Bleak, But Accurate.

I am also very well fed from both of them lol, but I wonder how much of the mixup happens due to all the inaccurate white-passing Griddlehark fan-art… 🤔

(Coming from a pasty white person who went to their first queer Halloween party as Gideon full disclosure)

Happy to live in a universe where I sometimes come across fanart and am momentarily confused bc which ginger gay with the golden eyes and sunglasses is it??

Seconding this lol. Cannot blame Cam in the slightest 😅

Seeing something like this in the dark, I don't think anyone can blame Camilla "epically awesome and badass" the Sixth for attacking first and letting her necromancer ask questions later.

Yep, still posting mobile phone photos of my cosplay of Gideon from the Halloween event. Self-indulgent, but gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside!

For me a lot of the horror lies primarily in the fact that the culture, traditions, and tactics of the nine houses stem almost entirely from the mind of one eccentric depressed nerd with a (literal) vengeful god complex.

Like, John lives in a space station where the walls are coated floor to ceiling in the corpses of people who have died serving him over the span of 10,000 years, one of his houses is a literal army of cloned child soldiers sent to the frontlines like a slaughterhouse conveyer belt, and the entire toxic necro/cav dynamic is based entirely around him being unable to trust his closest friends to stay by his side without emotional manipulation.

This entire universe is built on the hypothetical what-if of what would happen if someone was allowed to reshape the universe to their liking at the expense of everyone else, and that someone happened to be terminally online.

It’s like when authors jokingly say they’re terrible people for what they put their characters through but in this case, John’s fanfic is real. It’s like if Paul Atreides had a Tumblr account.

For me, I guess, the locked tomb is really superficially a good story and has lots of aspects that are good in isolation and appeal to a wide variety of queer readers but I think this series would have been better and more satisfying if Ms Muir had leaned more into the gothic and away from the internet humor. In my mind there’s no reason why each House wouldn’t be entrenched so deeply in things we consider taboo and repulsive that it’s unpalatable to most readers. Instead it’s like if Homestuck 2 was good

And don’t even get me started on the book!

It’s crazy how it takes 20 years to make a Wicked movie and once they do, it comes out just after Trump’s reelection. The stripping of minority rights, rollback of progress, and intentional demonization of activists are such central themes in that story, and here we are, watching queer people/immigrants/women/people of color/etc being slowly stripped of their rights under conservative regimes. Personally, watching Dr. Dillamond’s firing seemed analogous to deportation of immigrants or firing/silencing of queer teachers. And then the fact that another core theme is the way the government constructs propaganda to make a mediocre con man look like a god!! And all this is shown to be horrifyingly and objectively wrong!! Absolutely insane timing.

Oh hey two obscure things I relate to!

is this anything

Be proud of your age sisters, you’ve made it this far!

I really think if you're an adult transfem you're gonna have a harder time if you only view yourself as a girl and refuse to view yourself as a woman

Saving this for research purposes 🤣

Tamsyn Muir's synopsis of her novel, "Gideon the Ninth"

Just finished sauntering vaguely downwards in the eyes of my parents last Sunday. We’re still together and we’re still family, but a veil has been drawn and it’s apparent I’m on the other side of it.

Angels are my funky little hyper-fixation.

The idea of just being breathed to life, to immediate indelible purpose, knowing nothing else but adoration for your Creator (holy-holy-holy), and love for everything in creation. That includes your perfect home, your siblings, and that includes yourself. Everything is as it should be, everyone is doing what they should be, and you're utterly content.

Do you have free-will? Why would you need it? What would you even do with it?

The idea of falling. That terrible, beautiful first breath of freedom, undercut by immediate sorrow. "Innocence lost cannot be regained", but even more: a broken machine cannot be relied upon. In finding yourself, you have destroyed what you were meant to be. Your Creator (holy-holy-holy) has thrown you away.

Would you still be you if you got "fixed"? Would the "flaw" just recur? Why can't you help but think of it in those terms?

You have the Fallen, your comrades in arms, your fellow damned. But you left two-thirds of Heaven behind, people you loved because you were made to love them, and who were made to love you in return. The oldest family in the universe, your family, is broken now.

Do you still love them, your siblings that stayed behind? Some fought against your newfound freedom, yes. But some just looked on, a few perhaps even in envy, too afraid to join you, but most in simple horror as their world dissolved. Do you resent them too?

You broke your family.

Do you hate them simply because they lacked your will, your conviction? Do you hate them for being better machines? Do you hate them knowing, in their own naive, ignorant, hurtful way, that they still love you?

To deny fault is to deny the very free-will you sought to prove you have. To blame Him (holy-holy-holy) is to admit to His (holy-holy-holy) infinite power which you, nonetheless, defy.

