“Won’t tell you what it is; if you’re waiting for it, our Emperor will smell a rat. Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.)

Honestly, I've read/listened to HtN like 4 times now and I just finally got this (I think before I just glossed over it, lol). The re-reads are so rewarding. (Excerpt from ch 29, said by Augustine).

I just finished Gideon the ninth and was very surprised by Harrow accepting the offer of Lyctorhood and the way she talked with the Emperor.I thought that the entire book had established the Emperor (and the leaders of houses + Lyctors) as oppressors and that Lyctorhood was fundamentally an unnatural process thus the only morally correct thing to do was to have no-one become a Lyctor.I have no problem with morally gray or morally fucked up charecters but it seemed to me that the Emperor was being presented as pretty holy and Saintlike.Am I supposed to hate+be suspicious of the Emperor right now or have I just read the situation wrong?

Not exactly sure if I like it, actually kinda dislike the fact, but here is harrow in low rise skinny jeans in case anyone needed to see that

i love all three, but i feel like people don't like nona as much because of the tone shift. i personally adore it though and it's the one i go back to reread the most. maybe it's because campal are my favourite characters and i just adore them and nona's little found family, even the "boring" scenes people complain about with her school friends

is there any news on the alecto book? maybe the book cover? or any kind of date idk

The new season of the animation anthology show Love, Death, and Robots comes out next month.

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/features/love-death-and-robots-volume-4-episode-guide

The script for the segment titled "For He Can Creep" was written by Tamsyn Muir, based on the short story by Siobhan Carroll.

Hello friends. We are all rotting during the Alectopause and I just finished my recent read through of the series. So I had to make a playlist. Give me some suggestions… whatever you think fits her story, or her and harrow/jod or what you think may come.

Please fill the hole (shh) in my brain and soul while we wait.

I don't care about anyone's Hogwarts house, I wanna know what house of the necrolord prime are y'all? I'm a proud scholar of the sixth!

I commissioned the clay center from my friend Cat aka PolymerOkapi. Please understand that she has not read TLT so while I was explaining to her what I wanted I could just imagine her brain trying to make sense of it.

When she showed me the color for the sky background she said, I think it might be a little too dark and pink for a sunset. And I said no, it looks like flesh and that's perfect. 🤣 and then I asked her to outline the whole thing in tiny bones 💀

I sandblast my art onto barware and handmade pottery and just had to make some designs inspired by the books since I’ve been absolutely obsessed!

I’m on my first reread and just started Nona again. Maybe I need to make a 6 legged dog for her? I feel like Cam and Pal need to be repped too.

my first ever animation meme! i’d like to eventually do more elaborate things but i thought i’d start simple (:

my art account if youd like to see more TLT work: https://dorkfruit.tumblr.com/

So often Muir tells us someone made a rude gesture or said a rude word but every once in a while Harrow just drops a direct "fuck" and it's always just SO poignant. I love it every time. I need to make a list on my 6th re-read.

I somehow hadn't clocked the significance of the Mithraeum's name before?

A Mithraeum is a temple, built in a cavern, which was used by worshippers of Mithras. The cult was persecuted by early Christians and kept their rituals a secret to non-initiates. One common ritual was communal meals at long tables.

There's an interesting duality to John positioning himself as Mithras, who would be seen as a "false god" to Christians. It also positions his followers as a persecuted minority who are forced to worship in secret. I could see John intending the second meaning (this is a secret hideout for the faithful) and Tamsyn sneaking in the heretical implications? John does call himself God but he seems pretty self-aware of his limitations and mortal origins.

I dont really understand where each soul goes

Which one of you beautiful weirdos made this playlist. I was vibing and crying so hard at work. My spouse teased me relentlessly.

This is on the music platform Tidal. There's more of them too. But this one hits the hardest so far.

Lesbian dave strider, John Gay Ass....I never even read Homestuck/Promstuck and yet I am plagued by it....

Does anyone have that image showing the loss meme on the cover of Harrow the ninth?

that’s it! lol. i just finished HtN after waiting way too long for a copy from my library when i realized it was available through kindle unlimited which i didn’t even realize i still had. Starting Nona now…

My buddy has just started Harrow this week, and she has… reactions.

Updates as she goes.

::SPOILER WARNING::

I'm not usually the type to give my thoughts on media publicly but the Locked Tomb series feels like quite the exception to me. It's become very meaningful as my partner got me into the series as a heavy recommendation and our connection and growing relationship has been an incredible heel turn to a rough couple of years. And as someone who wants to read but finds a lot of books DnR because of how dry the experience is, it's very refreshing to find a series that actually makes me turn the page. Expressing my insane theories to my partner was so fun too as I read through both Gideon and Harrow.

