The Potters

astonishing how good it can feel to get some chores done sometimes. you’ll be sitting there like damn i am some type of horrid little smeagol like creature who should be crushed to death. but then you do some laundry and you’re like wrow. im actually gods most fuckable soldier.

for real though I'm so happy with how this came out

By DC's anarchist cartoonist, Mike Flugennock 2017

Naked Sea Angels (Clione limacina) are small, free swimming snails. The shell has been lost and the foot has been modified into wing-like paddles for swimming.

(source)

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

well look who it is. my old friend. the conses of my quences.

friends to enemies to lovers is actually something that can be so intimate. i know you i know everything about you i have told you all my deepest secrets and you have told me yours and now i am trying to kill you literally or metaphorically because hate and love are separated by a very thin line and i don’t know which side i am on

chapter 20 of htn is short but has so much weight to it. the entirety of the chapter is this: the whole family watches and cleans up and does nothing else while harrow gets violated over and over again by her eldest brother, at the behest of her father.

the chapter begins with gideon penetrating harrow's pelvis, then god makes her whole again, yet claims powerlessness.

he calls her to his rooms and insists she consume things she does not like and does not want, and she does it, because she has nowhere else to go, no one else to turn to, and no other form of protection.

the chapter ends with harrow seeking physical solace from the body: a woman, her silent caretaker, john's original victim,

and then it is revealed to us that the poem john recites to harrow is the poe verse at heart of humbert humbert's (of nabakov's lolita) backstory.

i really love the way tamsyn muir navigates incest and sexual violence here. it is inarguable that harrow the ninth is a family drama; john is a patriarch in every sense of the word: a divine patriarch, a scholarly father-figure, and a literal father; harrow's narration posits him as fatherly, ianthe's dialogue refers to him as such, the other lyctors half-jokingly call him daddy; the lyctors dutifully call each other brother and sister. they are god's children, in that he made them, literally or hegemonically, and as both lyctors and theocratic royalty, they interpret god's will. they have a religious compulsion to follow john's orders and to not question him. the lyctor's familial titles call to christian ecclesiastical titles of sister, brother, and father. john uses his self-appointed divine right and the historical hierarchy of the catholic church to perpetuate systematic violence and allegorical rape against harrowhark. john lived out a jesus narrative, coopted historical european aesthetics, political structures, and religion, recreated the catholic church with necromancy as religious praxis, and is now cycling through the historic legacy of that very system—and in this chapter, and harrow the ninth as a whole, the macro becomes the micro. this family dynamic is just a minute example of what is happening empire-wide.

on a non-religious note: i recently read the incest diary by anonymous, and this chapter reminded me of a few sections of that book where the author details moments where she brings up her incestuous abuse from her father to her family: her mother ignores her, just as she has ignored this fact for the author's entire life; her brother refuses to believe her and threatens to kill himself; her close family friend instructs her to never bring it up again, claiming that it happens to all women and that the author should get over it. mercymorn's callous caretaking of harrow in the previous chapter after gideon's first attack on her reminds me of this, as well as ianthe's mean-spirited snickering. the women in harrow's life reluctantly take care of her in the aftermath (if the family friend is to be believed, this happens to all women; it is entirely believable to me that both mercy and ianthe have been victims of sexual violence as well), and john heals her only to then put her in situations where she cannot say no to him. throughout the book, he steadily defiles her boundaries and backs her into emotional corners where she must confess to him, all the while using the threat of constant violence to keep her weak and scared. the physical is just a small part of the incestuous abuse happening in htn—so much of it is psychological, and it's psychological coming from the entire family. harrow's brother and sisters keep her from completely perishing under the weight of these attacks, but only just. and in doing this, they only enable john's abuse.

💥🙌👏