#my tlt meta

[theriverbeyond]

Always thinking about how TLT is in so many ways about cycles of abuse.... Mercymorn has spent 10,000 years being too emotional and too sensitive and wearing her grief on her sleeve (the feminine expression of grief versus Augustine's masculine repression of it) and she spends those 10,000 years being ridiculed for it. "Unlovable Mercymorn, critical Mercymorn" -- John denigrates her in front of her inferiors on the Erebos, Augustine has a constant, painted on expression of dismissal, etc until the point where Mercymorn herself just accepts it.

And then here comes Harrow, 17 years old and grieving just like her, and Mercymorn has a chance to help. She has spent 10,000 years as a live wire of grief, and she's given this broken baby who has torn apart her own brain, in many ways a mirror of Mercymorn's own grief, and she has the chance to help. But what does Mercymorn do?

She ridicules Harrow. She dismisses her. She perpetuates the violence that she herself has faced, and the cycle continues

#tlt meta #mercymorn the first #harrowhark nonagesimus #harrow the ninth #tlt thoughts #mercymorn cristabel woman that u are... #trb.txt #i have crossed the face of the universe i have poisoned it to match my grief

[pumpkin-cowboy]

#because y’all liked the Pyrrha post I made the other day #Here’s one for my fave #palamedes #palamedes sextus #camilla hect #the locked tomb #tlt #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #editing to add a tag for organization #red yarn conspiracy board #meta

[chekhovs-tantrum]

All of the kisses in the Locked Tomb series thus far, organized chronologically and described accurately

Inspired by @wifegideonnav's post on Tamsyn torturing us:

Suicidal ten-year-old makes out with corpse; gets possessed

^Same kid gets eyebrow kissy and baptism from hometown butch who she's definitely killed a few times

^Same kid sticks vomit-covered tongue into throat of vicious socialite immediately after lobotomy to forget dead girlfriend

Honorable mention because it happens offscreen: Dead Girlfriend's Mom (haunting same kid) (different haunting) vent-reminisces in memories about her unholy thruple-with-two-bodies

Socialite delivers averted cheek kiss with a womp womp womp

Sloppy bisexual thruple (different thruple) fuck God after lemon queen's ex-husband takes her cannibalized nun-wife's name in vain 

Dead planet baby feeling herself; kisses own reflection

DILF distributes daddy forehead smoochies

Dead planet baby perfectly mimics dead bestie's knuckle kiss to codependent bodysharing cousin

Honorable mention because there's plausible deniability: "horrifying noises" made by twins upon reunion 

Dead Girlfriend sees girl who owned/tortured her for years, stares longingly; dead planet baby rolls with it 

DILF gives real kisses to members of thruple (different thruple-in-two-bodies) before besties mutually explode in death-by-codependency

Dead planet back in second body. Bite. 

#this doesn't even count the armbone sex #also I might be missing some bc I can't control-F “kiss” in my paper copies of HtN and GtN; feel free to fill me in #after Alecto I want someone to run data #percent of kisses that are on the lips vs on forehead/hand/cheek #percent of kisses between threesomes vs twosomes #percent of kisses where at least one party is dead #tlt shitposting #locked tomb spoilers #tlt meta #harrow the ninth spoilers #nona the ninth spoilers

[direquail]

the thing that people are missing about TLT—what makes it so good and so extremely affirmingly gay—is that it is layered through and through with queer desire of all kinds: Sick desire, wrong desire, desire that will never be voiced let alone fulfilled, desire that CANNOT be spoken of, desires that shouldn’t be fulfilled or run counter to social mores of the setting in ways that are alien to the reader’s own. It is So. Horny. People are horny for corpses. They’re fucking using other peoples’ bodies (without consent). They’re subtextually fucking their siblings. The core homoerotic relationship is a necro/cav relationship, which in the book’s setting, romantic or sexual necro/cav relationships are considered repulsive.

And it will never be fulfilled or consummated in the sense that most people imagine them. Nobody is getting what they want. Girls are kissing girls who are in love with someone else’s corpse. Girls are lobotomizing themselves to save other girls’ souls. Girls are spearing their hearts on iron fences and offering their souls to other girls to eat. They are both profoundly Not Getting Laid and also having intimacies and consumptions that make sucking and fucking seem about as profound as a puddle. The penetration metaphor of Naberius’ death and the bottoming metaphor of Gideon’s cannot be overstated. Someone’s arm is amputated and it’s the closest thing that book has to a sex scene.

