Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 15

In which we have the obligatory party/ball scene. Obligatory to what? Off the top of my head, Murder Mysteries and Fake Dating AUs

A few hours later. A lot goes unsaid with this; it’s a time skip, but it’s a telling one. It means that nothing happened in the few hours between Harrow collapsing and waking back up; Gideon didn’t leave, didn’t look around, didn’t see or examine anything new of import. She kept vigil, and the narration breezes right past it.

“Necromantic Theorem.” So the magic system is formalized and not just pure will. Gideon’s being glib but this IS essentially how I thought this worked, so it’s nice to have this clarified.

Ha. Gideon remembers the name of the fourth Cavalier but not the fourth necromancer. Priorities.

“Fan Mail.” Possibly a concept Gideon picked up from the backs of the comic books. and from this fan mail we derive that Abigail and Magnus have a dynamic. Stern cop Jovial Cop.

Harrow jumps right to a (I assume) completely appropriate assessment of the genre they’re in and starts hypothesizing assignation plots. Gideon, meanwhile, demonstrates greater Machiavellian acuity than I’ve previously ascribed to her, purely because her first-ever dessert is on the line. She’s like Roger Rabbit with the Handcuffs. Extremely conditional trains of thought.

Harrow is nervous about the function. Gideon assumes that this is because she wants to get back to the trials, since she used to run Ninth House functions without a sweat. This brings us back to Gideon only really being able to model Harrow in a combative context; it’s cripplingly obvious why Harrow is afraid of this function. She ran a transparent con against addled, devoted, elderly clergy, many of whom were literally blind. This is a gathering of High Society, which Gideon herself just painted as a potential hotbed of information gathering and Machiavellian politicking- a thought that apparently literally stayed in Gideon’s head for the exact amount of time it took her to win the argument, and no longer. 

Glad Rags! Magnus is great.

Abigail Pent, Intense Librarian. Very curious how things are between her and Magnus, just generally. Political marriage? According to Teacher (they (helpful exposition dispenser) She’s a spirit-talker. A necromancer in the traditional use of the term. That’d be Fifth House’s bag?

Interesting exposition on the Fourth and The Fifth here; The Fourth has been implied to be subordinated to the Fifth a few times. Magnus I think is actually the dreadful teens Uncle, and Isaac is apprenticed to someone outside his own house. Did the Fifth swallow the Fourth the way Harrow is afraid the 9th will be swallowed? Is there precedent that she’s afraid of?

The Third and the Sixth are facing off before Teacher (conveniently!) defuses things by announcing the main event.

Gonna read stuff into the seating arrangements. Gideon is with Palamedes, her lady-love Dulcinea, and the fifth Cav. Harrow is with the Mayo dyad, Ianthe, Seventh Cav super mutant, and Naberius. Putting eighth and ninth together feels like some kind of power play.

“The same middle name.” Good God. Coronabeth is either laughing too hard on purpose as an ingratiation play, or she is, in fact, compatible with Gideon on two levels.

Okay, there are on-site greenhouses. That explains where the food is coming from. I was wondering.

Alright, Magnus and Abigail can’t conceive. Slightly adjusting my assessment; they have the affordance of being nice because they’re weird, and on the outs within the political system they’re ostensibly on top of. Abigail is interested in pure scholarship and Magnus is interested in Abigail. I refer back to my previous assessment of Magnus as embodying the fun aesthetic parts of courtly empire w/o the inherently monstrous decision-making power.

 And Dulcinea is, in fact, good at picking up on what her conversational partners care about and feeding it. It’s not a Gideon-specific thing; she’s honing in on Abigail’s interests as well.

“Post Resurrection, Pre-sovereignty, pre-cohort.” Aaaaand Gideon turns away from the exposition because that’s just what she does.

Okay, from the Young-Uncle-Ianthe-Babs interaction we get the following; young-uncle has something against… intervention in births? A religious taboo? Ianthe was premature, extracted by C-section; The Eigth (Silas, I checked the cast page) calls this a “wasted opportunity,” which feels like a deliberate inversion of real-life Catholic Abortion Dickishness ™. Babs jumps in to defend Coronabeth, as he did before; Ianthe tramples him verbally. From this we derive that Babs is into Coronabeth specifically, although it doesn’t end well for him no matter which of them he’s talking to. And he has opinions on Bucklers, which Gideon wants to hear. It’s always interesting to encounter someone who has your exact interests but is so massively dickish on every other axis that you can’t capitalize on it.

This is Gideon’s first interaction with Jeannemary, and it’s this. I like that even when Gideon is interacting with the fourthling directly, there’s a shift in the dialogue from when Jeannemary is speaking normally and when she’s doing the nasally whine thing. She’s great. (But is Isaac great? I can’t tell if they’re trading off on doing the bit, or if it’s all her, all the time.)

And Gideon gets to eat! That’s good.

Okay, so Harrow, given a chance to dig into things with Teacher, can make him look thoughtful. A theological discussion? Applied Theory? Most of the others haven’t gotten far enough in the trials, so far as we know, to be able to talk specifics in the way that Harrow now can.

Is Dulcinea’s bit about the Biceps a Gravity Falls reference?

