@iridescentoracle / iridescentoracle.tumblr.com
Someone else has probably already made this point—I'm late to the Locked Tomb party, I know—but I've been reading a whole lot of Locked Tomb posts (in between re-reading bits of the Locked Tomb books and thinking about The Lord of the Rings) recently, and if anyone else has made this point I haven't seen it yet, so, spoilers through Nona the Ninth:
The beginning and the ending.
This story is already full of everything I need.
i am so obsessed with how like. taken as read the ot3 are at this point. like on the one hand it feels like they've been building up to this for ages but on the other hand it kind of feels like i blinked and we skipped right past some Major Turning Point where everything got spelled out and we're just already in firmly Established Relationship-land. obviously tarvek is too well-protected for anyone to assassinate openly, look how angry his boyfriend and girlfriend are at the idea of anyone threatening him. at this point i'm half-convinced agatha's just going to refer to her boyfriends in passing to someone else and no one's even going to comment on it until van finds out twenty pages later and immediately starts making everyone pay up
#but the entire last month has just been. i am Reeling what has HAPPENED #i was ready to live off the group hug for the next YEAR and every comic since then has felt like a brand new brick????
Seriously we're dining so well this month what. is. happening.
Fascinated by how awkwardly sheepish Tarvek looks to me in that panel. One of Europa's most brilliant schemers accidentally put himself in an incredibly safe position by falling in love with the right people/having the right people fall in love with him.
Like, he's not going to deny the incredible benefits, but while he has a lot of brilliant plans, he didn't actually plan this.
NO FOR REAL that's like. the single funniest part of all of this i think. He is one of the single most politically well-protected people in the world because it is extremely common knowledge he's dating two major heads of state (whether or not the three of them actually consider that true yet) and there's a rumor they're all planning to add the Master of Paris to the polycule next. And he did this almost entirely by accident.
Like you can just imagine some young aspiring Sturmvoraus five years from now asking Tarvek how he pulled that off bc they promise they won't use it to try to destabilize the Wulfenbach-Specificially-Tarvek-Sturmvoraus-Not-Just-The-Sturmvoraus-Family-In-General-Heterodyne Empire they just want tips bc he's basically their hero for pulling off a scheme that successful, or alternately some biographer or historian who may or may not be Phil-and-Kaja trying to write up what-all happened, and he just has to sit there and come up with an answer that will make him sound cool but make it clear he's not going to reveal his secrets because he absolutely cannot admit that the truth is mostly what he did was "nearly die a couple times and get kidnapped a whole bunch"
I think a very important unwritten piece of locked tomb canon is that corona and ianthe are absolutely both writing home regularly to mummy throughout the entire series - not with any helpful plot points or anything, they just want pocket money. Their mother, hatefully running a planet that she also hates, has the knack of silently wiring pocket money in an incredibly nasty and hurtful way - despite not accompanying it with a note or anything - just a sort of careful psychic warfare involving timing, amounts of money, the transfer service, etc.
(Although at at one point she asks if one of them has Babs, or if he’s dead or what. Corona ghosts her and ianthe texts back “who”)
Anyway, breaking off your meeting with god or the rebels or whatever because mummy has just sent you $465.73 in THEE bitchiest possible way
the idea that one moment Mummy and Daddy Of Ida receive official condolences from the Emperor Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death, the Necrolord Prime that both their daughters and their cavalier have tragically died during their glorious pursuit of Lyctorhood, look here are their coffins isn't this sad :( and then like an hour later a note flutters in from Coronabeth all "mummy dearest please forward my pocket money to this address, xoxo your favourite child" is, as the kids say, sending me
this is exactly it.their psychic waves of triangulation and nastiness already transcend death, truth, spacetime & etc. so it’s completely unreasonable that the secret spacebase of the emperor undying not receive a shipping container of ianthe’s shittiest party dresses and half used makeup , spitefully packed. Yes of course we know she’s dead it’s very unfortunate (many such cases) she’ll definitely need her half used makeup from her ‘thought I had deep winter mystique with a light spring skintone’ era in the afterlife. mummy x
Headcanon unrelated to current comic events (everyone has Dreen theories right now)
In the future, it becomes known that Agatha Heterodyne's Spark was, for the first part of her life, suppressed by a wearable Mechanism. We know that fact is in university textbooks, after all... And because Sparks Are Just Like That, people try to replicate it.
