/the tower tarot/tower of babel/tower princes

the tower has reactivated/the tower wants john gaius

they are coming out of their tower/10 billion souls and john gaius

[youshouldjustliveinmychurch]

Don’t know if this has any bearing on the actual narrative of The Locked Tomb, but Ianthe and Kiriona’s “Tower Princes” title reminds me of the historical “Princes in the Tower.” In the 1400s, a couple of princes were kept in the Tower of London by their uncle, supposedly for their protection, until the coronation of the oldest prince. Unfortunately, they disappeared, with much speculation about if they had been murdered and if so, who was the culprit. At one point, two skeletons were found under a staircase in the tower and have long been assumed to be the bones of the two ill-fated boys, though it hasn’t been proven.

The Princes in the Tower also play a role in Shakespeare’s play “Richard III.” Tamsyn framed both GtN and HtN as plays. And then what happens at the end of NtN? Everyone starts speaking in what sounds like Shakespearean English. It just raises questions, that’s all I’m saying. The choice of tower princes is so interesting because traditionally the tower princes are seen as fairly helpless victims. They were children after all, who were murdered by someone hungry for their power. I mean so much potential symbolic significance there in terms of innocence, death, and power. It will be especially interesting to see how this may factor into Ianthe’s narrative arc, because I’m hoping her arc is going to be especially explosive and intriguing in AtN. Excited to see how this plays out!

[mayasaura]

im thinking about Silas and feeling Things. he’s so… sad. hes a mystery box to me. i want to know more about him and his upbringing. hes my locked tomb blorbo and i want a short story for him. hes so fascinating

He is so fascinating, and I haven't let go of the hope that he and Colum are still going to turn up again. He was last seen diving into the River to look for Colum, and Colum was the first victim of the demons that appeared again at the end of Nona the Ninth.

Silas was going to where Colum is, and Colum is in the the place between where the things are that eat us. Where the demons come from. I'll give you good odds he's in the tower, where Harrow's going.

[cosmictiddies]

Silas has 3 keys other than the facility key, and they are white, grey, and black. The 8th, 6th, and 9th. Silas and Colum had access to the studies of Mercymorn, Cassiopeia, and Anastasia. We know Harrow had the 8th’s key for a time and went into that room while Gideon recovered from the avulsion trial but we never get any description of it. Silas was Colum were likely the only people to see inside the studies of the 6th and the 9th.

Why were these specific rooms kept from Gideon’s - and the audience’s - pov? We never seen them. We never know anything about them, yet they are the studies of some of the most important lyctors. I wonder if the studies of Anastasia, Cassiopeia, and Mercymorn will be revisited in Alecto.

[wackachewbacca]

pov: you read the last fifty something pages of Nona the Ninth

my brain is mush

[unreachedgalaxy]

can't stop thinking about how tamsyn muir regularly includes foreshadowing in the most bizarre and mundane places (like harrow threatening to make bone meal explode out of gideon, and then she does do that to a Different Gideon).

anyway on a totally unrelated note, remember how they're fighting in GTN and harrow says "when I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it"? and remember what harrow knows now about the meaning of lyctorhood and cavalierhood, and the fact that she likely no longer wants gideon to just be her cavalier? and remember that there's almost no way they won't have at least one blowup fight in Alecto the Ninth?

yeah. thinking about it.

[katakaluptastrophy]

"I’ve already pretty much revealed that Alecto begins with the descent of Christ into Hades." - Tamsyn Muir

That's right...it's time for more Bible study for fans of weird queer necromancers!

It's currently Holy Week, the week where Western liturgical Christians reenact the events of Jesus' death and resurrection in real time. And today, it's Holy Saturday. So Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday. He rises from the dead on Easter Sunday. But what happened in between? His body lay in the tomb...but his spirit was otherwise preoccupied. Because on Holy Saturday, Jesus went to Hell.

But why would Jesus go to Hell? Because the resurrection was not just about saving the people who came after it - it was a bit more...wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.

To be a bit more specific, he didn't visit Hell Hell. The place Jesus visited isn't Hell in the sense of eternal punishment of the damned, but Hades or Sheol or the Underworld or Limbo - a place for those who were mostly good but lived before Jesus' resurrection had made salvation possible. So before his resurrection, Jesus went to make that salvation retroactive. Particularly, according to tradition, to major figures from the Old Testament, including Adam and Eve.