And somehow, even though it portrays repression in some cases, it is not Repressed(TM). The girls are Jesus; the girls are reading porn rags; the girls are dying as virgins. Someone tries to fuck a hallucination that is also the ghost of the Devil and also of the Earth. The ghost of the Earth and the Devil says “Huh. One moment, I have to cross time, space, and the River beyond death” and roughly… a day later, fully possesses their body.

Sex doesn’t begin to describe it. It is sublime; it is spiritual; it is as crass and visceral and compulsive as whatever sick pornographies anybody gets off to; it is as grimy and solipsistic and subterranean as any human unconscious.

You simply could not get that in a light and happy “found family! ✨” rainbow sci-fi

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #one of these days i will pull out my queer theory readers and do an essay #nona the ninth spoilers #tlt spoilers

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

some points. some things. some ideas. none of which are connected, i'm sure.

"anastasia" means "resurrection" or "one who will be reborn."

she is the only one of the original lyctors explicitly stated to have sired her house's line of succession.

this is vitally important (important enough to have been actively preserved against all odds for 10000 years), but nobody seem to quite understand why, including the reverend family.

alecto says "you are the blood of anastasia," as if this is relevant to her. she then kisses harrow and draws blood.

it's only after getting verbal confirmation and (presumably) tasting her blood that she pledges her sword to harrow.

she says "i am sorry about samael," as if that would mean something to harrow, as if she expects harrow to have the same grief over anastasia's cavalier that anastasia did.

the ninth house is "the house of the sewn tongue," which is a ritual for the keeping of secrets. it also sounds oddly flesh magic-ey for the ninth, which means they probably didn't originate the practice.

this would imply that it's relevant to their history somehow.

the ninth's skull is jawless, which we know from the ianthe situation is the way to undo the effects of the sewn tongue.

when people talk portentously of the ninth, they talk about its "secrets" and its "mysteries," always in the plural.

which implies that there are more secrets than just the tomb. i doubt they added the plural after the creche flu, can you imagine? the ninth has other, very old secrets.

harrow loved alecto from sight.

alecto recognized her immediately.

like i said, this is a series of random, unconnected facts. there are no conclusions whatsoever to be drawn from this.

#the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #anastasia the first #my post

[katakaluptastrophy]

“Oh, Harrow, bless you, I always was a busybody,” she said smilingly. “Don’t thank me for sticking my oar in. You asked me to come, and I came. I understand you didn’t ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours.”

I've banged on here about how the Fifth are doing necromancy straight out of the Odyssey, but I've just noticed something here...

A psychopomp is a figure who escorts the souls of the newly deceased to the afterlife.

There are a couple of those in ancient Greek mythology.

One of whom - Hecate - is particularly associated with, amongst other things, necromancy, ghosts, keys, and children (particularly girls).

If you want get really specific, she's also associated with Eleusian myth and cult - that is, with a set of beliefs wherein the myth of Persephone (of pomegranate fame) descending to and ascending from the underworld was thought to relate to an ability to transcend the usual awfulness of the ancient underworld. She's also associated with the Erinyes, or Furies, one of whom is the namesake of Alecto.

Which seems rather appropriate for a character who serves everyone pomegranate, dies, goes to the underworld, and there acts as psychopomp to Harrow before apparently transcending the River and freeing Harrow to go forth and unleash Alecto.

#the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #abigail pent #I had to dig out my copy of The Oxford Classical Dictionary for this #because Googling “Hecate” does not lead you to well-cited material about ancient literature and religion

[nonas-third-tantrum]

every so often i’ll see a post that’s like “ugh the characters in gideon the ninth seem way older than they are, they were obviously aged down to appeal to the YA market”

and i’m like

HUH

their youth is the point!! the fact that they are teens and young adults and the oldest among them are ~30 illustrates just how deeply cruel this world is!! that children are holding up entire houses, dying in wars, obsessed with being the greatest of their generations!!

mercymorn’s running bit about harrow being so young is not just her being condescending—she is genuinely horrified by how young harrow and ianthe are. especially compared to her ten thousand-ish years. they are infants!!

and don’t even get me started on the kids in nona the ninth, which is even more blatantly about how war permeates every aspect of life, even for kids, and makes them grow up too fast

anyway. tlt is not YA and even if it was, arguments about kids in dystopian novels “seeming too old” will never be convincing to me because 99% of the time…that’s. the. point

#this has been languishing in my drafts forever but I just saw another post calling tlt YA and my brain short circuited #tlt is so special to me in part because it ISNT ya #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta

[rozzie-the-ninth]

Why am I only now finding out that a TRIDENTARIUS is a sea snail and THIS is what it looks like???

