The Unwanted Guest - Tumblr Posts
is the ceremony for the ianthe in the first scene of the unwanted guest an actual thing on the third house? are the bloody kisses a real part of third house funeral?? bcs if it is it sooo feral.
things that make me feral about the third house:
the neptune imagery (trident knife, the pool scene)
their specialty in necromancy (eating pieces of flesh to convert it into necromancy? sick)
the titles of their house (the mouth of emperor? invokes their school of necromancy AND their role as spies. the house of the shining dead? terrifying imagery and another tie in for their necromancy. the procession? no idea what could that mean but still cool)
the insane way their necromantic abilities are used to shape everything (babs had to be the perfect cav, so he became the perfect cav? fucked up on so many levels. the way his actual physique can be attributed to the requirements of the duelling? mind-blowing)
the funeral in the unwanted guest if we assume that's the actual procedure that happens there (and do y'all think about why ianthe chose the opening scene to be her own funeral?)
The point about the permeability of the soul is at least in part that we cannot separate love and consumption. You almost always can’t say ‘this is because of the soul juices mingling’ vs ‘this is one of the horrors of love’ and that’s the point.
Is Naberius haunting Ianthe because they grew up together, because they were trained to be two halves of the same whole, because she knew him inside out and there’s a love in that, however violent? Or is it because she’s been using him like a battery and a hand-puppet and a computer program and now he’s threaded up through her. She can’t know! She doesn’t want to know, she refuses to look.
Did Gideon v1 become more militaristic after Pyrhha’s death through osmosis? Or was it because he loved her and trusted her and his first thought in a crisis was What Would Pyrrha Do. Did he love Wake because their programming got jumbled or was it because he met a awful redhead and thought oh, my best friend would have been so stupid for you, she would have been such a wreck…
Did John make the earth angry or did the earth fill John with anger or was it both? Did the love come first or the fury? Does Mercy love her god because Cristabel did or does she do it for the sake of Cristabel? The lyctors all view themselves as living memorials to the dead, of course they’d voice the dead’s thoughts, act out their habits and carry on their infuriating quirks. How else do you remember? You can’t peel apart the analogy and make it all magic or all mundane because soul-permeability coexists with the everyday manacles of affection.
way back in GtN, during Gideon&Babs' duel, specific mention is made to Naberius' proportions physically. Specifically that he was shorter than Gideon, with LONG long arms -- aka the perfect sport fencing build: a relatively small target (clavicle to sacrum, arms exception) combined with a long reach, will very efficiently prevent anyone from being able to touch you in a proper duel. and I'm thinking abt Ianthe "we'd fix him" the First and how Babs HAD to be the best with absolutley no room for anything less and I'm thinking about his physical proportions being perfect and like. the Third House definitely did that to him. very sinister. much to think about.
Relistening to Harrow while making dinner and when she gets to Cannan house in her river bubble she makes a comment on the double meaning of “bone frenzy” to Ortus when he’s reciting from the Noniad and he gets all pissy and bothered. I never even clocked it before but given what we now know about soul permeability, do we think that that was the influence of Gideon’s soul? I think for sure it is. Harrow isn’t really a sex joke girly. Especially considering Ortus makes a quip about people who read magazines right after. 👀
The Reddit post linking The Unwanted Guest has been removed but don't fear!
I got the DocDroid link. And I downloaded the PDF if anyone needs it!
Now that I’ve finished it, here are more coherent/useful thoughts (under cut because spoilers)
Oh, this is so perfect. It’s SO perfect.
Ianthe loves being Ianthe. Ianthe loves being Ianthe more than anything else in the world—the closest she gets to loving any non-Ianthe person is loving her twin sister, and from the way Ianthe talks about Coronabeth, it’s pretty clear that it’s a distinctly acquisitive love, not a love based on knowing anything meaningful about Coronabeth as a person. Ianthe is, above all, extremely disinterested in getting to know anyone who isn’t the Most Interesting Girl in the World (Ianthe).
(I think that’s why she likes Augustine so much—he’s spent thousands of years crafting a perfectly blank persona, showing nothing of his interiority, leading Harrow to wonder if he even has any. Ianthe sees that and she’s like: awesome, finally somebody who’s not out to bore me with all their dumb complicated feelings, this guy’s the coolest ever, I want to be just like him)
So for Palamades to hit her with that—oh man. Oh MAN. Ianthe, in your quest to solidify Ianthe Tridentarius as an eternal unchanging paragon of Awe, you have become… not Ianthe. And you were too obsessed with your own Ianthe-ness to even see it.
You thought you could make the devil’s bargain with counterfeit currency and now the bill’s come due. Killing Babs is no big deal because “who cares about Babs?” Baby, YOU cares about Babs! You IS Babs now, bitch! Your perfect immutable self? You went and MUTED it!
God, it’s the perfect way to cut a self-obsessed person to the core. You love yourself so much? The person you love doesn’t fucking EXIST, Ianthe. You invited a permanent roommate into your soul and you don’t even LIKE him and now you’re on the lease together forever and you did it to yourself
The unwanted guest isn’t Palamades. The unwanted guest is Babs.
