she has not remembered her end

It's their day 🌷

Some things we do know about Corona:

she is not above abusing people she has power over

she has quite a bit of experience pulling off a con

if she's loyal to anybody, she's loyal to Ianthe -- but I don't think we can actually say for sure she's loyal to Ianthe, so, in effect, she's loyal to nobody

she has plans of some form involving Judith Deuteros

me: the ninth is a poor planet, and harrow is more cognizant of that than anyone, so if anything her look should be austere!

Surprise Babs and Colum for @elevenbenevolentmammoths. His wealth of knowledge will surely win him over eventually, trust.

+ these words from Abigail Pent (Ch 45, HtN):

“Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”

Because Pluto can be another name for Hades, the god of the dead. But it's often one that's used to either euphemistically separate him from the fearful concept of the lord of the underworld (as in the Iliad - from which a number of Ninth names are drawn, including Harrow's parents), or to refer to a more complex or even positive idea of the god, particularly in relation to underworld-transcending cults such as Orphism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Which makes me wonder if there's to some extent a deliberate split between Harrow and Alecto's association with Pluto, and the way John is figured as Hades in HTN? Hades as death and control and coercion, vs Pluto as death and rebirth as natural yet potentially escapable cycles?

Muir has also suggested that ATN might start with something akin to the Harrowing of Hell - Jesus' descent to hell to rescue those who died before him. Though in Christian theology, the hell referred to is sometimes also called "Hades", to distinguish it as a liminal resting point of the dead, more akin to the neutrality of the classical conception of the underworld, rather than the place to which those judged sinners might be confined.

So we have Harrow - her very name referring to the idea of souls being rescued from some infernal waiting place - also associated with concepts of transcending the underworld. Which is, of course, Abigail's heresy: that one can cross the River. That there is something Beyond. Abigail is heavily figured as the classical chthonic psychopomp Hecate, who is also associated with underworld-transcending mythologies.

And it's Abigail who introduces the idea that there is something wrong with the River, that she has written notes about this, and that her brother might find them, which would rather seem to be setting us up for some kind of reveal, perhaps one that will connect to what the end of NTN suggested about where John has been putting souls and how that might be going rather wrong.

I'm having trouble articulating my point around this, but:

Thinking about the "abused wife" archetypes you often see in older media (not to say these don't still crop up nowadays, but they were much more blatant and accepted in decades past). Particularly the following two flavors: 1) the irritating, stuck-up, "bitchy" wife whose suffering the audience is expected to find funny/cathartic, because she "deserves" it, and 2) the long-suffering "good" wife (not framed as "deserving it") who the audience is meant to view as a tragic but morally-upstanding (and therefore aspirational) figure of Christian womanhood

and

knowing Tamsyn Muir's propensity for pulling the old gendered-trope-switcharoo

thinking about how neatly Babs and Colum slot into those archetypes

-----------------------------------------

Notably Muir is not only inverting these tropes on a gendered axis but subverting them, too, on a narrative axis, given that Colum is clearly positioned not to be a figure of aspirational cavalierhood to an audience of literally anyone outside of his Eighth House cultural context, let alone the reader, and that she has Pal outright state that Babs didn't deserve what he got.

Beach AU ☀️

These are gonna be sticker sheets, and some will also be keycharms