#tlt teacher

[derseprinceoftbd]

A VISION

STEVE BUSCEMI AS TEACHER

[we-are-the-graves]

Anybody else catch this in GtN?

And then there's a paragraph or so, but the next words that are spoken are:

"Anybody else want to admit they're an unholy necromantic construct?"

The Unholy Necromantic Construct enters.

"Maybe later," he says.

Nobody bats an eye.

[tiffanyachings]

kill us twice, shame on god

[midnightcrows]

finally doodled Teacher(canaan priest)

—but he cried out: "And miss out on the chance to die? I've been wandering these halls at three o'clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, 'It would be terrible to be shot,' and the Sleeper still does not come... It is dreadful to be shown a monster's pity."

[mayasaura]

Going into Alecto, I think it's important to expect that the series won't conclude with a clear lesson. Either about morality—what makes a good person, evil getting their just desserts, ect—or a thesis on decolonization. It's not that kind of story.

Deep down, this series is two drunk girls bearing their souls in a dark corner of the bar. An hours-long conversation that wheels wildly through pop culture, past trauma, theoretical physics, dreams and aspirations, global warming, hairstyling, friends, family, gender, personal insecurities, world history, favorite foods. It has a lot to say, and a lot of it profound, but it's not trying to teach anything. At the end of the night, the point was how fucking cool that girl was, and the potent electric potential for something lgbt to happen

[damthosefandoms]

every week we have to wait between new pjo episodes is like reliving the year between mark of athena and house of hades. except this time we’re ten years older and still haven’t forgiven rick for that author’s note💙

[eemolu]

harrow’s lobotomy timeline is so fun because she uses it to roast people who pissed her off the first time. the second they get there teacher is like oh nooo i don’t go down in the labs because i don’t want to wake the sleeper and i just love noise toooo much. basically harrow said yeah this bitch loves to never shut the fuck up which is obviously the number one reason he’d be terrified of the mean revenant in the basement. couldn’t be the threat of imminent death or anything. babe be SERIOUS

[stergeon]

"hey harrow how good do my glutes look doing this"

live nonagesimus reaction cam:

somewhere aiglamene is screaming about gideon's atrocious form

paintless pinup:

[claudiatherelentless]

I find it so Fascinating that the construct called Teacher is so genuinely afraid of Water. The first time I read this book I was sure I was Important and now having read Harrow the Ninth I'm absolutely certain it has Something to do with The River but like

What

So this is an open invitation to send me Meta or just infodump right on this post lol

[notedchampagne]

What do you think The Angel and / or We Suffer look like?

boes sillycrowd

[wofworld]

thinking about how harrow insisted that she can only share the ninth house’s secret with gideon if they are submerged in salt water. thinking about nona’s love of the ocean and about alecto being called a ‘saltwater creature’ on two (??) different occasions. also thinking about alecto’s favor to anastasia and the irony of the saltwater pool tradition being passed down through so many generations- but only on the ninth and with no real concept of where it started…

[illisidifan]

"As for Teacher's expression, well, that one was hard to fathom. In the end it was something like melancholy and something like resignation [...] Harrowhark asked, 'Teacher, was Lady Septimus so diagnosed?' 'Dulcinea Septimus was not meant to live to 25.'"

I swear to jod, Teacher 100% knew that Dulcie wasn't what she seemed.

And I'll never get over the fact that he of course knew the way the trials would end, what would happen to the cav's and when he talks about the third's "discrepancy", he mentioned that it would be "Only trouble at the end of the line, and trouble confined to them!" The *foreshadowing*.

I swear, this book gets better with every re-reading, I find something new every time, notice some new bit of connection to what will happen later, sometimes not even until the next book.

[techyroad]

i had to draw something for art class and it looked like shit soooo i started scribbling on it with white and realised it looked a bit like our tenebrous overlord Harrowhark. I just went with it and made THIS. thought tumblr might enjoy

[themythecho]

shoutout to my Musical Theater teacher when today we were talking about finding the right song for the solos we’re preforming at end of quarter and she goes “Envision the scene of what’s happening when you listen to it”. So I raise my hand and tell her I have Aphantasia and I physically (Mentally?) can not do that. She told me “Oh.. I don’t know, try your best”. LOVE the subtle ableism you bring to the table. Anyway I may be cooked on my assignment but I’m singing Good Kid from PJO the musical so how hard could it be (Very hard). ALSO SHE SAID I COULDNT DO A SONG FROM EPIC??