So Nona the Ninth ended with Harrow walking off into the River in search of theological truth. And Alecto the Ninth apparently begins with Harrow in Hell:

Alecto the Ninth, ACT ONE HARROW IN HELL CHAPTER 1 At a point in the slit she was carving through life, Harrowhark Nonagesimus woke to find herself lost in a dark wound. She had been walking when it had all gone black– any path ahead or behind was blotted out; now she was here.  - Tamsyn Muir reading at TorCon

This is riffing heavily on the beginning of Dante's Inferno:

"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost." - Dante Alighieri, Inferno

But lots of people go to Hell. What's so special about Harrow going there? Because the traditional name in English for Jesus' chthonic salvation adventures on Holy Saturday is "the Harrowing of Hell." "Harrow" comes from an Old English word meaning to attack or despoil - a very martial way of expressing the idea of Jesus as the victor over sin and death.

Harrow ended NTN realising that she cannot trust John's account of metaphysics. That she needs to discover the reality for herself. The faith of the Nine Houses and John's own styling as god rests on the foundation of the Resurrection - John is the "ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death", his power is understood to be absolute: "Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine."

And yet even that prayer - "let those across the river..." - introduces doubt. Magnus jumps in to silence Abigail when she expresses her heretical belief in the River beyond, and Harrow herself scoffs that "it has been thousands of years since anybody bothered to believe in the River beyond." Abigail believes that John knows nothing about what exists beyond the River. And what about Hell? In HTN, Ulysses the First is described as "languishing in Hell" after his run-in with a Resurrection Beast. John himself describes the stoma as "the mouth to Hell", "a portal to a place I cannot touch - somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless."

In the Book of Revelation - the Bible's account of the end of the world - Jesus holds "the keys of death and Hell". John may have resurrected the dead, but he does not comprehend what is beyond it. Both the destination of the good, the River beyond to which the souls of little Isaac and Jean should have traveled lightly after their short and brutal lives, and the Hell that lies beneath the stoma are outside of his power. He is a few keys short of the full divine bunch. He can manipulate death, but he is not really its master.

And so Harrow walks off into the River to look for something or someone she can call god. Harrow, who shares a name with the defeat of death across time and space. Harrow, who is of the unbroken line of Anastasia. Anastasia was kind to Alecto, who like Eve is the mother of all and like Adam walked on the empty earth with god.

In Orthodox icons, the Harrowing of Hell is depicted with Jesus triumphant, leading Adam and Eve by the hand from their tombs. The traditional term for this image is an anastasis, the Greek term for resurrection. Adam and Eve, whose sin broke the intended shape of reality, are restored to wholeness with god.

How will Harrow answer her questions about god? What really is beyond the stoma and what would it mean to conquer it? What does it look like, metaphysically, to restore the world of The Locked Tomb to wholeness, and what will it cost?

[liesmyth]

would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!

Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote

#earth conception of race doesn't impact any character in the series except the canonically brown main antagonist

By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).

I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.

[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]

Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It's not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards... these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.

John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.

[lemon-natalia]

Nona the Ninth Reaction - Chapter 28

‘golden eyes like a dead animal’s’ you are sick and twisted Tamsyn Muir, sick and twisted (affectionate). also that is an interesting description of Kiriona's eyes. of course part of it is that she is quite literally in a dead body, but these are also the eyes that John got after he gained his necromantic powers

ohhhh my god. i don’t think my heart can take Kiriona asking after Harrow. she gave up her life for her, did the best she could to take care of Harrow’s body, and now she doesn’t even know if Harrow’s alive or not

oof both Pyrrha and Nona clearly know that she’s Alecto, but Nona really doesn’t want to remember. i wonder how long exactly Pyrrha knew who Nona was, even if she was hoping she was Gideon, i feel like part of her must have suspected since the beginning

hmm i wonder if there’s something significant about Alecto’s name? not in terms of its Doylist meaning i.e. being named after one of the Furies, but in universe. here Nona doesn’t want Pyrrha to say her name because it will make her remember, John (from what i recall) only ever used nicknames like A.L. and Annabel Lee etc. when talking to Harrow, and both he and the other Lyctors had a remarkably strong reaction to Mercy using it at the end of HtN:

'A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her-” “Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she said it, as though it were an aural stab’

oh wow, Alecto’s consciousness (voice?) rising up to speak from Nona is very disturbing. once again, Alecto doesn’t seem like the nicest person. which makes sense i suppose given she is in actuality a Resurrection Beast herself and seemingly very pissed off about the whole ‘killing humanity and putting her in a human form’ thing

‘astonishingly, Pash, helping an extremely feeble and aged person’ i mean good on Pash for helping the elderly, i guess?

