🍌 sonic, TLT, and BF brainrot 🐟 🌊 No reposts without permission/credit or this fish will eat you 🦈
283 posts
Latest Posts by yourlocaltinsmith - Page 5
Re uploading this so the quality is better
I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say
well 🧍♀️ as a reminder this blog is NOT a safe space for trump supporters but it IS a safe place for women, queers, trans ppl, people of color, undocumented people, and any marginalized group.
i NEED nona from gideon/kirionas point of view. i know the second she was resurrected she was trying to figure out where harrow is. the first thing she even ASKS nona is where harrow is. "listen, she can be in hell for all i care, i wont get mad. she can be at the bottom of the sea or at the bottom of space. i just need to know– where." i know she was going insane for MONTHS
Reminder for when he “saves” it. He was the one who wanted this, and now he gets to be the hero and win favour with young constituents. Don’t give him the credit for fixing his own problem.
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
Top Femslash Ships Bracket - Round 4
This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with some of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement of anything included in the bracket, and refrain from harassment.
Do u ever think about how Gideon's last words were ,,, WEDDING VOWS. And then do u think about how they're the first thing Harrow says when she finally remembers in htn .... AND THEN do u think about how Gideon/Kiriona acknowledges the fact that yeah they were wedding vows in ntn ... BECAUSE I DO. I FUCKING DO.
Gideon the Ninth, chapter 37.
Harrow the Ninth, chapter 43.
Nona the Ninth, chapter 25.
That cat is so patient it's unbelievable
i forget to draw judith for how much i like her
griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice
Merry Christmas! My gift to all of you is to read this my book rec. Free trial for 125 pages on google it's called the blood of hercules and wait where are you going
IT’S NOT ‘PEEKED’ MY INTEREST
OR ‘PEAKED’
BUT PIQUED
‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’
THIS HAS BEEN A CAPSLOCK PSA
The Fifth for the next sketchpage?
One Magnus and one Abigail, coming right up!
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.
guys can we talk about for one second how nona kissed gideon as soon as she looked at her and her reasoning was "You looked like you wanted to be kissed."
lets backtrack. Gideon. Opens her eyes. The first thing she sees is Harrow('s body). Harrow. Harrow. And Nona, who reads people like books (joke is nona cant read) sees how badly Gideon wants to kiss Harrow('s face) and kisses her.
Can we talk about what this meant to Gideon for one moment. Can we talk about the implications of this please. guys please.
PLEASE CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS. PLEASE. GUYS PLEASE -
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.
Oh, you're soooo gonna go insane about the next book
finally reading gideon the ninth after procrastinating for years and. oh my god i need to be locked in a cage, why would you reccomend these, harrowhark nonagesimus is rotating in my mind like in a microwave. 80% through the audiobook and i need a lobotomy and i think that feeling is not going to get better
You’re not the only one getting a lobotomy <3
Have fun with the second book
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)
How Ash's Sexual Abuse Impacts His Perception of Himself Part 1:
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make in their understanding of Ash is in thinking, because he had the intellectual capacity to objectively view the abuse he suffered as wrong and to understand objectively that his abusers were bad people, that must also mean the abuse he suffered didn't have a genuinely negative and crippling impact on his perception of himself. Typically, you see people who make this argument also lamenting the ending of the story as "bad" or "unnecessary", or done for "shock value". They argue that Ash would have been able to recover from the sexual abuse he endured because he already showed an intellectual resistance to it coloring his perception of himself. But I think this is completely wrong, and I think, further, it only serves to undermine the seriousness of what Ash went through, what was done to him, by framing it as something simple intellectual prowess and fortitude should be able to overcomes, as if that's how the insidious nature of abuse and the ways in which it impacts its victims has ever worked. Emotion isn’t dictated by logic. How we feel isn’t dictated by logic. Being able to objectively acknowledge that something that's happened to you is wrong doesn't mean you haven't internalized the experience or will somehow be able to escape any and all feelings of responsibility and self-blame. Victims of abuse, particularly child abuse, can often objectively understand that what they went through was wrong, but they often still struggle with feelings of shame, rooted in the sense that the abuse must have somehow been deserved or otherwise a result of some failing on their part, which is also why you see victims of abuse often struggle to fully blame or hold their abusers accountable for what's been done to them. I think this very obviously applies to Ash, evident in his naked self-loathing displayed throughout the story, and there are so many examples throughout the story that prove without doubt that Ash's perception of himself has been impacted and terribly skewed by the abuse he's suffered.
