#locust rambles

some of the meme references have dated themselves a bit tho, I think it’s appropriate that a quote from Stross was put on Gideon the Ninth’s cover because for all the two series’ many differences, many of the Locked Tomb’s jokes will also feel dated in a few years

not a knock to either book but it’s just an occupational hazard (hah) of writing a book like that

Eva is both the monster and the martyr; she did everything in her power regardless of how destructive it was in order to save humanity, and she paid the highest price for it; losing her only actual friend and spends the rest of her life in prison or hiding, utterly isolated. She doesn’t become inhuman but I’d imagine it’s hard to be so thoroughly abandoned for doing what was necessary while keeping a sense of humanity intact.

Genuinely she is one of the few characters I would directly compare to Makoda Kaname or Cyrene. If she could have been the sacrifice, she would have been. She was fully on board with dying for humanity without even thinking about it, without any kind of persecution complex or anything that implies selfish reasons. Even if she was doing it for selfish reasons- saving the world is still saving the world.

Nightmare Stacks is funny bc it baits you repeatedly

first it presents you with this bitter nerd (also vampire) who runs into a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, see, and you think you’re along for the standard ride

but then turns out that little miss cheerful green-haired goth theatre kid had her own stuff going on, wouldn’t have found the lead particularly interesting, and didn’t seem to have much desire to be anyone’s Ramona Flowers tbqh…

…except she was actually kidnapped and replaced by this spooky fae doppelgänger before we met her, and she’s dead, and the doppelgänger absorbed her soul and took her appearance and assimilated her personality and sorta thinks she is the girl,

and she’s got some deeply malicious reasons to be hanging out with our bitter lead, who increasingly proves to be a genuinely decent human being except he has a horrifying reason to be bitter which is thoroughly damaging his mental health in bleakly sympathetic ways, and he really doesn’t deserve to be catfished by a brutal invading empire just because he feels lonely and alienated-

-but it’s cool because it turns out that the soul-stealing fae doppelgänger working for the malevolent empire is also a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Janice tries to hit on Mhari because it’s that, expose a human to V-dementia or try to date a man

Various of the Unseen Family Members Who Only Exist To Get Mocked form a polycule

After Mhari’s banker boyfriend croaks and Bob’s marriage goes south they hook up like in the old days and Make Each Other Worse

One-sided Alex x Yarisol wherein she sees his Automated Number Counter Demon Army Summon and faints from pure lust

If tumblr cared about this series they’d have flooded the tag with Old Man Yaoi between Angleton and Old George

Persephone is ace that’s not even crack she just is

Mo already fell for a cop, a nerd, some invertebrates and a musical instrument in canon I can’t top that

Dick the Vampire x bullet in the brain, unless they already did that, I wouldn’t be surprised tbh