A Few Too Many Words on Tyler, The Locked Tomb and Turning 30
A Few Too Many Words is a very informal essay series I’ve been working on for the past year. It is a way for me to be able to get rid of perfectionism when it comes to writing posts for this blog. Also, a way to develop my voice outside of official articles I’ve written.
“Welcome to the rest of your life.”
I heard Tyler The Creator’s Radicals while sitting on a futon in my cousin’s room in 2011, and it felt like a mirror had been held next to my face. I had spent the better part of 3 years listening to N.E.R.D’s Seeing Sounds and cementing the track Love Bomb as one of my all time favorite songs on one of my all time favorite albums. I was a “weird” black girl and was looking for mirrors that reflected me. It was the 2000s and the internet was still in its infancy. The term “acting white” was still being used as an insult to any black person who stepped outside of what black people where supposed to sound or act like. Weird black kids were being made fun of, and gaslit about being made fun of. “It’s all love,” was the refrain I heard often when the jokes hit too close to home. I looked to media to find what real love was, which led me to Tyler The Creator’s work that one fateful day on that one fateful futon.
7 minutes and 19 seconds later, I had found what would become one the most important mirrors in my life. Tyler’s work was an is, all together funny, heart-breaking, socially aware that often reflected my own in my life (#ProblematicFave I know). For the next 13 years of my life, every Tyler The Creator album release felt like a checkpoint of my own life.
Goblin came out when I myself was an edgy, out-of-control teenager, Wolf when I started coming to terms with my freedom and trauma in college, Cherry Bomb when I started finally cultivating a burgeoning sense of self, Flower Boy when I started trying to figure out my own life’s path as a fresh graduate, IGOR during COVID and finding and loving my distinct voice, Call Me if You Get Lost when I finally landed a job at a elite college and came out of the closet, and the Estate Sale when I realized there was life outside of the rules.
With the announcement of Chromakopia I was curious about what it reflected and it was delightfully gut-wrenching. Like Tyler, in the past three years, there were apologies given from my mother that shook me to my core. Like Tyler, I reconciled my once volatile feelings toward my family. Like Tyler, I began to love my body much more as it started showing its first signs of age (I have to stretch in the mornings, take supplements and consult my doctor on getting on GLP-1 meds to stave off my family history of diabetes). Like Tyler, I cannot seem to stop falling in love with a new woman every few months, even though I need to seriously start trying to settle down. Most notably, like Tyler, I exist more and more comfortably in a world that is more accepting of me than ever, even if I don’t always notice it.
Instead of wishing to be considered, I wish to contribute, I wonder what I’ll leave behind. My dreams aren’t as big anymore, but they’re still there. As I enter my 30s, I think about the comics I read and the people who have left a mark on me when it comes to their creations, large and small. Most recently I think about Gideon The Ninth, a sci-fi book from Tamsyn Muir who was in her 30’s when she wrote it.
There is nothing more delicious than reading a book from someone who has the same spirit as you. The writing is layered, textured and gives no fucks about the respectability of literature or the relatability of the masses. Gideon the Ninth asks its readers to come into its world and watch the gears of its very specific clockwork clatter together seamlessly. The premise is something out of a very detailed lucid dream. It is at once an anime training arc, the world’s most fucked up version of Luigi’s Mansion complete with keys and challenges, and a slow-burn lesbian romance drama featuring the two of the most emotionally inept and throughly maladjusted teenagers ever put to a page. That’s of course, before you even bring up the fact that the powerset in this universe is necromancy and the setting is a resurrected futuristic version of our solar system (you know, because of necromancy).
Audacious would be an understatement. This is the type of premise that would have plenty of agents asking if the person writing it needed to take a grippy sock vacation, rehab or both. It is also a premise so thoroughly confident, it makes you think that the author never was told to “be realistic” or “grow up” or “be normal” when their adolescent ideas creeped through their head and dared to make themselves known to other people. That or they just told those who did tell them to “grow up” or “be realistic” or “be normal” to (rightfully) go fuck themselves.
At a solid 448 pages, Gideon the Ninth is a hell of the ride. The descriptions of this world and characters are all-together hilarious, stomach-turning, devastating, and beautifully tender. The dynamic between leads Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Gideon Nav is the “jock/stuck-up smart girl” dynamic seen in many pieces of teen media, but it’s given a new coat of cracked black paint. Instead of sports, Gideon sports a two-handed longsword she reluctantly gives up to use the rapier that her necromancer challenge partner demands in order to succeed in her test to become a lyctor, an immortal powerful necromancer that serves the God of this world.
The supporting cast are no slouches either. Fellow necromancer and lyctor hopeful Ianthe Tridentarius is awful in the way that female characters often don’t get to be. Without spoiling anything, by the end of the book she does something so thoroughly disgusting to a man that I was both unsettled and awestruck that Muir had the balls to put it into a book. I yearn to be so openly brazen with my own works in my own creative career as Muir and Tyler are with theirs. So far, it has led me to getting essays published, comics anthology work, and multiple award nominations. There will be more of these through the next decade as I keep working.
I turned 30 in early December, an age that holds a lot of significance. For many, it’s the end of youth. To me, it feels like the beginning of the rest of my life. My teens and 20s felt like a test to prove I wouldn’t get myself killed, either by my own hands or someone else’s. My hope for my thirties is that I begin to fulfill the dreams I didn’t think I’d live to attempt, let alone complete. Who knows, maybe I’ll come up with the next Chromakopia, or the next Gideon The Ninth.
Or maybe something completely new of my own.