This is, to say the least, not a good idea. No one else is Barry Heterodyne. Most of the Sparks who try cause serious damage to the potentially Sparky children they try their devices on. You'd think people would get a clue, but...Sparks. Sparks think "oh, but that inferior hack who barely deserves to be my rival did it wrong, obviously, I can do better!"
It is one of the things that, in the post-canon, Triumvirate-ruled Wulfenbach Empire, gets you shot on sight.
(Outside the Empire, it gets you wrapped up in the local equivalent of a high-security bow and sold to the Empire to be shot on sight. Both Gil and Tarvek have been known to undersell valuable trade/security treaties because they really want to shoot that guy. It's a known if minor weakness in their diplomatic prowess, which their neighbors are happy to exploit when possible.)
(And it's still considered the merciful option, because if they don't shoot the guy, Agatha is going to get her hands on him.)
The Triumvirate takes such things personally. They have kids by this point. There was never any doubt that the kids would break through, but boy, were the three of them really paranoid about locket-type mechanisms for a while.
Triumvirate kids get warned about accepting jewelry from people with the fervency of razor-blades-in-Halloween-candy scares. Each of them has a secret pattern of imperfections on all their sigil pins and other wearable things, that only they know, so that no accessory they ever own is replaced or altered without their knowledge.
No more Spark-suppressing, brain-strangling mechanisms. Ever.
“what’s the song of the summer” ?? it’s DANCING IN THE DARK by bruce springsteen for the 40th year in a row
*cries about combs*
ChengQing papercraft commission for @theleakypen! I love… them….. aaaaaaaaa
Just! The what-ifs! The mutual fierce dedication to their families and to their intrinsically opposing duties! The recognition of that in each other! The respect therein! Their eyes meeting in silent acknowledgment that this unspoken Thing could have existed between them (she took the comb!!!) but not in this world (she gives it back!!!!!!). I just. I’ve been in this fandom for like a year and a half and I’m still going feral over it
Anyway, I tried to pour some of that into this piece! Got some Extreme Hand-Holding and Intense Yearning Gazes for y’all.
Was hit with extreme ChengQing feelings and decided to reblog this one!
A lot of stories about learning magic hide the cost of magic: they tell a story that you can have magic through your own individual efforts, i.e. that magic comes by studying hard, learning something, and you just have it! You get this magic, and it’s yours.
Our own society encourages us to pretend that magic is free in similar ways. “I worked hard, I got paid, and I bought this iPhone. It’s magic! And it’s mine!” But we know, we all know deep down, that much of the actual costs are being paid by other people somewhere else, or will be paid by you in the future and in your children’s future.
Magic isn’t free. Whenever there is real magic, someone pays for it. And trying to claw apart the story to get to that truth, to expose and show that truth on a visceral level, is part of what I’m trying to do.
everyone on about “star wars day” this and “the 20th anniversary of smash mouth’s “all star”’s being released” that like we don’t all know what’s really important about today
happy 128th anniversary of the day sherlock holmes didn’t die
happy 129th anniversary of the day sherlock holmes didn’t die
happy 130th anniversary of the day sherlock holmes didn’t die
happy 133rd anniversary of the day sherlock holmes didn’t die
Do you have any opinions on Scholomance?
I do! I like it a lot. I really enjoyed all three books, blitzed through them easily and was much more excited to see how the plots unfolded than I'm used to these days, as a jaded adult, and I also really appreciated them as works of craft.