it’s gotta be so strange for Palamedes’ mother and the other people in the Sixth to be dealing with the ‘i’m dead and in Naberius Tern’s also dead body’ thing. it can hardly be what they imagined when he and Camilla went off to the First in GtN. speaking of, i do still wonder how everyone’s family members, the Cohort etc. reacted to the news of basically everyone dying after going off to try and be Lyctors

‘Palamedes was acting as though he were a tiny at show-and-tell’ is that not how Palamedes always acts about everything

Pyrrha Dve queen of ill-advised romantic relationships. poor her, she’s lost basically everyone she cared about before (G1deon, Wake, and now Pal and Cam, Nona is dying) now as a result of Lyctorhood to some degree

oh why does everything they’re saying here feel like a goddamn funeral, i categorically don’t like this

'something white and grey and powdery [...] Camilla [...] - to Nona's horror - ate it' i’m assuming that’s Palamedes’ skull goop making a reappearance. ew

ohhh wow this is a lot worse than i thought it was going to be, they’ve actually just straight up merged themselves into a single person. i suspected the whole Camilla-and-Palamedes thing was going to come back but not like this. it’s not like they had a lot of choices, and i mean i guess it’s better on an emotional level than one of them dying and the other having to live with it, but still, yikes

wdym i am categorically not crying about the fact that Kiriona is apparently totally disinterested in this whole situation, but her first instinct is still to want to hand over her jacket to … Cam/Pal. (Pam?)

listen i get what Palamedes is trying to do here, encouraging Ianthe to accept Lyctorhood as a mutual loss & rebirth rather than a sole sacrifice of the cavalier, but quite frankly i think poor Naberius would like being merged into a single person with Ianthe even less than being murdered

[babybutchianthe]

acknowledging the themes and political dimensions of a text is distinct from insinuatimg there is a fable-style moral of the story, or stating that the narrative contains a central thesis that it acts as a rhetorical vehicle for. nobody has said that there are answers and truths that lie within the locked tomb series. we also don't need an answer to colonialism courtesy of a pākehā person who had given thought to the ethnicities of various characters but does not textually acknowledge them until 2½ books in 👍

the reoccurring theme here rlly seems to be this presumption that for a work to have political dimensions worthy of analysis & discussion it simultaneously needs to be guiding the reader toward a particular moral conclusion—because the other side of this debate has this compulsive need to relate things back to morality—and that they are not worth being interrogated if there is not an answer or conclusion the author has supplied. by calling attention to the themes of colonialism that pervade the narrative we are not asking for a white woman to give us the keys to decolonialism, and that implicit assumption is insulting given that it takes a defensive position of 'her choice to refer to colonialism doesn't need to be read any deeper because it's not her job to solve it'.

nobody is presuming tamsyn to have wrote an ideological treatise: yet still, something that is not an ideological treatise can be interrogated and has meaning regardless of intention. the continual refrain that the personal is extricable from the political is a symptom of a privilege of ignorance endemic to the perspective that allows one to write off any discussion of substance as digging too deep, or state that 'a series can have political themes without making an in-your-face definitive statement'; why is there an incessant need to publicly protest people calling attention to the things you'd prefer to ignore? why are you compelled to insinuate that anyone questioning the text's themes is digging too deep? what is motivating you to speak out against people being 'too political', what is the source of that discomfort?

why do you presume you can clearly delineate the personal and political, as if they are separable, adjacent instead of intertwined, and demand others do this—others who continually find their identities, bodies, and cultures politicised? deemed taboo and in conflict with sensibility, normativity and hegemony? tamsyn muir doesn't have the answer to colonialism, i agree, and your outcry against the acknowledgement of it makes me presume you don't particularly want one either

[miraonpluto]

i did a deep dive on pyrrha’s name and was once again impressed by the sheer amount of meaning behind everything in these books? anyways here is what i found (warning for long post ahead):

literally pyrrha’s entire life because she never gets a break but specifically: g1deon pushing wake out of the airlock and killing her but saving the nine houses in the process. g1deon setting off the nukes (everything is his fault, objectively). losing nona to save harrow, losing cam and pal to save cam and pal. etc

pyrrha is one of the founders of the second house aka the military house (was she a cohort commander? i don’t remember) and the logo for the second house is a skull wearing an ancient greek helmet!! also pyrrha/g1deon is the only character to use a spear as an offhand, the main weapon used by ancient greek soldiers. plus ancient greek soldiers are typically depicted with red plumes and white tunics, which are the second house colors. why john decided to theme the second house after ancient greece in his dark academia space punk imperialism universe is not something i want to analyze right now

in terms of benevolence i would actually say one of pyrrha’s main traits, at least in contrast to g1deon, is her kindness, especially when she told harrow how to protect herself from g1deon. based on how john describes pre-resurrection g1deon though this could be a soul permeability thing

fucking the enemy definitely counts as a failure to maintain focus. no further explanation required

i would say this is a coincidence but idk if tamsyn does coincidences so. the other meaning of pyrrhic is Two syllable meter. what the hell!