She and I both understand that the goal is always worth the cost.
Ianthe you’re exposing yourself as actually not knowing Harrow at fucking all.
Harrow, upon finding out the cost of lyctorhood, NO LONGER WANTED TO BE A LYCTOR. She told Gideon “all you have to do is live.” She ABSOLUTELY did not think the goal was worth the cost, you freak ianthe I hate you SO much ianthe I love you I love you but I absolutely HATE YOU
Tamsyn said
“They shouldnt want to fuck ianthe”
Then releases the unwanted guest short story.
You are giving the girls mixed signals tamsyn
The Unwanted Guest was pretty good and I'm being normal about souls and permeability
PRECISELY
She and I both understand that the goal is always worth the cost.
Ianthe you’re exposing yourself as actually not knowing Harrow at fucking all.
Harrow, upon finding out the cost of lyctorhood, NO LONGER WANTED TO BE A LYCTOR. She told Gideon “all you have to do is live.” She ABSOLUTELY did not think the goal was worth the cost, you freak ianthe I hate you SO much ianthe I love you I love you but I absolutely HATE YOU
I picked the perfect time to reread HtN
You CANNOT tell me that this isn't Gideon seeping into Harrow. My girl was always clever but sex jokes and puns are Gideon's domain, baybeeeee
I think the most interesting, perhaps horrifying, part of The Unwanted Guest is the fact that Naberius Tern haunts the narrative much more than I previously thought.
Reading Gtn: haha! Babs is just like, the classic “perfect boy” lmao
After reading tug:
Oh
way back in GtN, during Gideon&Babs' duel, specific mention is made to Naberius' proportions physically. Specifically that he was shorter than Gideon, with LONG long arms -- aka the perfect sport fencing build: a relatively small target (clavicle to sacrum, arms exception) combined with a long reach, will very efficiently prevent anyone from being able to touch you in a proper duel. and I'm thinking abt Ianthe "we'd fix him" the First and how Babs HAD to be the best with absolutley no room for anything less and I'm thinking about his physical proportions being perfect and like. the Third House definitely did that to him. very sinister. much to think about.
Tazmuir writing The Unwanted Guest as a script is SO good on so many levels:
It shows us what's happening without showing interiority for either Palamedes or Ianthe
It enables the asides, which were actually Palamedes conversing with Dulcinea, all while keeping her identity a secret for part of it
Speaking of, the asides show us that Ianthe doesn't have complete control over the mindscape/river bubble thing, since she doesn't know that Palamedes is having a conversation (she thinks he's just standing there, thinking)
It implies there is an audience watching! But who? Dulcinea, yes, but maybe also Camilla and Nona etc? Us? Naberius himself?
The meta level (like this whole thing isn't meta) of them following a literal script — as in something not written by them, not their choices — which is exactly what's going on in the narrative itself.
It also highlights that everything Ianthe does is a performance.
Anyway there's probably like sixty other things I could mention but ugh it was so good
i'm thinking a lot about the permeability of the soul and really chewing on like, how this knowledge retroactively impacts and changes the way one can read characters' actions throughout all the books so far. and that's interesting to me, because I'm not sure it's as simple as character X's behavior being retroactively revealed to be due to the soul of character Y. because like...
of COURSE we impact each other. of course when we brush up against each other we bleed. we leave things behind. but at some point, when does that stop being someone else, and start becoming just another part of you? the body of theseus. the soul of theseus. are you the same person as you were when you started this, even though everything has changed? is the Augustine that entered the stoma the same as the Augustine that woke up on the first day of the Ressurection, when it was only the newly re-born sun, and him, and John?
and I mean, no, obviously. So much has happened since then. But Augustine has been Augustine-and-Alfred for thousands of years longer than he was ever only Augustine. Same for Mercymorn-and-Cristabel, same for Cytherea-and-Loveday, same for G1deon-and-Pyrrha, same for John-and-Alecto. and like. the soul of theseus, you know?
Is the Cytherea Loveday who died at Canaan House the same as the Cytherea Loveday who woke up that day after the Lyctoral Ascension, on the first day of the rest of her life? After 10k years are the actions of Cytherea Loveday truly dissectable as Actions-of-Loveday vs Actions-of-Cytherea, or is she just one person, being bled all over by another until they are no longer distinguishable? How much of someone taking on another's mannerisms is because of soul entangelment versus the human visegrip of grief, desperately holding onto anything and everything you can, remaking the person you love in your mind until they are more yours than they ever were themself?
and I'm thinking again about Paul, and how maybe they just skipped to the end. Maybe all lyctorhood is, is damped oscillation, in which the end point between two extremes will always trend to 0. and Paul makes it so obvious, you know? Pal and Cam DIED that day. they did it, it's done, Paul is risen.
but when Ianthe Tridentarius killed Naberius Tern, did she not also kill herself? when she ascended as Ianthe The First, she became someone new. Ianthe Tridentarius is as dead as Pal and Cam are. as dead as Naberius Tern. as dead as Alfred and Cristabel and Loveday and John and the entire goddamn earth. trending twoards 0. thinking.
