Latest Posts by abysskisser - Page 5

Cool, thanks!!

Sorry if this is a question you have answered before, but what versions/adaptations of the Arthurian legend would you recommend? My main entry point has been The Sword and the Stone (both book and movie) and The Darkness is Rising, and I'd love to explore others.

hi!! I'll link a response to a previous similar question here but i generally recommend reading more medieval texts i think to get a better feel for arthuriana as a whole! so you can understand where adaptations are going with the medieval stories they're based on. sir gawain and the green knight is a nice and easy place to start w medieval lit if you're looking for a story that's not too complicated and hard to follow. it's kind of fun i think. knight of the cart (by chretien de troyes) is also fun. le morte d'arthur (thomas malory) is kind of one of the most famous medieval king arthur texts comprising a lot of the big adventures of him and his knights etc but i personally find it very very hard to get through chronologically (and it kind of works fine to hop around generally). actually if you would like an adapted version of it that's a little more readable and easy to follow i'm reading john steinbeck's version right now (the acts of king arthur and his noble knights) and it is seriously such a blast. very fun and i am just such a steinbeck fan so i love his writing. he never finished it but he adapted a good chunk of le morte and it is just an absolute delight to read. highly recommend :) but anyway there's no wrong way to get into arthuriana so these are some jumping points but follow ur heart. hope this helps!

Ah cool, I'll check those out!! Thank you!!

Sorry if this is a question you have answered before, but what versions/adaptations of the Arthurian legend would you recommend? My main entry point has been The Sword and the Stone (both book and movie) and The Darkness is Rising, and I'd love to explore others.

hi!! I'll link a response to a previous similar question here but i generally recommend reading more medieval texts i think to get a better feel for arthuriana as a whole! so you can understand where adaptations are going with the medieval stories they're based on. sir gawain and the green knight is a nice and easy place to start w medieval lit if you're looking for a story that's not too complicated and hard to follow. it's kind of fun i think. knight of the cart (by chretien de troyes) is also fun. le morte d'arthur (thomas malory) is kind of one of the most famous medieval king arthur texts comprising a lot of the big adventures of him and his knights etc but i personally find it very very hard to get through chronologically (and it kind of works fine to hop around generally). actually if you would like an adapted version of it that's a little more readable and easy to follow i'm reading john steinbeck's version right now (the acts of king arthur and his noble knights) and it is seriously such a blast. very fun and i am just such a steinbeck fan so i love his writing. he never finished it but he adapted a good chunk of le morte and it is just an absolute delight to read. highly recommend :) but anyway there's no wrong way to get into arthuriana so these are some jumping points but follow ur heart. hope this helps!

The man who became God is John Gaius. The God who became man is Alecto.

In this essay I will not explain myself because explaining yourself is for chumps and...

hey

For those who needed to hear it today

AU where Silas has 3 cavaliers for no good reason lol

the soap opera fights would go so crazy

How do they choose which sand to be the glass and which sand to be the sand in an hourglass... Imagine you and your best friend were two grains of sand and you had to be in the hourglass and your bestie had to be the glass. Ur together but youve never been more apart. A Sick and twisted practice hourglassery is...

If I had a nickel for every time a fictional Ianthe was an awful, awful, nasty person who made every wrong decision ever, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it is weird that 2 separate Ianthes have broken my heart twice??

So running is still kind of a pointless form of exercise like going to the gym, but this reminds me of when I ran on a treadmill for the first time and was just left so confused as to why a machine used first to punish prisoners is people's experience of running. When running can be such a beautiful way to feel yourself move through the world and experience the outside, and instead everybody is convinced it's a chore they need to complete in a grey exercise room.

i don't think gym muscle counts. i think you should put on muscle from ploughing the field. rowing a boat. spending your days at the loom weaving intricate carpets. things of that nature

Abigail Pent literally brought her husband, and look where that got her!

Oh, I can't be normal about this...

Ianthe is saying all of the quiet parts out loud about cavaliership in the Nine Houses:

She says "the cavalier’s job is to die for the necromancer" (Palamedes tries to gloss this to "protect the necromancer", but concedes that "if this entails their own death, then they're expected to accept that"). She talks about Naberius as a commodity, procured at birth, raised for a purpose, modifiable and disposable at will.

She wants to make it clear that she was terribly clever and has no regrets. Which is obviously why she's been thinking about two people she deems "dull and stupid" to the extent that they're her main touchpoint for explaining her position and that she name checks both of them, separately, during her responses... (poor Magnus).

Because the Fifth represent the opposite of how things turned out for the Third: an incidental cavaliership to a relationship of two equals who chose each other (against social currents, quite possibly on several counts). Ianthe made a choice at Canaan House. And Abigail made choices eleven and five years before that. And Ianthe has been thinking about those choices.

So Abigail Pent brought her husband on a research jolly to the First instead of bringing a slave to the killing fields (to paraphrase Harrow). And where did that get her?

Well, The Unwanted Guest rather confirms Abigail's heretical speculations about the River: it is not the end, but a purgatorial passing point through which one can travel lightly to the further shore, or sink down to the horrors at the bottom. Abigail may not have gained ultimate power and posters of her face, but she did end HTN going off to cross the River to what, in the implied cosmology of TLT, sounds rather like heaven.

