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Of course Pyrrha looks at Gideon with “a kind of soft, guarded want; a hunger—a living desire to take the corpse in her arms like Kevin's wanting desire with his dolls. To own, to squeeze, to cosset and destroy.”

How else would the woman who loves landmine people look at a child called Bomb?

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Jewelle Gomez in Pride episode 3 (2021) dir. Cheryl Dunye

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there needs to be a cultural shift in america like im not talking about culture war bullshit i mean the average american needs to learn to care about their community and the rest of the world and not be a self-absorbed asshole with a "fuck you i got mine" attitude.

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the tlt fandom's insidious problem with ableism

this will be my final original post for the locked tomb fandom, if not forever, at least for a very long time.

i have been in this fandom since november 2021, so about 3 and a half years. i can handle john gaius discourse, and butch harrow/butch4butch griddlehark discourse, and imperialism discourse, and all other bigotry discourse, and SA discourse, and all of the other incredibly difficult and meaningful topics that are worth discussing in this fandom, but the fact that i privately told someone who tagged my post with "harrow is crazy and evil and gideon will fix her" that it was ableist and upsetting and to not say those things about people with severe mental health conditions anymore, and i got blocked for it, the fact that that happened from someone who had a "punk" pinned post and was a leftist…

this is my final straw.

i see ableist microaggression after ableist microaggression day in and day out with this fandom and i'm sick and tired of acting like it doesn't deeply disturb me. other people don't think people like me are full human beings. and yeah, that's what all bigotry is, i'm not trying to act like i'm exceptional. but, like a lot of other insidious and deep-running forms of bigotry, this comes from even the most "progressive" of people, people that like to champion other marginalized communities and stand up for other disabled people. but nobody likes psychotic people. even the fucking medical providers that are supposed to help us and sympathize with us don't like us, don't believe us, belittle us and abuse us.

nobody has any idea the amount of trauma this disorder and this diagnosis has inflicted on me, how it has made my life significantly harder on a day-to-day basis and a systemic basis and an interpersonal basis. i didn't have a job for FOUR YEARS. i've had to take medications that make it difficult for me to wake up in the morning, give me issues with swallowing, and can sedate me so much that i can't drive at times. i started this medication in march 2021 and i have never felt fully awake since then. i was involuntarily committed for nine days and experienced abuse and medical malpractice in both a major hospital and a psychiatric facility that led to PTSD. i used to wake up screaming multiple times a week from PTSD nightmares related to my hospitalization. it takes me so much longer to do academic work and i have extensive disability accommodations at my university. i'm still an undergrad student at 26 years old despite starting uni at 20, and i'm not expected to graduate for at least two more years. after i was out of the hospital in 2021, it took me six months before i could start doing schoolwork again, and i could only handle one class at a time. i barely remember those entire six months honestly. the first two months, my mom (my caretaker at that time) said that i seemed like an alzheimer's patient or a dementia patient, that i wasn't myself and i struggled to take care of myself.

and when i read harrow the ninth for the first time in december 2021, i saw all of that in that book. it was a hard read because i saw so much of the shit i went through in harrow's experience on the mithraeum, with ianthe and john who wanted to "help" her but were really exploiting her (reminding me of someone whose actions triggered paranoia in me during my first psychotic episode), with mercymorn and augustine who treated her like an annoyance and an idiot (reminding me of some of the nurses and providers in the facility, people who were undoubtedly overworked and underpaid but still misused their power over me and other patients), harrow herself waking up with panic attacks and not knowing what was real and what was just in her head, her constant yearning for home and leaving the horrible place that she was trapped inside of (self-explanatory). all of this resonated so deeply with me, and even if all of it wasn't the exact same as what i had just gone through earlier in the year, it was all very thematically similar.

and then i got to this fandom and its mostly just people shitting on htn harrow and jokingly calling her a brain damaged wet rat, but like, over and over and over again.

can you imagine how this made me feel lol.

it made me feel like shit.

so i ignored that feeling, maybe even went along with the rest of the fandom for a few moments because you know, maybe i'm just overreacting. maybe it's not that deep. after all, maybe i'm no different from a "brain damaged wet rat" myself. but that was the internalized ableism talking. but it just kept bothering me, and bothering me, and bothering me. it's been like three and a half years now and i can't ignore anymore how much it bothers me, how deeply disturbing i find it that people call her "cutesy" slurs like crazy and psycho and "delulu" or say she needs to be "fixed" or that gideon WILL "fix" her or that "her brain is made of soup teehee" or making "grippy sock" jokes or calling her a "sopping wet pathetic meow meow" or like whatever. honestly i don't even think people are doing it maliciously. that doesn't stop it from being hurtful and damaging.