Oh, Jeannemary was, like, jealous. And possibly Crushing. Okay, this is back to cute. I like how the vocal affect reflects their tone but also their physical distance from Gideon and Dulcinea; also, question answered. It’s all Jeannemary. Isaac is the voice of reason, ish.

Okay, so Dulcinea pops the question- the big question- why are the houses like this. The dysfunction is obvious if not yet explosive; The houses are militarily and financially secure from the constant influx of spoils; The Emperor’s favor is both nebulous in its actual benefit and completely unrelated to the task at hand, which is pretty explicit (learn how to be Lyctors!) You’re inclined to say that everyone in Canaan House, categorically, has virtually no higher place to which they can climb within their hierarchies; that’s the point of pursuing Lyctorhood. Of course, the situation with the Ninth tells us that the assumed notion of security isn’t true in the slightest, the situation with the Sixth demonstrates that the Houses can have orthogonal interests like pure scholasticism, The eighth clearly aren’t in it for money…the more I think about it, the more Dulcinea’s remarks feel like that thing pretentious poets sometimes do where they wax cynical about an arrangement without putting much thought into the petty incentives underlying stuff. This might be deliberate; Dulcinea is clearly pretty clever.

Alright, something’s going on between Palamedes and Dulcinea. Gideon thinks that his weirdo obsession with. uh. Medicine that works…? gives him the hots for her.

“Magnus was nice.” I forgot to mention in chapter 12 that Gideon’s word choice in relation to Magnus is tied like an anchor to her current mood. When she’s in the pits, Magnus “tries pathetically hard;” when she’s well fed and high on Dulcinea, he’s “nice,” and she’s hurt on his behalf when Harrow ignores him.

And we end the chapter on this; Harrow thinks Pent is now in the running. Harrow is really, really committed to the idea that she has to WIN; this is, with added context, probably at least a little true, because the Eighth is probably an existential adversary and the Third strikes me as an opportunistic adversary if they get an opening. But it’s very telling that Harrow hears the Eighth- the most zealous of all the houses- just hand this information over to the Fifth without any cajoling and jumps to the conclusion it’s a race. What she overheard was an act of cooperation. And she was asleep for a major act of inter-house cooperation. She’s sticking to her initial paradigm, in the exact way that she stuck to her initial paradigm with the 163 skeletons. And Gideon, with her ability to actually make nice with people from other houses, might be the only effective counter to this tendency.

Any good live read or re read blogs or twitter threads for the locked tomb series? Don’t have to be recent; just really enjoy hearing what others think as they read. I HAVE listened to all the podcasts I can find :-/

i cannot fucking wait to finish this book so i can read all those long ass analysis posts i keep scrolling past. this is phenomenally written. the 2nd person narration??? the complete lack of true introspection that this causes?? the false memories that will eventually come crashing down???? im losing my goddamn mind

i love seeing locked tomb livereads because some of yall are so smart and pick up on all the various hints throughout the text. i, on the other hand, didn’t realize his name wasn’t actually ORTUS the First until harrow pointed it out. 

Harrow the Ninth Live Read: Chapter 3-5

Been absolutely lost in the sauce playing Bloodborne lmao.

Chapter 3

Starting off with some cool lore about the Ninth House, and more on Harrow’s backstory. (I am wondering, though. What exactly precipitated the Resurrection? It sounds like a whole solar system worth of people suddenly died; why? How? Something’s fishy...)

And some cool lore about the Body... and her parent’s suicide... Mmm... (two nooses for their cavalier? How tf does that work??)

Oh. Poor Harrow. 

Okay, this kind of confirms what I was thinking last time. Harrow has redacted Gideon from her memory, and partially undone the Lyctor ritual. I’m... pretty sure this isn’t supernatural though. Maybe.

Chapter 4

Okay Harrow’s being murdered. Okay, no she’s not! That’s good.

Did Ianthe do something to her, to make her think she was being murdered? Or is this letter she’s pulling out a suicide note written by Harrow to herself...

Oh nope okay it’s... instructions Lyctor!Harrow wrote? Letter 2 of 24? Where’s the first letter??

“Her resurrection constitutes a fail state and must be avoided at all costs” Beg pardon? Lyctor!Harrow knew she was going to suppress her Lyctorhood, and wanted that? 

“This letter cannot answer questions.” Ah. Thank you, Lyctor!Harrow (As an aside, what’s the deal with Adjective!Name? I’ve seen it a bunch, and it’s usually in reference to AU’s or other states a character can be in, but I picked that up through osmosis, rather than seeing it actually defined anywhere...)

Guideline 1: Stay alive. Ok, with this so far.

Guideline 2: Don’t Go Back to the Ninth House. Ok, matches what the Emperor said. Either the Emperor repeated himself on why and was cool with it, or he’s in on the work, OR Lyctor!Harrow figured it out herself. Interesting.

Guideline 3: Keep the Sword. Huh. It seemed like Harrow was following this during her power-vomit/murder days, as Ianthe put it. The blood and ash treatment is interesting, and not the way you normally take care of a sword? I think?

Guideline 4: You’re Compromised. It occurs to me, I don’t think we’ve seen Harrow do any real necromancy yet. It sounds like she has the souped up power of being a Lyctor... but is she unable to do bone necromancy now? That would be a problem...