Etymologically, Tridentarius dentatus means "toothy trident" but trident on itself means three teeth so the snail is named basically "toothy three-tooth"

"It’s not unusual to find them as pairs"

Oh really. I never would have guessed.

Feeling really stupid rn, all this time I thought Ianthe and Corona were named for a trident 🔱 , not a conch.

#tlt #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #nona the ninth #ianthe tridentarius #coronabeth tridentarius #the tridentarii #name meanings #tlt meta #tlt analysis #sea snail #tridentarius dentatus #my post

[commanderbabygirl]

the fact that nobody in the tlt universe other then alecto (possibly not anymore after the tomb) is ever scared of death is wild to me cus they know what happens after death and it’s going mad until you loose all semblance of yourself. and nobody has a reaction to this???

like yes you could argue it’s just a fact of life they’re used to it but like people have existential crisis’ about death and that’s a fact of life. and yes we’re not surrounded by it like they are but still i feel that such a close relationship with the spirits of the dead like the fifth has to freak you out even if just at first, the whole the more you know about it it either scares you shitless or your no longer scared. and the other houses who know about it in a more abstract way like that would freak me out like wdym i’m going to loose all coherent thought. it’s just a given???

petition to have at least one character have a breakdown about it cus what

#it should be pyrrha she’s been in the river and has been alive so so long #also revenants??? #are revenants and ghosts different in world cus ghosts are brought up specially and there is maybe a distinction made?? #enjoy my unstructured ramble #also also how are we feeling about pyrrha in the back of a brain for a myriad how does that compare to the river #commandersposts #give pyrrha a break tho let her be happy #tlt #tlt meta #pyrrha dve #the fifth house #abigail pent #the locked tomb

[liesmyth]

I'm always thinking about how G— was an engineer. A damn good one: the sole engineer of the cryo project, good enough that of all the ten billion, the FTL project chose him to inspect their work, back when the project was still a pipe dream. He was a man from an immigrant family in an underprivileged area who became arguably the world's best engineer, which is impressive in its own right, but it gets me thinking... Pre-Resurrection, John says they can't grow food on Mars (and for all John's unreliability, that's pretty believable, given that the high perchlorate concentration in Martian soil is one of the big obstacles to carrying out a sustained Mars mission), and as silly as this might sound, the engineer and scientist divide is real, and of all the nerds that John resurrected, I can't imagine it was the artist or the contract lawyer or the medical and chemistry experts that made the Mars installation viable. Gideon made a House out of it, and one that accepts recruits from across the Dominican system! "Saint of Duty" is said to fit him, evident in his loyalty and commitment to the Cohort and fighting the Resurrection Beasts, but I have to wonder, how much of that was his commitment to making shit work? I can't shake the image of a couple million people awaking to a ruined world, and someone had to get the other Houses settled, figure out spacecraft and space habitats using what little supplies they have left, and what better candidate for that than the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice?

ANON I love this so much. You're SO right, and you put into words something about G1deon and John's shared background that I've tried to articulate for a while. In the very first chapter, John says, "It wasn’t that they didn’t have the money for a bigger team; we were simply the only ones capable of what they were asking."

This was an incredibly elite team. They were a brilliant bunch of hyperspecialised nerds. And, like, among John's squad, A- and M- and everyone else started out as colleagues — very smart people he probably met in academic circles, where being smart was kind of a prerequisite. It was their research that brought them together to begin with.

G1deon, though! He was John's friend growing up. John knew his grandparents. They spotted each other spare changes for snacks!! Then John went on to Dilworth, then to university and then overseas, and G1deon had his own (probably different) academic path, and maybe they only stayed vaguely in touch, but when it was time to look for an engineer that could help them build spaceships constructed to provide life support to the whole of humanity for centuries — and G1deon was the guy for that.

