we do bones motherfucker

Everyone, trying to warn me: Harrow the Ninth is so complicated and so hard to get through and you won't have any idea what the hell is happening!

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.

They are using fountain pens on spaceships. Fountain pens. To the extent that every vaguely intellectual character (other than Abigail Pent, who is repeatedly described as "neat" and "immaculate") is constantly described as having ink stains on their hands and even faces, and the smell of ink is referenced repeatedly.

And when they're not writing with fountain pens, they're using necromantically stabilised blood (this isn't just a Harrow quirk - the Sixth have special spikes on their clipboards for signing documents...).

Amongst the Lyctoral traces Abigail finds in the library at Cannan House are "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge."

It also seems reasonable to assume that the "clockworks" they wear are analogue watches, as Nona scolds Cam for referring to her beeping digital watch as a "clockwork" on New Rho.

And besides the fountain pens, regency navy uniforms, swords, and general 20th century pulp literature culture, a few more things that characters specifically describe as antique or ancient include:

Sunglasses

Metal industrial shelving

Paper books with glossy pages

Black tie formal wear

Automatic doors

LED lights

Chrome kitchen fittings

Guns (to the extent that Abigail specifically says to the Sleeper "you come bearing ancient weapons")

And fine, these are all within the realms of things people are reasonably allowed to have a personal preference against...

But you know what else the Nine Houses don't have?

VACCINES.

What was the thought process by which Dr Science and Humanitarian Empathy decided to bring back routine childhood illnesses from the 1950s?

Speaking of the 1950s, why - in a society that appears to find permanently magically manipulating the bodies of living people trivial - does the standard of eyecare seem to also be from the early 20th century?

As a glasses wearer, I totally appreciate that there may simply be a social preference for glasses despite the existence of flesh magic. But Abigail Pent swapping between two pairs of glasses would seem to suggest that varifocals went the way of the mumps vaccine...

here's all the relevant info on cristabel i took note of during my tlt reread, in one place!

you can find the rest of the posts in this project here!

or did palamedes suspect his soul was already bleeding with camilla’s- did he see the watercolor edge between them- and ask ianthe, do you believe in the permeability of the soul? and watch her carefully and know that he was right? did he think paul was a foregone conclusion?

ten thousand years and the lyctors are bled together so permanently with their cavaliers and not one of them noticed. a few months and palamedes did. he saw the half life of a soul, and he saw camilla’s beginning to change, and-

baking soda into a volcano. better to make it happen than to let it happen.

It started out with a kiss; how did it end up like this?