Guideline 5: You Owe Ianthe. The fuck is “Favor of the Chain”? The first google result is from a reddit thread about this book that i dare not look at, so. Probably not a common phrase I haven’t heard before. Still, very spooky. 

Guideline 6: Don’t Read the Other Letters. OOOOHHHH this explains the “so you’ve about to die” letter from the prologue!

Guideline 7: Check Out Ianthe’s Jaw. hwat. Just. There’s so many questions. What circumstances would lead to her jaw being replaced? Why would that be disastrous? How is she going to kill Ianthe if it has? OH she’s going to have to smooch her to make sure isnt she.

LMAO I knew it. Okay so the Favor of the Chain is probably just a fancy word for this fealty oath she made. Also, fuck! That’s quite the fealty oath! Okay never mind Harrow just said it’s not that big of a deal. My mistake.

Okay these letters are scary. Eyes changing color seems to be related to being a Lyctor; that’s basically explicitly stated with Ianthe’s deal. Why would Harrow’s eyes changing be such a big deal that it requires a letter to Camilla? Also, Camilla’s still AWOL, right? Also also, I just figured it out. Harrow’s eyes would be yellow, like Gideon’s, and even with her false memories she may know Ortus’s eyes weren’t yellow. 

There’s a joke to be made here somewhere about Master-Stranger Protocols...

So Ianthe seems to think Coronabeth is still alive. Is it just denial or is there something more here? It would tie into the letter to Camilla. 

Okay so she remembers Naberius. 

HEY WHAT THE FUCK. There’s... Mmm... There’s a lot to unpack with the end of this chapter. Ianthe stabbed her hand, then stabbed Harrow’s, and... there’s some questions I have about some of the adjectives used here. Anyway, the real take away here is that Harrow did cast Pin Missile, and the nails stuck in the wall were covered with boxes. By whom? and when? What?

Chapter 5

Another flashback, it looks like. That’s what the sheared Ninth House skull seems to indicate.

Okay, this is the scene of them arriving to Canaan House, from Harrow’s perspective, and with Ortus shoved in. Ortus wondering about the tragedy of living forever is interesting; is this something Harrow wonders about, deep down? 

I can think of one confident and wild fuck you the Ninth House possessed, Harrow.

“The eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me”

…Huh. Does this mean anything? Like, is this going to be relevant later on? 

Also, I just went back and read this scene in Gideon the Ninth. This doesn’t happen at all. It’s not just the scene from Harrow’s perspective, with Ortus shoved in. It’s all something Harrow made up. In fact, here Harrow said she sat on some Ninth House dirt, but in Gideon the Ninth, Gideon specifically says that she read about necromancers doing that in comics, but Harrow just read her prayer beads. 

This is weirder than I thought.

The following commentary on The Locked Tomb is definitely going to reek of the whole “getting a lot of Boss Baby” vibes from this, because I simply don’t read a lot of books anymore and a lot of the current big-on-tumblr SF/F wave flowed around me as water flows around an insensate rock. But one thing that I’m feeling as I get further and further into Gideon The Ninth is that this series has forcibly inserted a new wedge into the whateverpunk genre wheel by creating the thematically-cohesive and lovingly detailed Necropunk society; techonology and culture that are centered on necromancy, with aesthetics lifted from the Roman Catholic church and assorted flavors of Gothicisms, and a focus on self-sacrifice and/or sacrifice of the other as a core pillar of the social order. A niche that steampunk etc. have tried to colonize at times but never really completely absorbed without it feeling like a mashup with something else. It feels like something was finally codified here.

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 13

Gonna try and catch up on these.

Gideon is using increasingly possessive language used for Harrow- HER necromancer.

“I am just saying, you’d be dead.” More and more I understand the gestalt image of Harrow as the Kitten Who Thinks Of Nothing But Murder All Day. She’s a heap of bones and wet cloth held together with spite.

Big fan of the repeated use of "In a Bone”- “hiding in a bone”, “stuck in a bone”, “dying in a bone-” to describe the bone cocoon. This syntax smacks of Homestuck.

Okay. So Harrow was “just recuperating.” Here we see a reproduction of what Harrow did with her parents; sealing herself off from the world to try and recover, which is of course fruitless because you do it in a situation where you're starved for resources and there's nobody who even knows or cares something is wrong. Harrow rejects all solutions she doesn't execute singlehandedly; Gideon, meanwhile, snaps at opportunities as they emerge, even when offered by someone she hates; her brand of stubbornness only superficially resembles that of Harrow's because she was never given any real offer of assistance.

Finally Gideon starts flexing her leverage. This is good to see. Yell at your wet rat

Harrow is equally suspicious as I am of Dulcinea; she picked an interesting place to die! This, in turn, highlights something interesting about Gideon’s point of view; Gideon is cutting, but not consistently insightful. She’s very good at coming up with downright poetically mean and snarky things to say about the people and things around her; she can intuit the broad shape of the social dynamics, as shown in the chapter 12 intro- but she isn’t thinking critically about a lot of it. She’s routinely spending time with Dulcinea, and she hasn’t moved mentally beyond “she’s dying” to “why is she dying:” She hasn’t considered in the slightest the fundamental weirdness of sending a terminally ill person to complete a giant scavenger hunt. Gideon noticed and was put off by Canaan House’s dumpishness, but she didn’t parse it as a power play; instead, we overheard Naberius say that. Gideon noticed how incongruously constructed Canaan House is, but didn’t read much into it; Palamedes is the one whose bullshit detector actually went off.

