My favorite bit of characterization in Harrow the Ninth is how, to quote The Hitchhiker's Guide, John's just this guy, you know? So you can imagine how enraptured I was to see John's entry in the appendix.
Group of friends who are close because they all have the same superpower except no they don't.
As in, they all think the other ones have the same superpower as them, but, in fact, they do not.
For example:
Time traveler who always is running into these other people who seem to know what's going on or what will happen and is so happy he can finally share his travel stories.
Precognitive who is relieved he isn't the only one with the gift and who is glad to get help averting future disasters.
Mind reader with a horrible memory who tries to stay on top of things by skimming surface thoughts. You want to talk about next week's election results and how they changed the next decade? She's with you.
Totally normal guy who thinks the others have the absolute best bit ever and loves playing along.
They save the world at least twice without a single clue shared between the four of them.
It happens like this:
this is the exact inverse of my Superhero team made up entirely of speedsters post
I am 15% of the way through Harrow the Ninth. There are no plot spoilers below.
"Second person, past tense" is a really weird choice for a novel's narration, and I will be disappointed if this does not pay off mightily.
Most pieces I see in second person POV are short stories. The goal is to establish intimacy and immediacy, and they are most commonly in the present tense. The notion is that the action is happening to you, right now, and you are finding out about it as you the reader go through the story. Occasionally you see such a story in the future tense, suggesting someone is prophesying to you.
Second person, past tense is someone telling you your own history. This is kind of weird. One assumes a Memento story with an amnesia premise, or similarly Merlin living backwards in time. The second person here raises the question of who is telling you the story. The past tense raise the question of why you need someone to tell you your own story.
That our protagonist is explicitly and demonstrably insane gives us a lot of "why," although the particular "why" depends on the "who." The most obvious "who" is that Harrow is telling herself her own story. We have already seen Harrow telling herself her own story within this story, so adding another layer of recursion seems obvious and later adding multiple seems fun.
But here we reach a fork that we cannot resolve this early in the book. Is Harrow in a moment of lucidity telling herself what she should already know? Is Harrow in a moment of insanity hallucinating a new history? Is Harrow just lying to herself because the ending of Gideon the Ninth was too painful?
Harrow the Ninth is sometimes described as gaslighting the reader about Gideon the Ninth. Someone is not telling the truth about something here. One character seems to have noticed, but it is hard to be sure when our narrator is unreliable and may be hallucinating and/or lying.
Gideon was a somewhat unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lied (except perhaps about her emotions, except perhaps mostly to herself) but in that she was not paying attention, like the meme post in circulation about a movie showing the start of World War I from the perspective of a pet pigeon. You can probably identify all the important plot points of Gideon the Ninth by how boring Gideon finds them.
Harrow is more classically unreliable. She has a skewed perspective, and within that perspective she hallucinates, and on top of those hallucinations she will deceive herself and others. This early in the book, we already have many examples of Harrow seeing things that aren't there. She tends to realize within a page or two that she is hallucinating. The big news at some point should be that those little hallucinations were within the context of a larger hallucination and/or lie.
And now I need to go finish the book so I can check my Tumblr notifications without worrying about spoilers in the notes.
While I'm putting stakes in the ground early on, let me also predict that Anastasia the First is the Body in the Locked Tomb. This is not a spoiler, just a guess.
I say this based on the way that Tamsyn Muir drops important revelations and quickly walks away from them, as above with Gideon. Anastasia is listed with the Lyctors but was not The Eighth Saint to Serve the King Undying. She was from the Ninth House. Mercymorn immediately compares Harrow to Anastasia. With several signals that she is so important that the narrative looks away from her, I am taking a shot in the dark. The timing, gender, location, and importance all line up neatly, as does the notion that her revival would mean the end of the world.
And now I really can't look in the notes, but my respect and appreciation for the notes I have seen in passing that are just cackling and anticipation. You are Seen.
Since I have at least a dozen people in the notes wanting a report-out after I finish: spoilers below the "Keep Reading." If you have your own spoilers to add in discussion, please also hide them from new readers.
The character designs in Disney Mirrorverse are absolutely insane.
These Unironically rock
That Gaston is a fucking Chad among Chads
Mirrorverse character design is stellar. The design philosophy seems to be saying, "You know what would be awesome?" and doing it. "Let's give Anna a huge fricking sword. Should we give Ariel a trident? Nah, too obvious, how about a harpoon? What if we gave Mike Wazowski Ripley's loader from Aliens, but with blasters on it?"
No such thing as a tomato sauce boat. No such thing as a salad dressing boat. But I guess if you’re gravy you get ~SpEcIaL nAuTiCaL pRiViLeGeS~
I mean, marinara, it’s right there in the name. Who is more deserving, I ask you?
…you know you can put any sauce you want in your own gravy boat, OP? You know that, right?
Well yeah. You can put lemonade in it if you want to. Or use it as a spittoon. Or a paperweight. Whatever.
But when you’re not using it? When you have cleaned it and put it back in the cupboard? What is it then? That’s right. It reverts to being a gravy boat. Because that’s what it’s, as they say, “for.”