even if it's not sourced from malicious intent, it's just proof that nobody fucking cares about people with psychotic disorders. nobody fucking cares about the human rights abuses that happen to patients in psychiatric facilities. nobody cares about how hard it is for people like us to make it through the world. do you know that there are some people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that are catatonic, that can't speak or get out of bed? that can't take care of themselves? do you care about them and still think they're people? what about the people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia that can't hold down a job or finish a degree or provide for themselves? the people with these mental health conditions that are homeless or stuck in abusive group homes? are these people "brain damaged little meow meows"? i'm one of the lucky ones! i can still go to school and take care of myself and work! but it wasn't always that way for me, and it may not always be this way for me in the future. do i still matter, then? am i still a person that deserves respect? or am i just another thing to make fun of, especially when and if my condition starts to decline? do you realize that your jokes enable your own bigotry and enforce the bigotry of others?

but its fun to laugh at harrow's declining condition, and make jokes with your friends who will never have to worry about this being in their cards. lobotomized brain damaged wet rat. fuck you.

i know you're just here to mess around and have fun with the books you like, but so was i. i can't do that anymore because people have made this environment so difficult for people like me. for fuck's sake, i used to make shitposts and theory posts all the time. have you noticed i don't anymore?

there's a lot of bigotry in this fandom, but this is the only topic that i feel qualified to speak on at length due to how deeply personal it is to me. please, i am begging you, think about what you say about harrow's mental health, symptoms, and brain. i know she isn't real, but i am, and so are people with the psychotic conditions she has.

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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?

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So this guy on fb is very butthurt bc he was banned from the main tlt group and has been posting about it in other tlt groups about how he did nothing wrong, etc etc, and you go to his profile and it's all 'murica and the orange one and Jesus and taking the rainbow back for god and the pride month = demon thing posted several times.

And it's so far beyond "are you lost?" that it veers into "how the fuck did you even find this place, nevermind read gtn and htn without your head exploding Palamades-style?"

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i'm curious, what's everyone's Default Outfit? like what would you be always drawn wearing in a cartoon? mine is concert tee + mid length skirt

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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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as i grow older and age in fandom especially, i have waning patience for 2012 style fandom wars. i don't have time for the type of person who goes "why is this the 2nd top ship on ao3 when it bugs me", i don't have the energy to be friends with people who go "i specifically expressed dislike for this ship and people still write it?" and i have absolutely no time for someone who goes "this very personal trauma i have projected onto this random character and ship should be recognized and agreed by everyone else, otherwise they're bad people"

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do you ever read a take so bad you can't even be mad about it you're just like... ohhhhhh they must be stupid </3 so sad for them

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crane wives go crazy

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Time is running out, your miraculous friend is freaking out so badly he's sweating blood, and the authorities are closing in - it's Good Friday and since I apparently write weird bible studies for queer goths now, we're thinking about what it means to 'so love the world'.

Now I know, I know, if we're thinking about Good Friday - the day in Holy Week when we remember in real time how Jesus was judicially tortured and publicly executed - we should probably be talking about Gideon on the fence post or her subsequent colourfully-named stigmata or something like that. But I'm re-routing us to an incident at the end of the Last Supper because in many ways we can't talk about what Gideon is part of making better before we talk about how her dad messed it up to begin with.

If you're only passingly familiar with the Passion story, then you may not be aware of the incident sandwiched between the Last Supper and Jesus' torture and death, often descriptively referred to as 'The Agony in the Garden'. This gets mentioned in several gospels, but I'm going to go with Luke because that's the only version where Jesus sweats blood:

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.” (Luke 22:29-46)

TL;DRN Jesus has a frankly understandable after dinner freak out about the whole crucifixion business, but commits to the plan.

There are a couple of traditions about what's going on with Jesus here, but most involve some sense of being confronted by the awful enormity of the task ahead of him, whether that's the horror of the suffering to come, or the idea that this is the moment that Jesus takes on all of the sins of humanity.