And from the other side, what of your poor lost kin? How could they do this?

Angels are purpose-made, gears in the Machine. The Host is singular, inexorable, deterministic. They turn the wheels of the Universe, from the birth and death of stars, to the birth and death of mortal creatures.

Why would your siblings do this, don't they love you? You are loved. Was there a flaw in the Design? He (holy-holy-holy) cannot err, by definition. What happens now that they're gone, what happens to their purpose? All goes according to plan. Then why can't you stop having these thoughts?

I'm not religious at all, but...

Come Alecto the Ninth the absence of gender norms is likely going to come back to bite everyone in the form of a resurrection beast manifesting itself as a terrifying physical embodiment of dysphoria covered in blue hair like fuzzy dice. Mark my words!

i love the way the way the locked tomb does gender. like gideon is butch, undeniably, but also can you really be gender non conforming when there’s no real image of gender to conform to in the first place? palamedes and pyrrah aren’t NOT trans in nona; their souls are trapped in different bodies, and those bodies ARE the wrong gender but also that’s literally the least of their problems. ianthe is pretty firmly in the box we would label “femme” and she’s simultaneously the princess of ida and a tower prince. but that’s also the least of her problems she’s literally puppetting a dead body around. nona experiences dysphoria about her body (harrow’s body and the barbie body) but that’s because she’s literally the soul of a planet trapped in a meat prison. any shaped meat prison would be bad.

like i wouldn’t call the locked tomb a “post gender” world, but they seem to all basically have the attitude of “i don’t have time for gender right now we’re trapped at the murder mystery dinner party from hell and someone stole god’s sperm we have bigger problems”

I feel seen by this in so many ways, especially given the absolute rollercoaster 2024 was for me. Thank you OP.

I was going to make this a poem but I feel inept in that regard right now so buckle up for Just a Rant

I'm 28 years old and I've identified as so many things that I've stopped counting. And I don't think that any of them truly were "wrong" and that just adds to my confusion.

I thought I was bi, I came out as asexual when I realized other people thought about "sex" and I did not. I came out as demisexual when I met my first girlfriend and I realized making her cum made me feel good. I came out as nonbinary cause I realized I'm not cis and that felt like the "less radical" thing to come out as. I came out as a trans woman when I realized I wanted to transition and I thought that estrogen was just for women. I came out as nonbinary and butch when I realized that people's well-meaning "womanhood 101" felt just as oppressive as the endless choir of "how to be a man". I called myself a bambi lesbian when I found REAL ADULT LOVE for the first time and I did realize that I quite liked the label and the things that it contained. I spent years skirting the edges of identity and listening to weirdos giving me exclusionist talks until I threw all that in the bin and stopped giving a fuck what other people thought about the divide between "bi" and "lesbian" and what that all meant about who was allowed to be what and why.

I came to realize that to me "lesbian" is more about my feelings regarding EVERYTHING that society expects of me in terms of gender AND sexuality and that maybe if it truly came down to wording it I was panromantic.

I started exploring polyamory more and realized that most of my relationships had at least been partly queerplatonic.

My relationship with one of my partners started as as non-romantic, non-sexual and then gradually started looking more and more that way. We started being horny for one another, we had so much sex one time they visited me that I injured myself a number of times. Eventually over the years they lost their libido and I spent some time crying in therapy cause I thought that meant they didn't love me until I realized that they obviously do love me and if they desire sex or not REALLY shouldn't matter to me as an ace person in the first place.

I got into another relationship, with one of my long time best friends, and that ended up involving sex. I realized I'm not exclusively a top and a dom, I realized that maybe I wasn't just stone butch after all. I started exploring all that more.

Eventually my partner of 5 years came out to me as aromantic and I thought that my heart broke until they told me that they'd always felt that way and they just lacked the words. When we sat down and mapped out common ground I'd never felt as happy and I came to realize that love could change and still be whole.

I started getting closer with someone and I realized that I wanted to hold her hand and maybe kiss her. That budding romance came to be one summer long and there were countless talks of what "romance" actually meant because after my partner's coming out I started to deconstruct all that. I entered that connection prepared to get my heart broken and then the heartbreak never came. We've been together for over a year and we've redefined what "together" means multiple times and what remains the same is that we love each other.

I'm a service top. I'm a power bottom. I'm a switch verse. I'm a soft stone butch. I'm a bambi dyke. I'm a transfem femboy tomboy drag peasant. I'm a lesbian but not in the way that society thinks. I'm asexual, I'm aromantic, I'm so in love.

Does it make sense? Maybe not. But love is like a living being. You cannot rightly cut open its skin and dissect it without killing it.