And when you take it out again and fill it with, idk, salsa verde, what will people say? They’ll say, “Oh, that’s a good use for a gravy boat.” No one ever says “how clever of you to use a salsa boat to serve gravy.” Because the boat defaults to gravy. That is the problem.
If I go to the store and ask for a raita boat, I get funny looks. If I ask for a gravy boat, they know exactly what I’m talking about. Fair? No. Fact? Yes.
Can you see that this is about what is a marked use and what is an unmarked use? Can you see that, friend orbisonblue? That this is not just about what I, personally, can do with my tableware, but what our society considers to be “normal’ sauce-serving practice, and what is “abnormal”? Can you?
Archaeologists determining if mundane objects are also ritual objects
see if you put anything in the gravy boat, it becomes gravy. nothing about its essence changes but but the boat grants gravy status to whatever is inside it
Oh, but I would posit this only furthers the problem. It becomes gravy? As if granted merit beyond its form by the blessing of its vessel? If my cat fills a dog bed with her tiny body and audacious spirit, is she now a dog? If I don a dress, does its presence grant me womanhood? (Yes, because I am genderfluid/bigender/some eldritch thing and I have deemed it so, but that’s beside the point.) If I manage to run DOOM on a blood glucose monitor, does it become important health information? No! Why must a thing (sauce) be transfigured to convention and conferred value (gravy status) by its context (porcelain “boat”) instead of rendering its context resplendent by virtue of its own radiance (sauce should get to have a boat without having to become gravy)?
If my cat fills a dog bed with her tiny body and audacious spirit, is she now a dog?
Yes. This is in fact where new breeds of dog come from, which is why dogs are so varied and diverse. How are Chihuahuas and Malamutes the same species? Not selective breeding, just different things or animals entering dog beds.
Dog beds were invented before dogs. It just happens that the first animal to enter a dog bed was a wolf, which is why so many dogs look like that.
Reblog to headbonk your mutuals like a cat full of love
the year is 2039 im in the middle of a 14 hour shift driving a cyber hands free semi-truck that needs a human monitor to keep it from blowing through red lights indiscriminately. since the water is undrinkable we’re back to drinking beer instead im drunk and the AI hologram personified as a non threatening woman with a computer voice in the passenger seat keeps trying to seduce me because fucking the hologram is a fireable offense and the company is trying to downsize
Just giving you this now. Watch this spot in 16 years
I am 15% of the way through Harrow the Ninth. There are no plot spoilers below.
"Second person, past tense" is a really weird choice for a novel's narration, and I will be disappointed if this does not pay off mightily.
Most pieces I see in second person POV are short stories. The goal is to establish intimacy and immediacy, and they are most commonly in the present tense. The notion is that the action is happening to you, right now, and you are finding out about it as you the reader go through the story. Occasionally you see such a story in the future tense, suggesting someone is prophesying to you.
Second person, past tense is someone telling you your own history. This is kind of weird. One assumes a Memento story with an amnesia premise, or similarly Merlin living backwards in time. The second person here raises the question of who is telling you the story. The past tense raise the question of why you need someone to tell you your own story.
That our protagonist is explicitly and demonstrably insane gives us a lot of "why," although the particular "why" depends on the "who." The most obvious "who" is that Harrow is telling herself her own story. We have already seen Harrow telling herself her own story within this story, so adding another layer of recursion seems obvious and later adding multiple seems fun.
But here we reach a fork that we cannot resolve this early in the book. Is Harrow in a moment of lucidity telling herself what she should already know? Is Harrow in a moment of insanity hallucinating a new history? Is Harrow just lying to herself because the ending of Gideon the Ninth was too painful?
Harrow the Ninth is sometimes described as gaslighting the reader about Gideon the Ninth. Someone is not telling the truth about something here. One character seems to have noticed, but it is hard to be sure when our narrator is unreliable and may be hallucinating and/or lying.
Gideon was a somewhat unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lied (except perhaps about her emotions, except perhaps mostly to herself) but in that she was not paying attention, like the meme post in circulation about a movie showing the start of World War I from the perspective of a pet pigeon. You can probably identify all the important plot points of Gideon the Ninth by how boring Gideon finds them.
Harrow is more classically unreliable. She has a skewed perspective, and within that perspective she hallucinates, and on top of those hallucinations she will deceive herself and others. This early in the book, we already have many examples of Harrow seeing things that aren't there. She tends to realize within a page or two that she is hallucinating. The big news at some point should be that those little hallucinations were within the context of a larger hallucination and/or lie.
And now I need to go finish the book so I can check my Tumblr notifications without worrying about spoilers in the notes.
While I'm putting stakes in the ground early on, let me also predict that Anastasia the First is the Body in the Locked Tomb. This is not a spoiler, just a guess.
I say this based on the way that Tamsyn Muir drops important revelations and quickly walks away from them, as above with Gideon. Anastasia is listed with the Lyctors but was not The Eighth Saint to Serve the King Undying. She was from the Ninth House. Mercymorn immediately compares Harrow to Anastasia. With several signals that she is so important that the narrative looks away from her, I am taking a shot in the dark. The timing, gender, location, and importance all line up neatly, as does the notion that her revival would mean the end of the world.
