#htn Tumblr posts

Jodybeth sketch 🥺 what are they talking about???

“She was Mercy’s — and indeed, perhaps everyone’s — joy.” cristabel oct, of whom the 8th house will never see the likes of again twitter

give your cav the kisses you promised her

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I’m not sure if this has been talked about before, probably has but, the take that some people have about Gideon and Harrow being “soft girls and madly in love with one another” is just not a good take.

These are very traumatized teenagers !!! that have not been shown an ounce of pure love in their entire lives. Do you think they know what love is? What that feeling is? They had Abigail and Magnus in Canaan House as an example for romantic love, that’s it.

Harrow thinks she’s in love with a BODY (which can be more seen towards a religious type of love, a worship of a being really). The abuse from the ninth house is always present in both Harrow and Gideon’s forms of attachments.

If anything, the girls are gonna have to have it pointed out to them very bluntly like “oh hey the way you’re acting kinda is like being in love with someone btw.” They’re not just going to know,,, that what they are feeling is love and is OKAY to feel.

These characters would have to develop very healthy and maturely to even be self aware of feelings of love, and I do not see that happening to be honest.

Anyway. This is just my opinion obviously but.

After As Yet Unsent I think it’s pretty clear that the body in the HTN epilogue is Gideon’s body. The whole failure to rot thing tracks really well with the whole incident with the guy who sells snacks who says her face should have melted off, but she doesn’t actually feel anything. My question is, who had custody of Gideon’s body when Cam, Corona, and Judith meet Harrow? The shuttle is described as being really small, with room only for the three of them, the portrait of Wake, and a few boxes. And if Harrow can sense the thanergy emanating from the bag of Palamedes’ bones, then she should definitely be able to sense the thanergy emanating off of Gideon’s body, even if it were hidden in a box. So this has to mean that, while our three musketeers were traveling in their shuttle, somebody else had Gideon’s body. It has to be BOE, and probably We Suffer specifically, because it’s clearly a military asset and powerful religious symbol (getting real Eva Peron body vibes here) and it would not be strategic to simply let that go. So what happened to it in the meantime, that it came to be inhabited again? Based on Judith’s experience in As Yet Unsent, they most probably experimented with Gideon’s body to see if they could use it to power their necro tech, before giving it back to Camilla and company. I could not say exactly what this experimentation would entail.

As for who inhabits it: I don’t think it’s Alecto or anything Alecto-adjacent from the facility under Canaan House, else she would not be able to act human and they would not be able to take her out of their apartment on the BOE planet. It could be Gideon, even though last we saw her she was in Harrow’s body; if Gideon died in Harrow’s body in HTN, then it’s possible that it is a version of Gideon, whose spirit was briefly submerged in the River and therefore has become a bit confused (but she’ll shake it off and be OK). That would be made possible by the fact that the spirit always longs for its body, and Gideon’s body is fine.  My pet theory (of course) is that it could be Cassiopeia, who faked her death to defect from John and join BOE half a myriad ago; could be that We Suffer offered the body up to Cassiopeia as new, functional housing. I’m not totally sure who it is! But I do think that whoever is in there got in there by way of whatever BOE was doing with Gideon’s body while it was separated from the trio.

I have never been convinced that Judith was a member of the trio, since she’s so clearly resisting joining the fight against the Nine Houses. I don’t know what that means as far as what happened to Judith. I don’t think the other two would have allowed her to escape. Maybe she does eventually give in, but I really have no idea what could have happened to change her mind. If the loss of Marta and her treatment as a POW couldn’t make her flip, if Corona and Cam can’t convince her to flip, then what could it be? If I’m right and Cassy is with BOE, maybe meeting a Lyctor and hearing the truth about John could have made her flip? But that doesn’t seem very likely to me, Judith seems extremely set in her thinking. I think it’s possible that Corona is the “person who goes to work for her”, though she could also be the “person who teaches her;” whoever that is definitely has to have either a necromancer’s skill set or the ability to teach it, and Corona has been trained to be both a necromancer and a cavalier. And then who is the third? Maybe Judith; maybe Palamedes in a body he reconstructed for himself, having achieved perfect Lyctorhood with Camilla. I just don’t know.

in light of new intel from BoE

John Gaius sanitizing his violence part 2: electric boogaloo

now that I have more Locked Tomb followers: I am once again asking you if there's anyone out there who will accept a commission to make me a vintage travel poster of Canaan House? please??? let's talk

hhhh i only have a few hours left on htn and i’m losing my mind

please consider that, not only is camilla Just Kind Of There for dulcinea/palamedes, gideon/harrowhark (including that final scene), AND now also judith/coronabeth but also:

the funniest possible version of this is aromantic!camilla

just sitting there staring into the camera like she’s on the office every moment of every day

hey uh so i've been seeing lots of people being very excited about the new content in the htn paperback, and though it is very exciting,can we stop for a second and have a think about piracy? the new content is included to encourage people who've only read the ebook to buy a physical copy. widely sharing screenshots or copies of the new material WILL have an effect on the sales of the htn paperback, and its not going to be good. raising hype around what the new content is should be fine, i'm not trying to stop people discussing what has been revealed (though tag spoilers please). but showing screenshots? uploading the whole thing and sharing it? that's not in good taste. and it will have a real effect. if we want all four (four!!) books to be published, tor.com need to see sales for every release.

yeah, tor.com did an oopsie and accidentally released some bonus content. but they took it down, and the best thing we as fans can do to support tmuir is not to share that content before the paperback is even out. piracy isn't a big deal when its from Disney, but books are a whole different game, especially non-mainstream ones like the locked tomb.

anyway im going to go preorder the htn paperback. if you are hosting pirated content, please take it down. thanks.

hey y’all, we have transcribed the new HTN bonus content into google docs that are hopefully more accessible for people who use screenreaders! i am reblogging this post with the link to the google folder where these documents are stored.