The awful orange tone of human leather. Jesus fuck.

Alright, so they aren’t supposed to go through locked doors without permission. I didn’t remember the specifics of the wording on that one.

Harrow got ahead of the other houses because she has the force multiplier of skeletons; Palamedes has psychometry. The eighth house has... raw zealotry? There’s gotta be some necromantic element giving them a leg up. Here we get insight from Harrow about the other houses, insight absent from the narrative up till now because Harrow is, again, the protagonist of a very different story from that of Gideon's, with a very different set of known unknowns. All that buildup surrounding the sixth pair, and Harrow just kind of casually knows Palamedes by reputation. Also here we get a sense of who Harrow considers the functional competition- the Sixth, the Eighth, and possibly the Third. This makes sense; the Fourths are teenagers, the Second don’t actually seem interested in this, the Fifth were painted as pretty non-competitive in the dueling sequence, and the Seventh is.... actually, now that I think about it, Dulcinea is pretty heavily implied to be doing what Harrow is doing but with her Cavalier as her proxy instead of a skeleton army. Hmm. Harrow might not know this, having been AWOL the last week or so. And Gideon herself is not making that connection at the moment.

Harrow’s description of how she methodically swept the entire House for locked doors and then threw 163 skeletons into the bone grinder is yet another example of her being the protagonist completely different kind of book than Gideon. Harrow is the kind of prodigious protagonist who has incredibly in-depth understanding of the magic-system and to a lesser extent the setting politics; a strong insider of the sort whose "arc" often consists not of getting good, but of turning their incredible force of personality against the correct adversary, and whose minute-to-minute page-filling challenges consist of outsmarting hard-magic-system puzzles through cleverness and brute force. That whole "163 skeletons" thing, in a different kind of book, would be a triumphant sequence for Harrow where she tries everything she can think of until something finally works; but this is a story about how trying to do everything yourself fundamentally destroys you.

Brief aside- we get another mention of blood “skeletonizing,” which appears to involve rapidly drying it/ draining it of energy in the process; presumably this might allow for the rapid creation of occult diagrams, or that might be a mundane use compared to the mystical function of a quick powerup.

And Gideon puts the nail in the coffin; she found the door, she’s the only one of the two capable of standing upright, she’s successfully framed Harrow as being the weak link in their power projection to the other houses. Gideon is good at this kind of freight-train Laying Out Of Points when she’s given the opportunity; she hasn’t had cause or opportunity thus far in the book, but like any good swordswoman, when she sees an opening, she presses her advantage.

The sum of all necromantic transgression. That’s a fundamentally interesting concept to hear come out the mouth of a girl reading a book bound in human leather. Given what we've already seen of business-as-usual necromancy, what does the head of first house consider "transgression?"

Ten Thousand Million unfed ghosts. What do you feed ghosts? And why are there a billion ghosts? Someone was busy.

So Teacher is capable of specificity, if you hit upon the right questions. Florid specificity. Does he write his own lines? Is this his description of the situation down there, or did someone give him a script?

“Ghosts and you might die” is my middle name. Not far off- I haven’t really touched upon the bizarre circumstances of Gideon’s coming into the Ninth, but she was named by a manic ghost. (Does she, herself, know that? Did anyone tell her the profoundly bizarre circumstances by which she came to Drearbaugh, or is this something only the narrator knows?) 

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 16

This initial sequence is the first time that Gideon has demonstrated real awareness of Harrow’s internality; she identifies frustration, self hatred, “fury at herself rising like Bile.” One goddamn chapter ago, Gideon was incapable of assessing why an anal-retentive perfectionist from a dying house attending a cutthroat state dinner for the first time in her life might be feeling anxious. I think that this is a result of whatever freaky mind-meld they’re doing.

As a side note; “Necromancy,” as the singular overriding magic system, encompasses some stuff that’s not typically lumped in under Necromancy, such as possession and implicitly some degree of biokinesis. I wonder if it’s a cladistic failure, the necromantic applications of magic being discovered first and then swelling to include stuff you generally wouldn’t cram in under that paradigm.

Okay, upon cracking the mind-meld, we enter bossfight mode. Necromantic constructs apparently adhere to crit zone logic. I wonder if it HAS to be that way, or if it’s specific to this construct (which context quickly reveals is in fact part of the game.)

We get two detailed descriptions of Gideon taking out crit spots, then another prose implementation of a montage. In an animated version (the only appropriate way to adapt this) you’d get three or four lovingly detailed hits to a triumphant crescendo, before it devolved into a Samurai-Jack style multi-cam POV of Gideon slashing at the camera.

Okay, the monster drops a box. The box- rather pointlessly- is an electronic affair with a slow count-up to opening rather than something purely mechanical. It’s a Lootbox. This setup was engineered by someone with a strong understanding of co-op games.

