More con floor pics from last weekend, as always I got very few actual photos during the con cos I was so busy buying myself gay little trinkets but I did actually get a couple!

Harrow: designed and made by me

Photos: the lovely @cgrphotography on Instagram and facebook

a part of me is hoping that the alectopause has been going on for so long because muir has to split it into two novels again

hands down one of my favorite parts of htn is how Ortus saved Harrowhark's life by means of his lifelong passion for writing fanfiction

Me seeing people shipping Camilla and Palamedes: wait. Wait I thought we agreed they were some secret third thing. I thought we were being aromantic about it. I thought we all got the memo that it wasn’t romantic but intense devotion to the extent that their souls could do nothing but come together. What’s happening over there

10 crazy locked tomb things, a list compiled entirely on the drive home from the grocery store and containing spoilers for the whole series so far

Gideon when explaining what's happened to Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity when he pushed her out of airlock: The Woke Left

do you think Palamedes ever got slightly sad that Nona never even figured out that the bones she got to toy with were his?

Nona the Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Not just because it's Locked Tomb, but it is the purest form of one of the big messages the series is trying to divulge.

The price of love is grief. We will never be free of it as long as we love anything at all. Our family, friends, our pets, even beloved media. Anything that connects that deeply to us that we love it will leave a gaping hole when it's gone.

But no one rejects loving to avoid grief. Every one of the characters holds on desperately to something they love, to levels that seem unhealthy to us. They want the perks without the cost.

John is holding on to a world and people that died 10k years ago.

The lyctors cling desperately to their cavaliers memories, to the point of being willing to end the 9 houses to honor them.

Cam held on to Pal, Pal held on to Dulcie. Harrow held on to Gideon so hard she disappeared her from her memory to avoid the grief she would pay for the privelege of caring for her.

But Nona loves indiscriminately. She loves the polluted sky, she loves the sad people, she loves the stray dogs and her friends and her teachers and Varun. She loves Pyrrhas lying ass, she loves Camilla and Palemedes, she loves crown and even cares about Judith. Nona isn't afraid of grief, because to her all that love balances it out. Nona is the only one in the end willing to pay the price for that 6 months of unconditional love. She knows from the beginning of the book that her own days are numbered, but she doesn't shy from it and avoid loving.

She loves all that much harder.

"If you could see your whole life, start to finish, would you change anything?" The movie Arrival (2016) approaches this same theme. If you knew what you'd lose, would you go back to avoid it? Would you keep away from the people and things you knew you'd lose? Would you shy away from experiencing love just because it hurts?

"Love and Freedom don't coexist, warden."

and somewhere, somewhere the atoms stopped fusing / i'm still your favorite regret / you're still my weapon of choosing

I choose to believe there's someone in Blood Of Eden named Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way and no one can get me off this horse

Imagine being Magnus in this situation. You're a whole-ass married adult. You are 38 years old. You wind up at this shindig with like 20 hormonal teenagers all trying to out-scheme each other and you just want to cook and tell jokes. Everyone else is vying for immortality and you want to host a dinner party to celebrate you and your wife's anniversary. You wind up in a friendly duel with this mute edgelord. She is wearing a full hooded robe, sun glasses, and skull facepaint. You wonder if she maybe wants to at least lose the sunglasses before fighting you. She shakes her head.

Yeah alright. She's gotta posture. Good show. That'll convince the other insane teenagers that she's cool. "Well done."

reverend daughter

gideon as a pirate / sailor

Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.

yall know how peeta was hijacked and spent a long time sorting through false memories? I wonder if harrow will experience something similar. her brain rewrote her entire life, including moments where gideon wasn't actually present, and non-gideon details.

for example, in gideon the ninth:

vs. harrow the ninth river bubble:

just how much was her character shaped by her need to impress gideon? how much does gideon's absence domino into an entirely different life? an entirely different harrow? how much time did harrow spend antagonizing gideon, and plotting to antagonize gideon, and thwarting gideon's escape attempts, and preparing for fights against gideon, that in her alternate history were spent in prayer, study, or necromantic practice? how much effort will it take for her to differentiate between her true and false histories? is she a different person now because she's spent a year believing in a different version of herself? I truly hope we get to see some confusion related to that, maybe a kind of "real or not real" thing with harrow and gideon,,,

I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should-