The fact that two boys from similar underprivileged backgrounds individually made huge breakthroughs in their chosen fields, and got to work together on a project that was meant to save the world... I bet at the time it felt like a miraculous coincidence. I think they thought, if they'd made it that far, that they could do anything.

(yet another layer to the tragedy of what happened etc etc. G1deon torn between John and P—. John stopping G1deon's heart)

Thank you so much for all your thoughts about the Mars space installation, also — I wonder how long there was between Mars becoming the Second House (founded by G1deon! he and Pyrrha did the bulk of the work!) and the institution of the Third House, which doesn't have a named founder and might very well have been a shared project built on the blueprint of what G1deon set up. "the man who canonically engineered spacecraft twice" — my god I love this so much. It's G1deon emo hours today

#this ask PUNCHED ME IN THE GUTS ty for my life #g1deon #gideon the first #tlt thoughts #ntn #ask #anonymous #tlt #tlt meta #ONE THING though is that I don't think we're meant to interpret G1deon as being from an immigrant family but rather native #it's not spelled out in the books so it's all headcanons #but pasifika G— is where I'm at personally

[nose-coffee]

honestly, i just gotta imagine anybody from the Houses not involved with the Cohort hearing abt tlt events would be wild. like

random fifth house citizen: all....all of the house heirs died?

their random fifth house citizen friend: [nodding] except for Ianthe Tridentarius of the Third and a Ninth nun. they’re the Emperor’s new Lyctors.

random fifth house citizen: [imagining the Lyctor trials as Battle Royale style death matches]....but everyone else died??

-

random fifth house citizen’s friend: hey did you hear? the sixth house installation got cooked in that recent sunflare!

random fifth house citizen: 

random fifth house citizen’s friend: also the Emperor has a daughter

random fifth house citizen: oh shit really? congrats to him. chaotic time to be raising a kid tho, imo

random fifth house citizen’s friend: she’s like, nineteen

random fifth house citizen:

-

random fifth house citizen’s friend: [poking their head into the room] hey, just letting you know, the tomb’s open

random fifth house citizen: the what’s what

random fifth house citizen’s friend: the tomb is open. the locked one. on the ninth house. it’s open.

random fifth house citizen:

#fuck off lou #my post #tlt #the locked tomb #'tombs open' w the same energy as 'moons haunted' #tlt meta #tlt shitposting #honestly i just think abt third house citizens celebrating 'princess coronabeth our darling gone too soon day' a lot #like. you poor fuckers have no clue oh god #i think abt the nine houses nameless citizens a lot. who knows what fate has in store for them

[theriverbeyond]

"I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?" is an underrated line from the pool scene IMO because it connects so tragically with the Great Griddlehark Mismatch, which is that all Gideon wants is to be eaten and all Harrow wants is to never eat Gideon again.

In her most pivotal moment, Harrow confesses her two greatest sins. The second, of course, was that she rolled the rock and walked onto that icy shore, but the first was how she used Gideon. How she isolated her, abused her, relagated her to a life of abject misery, made her both a whipping girl and a meat pumpkin. Harrow ate Gideon's childhood and she ate Gideon's future and she only truly came to regret this after it was too late.

"i gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it" like, yeah. Harrow didn't want it. Harrow wanted to give it back.

#griddlehark #harrowhark nonagesimus #gideon nav #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt meta #hi im. unwell about them #just oanic cleaned my kitchen bc the fridge ppl r coming tmrw :/ #panic* #tlt thoughts #trb.txt

[arithmonym]

i’m SO normal about this word choice!!!!

#RATTLING THE BARS OF MY CAGE. TAMSYN YOU CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS TO ME #i can’t emphasize enough that i’m genuinely crying right now #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #john gaius #harrowhark nonagesimus #camilla hect #palamedes sextus #campal #m speaks

[folfar]

A scientific consideration of cultural preservation in Gideon the Ninth

HYPOTHESIS: the Venus de Milo is in Canaan House

REASONING: John is keen on decoration (the rest of Canaan House, the Mithraeum, his fancy baby-bone crown). John has strong opinions on preserving things he considers ‘worthy’ (the earth, his friends, Shakespeare). Why not famous art? Canaan House is filled with old and rotting portraits - they can’t ALL be of Cyrus and Valancy.