Okay, Gideon shouldn’t have been able to see the energy signature; I assume that a door goes two ways, and that she’s getting visual input from Harrow. (Pacific Rim AU. I swear to God, Muir has a fuckin’ checklist)

The visuals on this keep emphasizing that overuse of necromancy leads to hemorrhaging, blood sweat, burst capillaries. Is the logical endpoint a meatsplosion? Will I get to see a necromancer explode? That would be neat. Not for them. Or for anyone standing next to them. 

Our first unabashed, barely-qualified compliment from Harrow. A firsthand experience of what it’s like to Gideon in a fight for her life; of what being a cavalier MEANS. And once again both parties play it down, in tried-and-true enemies to lovers fashion. Focusing in on the specifics of the downplay- which feel a lot like Harrow trying to remind herself of everyone's station- reminds me of a lingering question I’ve had- namely, is EVERYONE in the empire subordinated within a house, or are the houses JUST the ruling class, with a Helot type of underclass? Anyway, my theory that Harrow could have avoided a lot of hassle by just making Gideon feel welcome and wanted swells in its power. Reinforced by the subsequent line-

“It betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed with sheer collusion.” I really do want a full looney-toons type of story about the two of them constantly playing cat-and-mouse with each other for 17 years.

“She’d eaten a good meal. She’d won the game. The world seemed less maliciously unfriendly.” This is the last chapter in act 2. I am reading this on a computer blown up to 200 percent text size. I physically cannot see any words below the current paragraph. But I know that they are not good words.

Oh, hey! “Bronchial” passages. Like Lungs. I bet if I went back with a pen and started circling, I’d first off really fuck up my screen, but I think I’d also notice that there’s a very body-centric cast to the description of things due to the cultural implications of so much of everything being modeled off/made using human anatomy. Neat worldbuilding detail.

Magnus and Abigail died

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 12

Longest of these yet. In which we meet the sixth house, get even more of a sense of the shape of Gideon’s Harrow obsession, and analyse the incongruity of Canaan House as it relates to a certain suite of YA tropes.

We open with Teacher, the fucking comedian. The Tridentarius assessment was wrong; probing the priests produces zilch, The specifics of the trials, whatever they may be, remain unclear. Teacher, for reasons unknown but well-in-fitting with his would-be trickster archetype, fraternizes with the isolated weirdo.

Gideon’s rundown of the necros and cavs conspicuously leaves the sixth unaccounted for, bar their general absence; this feels important. Potentially they’ve gone the route Harrow did of sequestering themselves. Her commentary on the eighth provides some clarity; they’re second-to-last house before the Ninth, their aesthetic inverse, and apparently aggressively pious; there’s a religious schism at play. Very likely the eighth wants to assume the duties of the ninth, and given the ninth’s sorry state would have very good grounds to do so if it got out how badly things are going. Other points of note: The second house dyad seems to not want to be there. Earlier I speculated that at least one house was going to turn out to have sent someone primarily to keep up with the joneses; I suspected that it was Dulcinea, given how she seems like she’s about to keel over, but given that the second appears to lean more heavily into the conventional military side of things, it might be them.

Something of note is that Gideon isn’t disdaining the idea of breaking down barriers and making friends; when she alludes to the tried-and-true pillar of the John-Hughes industrial complex, it’s in the context of feeling unhappy that it hasn’t happened yet. Once again she’s offloading her failure to fit in onto Harrow’s “Ambience;” without really taking into account the whole, “never talking or expressing yourself” thing that she’s stuck to like glue thus far. You can argue that that’s also downstream of Harrow but Harrow, again, isn’t around to enforce anything she told Gideon to do, and hasn’t been for several chapters; I get the impression there’s a form of learned helplessness going on. 

Interesting progression of Gideon’s relationship with Dulcinea. Hard to gauge the degree to which Gideon MINDS Dulcinea’s (expressly) master-servant interpretation of their (friend?)ship. Does Gideon mind less when the desire for service is explicit? When the requests are clear and specific? How much of the dysfunction with Harrow is that Harrow has no carrot behind the stick, never actually asked for anything and just impeded Gideon?

So Gideon wanted to do war crimes in exchange for a Big Ti- I’m not typing the rest of that out. But I think I called the flower wars thing! They kill people for thanergy.

This highlights something I’ve found extremely interesting about Gideon’s character; she’s essentially a protagonized Legate Lanius. Her goal and aspiration was to become one of the frontline hapless shitsacks that I hunt for sport whenever I boot up Fallout: New Vegas out of nostalgia. Everything we’ve seen of her childhood in the Ninth, and the myriad of ways that this fucked her up- this would be information thrown in near the bottom of an optional dialogue tree, a brief concession to the material causes that create evil people, before the player goes right back to coming up with the most over-the-top possible method of killing this faceless, unnegotiable final boss. And the fact that it’s Gideon- funny, likeable Gideon- being the one to narrate this, with no attempts to justify or rationalize it, no pause indicating that she feels a need to, is a fantastic signifier that a moral lens is absolutely the wrong frame with which to judge this story and these characters. Everyone in Canaan house is some flavor of bastard, maniac or dupe; that that’s price of admission. All that’s left is to watch them bounce off each other, to follow the horrible inexorable logic driving their characters. You are not invited here to Pass Judgement on their horrific ideals or moral behaviors; you are here to Bear Witness and hope they muddle through the Situation (capital intended) that they are about to be in. I like this.