Especially the first one, I spent the whole time being all 'wow!' at how simple it was. So easy to read, but no waste. You really need to know what you're doing, to get that kind of pared-down elegance of form to work and still fit so much content in.
Like these are dense, there's a fantastic stylistic minimalism that allows El's character all the space it needs to breathe by making absolutely every other thing and person in the whole novel also do character work for her, which is exactly where the first person voice shines.
Also great use of character perspective to make the pacing feel really natural, so the fact that the first book takes three weeks, the second book takes one year, and the third book is like. Five or so incredibly stressful days spread out over the course of a few weeks? Doesn't feel imbalanced.
I actually got distracted from the story a few times by noticing the strength of Novik's technique. 😂 This is a me problem, in itself it's the opposite of distracting. Very low-profile.
I think the Scholomance is a great example of how far you can go in specfic when you aren't cringing from the label 'derivative,' because the Scholomance books feel very fresh ad clean specifically because nothing in them is concerned with standing out as 'original,' whatever that's supposed to mean, only with being well-executed and suitable to its task.
Hm, maybe that's where Liesel was born, the intersection of the efficient narrative style and the vast proportion of the story that concerns the maximization of utility and the instrumentalization of persons by themselves and others, and the forces that incentivize these behaviors. Or maybe she's just the narrative counterweight to Orion 'Head Empty' Lake lmao. How's that for a principle of balance, Galadriel?
I really did enjoy how beautifully it was laid out, over and over, in dozens of shades of humanity, how no matter where you go in an exploitative system almost everyone is being driven by the same survival instincts.
Because I don't think I've ever seen made so cleanly clear why you just can't expect any person or small group of people, no matter their level of goodwill or status, to unmake one of these systems from the inside; how it's not a matter of people being bad but of every single person being very...small.
And then not retreating into the idea of a person who is Big coming and breaking the cruel system from the outside as some kind of panacea, because 1) that is terrible, even if it's necessary and done in the best way possible and 2) that's not a sustainable answer to anything. Getting a balance between the protagonist being able to effect change and not subscribing to the great man theory of history can be really tricky!
Also did I mention, I love El, and I love most of the cast, even the dreadful ones. How am I going around with this many feelings about Li Shanfeng who doesn't appear until the actual climax?
The romance murdered me a bit, but it took up no more space than it absolutely needed to do its job, and I respect that. Also I appreciated Orion as a love interest; Novik has a slight record at this point of a version of that style of male love interest who's like a caricature of Mr. Darcy but old, which was shaping up to be my least favorite thing about her body of work.
...Orion is kind of like if you took the human king from Spinning Silver and gave him an alignment flip come to think of it, so he's not coming out of nowhere. Lmao.
Which reminds me (re: romance character typing) I've heard Novik didn't want it to be known she was astolat, which this series has renewed my sympathies if so. Because if I were a published novelist I wouldn't want people going 'you know, that resolution was really emotionally satisfying! reminds me of that fic she wrote where optimus prime and megatron get stuck in a hole underground and hatefuck about it.'
I don't even like Transformers. That fic almost made me cry. Actually I suspect it reads better if you don't like Transformers because I'm sure it does not give a shit about canon.
Anyway, whoever pointed out that one of the things El has going on is she's Enoby (and we're going to sit down and explore what the true reason to put your middle finger up at preps is, and what are some constructive ways to channel that socioeconomic wrath, and what it means that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism) was right and I'm not entirely over that either.
Fucking love El's mom as a character. Spectacular level of parent relevance and usefulness. A+.
Aadhya and Liu are also characters who fucking delivered.
Re: minimalism though, I laughed at the start of The Golden Enclaves when I realized that none of the enclaver characters who'd gotten development in the the first two books were from London, the enclave El was theoretically shooting for when we met her.