EVIDENCE:

There was a single statue at the end of the corridor where it turned left. It must have once been a person, but the head and arms had been lopped off, leaving only a torso with beseeching stumps. - GtN p130-1 (when Gideon is looking for Harrow)

beseeching stumps?? It’s simply got to be the Venus de Milo. No stumps plead more tenderly:

But she has a head! I hear you protest.

Aha! Now we come to Palamedes and Camilla doing psychometry to figure out the age of Canaan House:

"Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let's talk about this"-a scrape of stone on stone-"being three thousand and some years older than this." A heavy clunk.

About 3000 years older than another part of Canaan House? Hmm! And what’s that Camilla is holding?

“Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrapped figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip.”

“The cavalier narrowed her hooded eyes, fidgets gone and absolutely still; then she exploded into action. She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced.”

SCULPTURE!

CONCLUSION: the Venus de Milo IS in Canaan House! However, it was decapitated by known practical thinker and simp Camilla Hect so that Palamedes Sextus could do his carbon dating easier without tiring out his necromancer noodle arms

SECONDARY CONCLUSION: Camilla was going to use the head of the Venus de Milo to bash open the laboratory hatch

#read my essay boi #sorry but like if you’re trying to make something that will last forever and be beloved for all of your understanding of human history #then you might as well have an og around to inspire you #the og is the Venus de Milo just in case that wasn’t clear okay #camilla ‘cultural vandal’ hect #the locked tomb #Gideon the ninth #tlt #Camilla hect #palamedes sextus #meta #like #technically meta #in a very loose sense

[lady-harrowhark]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Gideon’s blood and the Tomb. I’ve got two points here that dovetail somewhat…

Let’s review some key events. I realize these probably seem a bit all over the place, but I do believe they come together. I’ve tried to put these in roughly chronological order.

John attempts to consume the soul of the Earth, and then creates a physical body for Alecto: “I ripped half my ribs from my body and made you from the dirt, my blood, my vomit, my bone.”

Ten thousand years later, Gideon and Harrow duke it out. The initial recollection of the fight says that “Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.” The more candid HtN version has Gideon telling us, “You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails.”

Harrow opens the Tomb with Gideon’s (read: John’s) blood on her hands.

Harrow sees Alecto, falls in love with her, and decides to live. 

At some point while in the Tomb, Harrow apparently kisses Alecto: “She hadn’t come on purpose; the scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for it—the chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen.”

At Canaan House, Ianthe ascends and tells the others that step six of the process is to “consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you.”

Harrow’s letter tells her she owes Ianthe “the favour of the chain”, which extends “into the House, but NOT into the Tomb.” The agreement takes precedence over any oaths sworn to others, including John, except for the Holy Corpse.

Harrow kisses Ianthe to inspect her jaw and re-swears the oath.

Harrow’s Nova AU has her retrieving the chain of Samael from the Anastasian. This is considered a sin severe enough that the Reverend Father whips her, but she is allowed to keep the chain. Denied the role of Reverend Daughter, Harrow tells Ortus that she is “the unfulfilled vow and the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull.”

Alecto kisses Harrow, bites her, and recognizes her by her blood - the blood of Anastasia’s line. Alecto tells Harrow that she is very sorry about Samael, and she vows the favour she had promised to Anastasia to Harrow.

We see over and over this theme of consuming another life, whether body or soul: we get two sides of this coin when we compare Gideon’s “All I ever wanted you to do was eat me” to John’s statement that “it’s the human instinct, to take.” Consuming the flesh is, per Ianthe, one of the steps to taking in a cavalier’s soul and becoming a Lyctor, directly paralleling John consuming the Earth, both physically when he eats dirt and spiritually when he takes in her soul. Thus far, though, we don’t know how or if Harrow consumed Gideon’s flesh in the interim between chapters 36 and 37 of GtN. 

But here’s what I’ve been wondering: assuming Ianthe is correct (and telling the truth) about the steps to becoming a Lyctor, to what extent does the order and timing actually matter? I think there’s a distinct possibility that Harrow had consumed Gideon’s flesh years before they even came to Canaan House.

Because Harrow had Gideon’s face under her fingernails. And Harrow bites her nails.

HtN, chapter four:

You held your left hand up before your face, before the light, the even white light with its hot tungsten filaments. The thumbnail was whole and even. Too even? Were you wont to chew your fingernails still, that unattractive tic of your girlhood?

And again in chapter twenty-one:

She took off her gloves, and with the edges of her fingernails - bitten to the quick, and never much help - she started to prise open one wrinkled corner.

