3sAreGreen

AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD

HIM I’LL KILL QUICK BECAUSE SHE ASKED ME TO AND BECAUSE THAT MUCH HE HONESTLY DESERVES BUT YOU TWO MUMMIFIED WIZARD SHITS I WILL BURN AND BURN AND BURN AND BURN UNTIL THERE IS NO TRACE OF YOU LEFT IN THE SHADOW OF MY LONG-LOST NATAL SUN.

WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU

I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILIZATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN 

WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

--

TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

what iron lung fans see

While there are of course several instances of both of them knowing things about the other that they shouldn't, one bit that's particularly interesting here is when he's first teaching them about River travel:

“You’ll have to keep your minds—I can take your physical bodies, but your souls won’t go with them, not without you holding them steady.” “Physical transference past the liminal boundaries,” you said, and were surprised by the knowledge coming out of you, as though it weren’t your own. “This is deep Fifth spirit magic.”

>:) And this especially alongside multiple points emphasizing that Harrow has been neglecting her spirit studies. So yeah, I definitely think there are times she reaches for knowledge and unconsciously draws on more than she "should" have. That it's at least a factor in mastering perpetual bone so quickly and raising her own dome shield on the ruins of the cow wall and so-on.

-

Bonus that yeah Harrow was always prodigious as said, but her most impressive acts didn't start until after she broke into the Tomb—and she spent her whole life thinking it was her own skills as a necromancer that allowed her to break in, but we later learn it was just that she happened to be smeared in Gideon's blood. Getting the door open had nothing to do with her own merit, and imagine how she'd feel learning how long she'd been tapped into this secret extra source rather than any of her greatest works being purely on her own. It wouldn't invalidate the hard work she put in, not entirely, but it would still feel so much like cheating...

Anyway on a tangential note, if I'm write about Gideon being a third facet of the god soul and her basically inheriting a lot of her sword skills from Alecto too, this is something they can suffer in common. 😌

She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself.

The above is more debatable if it's connected but...

“Oh, time … time,” said a voice from the doorway. “Time means very little … mastery does. This temple stood for ten thousand years untouched by all but time’s clumsiest pawing … but then its master was the Master, for whom even the River will part. Time is nothing to the King Everlasting.”

and

“It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”

and

Harrow turned away from the hand, and crunched out, barefoot, over the wet sand—her feet slapped with each step—and she stood ankle-deep in the River, disbelieving.

Before her, the waters parted, speared-through and mute, for the enormous lance of a tower—a tower that had never been there before; a tower that soared, impossible and deadly grey, out of the waters—a tower of grey bricks, lurching out of the River as though gasping for air. An impossible, cone-capped tower—a belled tower; she could see the steeple, but the bell cot was too far from shore to see the bell.

“I’ll start there,” she said.

And she stepped into the River. She took another step, and she walked, and she walked.

We do have to wonder why now of all times that The Tower Has Reactivated, and why it would call to Harrow.

So yeah, I think John does see Harrow first and foremost as a daughter and as part of that a potential successor. He's also projecting Alecto onto her but Alecto is simultaneously a partner and friend and mother and daughter and teacher and student and patron goddess and power source and abuser and victim and beacon of hope and bottomless pit of guilt and despair and about a billion other things to him so like, that's not not-seeing her as a daughter even if exactly what all it does mean is wildly up in the air and surely going to be a problem either way.