Your personal Tumblr library awaits
Harrow The Ninth - Blog Posts
I saw this back piece on Etsy, and couldn’t stop picturing her in it so I kinda threw one on her and added my own flare.
I saw this back piece on Etsy, and couldn’t stop picturing her in it so I kinda threw one on her and added my own flare.
Locked Tomb stuff
i need to reread this book RIGHT NOW‼️💥
A sadge Harrow panel from an animatic I’m working on. 💀
Wake me up— WAKE ME UP INSIDE
(I can’t Wake up— WAKE ME UP INSIDE
if Gideon ever wants to talk about her mom, would John be like 'ah yeah, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' or 'do you wanna talk about Wake Me Up When September Ends?'
Preorders are now open for The Locked Tomb Fashion Zine!
Preorders will run from 7/3/24 to 8/1/24. This is a charity zine with all profit benefiting the National Center for Transgender Equality.
There are four bundles for purchasing on our gumroad:
PDF Only
PDF and Hardcopy Zine
PDF, Hardcopy Zine, and Merch
Merch Only
If you are in the UK please use our Etsy store because of VATs, thank you!
this isn’t how it happens
griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice
Just wanna take a moment of appreciation for what I saw at my local Barnes & Noble today
IM SORRY WHAT?!
….tamsyn when I Get You
harrow, in a hospital gown, covered in her own blood, barely awake enough to speak: my Lord, could I get some spiritual guidance?
john:
This has taken hours of work comparing different, yet similar fonts and the book cover titles.
All completely hand drawn. I present my own version of the locked tomb font.
For your own use:
It’s currently only letters right now.
I will update as I work through numbers and symbols.
Reread time! I take annotating very seriously 👆
Never realized that the first thing Gideon does when she’s in Harrows body, the first thing she does as a character since her death, is un-impale herself. Harrow had been skewered through by Mercy just like Gideon was by the fence. Tamsyn fucking Muir.
Once again I would like to my post-it note annotations:
finally started my gtn reread & i forgot just how crazy this series makes me. it triggers all of my academic instincts. i want to grab a highlighter & sticky notes & pen & start taking notes in the margins. i want to put up a corkboard with a million red strings. i want to write several phd theses about it. i want to release a gideon the ninth: annotated edition that's somehow 200k words longer than the original. i want to start a religion. i want to jump off a building
griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice
Was thinking about this line because Harrow what the actual fuck are you talking about, and I realised something.
Not only does Harrow really for real not know that Gideon loves her—in the bullshit context of their lives, this is a reasonable misunderstanding for her to have.
What has Harrow known Gideon's life goals to be since they were children? Hint: There are at least two Harrow is fully aware of.
The first is to be wanted. As much as Gideon hates and wants to escape the Ninth, she also paradoxically craves their acceptance. They're the only community she's ever known. Harrow plays on that desire from the very beginning, mostly by kind of .... well, okay, by negging her about it. Ironically appealing to her sense of loyalty and duty to her house when they both know Gideon never even had that bridge to burn. That kind of thing.
Whether or not she's right, Harrow sincerely believes that acceptance to still be important to Gideon. First flower of my house, the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. When Harrow has only seconds left to make amends, she not only banks hard into praising Gideon, she frames it to unambiguously offer Gideon the acceptance she's always been conspicuously denied. Assuring her of her value not just as a person or as a cavalier, but as one of their house, one of their people.
The second thing Harrow knows is that Gideon wants to join the Cohort. Easy, everybody knows that. She's only been telling everyone with ears (and then some) since she was eight years old. It's the bait Harrow dangled to entice her into this mess. She wants to be a hero, to do great deeds like in the comic books. She wants to be a soldier.
Against the backdrop of all that context, Gideon's dying declaration "for the Ninth" starts to sound a hell of a lot more like "for Queen and country." Especially when you remember that Harrow is still the sovereign ruler of the Ninth. From Harrow's vantage point, Gideon could easily be playing the heroic underdog in a war movie. The soldier no one believed in until she threw herself on a grenade to save her squad. The knight errant who proved her chivalry by giving her life in service to her king.
From that perspective, Harrow's line to Ortus makes sense. She's following through on her promise of acceptance, defending Gideon's loyalty to the first Ninth face she sees. She's playing out Gideon's war hero fantasy, where Gideon's act of heroism proved them all wrong about her. In which case Ortus's response, "You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth House could muster. I truly believe that," flows very naturally as a reply. He understands what Harrow is trying to say, and affirms it.
It's not a hero's burial in the Anastasian, but it's the closest thing Harrow has the power to give her. And it's a fucking reasonable interpretation of Gideon's actions that doesn't touch on her feelings for Harrow at all. Fuck me.
i love how as you read more into tlt, the ninth house seems more and more normal. Like if i'm at an immoral evil government competition, and i use human fat as soap and animate skeletons to do menial labor, i'm gonna LOSE if my competition is the third house, represented by ianthe "who HASN'T eaten human flesh and fucked a corpse" tridentarius. My weird skeleton thing seems normal, suddenly. Well-adjusted, even. It's recycling. They're using resources in a sustainable way. Normal and regular and productive for a post-climate change apocalypse universe.