If the steps do not have to be completed strictly in order, Harrow may very well have already checked off step six if she were biting her nails with Gideon’s flesh and blood still clinging to them.

The other thing going on here is that we get these repeated connections between chains and favours and kisses. I don’t feel like we have quite all the pieces yet to draw any definitive conclusions, but it seems that the favour of the chain may have something to do with the Reverend Family’s vow to protect the Tomb. Particularly, Harrow describing herself, sans Reverend Daughter title, as “the unfulfilled vow” as she wields the chain of Samael lends itself to this interpretation. I also find it very interesting that this unfulfilled vow is paired with “the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull” given that upon waking, Alecto kisses Harrow, bites her, and draws blood which then allows her to recognize Harrow as one of Anastasia’s descendants.

Before that kiss, though, there was another. Alecto describes being called back by Harrow’s kiss, presumably when she broke into the Tomb as a child. I have to wonder if blood was playing a role here too. Alecto says that Harrow’s flesh stuck on her frozen lips, that the ice burned her. If this kiss also drew blood, it could be that the blood of Anastasia’s line was the key to calling her back. However, there may have been someone else’s blood on Alecto’s lips that day. If Harrow had been biting her nails, which she’d earlier used to claw Gideon’s face, she very well may have had Gideon’s blood in her mouth as well. As John’s daughter, her blood was able to open the Tomb. Was it able to call Alecto as well? Could “the chain of a kiss” be referring to Harrow transferring John’s blood between Gideon and Alecto?

Overall, it seems like we’re circling something akin to a blood oath or living blood ward. The thalergetic nature of blood certainly aligns with the symbolism of life and light that we see connected to the Earth and Alecto, in contrast to the thanergy that John cultivates. Alecto’s physical form is derived from John’s blood, and his power is derived from her soul. If indeed a kiss and a few drops of John’s blood, shepherded into the Tomb by Gideon and Harrow, are enough to call Alecto, I cannot even imagine the pyrotechnics show that we’re in for now that he’s had a run-in with the business end of her sword.

#i've had the nail biting = step six thing percolating since pre-nona days #but the chain of a kiss part didn't hit me until the other day #at which point i quite literally froze in my tracks to process #i can't really blame harrow though. breaking into an apocalypse-initiating tomb would be a real nail-biter #(sorry i just think puns are funny automatically) #i do think there's a good chance they were already partway to lyctorhood by the time they got to the First #pre-lyctors. if you will. #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn #harrowhark nonagesimus #john gaius #gideon nav #alecto #alecto the ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

who sleeps in the dog beds?

i'm just thinking about the cavalier cots, and how all the characters used/responded to them.

(note: i know for a fact i've seen at least one other post about this, but i do not specifically remember the contents of that post. so if i do some plagiarism here, i would like to apologize and assure you that it's accidental.)

so.

2: it's judith and marta. obviously they use the cavalier cot precisely as intended. even if judith secretly cherishes fantasies of marta bending her over the edge of the master bed, they use the cavalier cot as intended.

3: obviously it goes without saying that the tridentarii share the master bed. i think on paper the cot belongs to naberius and he does sleep in it occasionally, but i also think when they're mad at him they make him sleep on the floor.

4: this is the only one i waffled on a bit. the conclusion i've come to is that, for the first few nights, jeannemary took the cot and isaac slept in the master bed like you're supposed to, because that's the kind of pair they want to be. but after the fifth died i think they started cuddling up together in the master bed, when they slept at all.

5: they're married. it would be pretty weird actually if magnus slept in the cot.

6: we have canon confirmation that the cot is used for storage, which means cam and pal almost certainly share the bed. no one is shocked.

7: gonna say n/a for the seventh because i doubt that the shambling corpse of protesilaus the seventh, ya know, sleeps. but i will say that, if the real pro and dulcie made it to canaan house, she would sleep alone in the bed. not out of any power dynamic, just due to protesilaus's sense of chivalry. she's sick, she needs the more comfortable situation. i think dulcie would feel a bit guilty about it, but pro would insist.

8: do i even need to include the 8th on this list. either they use the cot as intended or they both sleep on the floor, there are no other possibilities.

9: no speculation here, we know how it went down.

#the locked tomb #tlt #gideon the ninth #tlt meta #my post