I am shocked at how many people don't have an actively hostile relationship with advertising
I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.
If advertisers can use every manipulative trick in the book to get me to buy their product, I am fully within my rights to do everything I can on my end to make their job impossible
people talk about how we need to bring back "don't feed the trolls" rhetoric for modern internet ragebait and I agree but also I think the most useful thing from the Old Internet that I miss is LURKING
be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it's so nice and so freeing and it's a good way to learn things.
I have frequently regretted getting involved in shit that didn't involve me online but you know what I've never regretted doing? Lurking. literally lurk moar
Diagram I made to explain the importance of me having a hyperfixation at all times
Many people seem to have the misunderstanding that if one doesn’t have a hyperfixation, they will have more time to think normal thoughts. This however, is incorrect. The amount of normal thoughts thunk by the average neurodivergent stays relatively the same, it’s the amount of bad thoughts thunk that changes depending on the intensity of ones’ hyperfixation. Yes I am a neuroscientist trust me
After years of waiting, tomorrow torbooks and Tamsyn Muir will finally unveil . . . . book 1 of The Noniad!
a great tragedy of this world is that many things that are bad for you also look very sexy. smoking. riding a motorcycle. that crazy shit they did to saint sebastian
i have received and carefully reviewed a few respectable additions:
my oubliette doesnt even work right anymore every so often some piece of shit just fucking climbs out
one day neil is gonna get hurt and one of the foxes is gonna ask if he's okay and he's gonna practically spit through clenched teeth and a snarl "NO! It fucking hurts!" and all the foxes gathered round him are gonna freeze and short circuit as they collectively process with dawning horror just how much pain neil has to be in to admit it
It'll either be the worst pain that has ever happened or the most nothing thing on the planet. There is no inbetween. Neil either has broken his thigh bone or he just stubbed his pinky toe for him to admit that it fucking hurts. On one end is horror and on the other end is 'Oh he's actually getting better at admitting he's in pain'. Either way he gets doted on and cared for by all the Foxes.
@swordrogue Wait, hang on, that's a very good point. How many lyctor bodies were on the Mithraeum??
So there were three dead lyctors, not counting Cytherea. Cassiopeia was (allegedly) torn to shreds by hungry ghosts when she drove a Beast's corpus into the River, and Cyrus was spaghettified by a black hole. It's unlikely either of them left bodies. Cyrus at all, and Cassie in any state to be inhabited. But Ulysses.... Ulysses wrestled a Beast through the stoma. That kind of combat takes place in the River. He would have died like Gideon the First, leaving his fully intact and technically living body behind.
Where the fuck is Ulysses???
I assume if his body was left soul-less but living they would have killed it since a empty Lyctor's body is a pretty dangerous thing.
That still begs the question of where his body ended up, probably the Mithraeum and it's just never mentioned. Which makes two lyctor bodies that either got blasted out into the river or sucked into the stoma when the Mithraeum broke apart.
God, I hope it turns out the stoma isn't the end and a bunch of pissed off lyctor souls and resurrection beasts come burst out of the trash heap in Alecto.
I'm pretty certain the stoma not only isn't the end, it's already leaking like a rusty faucet. Where are the devils coming from? Perhaps the same place John put all the people he couldn't absolve. The trash heap, with all the other dreck.
We know for sure there's one lyctor in there, both body and soul. It's looking damn likely there might two.
BONUS POINTS, THE TONGUES HAD GRABBED THE MITHRAEM.
As he struggled, he somehow pushed the Emperor into a waiting, frenzied bed of the things, which wrapped around his legs—and the stoma sucked down. The Mithraeum went with it. I didn’t see what happened before everything rolled—pieces of the station broke off; I could see metal bouncing along the Riverbed, then whole sections of station, then garbage—panels and mechanisms, pieces of hull—twisting down to join it. The huge, encompassing weight of the ship was slowly ploughing forward, toward the hungry stoma.
It does not resolve exactly what happened after Ianthe fucked off with John and it closed (did it stay closed?) around Augustine and Gideon died for the fourth time that night. But it is ENTIRELY plausible that the entire Mithraem, with all the interred bones of so many heroes and at least two if not three other Lyctor bodies were also pulled into the stoma. Cyth was interred there. It's implied other Lyctors are, so given Cyrus was crushed in a black hole, it's likely at least Ulysses' body is there. And of course Mercy's body was still on board.
:"D So yeah!!!
MERCYMORN'S BODY WAS STILL—
Will never get over the fact that one piece has 2 whole trains in the entire world and Franky has been hit by both of them.
Pink hair AND pronouns. There's no one quite like him!
This idea that the Uchiha were selfish and put their family above everything else is so obviously false based on the story, and a mere example of how of Konoha's leading class projected their faults on them.
In the warring era, some evil Uchiha abused a powerful jutsu to unfairly gain power, and what did the rest of the Uchiha do? Turn their backs and let them? No, they made a counterjutsu to confront them and put an end to the problem.
Madara had just lost his brother, was broken in pain. And what, did he go crazy so-called-curse-of-hatred mode? No, he gave up justice for the person he loved most in the world in exchange of peace, just because he believed Hashirama, his enemy, was offering a treaty in good faith.
Madara finds Hashirama is a shameless liar and tries to get the Uchiha to break the treaty, what do the Uchiha do? Follow him and resume war just because he is Uchiha? No, they explicitly discredit him and send him away.
Sasuke finds that Konoha murdered his whole family just because its leaders were power thirsty genocidal jerks, does he just go and automatically join Obito and Madara because they are Uchiha? No, he summons his enemies to hear their part of the story and ends up fighting against the two evil Uchiha to help save the village.