[mayasaura]

I may have seen one long ago and just forgotten, but do you happen to know of any particular writings unpacking the whole situation with Teacher in HTN?? It seems like he is portrayed so differently in Harrow’s brain, and I have always wondered how it is that Harrow’s brain Teacher knows all of this more detail history about Canaan House when Harrow herself doesn’t know all that yet.

I don't know of any off the top on my head, but for my part I'm pretty sure that's really Teacher, just like Abigail, Marta, and the others are really themselves.

Like you point out, there's no way Harrow could have just imagined all the insider knowledge he has of Canaan House, and Judith killed him, so he is dead and therefore available.

He doesn't start off all that different from the way he was in Gideon the Ninth. He's always been a bit. Uh. Kooky. And intense. With his little sermons about "the sum of all necromantic transgression" and "murder is done by the living", and the way he tells Gideon that he's always hated water and then laughs hysterically with her when she points out he's surrounded by the sea. His speech about the Sleeper is more exposition than he ever gave in life, but Harrow needed someone to feed lines explaining the scenario.

It's after they start realizing that they're in the River, and someone is dreaming the scenario, that Teacher really goes off the rails. And who can blame him? The man is fifty souls smashed together in a necromantic hadron collider and left to marinate for ten thousand years.

As he puts it,

Now here he is, finally dead and in the River, and he's been drawn back into a facsimile of his old box. It might be enough to make anyone wander the haunted halls caterwauling in hopes of attracting the second death of oblivion.

I don't know why his lips are so much looser with secrets in the River. Maybe he was necromantically prevented from telling the secrets of Canaan House in life, with a ritual like the Sewn Tongue. Maybe he's just decided "fuck it!" and gone whole ham doling out forbidden knowledge.

Teacher is fascinating, because he's a construct. He's the blueprint for what Kiriona will be, and may be the blueprint for what Harrow is. A manufactured composite soul, tethered to a perfectly preserved body. I don't even know if he was technically alive or dead or a secret third thing, in Canaan House, and that's just wild to me.

[6badchickennuggets]

let me preface this Locked Tomb meta attempt with the posibility that i may be crazy or this may have already been said.

that said i would like to talk about teacher in Harrow the Ninth chapter 35.

Nona the ninth spoilers below the cut

At the beginning of the chapter, Caanan house (which we now know is a bubble in the river) has begun to freeze over and become hostile. Harrow narrates:

 “the rainbow girdled constructs had kept fishing in the still moving salt sea. but teacher had taken one look at their catch and refused to have it cooked, or to let anyone else even see it”. 

What did teacher see? That depends on if the catch was pulled from the river or from harrows brain. In the first case, it could be any number of the river’s abominations and thus teacher was simply trying to protect the inhabitants of caanan house. For the sake of interest, I would like to consider option two: that the skeletons fished out something from within harrows brain.

Now, who resides in Harrow’s brain and is repeatedly described as a “salt water creature”?  Let me direct your attention to teacher’s “mad” ramblings later in the chapter:

“but when the work was done, when i was finished, and so were they, and the new lyctors found out the price, they had him kill the salt water creature before she could do them harm.”

In the very same scene, he is drinking thistle shrub, which he assures Harrow is not alcoholic, but that he attempts to use to get drunk. 

I posit that the constructs pulled Alectos body from the river, and teacher, horrified, tossed her back, refused to let anyone see her. By his own confession he is “terrified” of her. He attempts to get drunk on whatever he has on hand and holds in his panic until the smallest trigger sets him off. He is haunted (not literally) (i don’t think) by Alecto. 

But why wouldn’t teacher kill alecto. He is horrified of her.

I don’t know what teacher is but he indicates some sort of sympathy or at least comraderie for what Alecto went through. He says “oh but it is a tragedy to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time. it happened to me but i was only a man, or perhaps fifty men.” (who are the fifty men). It’s possible he even feels some sort of kinship with what she is. 

And Alecto loves the sea. 

“Salt water had always relieved her: salt water made her feel as though, if there was someone in there with her, she would suddenly know the words to tell them everything.” NTN, chapter 9

I have no conclusion to this, but it is interesting to consider and I hope we get some more information about teacher in Alecto the Ninth.

(Separate wormhole: the drink Teacher is drinking in this scene is thistle shrub. thistles have the appearance of one flower but are actually a combination of many flowers put together. it’s just. interesting.)