Absolute sidetrack, but how does anyone read these books and NOT come out of them with massive feelings about Li Shanfeng? Yes, he only gets one scene, but that one scene and the few other references we get to his story are already just so much.
Consider: One of the international conflicts regularly mentioned in the book is how the western enclaves took a large number of scholomance seats for themselves and their local independents, while eastern wizards had to compete for a small number of seats. Li Shanfeng's enclave was destroyed by a mawmouth when he was a child and then he went to the Scholomance. How many nights do you think he spent in one of those tiny rooms bordered by void thinking of all the dead children he didn't have to compete with? He's a genius anyway, sure, but what did his time in that box of horrors look like while he was inventing the reviser and god knows what else?
We know from the various places Li Shanfang is brought up as a historical reference that he came out of the Scholomance with offers from every enclave and took none of them, which is a hell of a parallel to El. But it goes further! He went back to the ruins of Shanghai and went up against the mawmouth with a group of his friends and family -- almost certainly including his friends from the Scholomance who saw him turn down all those offers and went with him anyway, his versions of Aadhya and Liu -- and he rebuilt the enclave. Who do you think he put on his council afterwards? The reason Li Shanfeng can defy all expectations of what an enclave leader should be and go out and build more enclaves instead of hoarding power at home is because he's still surrounded by those people. He's not just the Hero Who Decided To Kill A Mawmouth, he's the Hero Who Decided To Kill Colonialism and I would argue people were following him for that even before he stepped into a mawmouth. He could have gone to London. He could have gone to New York. He took the harder path.
I think Li Shanfeng is a version of El who compromised. He couldn't kill the mawmouth, but he could make it smaller. He couldn't fight the idea of enclaves, but he could distribute their power to more people. He couldn't build an enclave without malia, but he could make enclaves bigger for the same price and save a few more independents that way. And I think it's interesting that El keeps trying to hate him and doesn't quite manage it. I think that seeing him gives her a little bit of the strength that she needs at the end to go out and do the work that needs to be done after the uncompromising end, like a coda to the realization that if she hadn't gone evil already then she wasn't going to go evil. Li Shanfeng is a person who she doesn't hate, even if he couldn't save everyone. El is allowed to be a person who she doesn't hate, even if she can't save everyone. And then she gets to walk into that future and keep trying.
I think it's terrible how Victorian readers probably lay in bed, happily thinking about what their blorbo was up to rn, and then in 1893 they opened the Strand Magazine to "The Final Problem" only to discover that Mr Sherlock Holmes had actually already died in 1891. What would you do
Many people have reblogged this, saying "well they went into mourning and complained, and ACD brought Holmes back". This was not what I meant, though of course it's true.
I meant that I think these people must have felt cheated in a way. Imagine you're just living your life in the early 1890s and daydreaming about Sherlock Holmes, and how you could go to him with your little (or more serious) private problems and he would solve them for you and be extremely brilliant and a bit eccentric about it. Imagine going for an evening stroll and wondering what Mr Sherlock Holmes might be up to, and reading the society pages and wondering what Holmes would make of it, and attending a concert an wondering it Holmes would enjoy it.
And imagine then learning that for two years while you have been doing that, your favourite fictional character had been canonically dead*. Idk, but I would have written ACD hatemail too.
*At least for a while
The 1891 date makes me bite things. He's dead before Scandal in Bohemia. He's dead the whole time. When Watson writes about walking down Baker Street and being pleased to see him in the window there, it's because he can't any more -
Strand readers unlocked an extremely new and weird kind of grief, previously only known to widows whose husbands had been away at sea
I am so in love with Naomi Novik’s commitment to having her two main characters be Weird. I feel like so many novels start with “look how WEIRD and STRANGE this character is” and then walk it back from there until you see that they’re actually Just Like Everyone Else. (Prefacing this with the fact that weird is not said disrespectfully in any way, I heckin love these weirdos and think that weird people are the best people.)