Oh yeah. Immediate follow-up section of the fantasy. Gideon wants what she’s doing to MATTER to Harrow. Hers is not a fantasy in which Harrow is dead or deposed. Hers is a fantasy in which Harrow is comfortably in charge of things and receiving letters about Gideon’s exemplary success.

Interesting exposition on how only a select amount of Canaan House is accessible by default. A very specific section. This is a challenge.

And now Harrow is missing. Here we ought to note that Gideon only notices this because of how heavily she’s scrutinizing Harrow’s comings and goings, that she can notice no minute changes in Harrow’s bedsheets.

If “Harrow were the type (to run away) Gideon’s childhood would have been a hell of a lot smoother.” Okay. This is Interesting. Did Gideon think about cutting Harrow in on an escape plan at one point? If she tried 86 times, she must have thought to try this once. The incentives are there, for someone in Harrow’s position. I wonder if she got as far as voicing this idea to Harrow. I sense an AU point of divergence.

Big fan of the “their subsequent marriage” gag. I don’t remember if I’ve harped on this yet, but Gideon is a silent protagonist from the perspective of everyone in the story bar her own. To the extent that it is Gideon narrating, all of the commentary is for her own benefit. it’s just how she thinks. (I’m not sure if this is third person limited or not, there’s been a few spots where it felt like someone commenting on Gideon rather than Gideon’s internal monologue.) 

A brief detail in the prose search montage (which is very easy to visualize as a filmed sequence); the skeletons are cleaning the pool- the pool specifically, out of the entire massive complex- and neither Magnus or Jeanmary seem to understand why. But the space has been getting progressively less shitty over the last few chapters. How long is that door Gideon found going to go unremarked upon?

Once again, this focus on Gideon’s frustration at Harrow not THANKING Gideon. The written version of an old chestnut visual gag, wherein she  “gives up” and then immediately resumes the search in the next paragraph. The default behavior is to search.

So Gideon finds her way into a lobby space, accessible through an extremely unintuitive path. Even when this space was in use, this would have been a very roundabout way to get to what’s being framed as a very officious space, in comparison to the very residential space of the main living space. I’m a little unclear of the topography here, but I think Gideon is out of bounds.

Here we meet the Sixth House duo.  Ignore what I said above about everyone at Canaan house being dupes, maniacs or bastards; Palamedes and Camilla are the protagonists of a very different kind of YA story than Gideon. We’re looking at Holmes and Watson. Artemis and Butler. One of the meaner Doctors and more militant companions. Encyclopedia Brown and the girl he kept on hand to beat up his enemies (Am I remembering that detail right, that he had some muscle on hand at all times? Anyway. These are the kind of protagonists who start out within the system but then reason their way out from under their conditioning due to their Commitment To Higher Principles Like Truth, thus bringing the entire system crashing down. Inside the first few lines- “there’s a wrong thing here.” “Anything can lie.”

And, to scrutinize what he’s saying a little more- Canaan house is weird. The lack of rhyme and reason in the architecture is reflected in the age of the building- not even room by room, but down to the individual materials within one room. The oldest successful psychometric reading is 9000 years old; but if I recall correctly, this is after people supposedly stopped using Canaan house for anything. Both of Palamedes’s theories ring true; it’s possible that the building was fished out the garbage heap, or that it is lying on a molecular level. I’ve got a theory about what’s going on here, which I’ll get into at the end of this.

Camilla is the first woman Gideon gets the opportunity to fight. She’s attracted to Dulcinea- oh my god, the Dulcinea effect, Don Quixote, how did I not notice this earlier. She’s attracted to Coronabeth because Coronabeth is incredibly hot. Camilla, she seems to be attracted to on the basis of their mutual kickassery. The Canaan house dating sim has revealed its fourth candidate.

This is the second time we see a Necromancer in combat, after Harrow at the drill shaft. Palamedes’s stunt with the fuck-you-and-the-meat-you-walked-in-on kill field tells us three things. It gives us context for what a top-tier necromancer from another house looks like in a fight. It gives us context for how powerful Harrow is in comparison to everyone else- Palamedes is only sweating a little blood. And it gives us a sense of why Cavaliers are necessary; Palamedes couldn’t have executed this without Camilla keeping Gideon pinned down. As he says in a few lines- if he’d tried this solo, he’d probably be dead, and he couldn’t keep doing this in a protracted fight.

“Policy Wonks on the Sixth,“ huh. I’ve been wondering what the governance looks like in the rest of the Empire.

Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.” I love this book. I feel inspired to draw this scene specifically.

Gideon hears that Harrow may have maybe lost some blood and into mom-lifting-a-minivan overdrive she goes. In this sequence we learn that Palamedes is a man with an extremely strong understanding of Necromancy and that Harrow is panicked enough that she works right past everything he’s saying. This is an example of a situation where the narration diverges from what Gideon is actually aware of; We the audience get some juicy tidbits about the ins and outs of necromancy, and we get a description of how much of it Gideon retained, but this is implicitly being reported by a third party.