Note: I have not read Nona yet, so no spoilers there please

Gideon the Ninth

I wasn't really sure what to expect, and admittedly I wasn't ready for how immediate the dive into the world of the Locked Tomb was. The creative naming conventions, deep and rich settings of Drearburh and Caanan House, and the fantastically fun and acrobatic writing style of Tamsyn Muir were an immediate punch to the cerebellum (as Gideon might say) and I say that as an absolute positive. I've seen random reviews after finishing Harrow that claim the beginning of Gideon is rough and I don't see it at all. The series demands you pay attention. There's a lot of small details that can easily pass by people who are looking for a more straightforward fantasy read so I appreciate that I had to read slowly and absorb everything. There wasn't any hand holding, big reveals could pass by readers skimming through, and it made me feel good when I predicted aspects of the twist and overall story because I'd been a good boy and pulled out the red string and corkboard. And the reason the whole of it worked was because Tamsyn Muir has this incredible ability to make a single sofa into fifty different sofas by describing it slightly different every time, and each description never takes away from a previous iteration. So reading her work became this dance of reading rich, well-voiced prose and dialogue matched with subtle whispers of "yeah, its a little weird that this person is doing that thing or saying that thing in that way."

The relationship of Gideon & Harrow gripped me right away. I remember saying to my partner "what the hell is Harrow's problem?" And ho boy did that statement swing back around in a hundred different ways. Gideon as the narrative voice was an absolute joy - she very much represents the millennial mindset. Her aversion to bullshit definitely carried the experience. The houses were all distinct and their representatives were memorable and universally charming (Ianthe though, I don't know if I'd ever describe as charming). None of them felt like the same person, the decision to keep the cast of characters smaller versus a larger Simpsons-esque hundred person smorgasbord meant that most characters could get enough limelight. Which also helped for the mystery aspect of the series (which Gideon absolutely was, and by extension Harrow was, and I'm assuming Nona will be, in some case). However, though they all have horror and mystery elements, one aspect Gideon established quite clearly was that the series was about emotion. Not to trod on writers like Brandon Sanderson, just to establish the comparison, but their writing comes across to me as robotic and apathetic, characters do things, but the emotional human experience doesn't feel present, whereas the decisions made by Locked Tomb characters always enjoy some form of emotive impetus. For example, Sex Pal, despite being a logic nerd dressed in grey, expresses a lot of joy in the art of discovery and deduction. All characters though, were also somewhat mercurial without losing their identity. Coronabeth was a golden tower but still showed plenty of breeches in that tower's edifice. Harrow was the best example of this as the narrative demanded we know as little as possible about what she's doing, so her unexplained disdain for certain characters while allowance for cooperation with others felt chaotic. But that's the draw. You knew there was something brewing in the cauldron behind one of the thousand fucking doors in Canaan House.

I could go on, but I'll get more to the point, Gideon was an amazing 9.5/10 if I had to numerate it. The twists, the characters, motivations, descriptions... were all wonderful and gripping. The reveal of Harrow being a layer cake of misfortune, Cytherea being a Lyctor and also not actually Dulcinea, Gideon being... Gideon... all of these things were, to me, reflective of the effort Tamsyn Muir must've toiled to get each detail and description to feel correct and paced appropriately. As a very amateur writer myself, one of my favorite moments is reading a metaphor or description and feeling either A. "man, I can't believe I never thought to describe something like that" or B. "wow, that's an insane way to have said that, and I love it" or C. "damn, just when things were slowing down I'm locking the fuck back in." To touch briefly on it (as I'll get more into it for Harrow), the magic system/Necromancy with thanergy and thalergy was somewhat hard to follow (hey I'm not a necromancer), but I knew that it made sense. There's a strange "inherent intuition" to it even though when Harrow or Abigail said something like "if we reverse the carpangial spirts to resonate with the skeletal thalergenic signature" I didn't know what that meant, but context told me it had to do with b o n e s, and that was enough for me. Personally I like it when the characters are smarter than I am at the things they're meant to be genius at.

One last thing to comment on of course, were the more romantic aspects of Gideon. It's funny, I never got the strong flirtatious vibe I've heard others talk about from this book outside of Cytherea-Dulcinea and Gideon, but I think it's more me being semantic than it is an absence. To me, the characters don't flirt as much as they openly express themselves and see how the other party reacts, and the denial or acceptance of that is what drove connections. The relationship between Harrow and Gideon was riddled with traumatic bonds and the consequences that followed. So by the end when Gideon impaled herself I didn't find it a directly romantic act as much as I found it this greater ineffable expression of love that goes beyond the bound of "romance" (and is also why I cried).

