Eldritchbrainworm - Morgan

Never underestimate the combined power of two traumatized punks who are heavily into the DIY side of things!

He implies she's worth building something new with, next thing we know he's wearing a more revealing outfit with her signature X doodled all over his body. Good for him!

Also, between this scene and the moment they show up in battle, they've apparently had the time to: - turn her entire lab/hideout into a blimp - cover the whole thing in giant tags of the firelights symbol, her cloud tatoos, and more - rebuild pow pow and fishbones, which were very much broken in act 2 - rally the firelights - cut and dye her hair - crop his top - pierce his ears - sew her a shark hoodie - cover her entire body in crayon drawings - accessorize their outfits - again, turn her lair, a giant airshaft, into a functional blimp

Maybe Ambessa gave her entire army the week off before battle. Maybe Jinx and Ekko were on unfathomable amounts of cocaine. We'll never know

Primary Objective: BECOME FRIEND SHAPED

gender euphoria is looking rly hot to other queer people and offputting to everyone else

It’s collaboration like this that makes me love my community lol 🖤

Also L’s outfit works WAY too well for it not to have been pre-meditated and hidden in the back of her closet.

Light answers a tough question

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

So glad two of my favorite fandoms are still getting along splendidly ☺️

i can be your angle....or yuor devil

Aw crap I done goofed, time to start over with a flood/blacking out the solar system! 💀

As someone who has never been very beguiled by fiction that explore/criticize religion through the perspective that God either never existed or is evil/selfish/uncaring I really truly appreciate and love that The Locked Tomb went with the, to me, much more complex, intriguing and existentially terrifying idea that God is just some dude. A dude that has more power than anyone else in the universe yes. But still just some dude. Who does not really have answers or a great plan, and the plans he does have are just... plans. Maybe good, maybe great, maybe less than good, maybe bad, but entirely human in their conception.

And in the ways God is portrayed as a father he is not an abusive and/or neglectful one in the violent, domineering, authoritative or indifferent way. He's a dissapointing, absent father in the way that he's there but doesn't quite know what to do with you. He cares and he feels for you but he does nothing to help. He pats you on the head and says you've been through a lot and then goes back to drinking his tea.

And you can argue that he's trying his best and that he loves you but neither of it is good enough, actually a lot of it is deeply flawed and all the worries and anxieties that was comforted by putting your faith in him now comes rushing over you tenfold as you realise he is not omnipotent or all-knowing or has endless love and it's not certain at all that he is more qualified to do this than you are.

He is just some dude.

Some dude named John.

And then to top it all off, Cam and Pal spend all three books unpacking and dissecting this binary until they ultimately reject it and LITERALLY become non-binary together!!! 🤯💀🔥🥹

I love how Tamsyn Muir was like, in this world everybody’s totally cool about gender and sexuality, but there’s a new invented binary that’s culturally and religiously defining and dictates who people are allowed to love and/or fuck and the roles they play in society.

They’ve written volumes and volumes of religious texts about how to conform to these sacred binary roles and filthy porn about people fulfilling or breaking the stereotypes of these roles. The role a person fulfills is determined before they’re born and dictates every aspect of their life. Once in a while someone who’s supposed to be on one side of the socioreligious binary is born more suited to the other side and has to hide it all their life (Coronabeth). Sometimes people fall in love in a way the socioreligious binary declares blasphemous and they decide to love each other openly anyway, and it shocks and scandalizes people no matter how wholesome and lovely and mundane their relationship is (Abigail and Magnus).

And these sacred binary roles are not equal, oh no, as much as the religious doctrine crows the importance of both roles, one is supposed to sacrifice endlessly and unquestioningly for the other, body, mind, and soul. And these binary roles have existed for ten thousand years and were created by God and underlie the whole structure of the universe! But here’s the secret: there was a time before this sacred binary existed, and God is just Some Guy who made this shit up.

This beautiful piece now begs the question, who makes the most sense as a sphinx cat: Silas or the Tridentarius twins….

gatitos…….

Nona the Ninth: The book in which half the cast dies and/or comes back wrong to the shock and horror of the rest 🤣😭

Paul - just Paul

Paul (HectSextusHextus) seems to have some sort of deal about insisting strongly that they are NOT Camilla or Palamades and do not necessarily maintain any of the emotions, opinions, or relationships of Cam or Pal. While I understand that, and it is totally fine if that's how it is for Paul going forward, I feel like they are a little insensitive with throwing it around while their friends (and their sweet little dying Nona baby) are in full crisis, and grieveing on top of that. Like they specifically say "Camilla and Palamades loved you" not "I love you" and "Cam remembered that", not I remember that. And they say this all so casually, and it just adds to the pain, because everyone is watching, hoping, thinking, let me see a moment of either one of them still being alive, please, please, please. And Paul is like NO I PAUL NOW. so so soooooo excited to see this character going forward and how they act, and how other people act around them. Because even as I read this back I realize it's completely unfair to be annoyed at Paul for not being Cam or Pal, but I feel it is one of the natural emotions to result from this scenario. and I want to see everyone react. but Nona is dead so- wow okay I'm sad now

First pass through: Oh Gideon you poor baby 😭😅. Coming from someone who’s been in recovery from an awful haircut for just over a year now, I feel your pain.

Second pass through: Okay I know Harrow always looks pissed… but I’m detecting a higher degree of resigned acceptance than normal from her here. Like, she’s suffering from the awful cut just as much as her situation-ship is, but like with everything else in her life, Harrow sees it as a just punishment for her sins and throws bones at Gideon to cope 💀

Thank you OP. These two panels were great!

P.s. Plus the mental image of Harrow holding clippers menacingly just sends me.

P.p.s… (bear with me)

Okay actually scratch my original thought about Harrow. It would TOTALLY be in character for her to be in her dark little library one night and have the most evil idea imaginable pop into her head…

She would write up a new doctrine for the Ninth then and there, explaining how the haircut is a parallel to the distant pinprick of light offered by Dominicus amidst a vast sea of darkness devoid of their gracious Emperor’s undying radiance.

A muster would then be called. Gideon would be dragged out of her cell by a freshly skull-capped Aiglamene (odd, but you’re never too old to rock a butch buzz-cut right?) to be plopped onto a pew amidst of sea of skeletons (with no hair), a dwindling handful of ancient nuns (also with no hair), Ortus (again, no hair), Crux (get the picture?), and Harrow’s parents (who due to being MEGAdead, always have their hoods up).

At this point, Gideon’s head is a single fiery beacon amidst an unchanged congregation of geriatrics and their token 30s-something poet.

So when Harrow steps out of the shadows and gets “permission” from her parents to read out a parchment “previously thought lost within the bowels of the Anastasian,” It becomes immediately apparent to a newly horrified Gideon that this will only really apply to her. Harrow won’t give a rat’s ass about her own hair because as Gideon knows, all she cares about is that damned tomb. And bones.

As Gideon stands to flip harrow the bird, a quartet of skeletons pin her back down to the pew and a mechanical buzzing noise suddenly echos through the rafters of Drearburh. 😈

Cannot for the life of me find the post, however, someone had the idea of the ninth house with tonsures and it was so funny I had to draw it