I don't think it's entirely coincidental that John's account of how things go down also involves him withdrawing from his friends in a moment of desperate overwhelm, during which he is approached by a representative of the divine who provides encouragement that strengthens but doesn't remove the issue at hand, before emerging to discover that his friends are not as he left them.

This is the point where we all turn in our Bibles to John 1:20:

He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”

Now John is not Jesus in this scene in a couple of senses.

The first is that the role he's playing in the John chapters of NTN isn't Jesus, it's John the Baptist. That verse, John 1:20, is where John the Baptist, asked if he's the messiah, acknowledges that he isn't, that his job is to prepare the way. I've suggested before that this is what the nun thought John was meant to do, and that his failure to take on this John the Baptist role is part of what sets the stage for the pool scene and everything that follows.

But the second is that - ok, hang on, it's going to take a moment to get there... We don't know quite what's going on in the John chapters, but it seems to be John re-telling the story of what happened for the first time, to Alecto. He's trying to make sense of his actions - to justify his actions - both to her and to himself, and he often carefully phrases or presents things to make what happened seem more inevitable than it perhaps was. To portray himself as suffering like Jesus, suffering because of others' sins, doing what was necessary in order to save the world - what could be more Purposeful? And after all, John so loved the world...

You've probably encountered John 3:16 in the wild, but let's quote it for context:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

To steal a line from yesterday's reblog - John isn't the Antichrist. But he is, thematically, anti-Christ. TLT evidently isn't intended to be operating in the same universe as Christian metaphysics, but for all that John tries to place himself in a comfortably familiar Christian pattern, his motivations are almost exactly opposite to those that Christianity attributes to Jesus: John so loved the world that he took, and everyone perished. There is resurrection, there is eternal life...and it's a horror that perverts everything it touches. John wants a new creation, but he wants to build it on another's sacrifice; it's not a world to repair others' sins and restore them to wholeness, but to ensure that no one remembers his'. It's a world in terrible stasis.

Tomorrow, its Holy Saturday, the day that marks Jesus' descent into Hell to bring even death under his power. The resurrected Christ in the Book of Revelation announces "Fear not. I am the First and the Last, and alive, and was dead, and behold I am living for ever and ever, and have the keys of death and of hell." (Revelation 1:17-19). John isn't first (but consider who in TLT is...), isn't last, is neither quite dead or alive, and hell is "somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless."

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dulcinea septimus......big fan....

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finally tried my hand at a twin cinema poem and yaowza !! took me a couple hours to figure it out but i'm very happy with this one and i wanted to share. you can read gideon and harrow's thoughts separately to see their perspectives on their own and each other's actions, and putting them together supposedly reveals the truth of the lengths they would go to but can't communicate to one another :3

i just think that a form where they are talking to one another without hearing any response and yet are intertwining so perfectly is deeply on theme and makes me ill

also sorry for image quality i formatted this on canva and idk how to put such a complex form into an image description so apologies </3

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honestly in mercymorn's shoes i would become insufferable also. you ended the world poisoned the universe lied to me let me eat my best friend and watched and said nothing. and there's nothing i can safely do about it. not yet, not for a long time. if i ever want you gone i am going to have to sit this out and let you think i still love you.

so you know what? i will be screaming everything i say to you from now on. every comment i make will be a criticism or a complaint and it will be delivered with as many exclamation points as i can manage. i will tear your every choice apart. i will openly fatasize about torturing you. i will never ever ever shut up. you will never be without my opinion on anything and it will never be positive. and just when it starts to seem like i've gone too far, just when you start to suspect i may actually hate you, i will pull it back. i will tell you that it's all for your own good. my love for you and your rule is so great that i cannot bear to see even the slightest flaw threatening either. and you will smile and forgive me and i will tell you that your speech was ineloquent your military is disorganized and you need to iron your fucking shirt before you ever show your stupid face in public again. i may never be free of you but motherfucker that means YOU will never be free of ME.

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They're color coded.

finally started my gtn reread & i forgot just how crazy this series makes me. it triggers all of my academic instincts. i want to grab a highlighter & sticky notes & pen & start taking notes in the margins. i want to put up a corkboard with a million red strings. i want to write several phd theses about it. i want to release a gideon the ninth: annotated edition that's somehow 200k words longer than the original. i want to start a religion. i want to jump off a building

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reblog the money pigeon for a financially stable future