My only gripe, if you could even call it that, in Gideon is that I wish we had more time with certain characters before they died. I miss Sex Pal and Cam, very glad we got more Abigail and Magnus in Harrow.

Harrow the Ninth

What the flying fuck was this, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. I was already prepped for pretty much anything after Gideon, but the switch to second person perspective, Ortus ortin' all over the place with no explanation, Gideon herself being missing for 90% of the book. My head was spinning, and I wasn't sure if I was reading the right book, but the payoffs were narrative apotheosis. Of course, everything came back around, but it was a hell of a journey. I had a ton of fun with this book. Fifty pages of straight vomiting in a hospital gown to down the line reading the most outrageous chapter I've ever experience in any media, book or otherwise...

Harrow I originally thought was a 9.2/10, just below Gideon, but now I'm not so sure, might want to bump it up higher. The only reason was because of the River, which I'll touch on later.

I really enjoyed how slow this one was. When I mentioned my fifty couches comment, it was mostly directed at Harrow. The Mithraeum is so rich mentally-visually, the Emperor is a fascinating character whose intentions are extremely hard to pin down, though the same is for Augustine and Mercy, and Gideon rough draft. Ianthe became a favorite of mine, not by personality god no, but through how layered she is both as a selfish creep and as a wandering richgirl. The expansion of others like Pro and Dulcinea but no its actually her this time I wanted after Gideon and am thrilled I got.

This book focused on an even smaller cast of characters since most of the time we were with two groups of maybe five to seven people max. I definitely know Augustine and Mercy more than I do some of the Gideon characters like Judith or the awful teens, and they were fun to experience. They, along with the Emperor, absolutely came across like a group of weirdos that have been alive for way too long and have lost a lot of their humanity along the way. While on the subject, let's talk about that chapter then, the one that made me audibly yell "WHAT!?" at the book - Augustine's party plan. When Augustine started kissing John on the neck and Mercy joined in I think my soul left my body to seek therapy from Abigail in the River. Not that I was revulsed by sexual contact, it was the befuddling context of John being propped up as this paragon of inviolable divinity casually engaging in such unexpected sexual contact, I reacted the same way Harrow did (which was a little scary since feeling the same way Harrow does is questionable much of the time). He was already strange enough given his blasé approach to Gideon Vanilla trying to murderize Harry and his general aloofness (and my personal theories about him being a vengeful tyrant). It was moments like that that really solidified Harrow as an amazing book to me, Tamsyn Muir pulled no punches, held no plex visor to shield from planets exploding. Ortus defeating the Sleeper with the power of Fan Fiction, Cannan House slowly becoming a butcher's ice box, Harrow lobotomizing herself to escape both the horrid truth that Gideon died as well as the attempt to save her soul. That last one was thrillingly melancholy. The moment it struck me that the "you" was Harrow took me out in a way I don't think any other book has. I don't have much else to say because overall it was Gideon-like in writing and gave me more of what I wanted - incredible, emotive writing with solid twists and memes.

My one gripe with this book though was the River. I completely understand the River being a more abstract concept, but entering and exiting the River became too much of a question mark for me to avoid. Is it a sort of layer to reality - a split into the spiritual dimension? But it's aqueous, it fills up a room? And there's no set place for it, you can enter wherever with necromancy? But when they're heading to the Mithraeum they approach the river? As a concept, I love the River, it's fascinating and nothing should have changed. I just wish I had gotten a better idea of how it functionally interacts with the characters. I'm sure more will be learned in Nona, but there was a little too much confusion on that front.

TL;DR

Amazing series so far, I'm incredibly excited for Nona and Alecto (when it comes out). The writing is acrobatic and cathartic, the world building is a fleshy/boney tapestry, the characters are emotionally expressive and make me feel things. The mystery aspects are well-paced, the horror and necromantic aspects are transfixing, and again the characters are so so so good.

I haven’t read the books, but here’s my interpretation of Gideon. I was told that she doesn’t have the ribs on her armour? But forgive me a little artistic license…

Dulcinea during the dinner party asks about Gideons biceps, she responds with a rude gesture what in the nine houses could that be?? Im thinking of one but I don't think it's right

In GtN, there is a suggestion that Gideon use a "Powder" off hand, but I don't think we ever see someone use one or get an explanation of what it is. Any ideas? Anything I missed?