And as for Ianthe? Jod's "indelible sin" may not be the most reliable account of Lyctoral River theology, but Lyctors do not seem to travel lightly in the River...and the Stoma did try to grab Ianthe back in HTN. The newly created Paul offers Ianthe - and Naberius - a second chance and she rejects it.

And now the Death of God has been released, Ianthe has bet on God, God is having a mid-dismyriad crisis, and the girl Abigail Pent risked a second and total death to help knows the truth and is off to harrow hell.

Ianthe Naberius used her cavalier for the rotten true purpose of cavaliers, and look where that got her.

i'm thinking a lot about the permeability of the soul and really chewing on like, how this knowledge retroactively impacts and changes the way one can read characters' actions throughout all the books so far. and that's interesting to me, because I'm not sure it's as simple as character X's behavior being retroactively revealed to be due to the soul of character Y. because like...

of COURSE we impact each other. of course when we brush up against each other we bleed. we leave things behind. but at some point, when does that stop being someone else, and start becoming just another part of you? the body of theseus. the soul of theseus. are you the same person as you were when you started this, even though everything has changed? is the Augustine that entered the stoma the same as the Augustine that woke up on the first day of the Ressurection, when it was only the newly re-born sun, and him, and John?

and I mean, no, obviously. So much has happened since then. But Augustine has been Augustine-and-Alfred for thousands of years longer than he was ever only Augustine. Same for Mercymorn-and-Cristabel, same for Cytherea-and-Loveday, same for G1deon-and-Pyrrha, same for John-and-Alecto. and like. the soul of theseus, you know?

Is the Cytherea Loveday who died at Canaan House the same as the Cytherea Loveday who woke up that day after the Lyctoral Ascension, on the first day of the rest of her life? After 10k years are the actions of Cytherea Loveday truly dissectable as Actions-of-Loveday vs Actions-of-Cytherea, or is she just one person, being bled all over by another until they are no longer distinguishable? How much of someone taking on another's mannerisms is because of soul entangelment versus the human visegrip of grief, desperately holding onto anything and everything you can, remaking the person you love in your mind until they are more yours than they ever were themself?

and I'm thinking again about Paul, and how maybe they just skipped to the end. Maybe all lyctorhood is, is damped oscillation, in which the end point between two extremes will always trend to 0. and Paul makes it so obvious, you know? Pal and Cam DIED that day. they did it, it's done, Paul is risen.

but when Ianthe Tridentarius killed Naberius Tern, did she not also kill herself? when she ascended as Ianthe The First, she became someone new. Ianthe Tridentarius is as dead as Pal and Cam are. as dead as Naberius Tern. as dead as Alfred and Cristabel and Loveday and John and the entire goddamn earth. trending twoards 0. thinking.

The 10 minute kilometer and 5 minute kilometer thing has been driving me crazy! A 10 minute kilometer is so slow! And a 5 minute kilometer is not very impressive. Considering they are in the cohort, I just find it baffling and haven't been able to decide if those numbers were chosen on purpose to show the effect necromancy has on their bodies like you said or if they're just numbers Tamsyn thought sounded like an impressive difference. Your post makes me think for the first time that it is probably the former, though I would still expect a bit more from Marta than a 5 minute kilometer.

Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is "rather small and feeble".

Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".

Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"

Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

like how much of the augustine we saw was alfred's habits and memories. how much of mercymorn was cristabel's. you digest your cavalier until you can't tell them apart anymore

Now that I’ve finished it, here are more coherent/useful thoughts (under cut because spoilers)

Oh, this is so perfect. It’s SO perfect.

Ianthe loves being Ianthe. Ianthe loves being Ianthe more than anything else in the world—the closest she gets to loving any non-Ianthe person is loving her twin sister, and from the way Ianthe talks about Coronabeth, it’s pretty clear that it’s a distinctly acquisitive love, not a love based on knowing anything meaningful about Coronabeth as a person. Ianthe is, above all, extremely disinterested in getting to know anyone who isn’t the Most Interesting Girl in the World (Ianthe).

(I think that’s why she likes Augustine so much—he’s spent thousands of years crafting a perfectly blank persona, showing nothing of his interiority, leading Harrow to wonder if he even has any. Ianthe sees that and she’s like: awesome, finally somebody who’s not out to bore me with all their dumb complicated feelings, this guy’s the coolest ever, I want to be just like him)

So for Palamades to hit her with that—oh man. Oh MAN. Ianthe, in your quest to solidify Ianthe Tridentarius as an eternal unchanging paragon of Awe, you have become… not Ianthe. And you were too obsessed with your own Ianthe-ness to even see it.

You thought you could make the devil’s bargain with counterfeit currency and now the bill’s come due. Killing Babs is no big deal because “who cares about Babs?” Baby, YOU cares about Babs! You IS Babs now, bitch! Your perfect immutable self? You went and MUTED it!

God, it’s the perfect way to cut a self-obsessed person to the core. You love yourself so much? The person you love doesn’t fucking EXIST, Ianthe. You invited a permanent roommate into your soul and you don’t even LIKE him and now you’re on the lease together forever and you did it to yourself

The unwanted guest isn’t Palamades. The unwanted guest is Babs.

the way i‘m not happy for spain because that asshole will take the credit fuck him and fuck men

Did u see horan crash dvd’s interview bahahaha 🫶🏽

Lindsey catcalled her to get her attention lmfao

a very happy women's world cup to all who celebrate

happy wwc to all the girlies here who are sooooo normal about football