People go on and on about how Muir drops you into gtn hearing from the person who knows the least about whats happening, and does not hand hold the reader through the crazy shit that occurs, and that's all true. It truly is a crazy writing decision to make your first pov character come from the universe's equivalent of amish fundamentalists. But the reader is actually done a huge favor being dropped into the ninth house first, because we already understand that space is cold and what catholic nuns are, and what goths look like, and what lesbians are. Very little time is wasted in the first chunk of gtn ripping hair out of your head wondering what the fuck is going on, because for all of its strangeness, the ninth house is already the most familiar thing we're gonna get.
Because THEN we learn that this whole universe's medieval chivalry system is designed to groom people from CHILDREN to not only be exploited and used as human batteries for necromancers, but to LIKE it. to wax poetic about it. to confuse it for love, to write fucking academic papers about it! Then we learn about planet flipping, an act so horrific and violent it turns the planet's soul into a massive vengeful monster capable of killing GOD. Like what do you MEAN the animals "change"? Is this why noodle has six legs? I would MUCH prefer to wear skeleton makeup and repent forever if the alternative was to witness my family dog grow TWO EXTRA LIMBS because the planet he lived on fucking died. Suddenly, living in the asscrack of a planet where no light gets in seems like a sweet deal when the whole solar system is lit by a sun that MAKES YOU GO CRAZY. The ninth house's WORST sin, killing 200 babies to make Harrow, a waste of resources and an act so terrible it haunts Harrow for the entire span of her life, is like a BLIP compared to the death count Jod's empire. God even hears about it and he's like, no big deal! The cohort probably kills that amount of people in a DAY.
And its ALSO tragic because you realize that all of this trauma and abuse that Gideon goes through is not really because of the ninth house at all. It's really just an individual skill issue that she wasn't treated with compassion. Nobody hated her because she's jesus or a bomb, nobody even KNOWS she's a bomb. It's just Priamhark and Pelleamena being deeply guilty and scared people that motivates her treatment, and absolutely nothing else.
They did something bad, and they know it, and Gideon survived it, and they can't kill her to cover it up, and that's IT. They killed themselves for pride, because they were afraid of the consequences of their actions (both the baby killing and Harrow opening the tomb) coming back to bite them. You can argue this is the catholicism of it all, and I wouldn't say you're wrong, but compared to the cavalier system, where exploitation is in the very lining of the house's institutions, the ninth house is really removed from the space empire's blood factory. This is compared to the fourth house where they have tons of children to be CANNON FODDER to join the cohort at fucking 14, compared to the eight house uncle nephew fuckery, even the fifth house which actually does seems nice to live on but also seems to have the fourth house in some sort of fucked up political bear hug??? (maybe the fourth house has so many kids in order to fight the fifth's battles? which is EXACTLY what jod's whole empire is about; politely stirring your tea and acting nice while you destroy everything) compared to ALL OF THAT, the cruelty that Gideon faces is really more a bug of the ninth's system than a feature.
There's nothing baked into the culture and everyday life of the ninth house that necessitated that cruelty; in fact, for such a pragmatic and resource-scarce place, it's WEIRD that a strong able-bodied young person was treated like a waste of space and resources. It could just have easily not happened, if Harrow's parents had been different people. Maybe they were products of their environment, but so was Harrow, and she values Gideon's life SO MUCH that she'd literally rather carve out parts of her own brain than exploit her. Gideon grows up knowing really NOTHING about cavaliers, so remote from the horrors of the empire that she develops an idea of what the cohort is from porn magazines. And in a lot of ways, that upbringing was desolate and terrible, and in a lot of other ways it literally DID NOT HAVE TO BE.
Gideon's MAIN THING is that she wants to be useful, to be needed, to be loved and it SUCKS that she couldn't even get it in the one place where she was actually an invaluable resource, where the death empire had the weakest reach. Gideon can't even blame her lack of love on the fucked up chivalry system like everyone else can because it JUST WASNT REALLY RELEVENT!?!?! This is like if i rolled up to the trauma competition and everyone else was raised in a nuclear warzone by wolves or something and i grew up in like, the suburbs and was raised by teachers and i somehow STILL WON. truly what the fuck guys.
mama a Body behind you 😰 // pt1/pt2/pt3
Lyric at the top reads: "I shine only with the light you gave me" from The Moon Will Sing by The Crane Wives
Alts below
I'm no good with drawing light but I thought I'd give it a try for GriddleHark.
I'm also drawing this with hope that it's enough for my brain and I won't need to make a animatic of it (no time)
There is no wrong uses of a tall yard skeleton but this is by far the best
That feeling when you misplace your 15ft skeleton that's meant to be carrying you around on a planet you're supposed to kill:
I'm CACKLING.
the sword that belongs to my dead bodyguard who sacrificed herself for me stays ON during sex
The entire Locked Tomb Trilogy.
Gideon is oblivious or perhaps in denial, Harrow is so in denial she makes herself get a lobotomy, and Nona is oblivious, to say the least
do you all see my vision here
Ive rewatched this a million times it's just too good-
I couldn't put it as a thumbnail so here's just Gideon seperatly
this is the dumbest thing ever but I had so much fun with it
Welcome to
✨ the experience ✨
⬆️ my notes.
ok I'm reading Harrow the Ninth and what the fuck is happening
I understand literally nothing
