#33 - Freaky Little Arty Guys

As I try to untangle the crossed wires in my brain and rebuild my sense of craft and artistic intention, I come back again and again to Tamsyn Muir.

When “Gideon the Ninth” — the first in the ongoing Locked Tomb series — hit the shelves in 2019, several distinct corners of the internet lit up bonfires and began a years-long dance of joy. I’d certainly read nothing like it and there’s so much to gush about: messy sapphic heroines, intricate world-building, an imaginative magic system rooted in bones and blood, tantalizing hints that the story unfolds in a place and time not too far from our own…

It’s just a good time. And Muir is a good writer. There is one element of her writing, though, that just made me so mad every time I encountered it, which is her insistence on weaving anachronistic memes and pop culture references into her otherwise perfectly original novels. I’m an hour deep into my story about space cultists, and suddenly I’m being backhanded by one-liners escaping containment from the cringiest corners of Tumblr: our protagonist studied the blade, two other characters died on the way back to their home planet, and — and this nearly made me throw Harrow the Ninth across the room — our main antagonist confirms his plans to keep the system of Nine Houses he’s built together so as not to become “none house left grief”.

When asked why in the world she did this, Tamsyn Muir confirmed that she just thought it was funny. Also that she had an editor who would get on her CONSTANTLY for doing this, and she would take out what they caught and nothing else.

In 2019, this pissed me off. It’s 2026 now. And I cannot find the fact that a memelord who cut her teeth in the Homestuck fandom is a Hugo-nominated writer anything other than delightful.

Recent Gigs

Since my last update, I have provided additional voices for the following projects:

• Trigun Stargaze, Episodes 1, 3, 4 & 7

• Fire Force, Episodes 316 & 317

Consume!

Look, I don’t know if his marketing team just isn’t pulling its weight or if there’s some large-scale anti-queer suppression campaign happening, but I haven’t seen ANY buzz about ND Stevenson’s newest project. If I didn’t follow him on Instagram I wouldn’t know that he’d written a novel, and then I wouldn’t have read it, and I would genuinely have been worse off.

If you’ve read Nimona or watched She-Ra: Princesses of Power, you know a bit of what to expect here. Stevenson has themes and images he likes to return to, like female criminals with a mysterious past, shadowy organizations that mix science with eldritch magic to horrific results, and people who love each other even when they don’t really like each other. But these common elements don’t feel tired or recycled. After landing the reader in the middle of a post-apocalyptic future with a lost history and a slowly-eroding landscape, Scarlet Morning explores the power of storytelling, the pain of realizing your world is bigger than you knew, and the complications of legacy — all with language a middle-grade reader can parse.

And there’s MORE coming. There BETTER be. If the sequel doesn’t get made because of low sales I’ll be VERY cross.

Performance(s) of the Week

I watched this film on a whim and I’m so glad I did - it waves its absurdity like a matador cape, ripping it away from you as you approach to punch you in the gut with a emotional poignancy or a stark reminder of our world’s inequalities. Then back to the bullfight, led by Tilda Swinton and the movie’s creator Julio Torres.

Torres slips in a smart piece of dialogue early on in the film that serves as the anchor for its narrative - Swinton, as the wife of a recently-cryogenically-frozen artist (played by RZA), is on a mission to get his wildly-misunderstood series of egg-related paintings a major showcase, and is criticized by one of her assistants for making her own life as difficult as possible. This tendency is mirrored in Torres’ struggles to remain in the US in pursuit of his dream job at Hasbro, for which he has left a life full of beauty with his artistic mother in El Salvador. As these two mismatched kindred spirits support and betray each other at turns, creating and raising imaginary stakes for themselves in pursuit of their ideals, I found myself shaking my head and nodding along in recognition, urging these characters to throw in the towel and keeping going.

This movie is so weird, and wonderful, and features a young creator and an industry legend acting together at the height of their powers - go watch it!

Time to Get Ugly

I am finally reaching the age where I can see the seeds of influence in work produced by my generation’s artists.

There’s different schools of thought on how obvious artistic inspiration should be - what’s the line between homage and imitation? - but I always enjoy reading a book and, for example, finding a paragraph in which the main character thinks about another book. Artists have done this since the beginning of art. The technique is called “meta-fiction”, and everyone from Lord Byron to Stephan Schwartz uses it occasionally.

The main difference is that Millennial artists have different mediums to draw upon for inspiration - in addition to novels, films, paintings, and television, we have video games, short-form video content, Flash animation, alternate-reality narratives, web-based multimedia monstrosities, and, yeah, memes.

The sense of embarrassment I feel when I see a niche internet reference in the wild is rooted in learned shame from my time in my degree program. From outdated ideas about “high” and “low” art, about who gets to be called “serious”, about denying what inspires you for the sake of earning institutionalized respect. But I’ve grown up in a time when those walls have started to crumble apart, where art is becoming simultaneously more siloed and more accessible, where the rules are changing in strange and miraculous ways.

I struggle myself with the desire to hold onto the craft of centuries past and the urge to make a big ol’ mess out of existing systems. I don’t believe it’s necessary to let go of the Canon while creating new reference points - Muir references the Bible as much as old Tumblr brainrot, after all. But I do think I’m done with pushing away from the dregs of my reference base for the sake of propriety.

In writing “None house left grief”, Tamsyn Muir in truth wrote “Hey. Do you see me? Do you know me? I made it.”

“I made it. And so can you.”

Hollis Beck is a performer and writer who crafts narratives about queer identity, found families, and people who try very hard. More information can be found on her website.