you must be happy / i'll try, i promise / then you'll be alright on your own

✶

tags from @galileosballs

yeah. yeah! I have complicated feelings on the shortage and the demand. It is true that GLP-1s getting approved for weight loss meant that it was nearly impossible for me to get ahold of the medication for about 4 years (around the start of 2021 to around the end of 2024). During that time it was much easier for folks with very good insurance plans and/or a lot of money to get ahold of the medications than it was for many with diabetes. However that demand seriously pushed both production and new development of GLP-1s and led to GIPs like Mounjaro/Tirzepatide getting developed and made broadly available, and the GLP-1 + GIP is even more a miracle drug than just the GLP-1s.

And that huge increase in supply and production has made it much easier to access these medications now. When I started them they were a relatively experimental drug that I was getting through the UCLA medical system (one with some of the best access to medications and treatments in the world). Now my relatives in the backcountry of Kansas, the Ozarks, Appalachia, etc etc all can get access to them. And they can get access for pretty cheap. My family members who have passed from diabetes complications were all broke uninsured country folk.

"Artificial God"

consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment

she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act

it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her

feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?

we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels

Reception Dress

c. 1897

by House of Worth