And now I really can't look in the notes, but my respect and appreciation for the notes I have seen in passing that are just cackling and anticipation. You are Seen.
I am 15% of the way through Harrow the Ninth. There are no plot spoilers below.
"Second person, past tense" is a really weird choice for a novel's narration, and I will be disappointed if this does not pay off mightily.
Most pieces I see in second person POV are short stories. The goal is to establish intimacy and immediacy, and they are most commonly in the present tense. The notion is that the action is happening to you, right now, and you are finding out about it as you the reader go through the story. Occasionally you see such a story in the future tense, suggesting someone is prophesying to you.
Second person, past tense is someone telling you your own history. This is kind of weird. One assumes a Memento story with an amnesia premise, or similarly Merlin living backwards in time. The second person here raises the question of who is telling you the story. The past tense raise the question of why you need someone to tell you your own story.
That our protagonist is explicitly and demonstrably insane gives us a lot of "why," although the particular "why" depends on the "who." The most obvious "who" is that Harrow is telling herself her own story. We have already seen Harrow telling herself her own story within this story, so adding another layer of recursion seems obvious and later adding multiple seems fun.
But here we reach a fork that we cannot resolve this early in the book. Is Harrow in a moment of lucidity telling herself what she should already know? Is Harrow in a moment of insanity hallucinating a new history? Is Harrow just lying to herself because the ending of Gideon the Ninth was too painful?
Harrow the Ninth is sometimes described as gaslighting the reader about Gideon the Ninth. Someone is not telling the truth about something here. One character seems to have noticed, but it is hard to be sure when our narrator is unreliable and may be hallucinating and/or lying.
Gideon was a somewhat unreliable narrator not in the sense that she lied (except perhaps about her emotions, except perhaps mostly to herself) but in that she was not paying attention, like the meme post in circulation about a movie showing the start of World War I from the perspective of a pet pigeon. You can probably identify all the important plot points of Gideon the Ninth by how boring Gideon finds them.
Harrow is more classically unreliable. She has a skewed perspective, and within that perspective she hallucinates, and on top of those hallucinations she will deceive herself and others. This early in the book, we already have many examples of Harrow seeing things that aren't there. She tends to realize within a page or two that she is hallucinating. The big news at some point should be that those little hallucinations were within the context of a larger hallucination and/or lie.
And now I need to go finish the book so I can check my Tumblr notifications without worrying about spoilers in the notes.
True crime videos that are all ”some say he merely fell off the bridge into the river while drunk. However his parents claim he wasn’t a heavy drinker and skeptics of this theory point out how he was spent a summer as a lifeguard and the bridge was only 30 feet above the water so it’s very unlikely he could’ve drowned. Another… more sinister… theory points to smiley face graffiti seen a mile away suggesting this was the work of an international serial killer ring”
True horror account videos that are like "my friends and I explored a creepy abandoned house. We found fresh scratches on the floor, signs of a recently put out fire, and a crumpled sleeping bag. We heard footsteps from upstairs and ran away screaming. I have waking nightmares about our near fatal encounter with Baphomet to this very day."
Human trafficking accounts that are like "when I came out of the grocery store, someone had left a shopping cart near my car, and I saw a white van only two rows over. I barely had time to get away before the slavery ring pounced on me."
Data is going to fuck shit up!!!
Data really said ‘maybe violence IS the answer’
me in my slut era (in bed by 9:30 and reading my spouse a bedtime story)
There is an awkwardly sweet moment in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) where Hank and Janet are discussing their love lives while they were separated across dimensions for decades and had no reasonable hope of finding each other again. Hank explains why it did not work out with someone named Linda: "She wasn't you, baby."
"You" in this case is "Michelle Pfeiffer, who is also a superhero and scientific genius." Kind of a hard act to follow. Linda was not going to live up to that unless it was @reallyndacarter who also really was Wonder Woman.
And that is the last secret of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.
-- The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne Valente
i decided to actually read myfarog and it just talks about how cool half-elves are but when it describes them its just a list of autism symptoms
sounds about right
Sounds like that "but" should be a "therefore"
Autistic4autistic couple teaching each other exotic new hand stims
downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
followed by
is such a funny sequence
i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE
I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd
No, y'all don't even understand.
There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.
That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop
Yall don't know how much I adore all of this
This is terrible but today when I was playing volleyball outside with some friends one of their children (18 months) was sort of ambling around on his stumpy little toddler legs and so we were all trying to be careful and like not spike the ball onto the baby but then he wandered over to his father, who picked him up bc dad reflexes, and then the ball got passed over to the dad and he sort of had a no thoughts moment and instinctively used his child to smack the volleyball over to the next person. Like he just swung the kid and used his legs like a baseball bat. I'm never going to forget his face of premature regret mid baby-manuever right when he realized what he was doing AND the instant he realized his wife saw it happen. Anyway the baby was fine he didn't make contact with the ball all that hard and he was just mad his dad wouldn't use him as a club again but I had to sit down because I laughed so hard I cried.