I'm Like If A Lover Hated Everything They See

Look at this gorgeous person. I am obsessed.

Jayden Revri for Behind The Blinds Magazine

It's like we all collectively forgot as a society that friendship and just connection in general takes effort. Even if you meet someone you immediately click with, it takes hanging out about 20 times (!) to become friends. And guess what, some of those 20 meetings might be awkward or unimpressive.

We all want to reap the benefits (having a friend circle, having a partner, getting married) without doing the work (going to events, interacting with people, learning to handle conflict maturely, dating). Myself included. If I could, I'd never leave the house or go on another mediocre date again... except, that's part of the process.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the cure to the loneliness epidemic is touching some grass and building tolerance for tedious in-person interactions.

Gideon nav please save me save me Gideon nav

Jayden’s Twitch stream 9/13/2024

Jayden says he is so grateful for our outpouring of love AND that he “was the only one” of the cast and crew who called that we were going to RIOT over this cancellation!

He said “nah my people my people are gonna be loud” AND WE ARE

Let’s show them all!

SAVE DEAD BOY DETECTIVES

Do you think the Mystery Inc polycule ever talks about their collective crush on the Hex Girls or is it just an unspoken thing?

KENDRICKS PROFORMANCE. KENDRICKS. PROFORMANCE.

1. When he went silent for the word pedophile he looked at trump which caused Trump to leave the stadium

2. One of his people came on stage and waved a palestine and Sudan flag and ran across the field well being chased by security

3. The people wearing red white and blue formed the us flag and then moved around at the end to turn into the trans flag

4. He talked abt how the superbowl is rigged

5. When booking him the NFL asked why there weren't any white ppl on stage and his manager said "I thought we didn't do DEI hires anymore"

6. He brought up SERENA WILLIAMS. Her blackness has been fucking dogged on and she crip walked.

+TONS more stuff. He knows he's not fucking coming back and he doesn't want to.

FUCK FOOTBALL. FUCK THE NFL. ART WILL ALWAYS SHOW THE HEART OF THE PEOPLE.

Just some screenshots of some tweets to keep everyone encouraged and motivated.

We really do have a chance. We just have to be persistent and patient.

It often feels like mainstream acceptance of queer people, particularly trans and nonbinary people, is contingent on there being few of us. When I was a kid witnessing arguments about gay marriage, statistics about LGBTQ people were so often presented in such a way as to reassure everyone else that we are not dangerous because we are rare. "It's not going to cause societal collapse ... because such a small percentage of people are gay."

And conservative rhetoric against queer people, particularly trans people, which explicitly refers to us as a "social contagion," really underscores that any perceived "increase" in sexual or gender diversity will be seen as a threat. If queer people are permitted to exist, we must be aberrant and isolated. If we are normal and natural and commonly occurring, it is because something has gone terribly wrong.

So. Forgive me if I bristle at the well-meaning argument that "these trans athlete bans are ridiculous, they're only going to affect a few dozen people!" I understand where they're coming from. But I think trans people should be free and abundant.

TLT Theory: Pyrrha was the Necromancer

No get back here, hear me out. I'm not saying Gideon didn't become one as a Lyctor. But I've been noticing a lot of things adding up weird here...

In Ch6 of HtN, when preparing for the first trip through the River, they call it Pyrrha's trial.

Much later, when Pyrrha is mad at Palamedes for the soul fuckery he and Camilla are doing, she refers to it as one they designed together, but that doesn't negate Mercy calling it Pyrrha's first and foremost. And...

She's worried about Camilla's brain, and okay, sure, they only have Camilla's body. But with Cris and Mercy, it was Cris getting cracked open. With Harrow and Gideon 2, it was always Gideon in danger, not Harrow. And with Gideon 1 and Pyrrha, it was Gideon's skull, Gideon's brain, getting the testing done. No mention of the same kind of testing or Mercy or Pyrrha. The principle of it is the necromancer's consciousness being overlaid onto the cavalier's brain, right?

But okay, maybe Pyrrha just doesn't mention herself, and Gideon's "a control variable" to compare herself to? But there's more.

Pyrrha fights with guns, prefers them. Gideon fought with not just a sword but a whole ass massive spear for an offhand, and has easily more physical prowess than any other necromancer we've ever seen. His stomach is still desiccated in typical necromancer fashion, he's dehydrated and not a scrap of fair fat on him, but he's a wall of muscle and sinew. Yes he looks "like an idiot's construct", probably because John regrew him from an arm when he was still getting the hang of using that level of power, but he's distinctly not built like other necromancers. If he wasn't a necromancer prior to being a Lyctor, his build might make more sense. Moreover, we've seen other cavaliers turned into sort-of-constructs, with both Protesilaus and Kiriona.

I also want you to look at the Saint of Duty and tell me that man isn't the walking essence of what it means to be a Cavalier.

