Still the Unresting Castles Thresh

you will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared

opening paragraphs of all time

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

LOCKED TOMB CHARACTERS X CLASSICAL REFERENCES

explanations for parallels come from here and here

I know I spelt pelleamena wrong and missed off juno zeta btw but it was getting a bit crowded. I could also probably extrapolate more but it can stay like this for now

EDIT: BITS WOT I FORGOT AND ADDITIONS FROM TAGS:

@mayasaura makes a fantastic point about the treatment of gideon's body by BOE being almost identical to the treatment of hector's by achilles, down to animals refusing to touch it and it not rotting or tearing because of divine intervention. hence there should be a light blue line between gideon and hector. this hadn't ocurred to me is and is v cool, here is their post on it (the original asker's point about harrow and priam is also v good)

@iamanoccasionaldoodler points out that Pyrrha is named after Achilles directly, given the 'Achilles taking the name of Pyrrha while on Skyros avoiding the war' thing; I did just forget to draw the line here sorry lol it was in my post! also the tags about camilla and hector... no you're right. they feel so similar, there has to be something.

@zombified-queer mentions I left out dios apate; bugger it, so I did lmao. I was focusing mostly on characters but that's such a big one! in the iliad it's the deception of zeus, hera's plan to distract him by seducing him so that the greeks can regain the upper hand. in harrow the ninth, as we know, it's... not dissimilar! both times in fact it is very similar!

I did also forget Juno Zeta I know, but as it currently stands I don't really know if it has any narrative significance...? Maybe.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

those are both "Tinder" for "Sapphickxs" (weird rigamarole and elaborate pageantry for mid sex after like a week of 5-hour-gap-in-responses texting w someone about star signs or spider plants or whagever)