So I'm going to go through just some of the examples of that evidence:
Example one. When Ash is forced to watch footage of himself being raped by Marvin, he reacts with evident shame, unable to even look at the film being shown, turning away from the screen and falling mute. He explodes moments later in this scene when Willard keeps badgering and harassing him over his age and his history of working as a child prostitute on the streets of New York, before again seeming to crumple and resigning himself to the things Willard is saying about him, insinuating that he's always been a bad person, always been a "whore", etc...
Example two: Ash weaponizing his sexuality. Ash often willingly puts himself into positions of letting others see and treat him as a sex object to advance his goals. This speaks to someone who is willing to sacrifice their sense of self-respect and dignity by allowing themselves to be abused or otherwise objectified, in the name of gaining an upper hand. What this tells us about Ash is that his sense of identity is wrapped up in the idea of being a sex object. He treats taking on this role almost as a natural extension of himself. He falls easily and readily into adopting the persona of a "whore" when it benefits him to do so. That doesn't seem like something someone would do who genuinely believed themselves to be above or to be better than reducing themselves to sex work. It speaks to someone who believes their dignity and body is an acceptable thing to sacrifice because it isn't worth anything, anyway.
Example three: Ash's father calling him a "whore" and Ash not at all seeming offended or angry about it, not even acknowledging it, simply brushing it off like it isn't a big deal at all. Almost assuredly Ash isn't offended by his father calling him something so derogatory because Ash, deep down, likely agrees with his father about what he is. We see other people who have abused Ash do the same thing, blaming him for their actions and accusing him of being a whore or a slut, acting as if Ash seduced them. The police back in Cape Cod do this to Ash, too, blaming him for his baseball coaches actions, telling him and his father that Ash must have done something to make Coach Peterson rape him. It only makes sense for Ash to have started to believe, consciously or subconsciously, that all these people telling him his abuse is his fault, must be right.
Example four: Again, we see how truly bereft of self-esteem and convinced of his own rottenness Ash is when we see him openly express here his genuine belief that Eiji will eventually grow "sick of him", and thus, get over being sent back to Japan. He genuinely believes that Eiji will eventually grow to hate him because he'll realize what a worthless person Ash is.
Example five: Relating to example four, how willingly and ready we see Ash is kill himself to save Eiji. This doesn't speak to someone who holds their own lives as very valuable. There are countless examples of this throughout the story, of Ash willingly sacrificing himself to save the lives of other people. He treats his own life and well-being like it doesn't matter at all, and that tells us that Ash doesn't see his own life or person as equivalently valuable to other people's. Again, this comes from suffering a lifetime of abuse and being told and treated as if he's nothing but an object made to fulfill the pleasure and satisfaction of others.
Example six: Ash having a literal mental breakdown while being held captive by Dino, referring to himself as a "living toilet" made for Dino and all of his other abusers to empty their sperm into whenever they got the urge. Ash starts to laugh uncontrollably at the idea of Dino wanting to make him the heir to his criminal empire, saying it's "the funniest thing (he's) ever heard". Ash sees it as a massive joke, laughing at the irony of being treated as nothing but a worthless object his whole life, only for Dino to want to make him his heir. Ash then says "Sorry, but I don't think I'm going to rise to your expectations "Dad".", and that's indicative of him seeing himself as only being suited to the role of being Dino's and others sex toy, expecting himself to fail at taking on the role of anything "better" or "higher" than that. He can't envision himself as accomplishing anything beyond his life as a criminal and a prostitute, because the abuse he's suffered and the life he's been forced to live as a result of that abuse, have conditioned him into believing himself to be worthless.
Example seven: Ash being willing for Max to use the photographs of him being raped for his article, saying "Dead people don't have any privacy to protect. Or any sense of shame". Again, we see Ash willingly allowing his own sense of dignity and well-being to be sacrificed here, despite the humiliation and shame it causes him to be seen the way the pictures depict him. He's saying here that he has no rights, and no right to even feel ashamed of himself, because this is just what he's always been. A sex object. A thing made for the pleasure of others. This so clearly demonstrates that Ash has indeed internalized this idea that's been drilled into him his entire life, that he's a worthless whore and nothing else, and so he shouldn't even attempt to preserve his dignity or sense of self-respect. He's expressing here that he has no claim to those things, and so it's pointless for him to fight for them.
There's other examples, but I can only fit ten pictures into a single post, so I'll be making a second to drive my point home that Ash's self-perception absolutely was negatively impacted by the sexual abuse he was subjected to. That, indeed, his sense of self-worth was deeply eroded by that abuse.
my fav banana fish arc...the geometry quiz arc....