definitely fits her personality but also g1deon's body has red hair so that's fun. i could connect this to landmine people and/or cam literally setting herself on fire but that might be a stretch

ok that's all i got if this post doesn't flop i'll consider doing it again for other characters' names (alecto maybe? that name has interesting lore)

bonus:

[totopopopo]

Everybody knows by now I think that harrow’s name comes from the (early) Christian concept of the harrowing of hell.

To summarize briefly, in Christian mythology, when Jesus died on the cross, he descended into the underworld for the three days that he stayed dead. I say the underworld—the word they use is Hades, not Hell, although some translations use the word hell. This pre-dates the Christian conceptions of hell that we are more familiar with—fire and brimstone and punishment etc—and reflects the idea that it was more of a neutral place where everyone went when they died, stemming from other traditions like the Greco Roman hades (obviously, which it took the word from) or the Jewish Sheol. The harrowing of hell refers to what Jesus does when he gets to this place. He descends and he kills death itself (using the cross as a weapon)—the death of death—and he leads ALL of the dead people there up out of the mouth of hades. He frees them from the shackles of death. This is all laid out in the early apocryphal text the gospel according to nicodemus. You should read it it’s fun.

When I say mouth, I mean that literally. In art and literature, even in the gospel of nicodemus, hades was characterized as an actual living creature, and in the harrowing, Jesus kills it and leads the souls out of its gaping mouth. This has lead to some frankly excellent art:

Okay, back to the locked tomb. Why am I bringing this up (other than the fact that I partially wrote my thesis in this so I will talk about it whenever possible)? Well, we know harrow’s name is… significant. We also know that in Alecto, she will find herself in hell. Okay. Where do we see ^ this imagery pop up in the universe of the locked tomb? What place does John call hell? The Soma, under the river. Soma, which means body in Greek. The body that houses the dead in its belly, the body of hades, the living body of hell. And we’ve seen it’s mouth already, a gaping mouth lined with teeth.

EDIT: it was pointed out it’s called the stoma not the soma, but. Stoma means fucking mouth in Greek so…. The point stands. The point very much stands.

Like.. mouth indeed.

I think harrow is gonna go into the stoma. I think harrow is going to kill death—or maybe, in a delicious inversion the likes of which Tamsyn Muir loves so much, she is going to kill necromancy. The death of the death of death. And she’s going to lead out the souls in there. All the people—Augustine? Cassiopea?—and all the fucking planets too.

Idk we’ll fucking see.

[tomomiisasleep]

notes on Ianthe

just casually re-reading GtN Ianthe moments

here she kinda bested Palamedes and Harrow in picking out information out of bone fragments, which is very impressive considering the specialities of the 69 necros.

it seems that when it comes to necromantic "theory", she really is the best of the generation, this deduced from her grand feat of figuring out the Eightfold all on her own.

here Babs kinda jabs at her for being jealous of Corona's ability to gain attention. hmm. I have mixed feelings about this. I mean Babs knows her pretty well and I would believe that she actually does care about whether or not she could show off, which is ugggghhhhhh PAIN I don't wanna think about the fact that it may have hurt her entire life to co-exist with Corona and let her draw in all the attention but she does it anyway because Corona is the only person that really loves her and knows her, aaaaaaa and she started at six. SIX. WHAT does that mean. Did she even give it much thought at first? or were they still in the same twin us vs. world mindset at the time?

anyways I always thought that their layered relationship is delicious(in a bad way but in a good bad way)

1. Ianthe seems to be only good at theorems while Corona is the perfect heir, thus Corona holds power over Ianthe.

2. Corona is not actually a necro and depends entirely on Ianthe to put on the act, thus Ianthe holds power over Corona.

3. Corona is the main and often sole source of recognition Ianthe receives, likely causing her to value Corona more and others less over time, thus Corona holds power over Ianthe. (This may be the reason Tamsyn deems Corona the "worse" because she is skilled in manipulation, not necessary with malign intent)

4.(Not entirely sure about this but probably) Giving Corona power is Ianthe's "goal" in life(I've seen this in other posts) which she deems highest priority and worth any cost(as expressed in The Unwanted Guest). She may measure her self-worth by Corona's success, which like, means that their relationship is not "one controls the other" but "-I need you. -I need you."