This is the first time Gideon has spoken in like 6 chapters; she speaks to a pair of individuals utterly unconcerned with addressing the discrepancy, instead focusing on the task at hand. I like the looks of these guys.

Everyone was issued a key ring and told not to open any locked doors. Well. It’s not a locked door if you unlock it first, and then open it.

It’s never a good sign when a lab is soundproofed.

So Harrow is in a Bone Cocoon. Gideon says she can take it from here; Palamedes pointedly (and rightly!) ignores her and runs a medical test on Harrow to make sure she isn’t about to die. Here we get an interesting split between “Curative Science” and Necromancy; presumably, there’s some stuff in this setting that necromancy can’t obviate the way it did robotics, and it makes sense that “making people healthy” is one of those things. (as opposed to “keeping them alive-” Hi, Dulcinea!)

Her fantasies where she.... dumps Harrow off the landing pad. Yes, Gideon. This is what you want to internalize the sensation of lifting Harrow up for.

Probably worth noting that the exact manner in which the bone cocoon collapsed was of interest to Palamedes; Gideon derides him for whipping out a ruler, but Palamedes has been pretty firmly established as a guy who Knows His Shit (tm). Anything of minute interest to him is probably worth remembering.

The last line- “I thought that would wake her up-” really cements my read on Palamedes as a little shit but also a fundamentally good person, which Camilla shores up with the “He did this for free” line; her loyalty to him seems earned. These seem like people who help people; they belong in another, happier series, where they walk the earth as private investigators, righting wrongs. It also shows that he’s self-aware enough in his little-shittery to simultaneously work over all of the egos at play, while still indulging his little-shit instincts.

So anyway. Here’s a thought I had, have, and will continue to have, which started around chapter 8 but, with the tomfoolery of chapter 12, is now basically cemented; I think that Canaan House is heavily, heavily in conversation with, and providing criticism of, the worldbuilding of Harry Potter. You’ve got the Houses, politicking and jockeying- except there’s an in-built artificiality, religiosity and militarism to it that makes it parse as rancid immediately rather than on reflection as an adult. You’ve got the kooky, wise-but-elderly mentor who clearly knows more than he’s letting on, who pays special attention to the outcast- except, as I brought up in chapter 8, he’s doing this from such a clear position of incredible institutional power that the Dumbledore routine is impossible to take seriously, because he’s a face of whimsy plastered over something bad. You have the massive, nonsensical academy, simultaneously labyrinthine and homey- except that Gideon the Ninth is holding the premise of a space like Hogwarts to the fire. It feels too big for the student body because it is, there’s only about 20 people on the whole planet, and upkeep is obviously prohibitive, and people are offput and unnerved by the space, they ask the questions akin to asking about why Hogwarts was built with so many moving staircases and hazardous flora. Out of universe, Hogwarts, and the whole wizarding world, is a thinly-conceived nonsensical playground, painted with a veneer of deep history but really meant as a vehicle for the core cast to get up to whacky, unsanctioned misadventures, all of which are, within the universe, not supposed to be happening. I think the exact same thing is happening in Canaan House, but it’s diegetic. I think that the whole space was engineered from the ground up, relatively recently, by people who’ve read YA, for the express purpose of providing a sandbox in which stuff like Gideon’s excursion with the sixies can happen as the candidates grope towards Lyctorhood. This has the energy of an unsanctioned sortie but it’s clearly along the lines of what they were eventually intended to do, given the keys. There is so much artifice, to all of this- and we have enough context about this society to know that it’s a sinister artifice. The light at the end of this carefully constructed tunnel is almost certainly an oncoming train. 

Gideon the Ninth Liveread: Chapter 10

Harrow is still missing in action. Noted casually, because Gideon doesn't care per se, but this is absolutely a length of seperation that would be setting off alarm bells within any other necro/cavalier pair; for all her complaints about Gideon not being able to maintain the charade, Harrow's lack of regard for Gideon strikes me as the fundamentally weak link in their plan, most likely papered over only by the fact that the other houses have no frame of reference for how the Ninth conducts it's operations. Also, I’ve had the thought that the other houses might not care; the whole "fake cavalier" thing seems tailored to the scrutiny of a social environment much more heavily populated. Harrow was gearing up for some real court intrigue, but Harrow and Gideon are marooned with just 16 named characters, all of whom have their own shit going on.

Funny aside; Gideon doesn't know what Fish are.

More details on skeleton mechanics. Harrow's specific skill at boneology (and that line I've seen floating around, "we do bones, motherfucker" is shoring up my growing belief that each of the houses has a Hunger-games-like arbitrary speciation in their flesh magics; it's a sign of great skill when you can get skeletons up and running without the assistance of connective tissues or any other fleshy bits. This is potentially a cultural engineering thing- an attempt to delineate between living slave-and-indentured-servant castes and pure robotic servitors. An attempt to head-off the exact bullshit Harrow is pulling with her parents, in other words.