The Scholomance doesn’t do that! First we get El, and it seems like her arc is going to be about overcoming her “evil sorceress” prophecy. Maybe she’ll use the power of friendship to trade for Not Evil spells, or she’ll convince the school somehow to give her other things. Either way, the narrative is set up so that we expect her to actively work against it. But that’s not the case!! We instead see her start to lean into that thing that makes her terrifying and unapproachable. In TLG, she’s throwing off killing spells left and right, and by the end she’s making plans around super volcanoes in the exact way she swore she’d never do at the start of the series. She’s still a good person, and she’s constantly learning to be better, but she doesn’t sacrifice her “weird” to do it- she just learns how to use it the way she wants, instead of how she’s expected to.
Then we have Orion. ORION IS SO INTERESTING. He’s clearly the knight in shining armor. Obviously Not Like Other Guys, but in a way that makes him an unapproachable hero rather than an unapproachable villain like El. At first, we expect to see over time that he’s just like everyone else- he’s lonely and isolated from the hero worship, he’s killing mals for the sake of friendships, etc. BUT INSTEAD WE GET THE OPPOSITE. Orion, instead of becoming more personable, gets WEIRDER. He’s faced with these reasons for killing mals and he replies with the fact that he simply. Does not care. He does it for fun and throws himself into danger because he wants to, even though it’s the last thing anyone else in the scholomance would want for themselves.
They don’t get less weird. They find people who love them in their weirdness, but they never back off from it- in fact, they continue to get weirder up through the end of the book. And that is so, so refreshing.
“You are already dead.”
Anyway, I'm going back and re-reading the conversation between El and Balthasar Lake after making it to the end of the book and-- (spoilers)
Aw fuck okay but the way that Naomi Novik just ruthlessly doubled down on her use of enclaves as commentary on capitalism and classism has me STUNNED.
Here are these safe places where only the best wizards can get in! They’re so cool! They literally take the sacrifice of a human being- someone who is completely innocent because they’re strict mana, who has spent their life working harder than everyone else to get on the same level.
But wait! There’s more! Then it takes those honest people who do things right and forces them to steal mana, twisting them into something unrecognizable to serve the very people who did it to them!
Now is that just me or does that sound like some good ol capitalist exploitation
I think one of the reasons why I love El as a protagonist so much is that yes, she never uses her powers to hurt anyone, and yes, she saves people’s lives constantly. But at the same time, she’s portrayed as a bit of a misanthrope- she doesn’t like most people (and has good reasons for that), is constantly angry, is probably the biggest cynic in the books… I just have so much appreciation for the fact that she isn’t shown as particularly noble or kind or any of those traditionally “heroic” traits, but is so fundamentally good. It isn’t natural to her or just part of her personality- she has to choose it, again and again and again. El is such a good example that being “good” or “heroic” isn’t a character trait, it’s something that you choose, and there’s no excuse for not choosing it.
Throw in the way Ophelia is described as being everything El knows she could be, if she ever went maleficer, and it makes an incredible comparison. Ophelia is how it would look like for El to write off goodness/kindness as something for someone else who has different choices or different ambitions. She literally wrote off her anima- her own conscience- as something unnecessary given her position in the enclave and what she wanted to accomplish. El and Ophelia both have immense power, both have capacity to do terrible things to accomplish their goals, but one chooses power and the other chooses people.
Even at the end of the books, Ophelia gets a fucking promotion, even though everyone knows what she’s done. El, on the other hand, is described as being a bit aimless, realizing her dream needs to be accomplished by someone else, and needing a lot of therapy. She wasn’t even able to stop the use/creation of maw mouths outright- compared to Ophelia, her goals remain unaccomplished. And El, being the angry bitter person she is, takes that with a massive fuck you and keeps choosing the right thing with all the spite and hope in the world. These books are a testament to what it means to choose kindness and it’s done so, so well thanks to El.
Just,,, non-traditionally good characters. They mean everything to me.