Ok so maybe me latching onto Tarvek should have foretold that I was going to latch onto Palamedes as well.

strongly believe that harrow would be the type of person who would always have their jacket on/with them

sometimes you have to draw characters in your clothes just to feel something

tamsyn muir really said “i think ruth and naomi were gay” and frankly, i don’t think we give her enough credit for that

wish i was rich so i could drop 1200 dollars on the subterranean press editions of the first two books of the locked tomb trilogy

[The corpse has still failed to rot. The princess says they are leaving it outside in significantly fluctuating temperatures, under observation, and it still fails to rot] -- As Yet Unsent

[He looked ahead and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ that He was neither abandoned to hades, nor did His flesh suffer decay.] -- Acts 2:31

So now Coronabeth 'worse twin' Tridentarius has someone who loves her, whom she loves, whom she has threatened to kill, who has asked her to kill her, whom she could kill to qualify for leadership position in BOE.

Interesting.

Evidence:

1: By Harrow's own admission, written contents (ie her letters) could not travel into the "river bubble" unless the person creating or expressing their rules upon the bubble knew their contents. Harrow did not know the contents of the letters, so she could not bring them into the bubble with her.

2: The bubble she finds Palamedes in was created by him and contains his view of the room and its contents at the moment of his death.

3: Palamedes Sextus has an eidetic memory. He only needs to read something once to have it completely memorized.

4: "The Necromancer's Marriage Season" was available, in its entirety, in Palamedes' river bubble.

Conclusion: Palamedes Sextus had ABSOLUTELY read that book before.

Just some parallels I’ve noticed about the Tridentarii, inspired by this post from @coronabeth and based on this passage from As Yet Unsent:

“I asked her if she was ready to sell her birthright for economics. She said as a Second I should be more than willing to sell my birthright for economics.”

Where have I heard this before? A twin selling their birthright for something implied to be trivial*? In the story of Jacob and Esau, of course. And yes, I know, tazmuir has made it clear that the Tridentarii were going to be named for Cain and Abel originally, but porque no los dos? So let’s dive in.

The story of Jacob and Esau begins not with the selling of the birthright, but with their actual birth. Per the Book of Genesis, via Wikipedia, Esau was born before Jacob but came out grasping at his brother’s heel, as though to pull him back into the womb. Compare to GTN p. 174, at the Fifth dinner party, where Ianthe tells Silas that Corona is “a few minutes older” because she had “removed [Ianthe’s] source of oxygen” and that failing to intervene in the birth medically would have resulted in Ianthe’s death. This tracks the Jacob and Esau story pretty well so far, with Corona playing Esau and Ianthe in the role of Jacob. Esau is also described as the more robust and athletic of the two by far, which also tracks. Esau is the heir, but Jacob is the special one, chosen by G-d. (Sound familiar?) Because Esau is older, he stands to inherit authority over the family/the right to be buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs/probably some material stuff as well, but at their mother’s encouragement, Jacob tricks their father into giving the birthright to him instead. There’s a big falling out; the twins go separate ways; at some point around this time Esau betrays his family’s teachings by intermarrying with the Canaanites. Sound familiar? Kind of like how Corona betrays her family’s/Empire’s teachings in the aftermath of Ianthe’s departure by allowing herself to become radicalized by BOE?

I’m not too sure how Christian/Catholic sources treat this, but it’s the case in the Talmud not only that Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him Esau’s birthright, but actually that before this happens, Esau “denied the principle of G-d’s existence, he denied the resurrection of the dead, and he despised his birthright” (plus some other things that seem less relevant here). Similarly, Corona distances herself from her G-d, who resurrected the dead, and rejects her birthright as the leader of the Third House. The birthright Ianthe takes from Corona is not Lyctorhood, but cavaliership.

Many years later, Jacob comes back and he’s a wealthy man, and he sends gifts ahead to Esau to try to appease him, because he is truly afraid of his brother. While waiting for Esau to get back to him, that’s when Jacob wrestles with the angel, who touches him on the hip, making him limp, and gives him a new name – not so unlike the way that Cytherea fights Ianthe, takes her arm, and then John (sort of) gives her a new name, in the form of the Saint of Awe. In the morning, Esau comes, and refuses Jacob’s gifts. They are reconciled, but they part ways again.

If this parallel is meant to instruct us as to what the future holds for the Tridentarii, I think this implies that Coronabeth will indeed become a leader in BOE; she and Ianthe are not in fact working together, but are on opposite sides of the conflict; but they will not hurt each other, they will forgive each other, they will live, but their ideological differences will create a vast gulf between them, and they will go their separate ways.

This also makes me wonder, though I have not explored this at all yet, to what extent the mysterious “going to see a man about a queen” could be about their literal mother, and whether the relationship between Jacob and Rebecca in the Book of Genesis could shed any light on what in the actual fuck that line could mean.

* see me, an economist, stifling my own objections here