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Rec List: TLT Holiday Exchange 2024

Today was reveals for the 2024 TLT Holiday Exchange, of which I'm a mod. I spent literally the entire day reading fanfiction and oogling fanart. From this first day foray, here are some of my favorites.

Note: I am a mod for this exchange. My opinions do not reflect the opinions of the moderation team, nor are they an official exchange opinion. All opinions are my own.

FANART

Beach Antics || Adorable comic featuring Harrow's hilariously failing attempts to flirt with hot surfer Gideon. I'm a fan of the line work and use of expressions.

Make It Real || Gorgeous digital painting of Cam and Pal in the moment before a kiss. Black and white and looks like a photograph. I am in awe.

IEA-3008-9 || Gideon and Harrow visit IKEA and find themselves in a zombie infestation. Hilarious and well done.

Try to make sense of this mess yourself || The TLT/Homestuck crossover you never knew you needed. Seriously, this one goes above and beyond.

Griddlehark || Gideon kisses Harrow's neck. The closest approximation of what I'm picturing in my head when I envision these two.

FANFICTION

I have not finished reading everything in the collection, and the recs below are only a sample of everything I have read. Today I prioritized longer fics, the ones that you can really sink into. I suspect these are fics that will get overlooked because of their length or subject matter, so I hope you give them a chance based on my review below.

I'll likely have a second rec list of shorter fics later in the week! :D

The Course, of Course, is the Least Direct || Rated E | 10,899 words | Gideon/Camilla || This fic captures so much character and longing. One of the first things I read this morning, and I was too lost in it to get out of bed for breakfast at a reasonable hour. A fic that doesn't require knowledge of the original source material to understand.

Long DXtance || Rated T | 7,673 words | Gideon/Harrow || HAM RADIO AU HAM RADIO AU! Imagine me and @rnanqo jumping around each other in excitement for this one. This fic captures the rare feeling of being isolated in body but connected in spirit via HAM radio conversations. The dialogue is amazing, and the ending is so satisfying.

well I walked into your dagger for the last time || Rated E | 7,622 words | Gideon/Harrow || This fic is beautifully angsty. I am eating it up and licking my fingers afterward. It's got some banger lines that ripped into my soul. Leaves off at a tense ending but based on what you read, you can see what is going to happen unfold in your imagination.

Adventures in Scientific Inquiry || Rated E | 7,799 words | Harrow/Palamedes || Do not be alarmed by the pairing. This fic does a great job portraying polyamory and platonic sex. It's also a great portrayal of demisexuality (as I've been living it at least), though I'm not sure if the author really intended that. A great way to touch on subjects that are not often explored in fanfiction.

Protocol Violation || Rated E | 7,848 words | Gideon & Harrow || Canon-Divergence where Gideon (Cell Commander Why Mourn We Not in Blood) interrogates a captured zombie (Harrow) about why all the House heirs are going to Eden. Brutally violent and left me wheeling. Could not keep my eyes off it even as I flinched.

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butch4butch2 (follow up to this illustration)

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back at it again with the tlt diagrams

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“Understand that once you do this, you can’t take it back. It’s better to die. There’s a power to dying clean … dying free. It’s not love, what you’re about to do. It’s not beautiful and it’s not powerful. It’s a mistake. We didn’t even do it right … we were children—playing with the reflections of stars in a pool of water … thinking it was space.” The story of a mistake: neither beautiful nor powerful—dying dirty and together. A luckless night at a shitty bar, and the ascension of the Third Saint to serve the King Undying; how the woman that would become Pyrrha Dve met the man on fire.

hi i wrote something

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i want to start saying 'are you a lolita locked tomb fan or a jarchie locked tomb fan' to people but the thing is they're not gonna get what i mean unless they have a very niche kind of brain poison

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any out of context spoilers for the next chapter? 👉👈

sorry for responding so late 😭 anyway these are kind of hard sometimes. i hope this is anything

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im not gonna lie the locked tomb has so massively skewed my standards for books that at this point when i say "i want to read a another book like tlt" i don't necessarily mean any sort of similarity with regards to character or plot specifics, i literally just mean "i want to read a book that not only fun but also good"

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I think what I also meant to say in my previous post was that gideon's death is presented to harrow as something she needs to heal and move on from in order to accept her current situation. And harrow simply refuses to accept the current situation and I don't think the narrative is leading to her ever accepting it. Gideon's death as fuel for harrow's lyctorhood is paralleled with alecto's death as fuel for john's power, which is a pretty straightforward metaphor for the way that empires like john's exploit the people they can and take natural resources with no thought for the future. So if these things are all connected, I just don't see how we could get any kind of satisfying ending out of harrow accepting gideon's death because to do so she'd kind of have to accept what john did to alecto and on a metaphorical level it would be a pretty bleak tone to strike to have harrow decide, oh well, there's nothing to be done. when there actually clearly were things to be done and harrow did them

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really fun duo you have there. mind if i add arbitrary roles to their relationship dynamic so i can write one of them as an overprotective caretaker and the other as a naive helpless baby?

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the moment  in nona the ninth when ianthe and kiriona show up like Attention Bajoran Workers We’re a Lil Transmasculine Now but Don’t You Worry About It

and the assembled populace is like Oh Fuck Fascism Is Here

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the locked tomb x homer: a not particularly comprehensive guide that no one asked for put together by a brain-fried uni finalist and it's all probably already been said but whatever

(previously discussed by me here (insane diagram linking everything) and here (paris, hector, gideon))

(sorry 4 dodgy photo editing... tried to add Visual Interest but. well. graphic design is my passion dot jpeg)

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"Harrow listens to My Chemi--" BZZT WRONG that girl doesn't want to hear noises louder than bone rattling. "Gideon Nav listens to --" BZZZT NO she is not listening to any music that deliberately processes an emotion more complex than "women hot." That girl is ten layers of trauma surviving solely on titty mags & "your mom" jokes. Modern Gideon would listen to a) horrible cock rock, b) horrible bro country or c) old school gangsta rap, depending on cultural context, and revels in the fact that everyone else hates her music. Neither of them are listening to your indie faves playlists, I am sorry

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So to sum up the tantrum-scene, Nona had just been kicked out of the gang by her friend and so she started screaming until blood came out of her mouth and sawing off her own limbs and throwing herself through doors and bullets and people screaming and screaming and screaming until they sent Camilla Hect who was like let me just swaddle you in a blanket like a big baby and hold you close and tell you I love you. And the soul of the earth was powerless.

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i love that pyrrha is sort of transfem in the sense that she’s literally a woman’s soul in a man’s body but she’s also transmasc in the sense that though she was a woman before she did consent to the process of putting her soul in this man’s body so you could read it as her having wanted to. she certainly comes across as someone who always thought with her dick even when she didn’t have one, though we didn’t know her before. but what complicates it is that the man’s body not only isn’t her body but is the body of someone she knew and loved. can’t really think about your gender identity too hard when your body belongs to your dead best friend. because it’s like. yeah his facial hair always did grow in fast. how can i stop growing facial hair.

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I love @ooctlt and wanted to give it a try! Ty for letting me steal them for a little bit, they are all yours again

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A soldier who has never been good at praying

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actually one of the craziest things about harrow and gideon's relationship is the fact that they're like, unhealthily obsessed with each other but also both think the other does not care as much as they do. gideon literally died for harrow and thinks that harrow hates her so much that she erased her from her memory. harrow lobotomized herself because she couldn't allow herself to destroy gideon's soul. and they're both still just like, "she could never love me." ARE YOU BOTH FUCKING STUPID??????? (the answer is yes)