BUT! That last one depends on which of them decides on what "Corona's success" entails. The one who has the final say in what their goal is, is the twin who controls the other. And. There are a few pieces of evidence I've gathered that Corona is in charge. HOWEVER there is the evidence that Corona wants Ianthe to eat her. and she refused. ugh maybe they'd be better off becoming a merged soul. Maybe that's the real reason Pal bested her in The Unwanted Guest. She is overtaken by regret that they missed the chance to become one. Now they'd never be truly the two of them together, because even if they merge there'd always be Babs in there third-wheeling

but I understand that despite all that, Ianthe does want to be recognized outside of being "one of the twins". It's natural. and she does have a very hard to ignore crush on Harrow.

And maybe I'll scratch all the stuff above later when I read their interactions(plus the Corona side-story! I've been saving that for when I get mental from alectopause) because I'm just speaking from memory and memory deceives.

ok I'll shut up about Tridentarii stuff now, what I actually wanted to say that Ianthe gives off different vibes in GtN and HtN. In GtN she's just this huge evil nerd, and in HtN she's gross-hot sexy-bitch. And it's funny how different she is from Gideon's and Harrow's pov, like all the fanfic I read in which she parties a lot and plays with girls a lot are all mostly drawing from Harrow's pov, and Harrow is a repressed nun who has only ever met 1 girl her age in her life and has a bone fetish(especially for Ianthe) and is obsessed with her scent. Though I enjoy reading all fan-interpretations of her, I think her canon lifestyle might actually be closer to how Gideon sees her(in GtN. in NtN they become bros which I love btw tower princes 4ever), which is wall-flowering in the corners and reading trashy romance novels while Corona deals with the socializing.(I kinda believe that people can be categoriesed into "reads about dating" and "dates" and Ianthe belongs to the first because she gets excited over a sexy makeover

she also spends a horrifying amount of time studying (because she's as good with theory as Pal who "made his life into a war" for Dulcie, and Harrow who studies with the weight of 200 dead kids on her consciousness.

ok Ianthe's such a hot nerd I'm gonna faint I have become obsessed with her aaaaaaaaa she's like everything that drives me crazy in a hot tall glass of skank(a skank for knowledge

[mayasaura]

I don't really know where this lands on the scale of basic to hot take, but I don't see the locked tomb as a very overtly political series. Like yeah, it has a lot of subtext you can interpret politically, obviously, if that's your jam. but to me, the series has always been an intimate exploration of existing as a badly uncomfortable and isolated person. there are a lot of different reasons people in the series are fucked up, but the important thing to me is that they are. and that they're being witnessed. To me it's a love letter to all the deeply fucked up people out there (esp the deeply fucked up lesbians) saying "you exist, and someone sees you"

Edit: Since apparently people are linking to this post to interpret and argue with it indirectly, let me clarify. I don't mean the story is apolitical. I mean that as I see the story unfolding, the central narrative is focused on the characters, and the heart of the narrative is human connection and character exploration. Of course there are political themes being explored—I've posted a lot about them myself—but that exploration is about asking a lot of questions I don't expect the series to necessarily answer.

Tamsyn Muir doesn't have the answer to colonialism. She does have the answer as to what will happen to two mentally unwell painfully lonely girls I suspect we've all grown quite attached to.

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

what i love about gideon being named for the biblical gideon is that, initially, it's really confusing. or at least, it was to me. i got to the naming guide in the back of gtn after reading it for the first time and i wasn't sure what to make of it. like yeah, cool, gideon as in the biblical gideon, but other than the vague concept of being called to fight, there doesn't really seem to be much of a connection there.

even in nona the ninth, the connection feels a little tenuous. i mean yes, she does now officially fight for god, but she's not even called gideon anymore, and god didn't choose her so much as he very abruptly found himself in posession of a daughter and decided to make lemonade.

and then it hit me.

gideon the first. that's gideon the first's name. and it makes so much sense for g1deon to be named after the biblical gideon.

either tamsyn muir is a genius or i'm thinking way too hard about this. because to me, it really does feel like the name "gideon" was introduced into this universe specifically for g1deon, and the fact that our girl ended up with it is purely incidental.

and like. when you think of that in the context of her relationship to john. she wasn't so much chosen as she was convenient. she was never supposed to be here. even her name, which carries the connotation of chosen one, is borrowed from someone john actually chose.

that name was never supposed to be hers. it was always meant to be his.

i just. every day man. every fucking day i realize something about a tlt character's name. and i end up chewing glass every time.