And he rarely uses necromancy. He can travel in the River, and he drains thanergy, but he never really uses theorems or sets up wards. His necromancy is used pretty exclusively in passive ways or to remove obstacles between himself and his weapons. But Pyrrha is extremely knowledgeable about all kinds of necromancy. She tells Harrow fresh thalergy is harder to drain. She sees Ianthe's brilliantly inventive combination of wards creatively mimicking the effect of Mercy's trial and can accurately tell what they're going to do, as well as how to break them. Among other things. She also says she walked the Eightfold. Maybe that means being led willingly as a cav, but what if she was in control of the process?

With Harrow, Gideon was constantly in and out of awareness, watching from Harrow's subconscious, things that Harrow was fully conscious for. Palamedes doesn't have that with Camilla, and both of them being conscious is rare and dangerous, as detailed above. Pal and Pyrrha are frequently compared with their situations. How did Cam and Pal work out how to do the switcheroo, especially while Pal had extremely limited ability to move or perceive? How did they work out a safe time limit before too much irreparable damage was done? Could they have had guidance from someone who's done it? Done it with a necromancer's knowledge, letting him know where he can safely go under in the brain, how to come out at will, what to watch out for?

On a separate note:

Lyctor names are sacred, but the Houses were founded before Lyctorhood was achieved. Anastasia did not become a Lyctor, so her name was not removed from history, and became common in her House. Judith and Marta are part of the Dve Territorials, and while that doesn't prove anything or could even be evidence against, I feel like it would make sense to have named prestigious military groups after the House's "main" Founder, before there were Saints and the decision to erase the Saints' names.

On a more meta level, I think it would be weird to have "their names were meant to be forgotten", history knowing jack shit about the cavaliers of old, and even emphasis on the Lyctors forgetting each others' House names, only to have a cavalier's House name in active use somewhere, if that information wasn't supposed to be serving a narrative purpose. If we weren't meant to question why.

"But they call her his cavalier. She calls him her necromancer."

Sure. And maybe that's straightforward; this is a theory, I could be wrong. But switching titles after Lyctorhood doesn't sound too out of the question to me. What's a bit of revisionist history in TLT? John knows where memory lives in the brain, and on Pyrrha's end, at least after Lyctorhood Gideon was the necromancer, after all.

(Edit to add: Augustine calls attention to how astonishing it is that Pyrrha never divided opinions, that not one of them has ever had a single bad thing to say about her. She's great but we've met her. We've seen John rant about her calling out his bullshit, in the dream. Not one bit of annoyance or criticism, from anyone? I'm just saying, if Something Happened that led to John needing to tweak memories, making everyone remember her nothing but fondly feels plausible.)

"So why can't she do necromancy when she's in control?"

"He took more from me than got taken from you" feels like explanation enough to me. He got her aptitude and more. She's a partial soul. If anything, she could even still has an ounce of it, to retain the body's healing capabilities. If Gideon was fully giddy-gone and the soul that was left had zero aptitude, what would the furnace be burning? But if Gideon's consciousness is dead and what's left of his soul is in the furnace with a (partial) necromancer at the helm, well, that's not far off from Lyctorhood working as intended.

"Why though?"

And there's the part that gets really tricky but interesting. My best guess short answer is, one of them was dying, and it was an act of desperation.

Maybe Pyrrha was dying and so brutalized her body wouldn't have healed right even becoming a Lyctor, but given what they're like and the Cam/Pal parallels, I feel like an even more likely answer was that Gideon was dying. Cris and Alfred had already put Mercy and Augustine in that position, and they took their souls to preserve something, but Pyrrha would have seen how well that worked, assuming the third ascension wasn't immediately after the first two. So perhaps in her own desperation, with endless adoration for the man so willing to burn for what he believed, she said no. You don't get to throw your life away. If you're going to keep throwing yourself on things, I will make sure you can survive it and keep surviving it, even if it kills me instead. And then walked the path in reverse, pinning her own soul to his instead of pulling his into her.

I've seen a post around here pointing out how when Pyrrha tells Nona about her first tantrum, she's laughing with her mouth but not her eyes, and it looks like it reminds her of something her brain doesn't want to bring back, and the post proposes maybe Alecto killed Pyrrha. And I do think there's a solid possibility it was Alecto's tantrum that mortally wounded whichever (or maybe even both!) of them and prompted them to ascend. If Pyrrha didn't blame Varun for Gideon recently, I doubt she'd hold it against Alecto either.

Either way, wouldn't something like that more than earn the title of Duty? Wouldn't it be beautiful that they both fit the title if both had in ways been the cavalier? Wouldn't it be fitting to allow the name Dve to stand in the military as a monument to such a woman?

I know this might still be a long shot, but I definitely think there's enough little things sprinkled around to at least to warrant some solid suspicion. And it honestly would explain a lot.