#st-just

you get: the kanohi zatth, worst mask power in bionicle

@st-just, in reference to this post.

Here's my more in-depth review of The Faithless, if you're curious.

The Locked Tomb is something of a special case of queer norm fiction. It took me a while to figure out why I loved tlt so much when I was so cold on all other queer norm fiction, but I do have an answer.

The thing about tlt is that it's queer norm in the sense that queer characters and relationships are utterly unremarkable... but it's also not queer norm because there is no norm. The worldbuilding in tlt is deliberately sparse, such that we have no idea what a normal family or relationship within the Nine Houses even looks like! We know Harrow's parents were married and had her. We know that Magnus and Abigail are married but don't have children. We know that Corona and Ianthe have parents. We know that children can be grown artificially in vats. We know that marriage for political alliance is a concept that Harrow is aware of. And as far as I can remember, that's it! The worldbuilding is a black box, and nothing that we can glimpse in it is strained by unremarkable queerness, which is a very rare thing.

The Locked Tomb also injects other elements that resonate with me as authentically queer. Probably the biggest one is that the characters, in addition to being queer, are horny and weird about it. Like, I know that sounds trite to say, but of all the wlw books I've read, I would say a plurality are pretty chaste, and most of the ones that aren't are fairly tame or understated in the level and type of horniness on display. There's a lot to be said about the overlap between the queer community and the kink community that is way beyond the scope of this post, but without even touching Harrianthe bone sex and Nona's vore thing, one of the first things we learn about Gideon is that she owns porn magazines. It is vanishingly rare for fiction to acknowledge that people have or use pornography, let alone queer characters, let alone in a value neutral way, but a lot of queer people owe some part of their self-discovery to porn, in whatever form. The books are just full of unsanitized, "impure", queer desire, and that's both resonant and uncommon.

The last thing, I think, that makes tlt stand apart from queer norm fiction, is that the queer normalization is localized. In Nona the Ninth, we see life outside the Nine Houses, and it is messy. Pyrrha gets misgendered and stereotyped. Her gender identity is misunderstood and disrespected. The polite fiction of perfect understanding and tolerance of a lot of queer norm settings falls away completely. If you want to take a particularly meta read, you could argue that since the Nine Houses are not an emergent culture but a society designed and created by John, a queer man from our time, that he acted as an author and deliberately enforced queer norm standards on them because if he was going to be God, then god dammit he was gonna have his queer utopia about it.

“If you’re going to stand there and freeze to death, make it fast? As much fun as watching my least favourite breed of ape shiver itself apart sounds, there are literally millions of places I’d rather be.”

a little fanart for merchant, a short story written by a dear mutual @st-just​

tall eldritch obsidian disdainful tsundere lady with long hair? why that is just every other third drawing that i make on this blog, i can draw that in my sleep, is basically how i look myself so i couldnt NOT draw it, is just common sense!

i love how for once we get a story about an eldritch being that knows how to make just enough allusions and suggestions to make you believe there is eons of myth going on behind this entity without actually having to infodump about every bit of lore completly robbing us of the mystery

I accept this about myself. I figure it was either that or booty shorts.

21. what’s a conspiracy you believe in?

multiple conspiracy theories are deliberately created by people who want to muddy the waters between conspiracies that actually happened and absolute nonsense about ancient aliens building the pyramids, because associating an idea with the right (or wrong) sort of people is a great way to discredit it.

(I don’t actually know to what extent this is true if any, it just seems like an obvious missed opportunity if nobody is doing it)

39. describe your aesthetic

1) hoodie weather is back and I could not be happier

2) I would love to wear [] but I will have to get past several anxiety attacks before being seen in public with it

3) the fact that I don’t have a robot arm multitool and a tail with independent body language is oppressing me

4) all formalwear should be replaced with wizard robes

3. rant. just do it

Opinion of Elon Musk is almost entirely driven by his public persona rather than by any of the things he actually does with his billions of dollars, which is a lot, because he’s one of the richest people on Earth, and it confuses me.

He gets a lot more hate than any random CEO purely for saying weird shit on twitter, while in terms of doing shady business deals and whatever he’s probably about average. That much is basically unremarkable, more well known people get more attention, whatever. But also, odds are he’s done more to fight global warming than the overwhelming majority of activists that say it’s the worst problem the Earth has today and it gets him basically zero points among them.