They are profiled and accused of acting on hatred and emotions, when over and over again we are shown evidence that they do what is fair. Even when they are targeted, mistrusted and treated like enemies.
You know who puts their own above the village, above peace, above justice and above whatever is needed? Freaking Konoha's leadership. Hashirama put his brother above everything, risking the treaty and Konoha, letting him do racist crap as he pleased. He put him above everyone's safety letting him develop the evil zombie army jutsu. Hiruzen put his student and friend above everything, turning a blind eye to their crimes. Naruto himself is putting his own interests and his predecessors above everything, never holding the advisors responsible for their crimes, sweeping everything under the rug.
All lies, all vicious slander to justify their crimes.
Teacher literally calls Canaan house the Tower in book 1.
Descriptions of Canaan House in GTN start by referring to it having multiple towers, but rapidly start referring only to its central tower, and by the end and in HTN Canaan House is simply referred to as a tower...
Chapter 27 if GTN is in no way ominous:
The things they’ve shown us would be powerful—would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability—if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.”
“Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth.”
She bristled. “It’s a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we’ve got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower. That’s what’s called hard evidence, Warden. Your megatheorem is based on supposition and your so-called ‘instinct.’"
Palamedes was right, but was Harrow wrong...
The gradual change in how it's referred to is so juicy...
And man, with my theory about steles and obelisks using dead languages and blood to command ghosts (specifically devils/the ten billion) to warp time as an alternative to FTL ("less to do with travel than it is with transmission") and the "Tower of Babel" motif that could sort of come with that, I've also recently realized, both stele and obelisk are just more precise words for types of pillars, and what is a pillar but a sort of small tower... Just tying all of the pieces together.
PLUS Alecto asks "where did you put them?" and Varun says "there is a hole at the bottom of their tower", but, well, Teacher said...
“Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression,” she said, in the singsong way of a child repeating a poem. “The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart. The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.”
And ten thousand million sure is another way of saying ten billion!
So if Varun implies these things are coming from the bottom of The Tower and Teacher says they were put down beneath Canaan, WELL... That math sure checks out, doesn't it!
And we've been rather Chekov's gunned for a very specific unexplored space in Canaan House:
“I’m not trained for this. I think our chances [of summoning Nonius] are very small. I think we’ve got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that’s significantly less unlikely, as I’ve come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than—never mind."
This is your semi-regular reminder that for all that he very much leans into being 'just a guy', John Gaius is a horribly unsettling and disturbing eldritch entity who has not been entirely human for 10,000 years:
As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you... I hid you in me. And when we were together... I became God..
We're repeatedly told how uncanny Alecto was. And how terribly ordinary-looking John is...but how deeply, deeply upsetting his eyes are to behold. They're repeatedly described as "monstrous" (on one occasion, directly before John jokes "I'm not a monster"), as well as "terrible", "like dead planets", "primordial", "chthonic", "inconceivable", and "deeply fucked up".
There are multiple descriptions of how his down to earth persona suddenly falls away and he can be seen as something infinitely more awful:
There's one moment in particular where Harrow perceives him as something vastly beyond human:
his great immortal age - of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell holding a heart.
(Though of course Harrow herself is far from metaphysically straightforward - in the River, Gideon says "You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire...you were a hunger without a stomach...")
When John describes Resurrection Beasts to Harrow - although we do not yet know that this is a confession of murder and of a sort of cannibalism by a part man, part planet - he is "lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue."
Even when he's not obviously being an eldritch thing, his very normal crown of foetal bones moves on its own, and the white rings in his eyes are described as flickering. Even blithely sitting in a Cohort Admiralty meeting munching peanuts, John is in constant, unsettling motion.
As if that doesn't already sound unpleasant enough, it seems rather like there is something physically discomforting about making eye contact with John. Looking on those white rings is likened to "dying" and "a migraine", and described as "scalding".
It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes... You had never become used to it.
Making eye contact with John doesn't just cause physical pain. It also seems to open you up to some degree of suggestion or compulsion. Here's Gideon's description of making eye contact with John:
God looked at me...and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline... Those white-ringed eyes closed, and your heart almost relaxed in your chest.
Which seems to place two incidents that otherwise might be explained as Harrow's difficulty refusing the man she has been raised to worship as god in a different light:
It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white.
He looked at you as though he were glad to see you... some nameless softening in his face and those white-tinged, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God
I don't think we're nearly frightened enough of John... Or of the prospect of John and Alecto - the man who became god and the god who became man - reunited (even if at odds) in ATN...
harrow the ninth asks the question "what is the first impulse of a genius necromancer when trying to retain any shred of coherency in a river bubble?" and gives the unambiguous answer "write fanfiction"
to be clear I am talking both about palamedes "the necromancer's marriage season... 2!!!!" sextus and harrowhark "role swap au" "ballroom au" "coffee shop au" nonagesimus. tamsyn muir said that in 100% of case studies the last frantic attempt of a prodigy to avoid entering a final psychological death spiral is writing tropey fanfic.
ortus I'm so sorry I forgot about you and your matthias nonius rpf. you may not be a necromancer but you were still fucking it up in a river bubble. unequivocally harrow the ninth boldly states that fanfiction saves lives.
Harrow the Ninth is in second person because it's a eulogy. Hear me out.
In the tangihanga, speech is addressed to the tūpāpaku (the body of the deceased). Songs, rituals, speeches, they're all addressed in second person, to the dead. The narration in Harrow the Ninth—the sharp, funny, angry, second-person narration studded with moments of aching tenderness—that's Gideon. Gideon addressing Harrow from the last moments of the book, when she's afraid that Harrow is dead and she has been left behind with her body.