Trying to guess which house this new antagonistic house is. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh and ninth are accounted for; this is either sixth or eighth. I get the sense that the necro may have artificially arrested their aging somehow, and with it possibly their emotional maturity/brain development? It would explain at least in part their Cav's disgruntlement. Or maybe the fact that the Cav has actually clearly seen a ton of use as a meat shield while the Necro is in silk and chain-mail too thin to fulfill its function. Actually, this looks like the only pairing thus far that’s seen real action. Most of the rest are kids, or Magnus, who does not, you know. Have the vibe of a guy who’s experienced true horror.

Gideon's reaction to the necro's thousand-yard stare is telling; her recollection of Crux, of Sister Lachrimorta, of the Reverend Parents, all emphasize this need to be wanted; to be of use; Crux's version is painful because it conveys disappointment, the Reverend Parents because they convey fear. And as she leaves the dining hall, her response to the Lyctor Trials is that she feels "suckered;" she isn't wanted here, she isn't useful here.

"The Stinging Slap in the face that she didn't even have Harrow." Okay, here we get a sign that Gideon views Harrow as a comforting absolute even if she nominally hates her. I've been wondering more than a little what the hell the grounds for a turnaround in their relationship were going to be; here we get a single inch of concession. (Also, open call to the peanut gallery- what does/did the insufferable discourse surrounding this relationship look like? Abuse apologia? Power Dynamics? This whole series feels like a hotbed of Facewearer discourse.)

Okay, my Bonesaw assessment of Dulcinea swells in its hold on my mind. She wanted in on Gideon's personal brand of suffering because it seemed like a romantic way to die, and lost interest because of the aesthetic mismatch. I'm inclined to say that this is callous towards Gideon's situation but given Dulcinea's state it feels like a grass-is-greener situation more than anything truly appropriative.

So the seventh house deals with... reversing aging? Arresting the spread of disease? Or the progression? This is mentioned to be a hereditary issue, so perhaps their brand of necromancy was influenced by 10,000 years of trying to counter what’s happening to Dulcinea. And, as a point of comparison, I can imagine that both Ninth and First House’s skill with bone automatons developed downstream of their chronic manpower problems.

Dulcinea twigged to the sword discrepancy. This makes sense; Her Cav is proportioned like a super mutant and seems unlikely to have exclusively trained with toothpick rapiers. I’m not sure if Dulcinea is the only necro who's capable of noticing this discrepancy at a glance- there are other fairly militaristic houses present- but she’s certainly the only one paying enough attention to Gideon specifically to notice.

Okay, Protesilaus is back. He reports that something is shut. What’s shut? Dulcinea sits and looks harmless, and she can afford to because she’s got her Cav off executing her plans for her, whatever they are.

So, final roundup! I sense a love interest. Noting, belatedly, that the very first thing Dulcinea does is give Gideon an opportunity to be helpful; and through this whole sequence it becomes clear that Gideon just kinda... does stuff if people ask nicely and make her, specifically, feel wanted and useful. She gets chased out of the dining hall, painted as a wrong and intrusive Thing, and moments later falls head-over-heels for the first person who makes her feel actively desired, even just for rote manual labor. Dulcinea’s appraisals of Gideon have this real.... charge, a suspicious charge, I felt like I was watching a spider wrapping up a fly with every request Gideon granted- and there’s a level on which it’s very sad, because a person less starved for affection would find being approached like this off-putting. Dulcinea is rotating her like a specimen! But to Gideon it’s a fantastic experience for reasons she doesn’t even have the vocabulary to articulate. I can’t picture her instinct being to confess everything at the slightest provocation to anyone else on this rock. 

Notably, however, I never have to hurriedly scroll past any posts about Gideon and Dulcinea being cute together- and unusually for this series, I have no idea why that is. This is one of the few elements of this story I’m experiencing completely blind, and I’m extremely excited to learn whatever fucked up circumstances lead to Harrow pulling ahead of Dulcinea as the intuitive romantic lead.

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 9

I like the subtle gag of capitalizing “Gideon’s First morning.” 

The bathroom sequence is an old standby- “fish-out-of-water-from-a-spartan-culture-explores-an-upper-mediocre-living-space” and paints an interesting picture of Gideon’s knowledgebase and ingrained Taboos. She knows what a Sink is from comic books but not what a bathtub is. She knows that soap made from human fat is an off-putting thing to wash oneself with, and uses the sonic in light of that, but at the same time grew up in an environment where all soap was human fat and thus there was no local taboo for her to pick up. Strongly suspect she’s never used soap before, just to spite the nuns; it’s also possible that she knows soap generally isn’t made from human fat (again via her comic books) but suspects that First House soap specifically might be, given their parallels to the religiosity of the Ninth House; This seems unlikely, given the lack of available humans, but it’s also unclear where they’re getting their supplies from, so, uh. Who knows. Anway this has been your daily three hundred word tangent about human fat soap.

Gideon’s complaint about Harrow upon finding the ring gone implies a previous track record of Harrow taking Gideon’s things; It keeps coming back to the fact that their Rivalry growing up was comically intimate and petty for how spiteful it was. Harrow knowing enough to cut Gideon’s attempted loophole abuse off at the knees also attests to this.

The general disrepair of Canaan House is interesting; they did the bare-minimum necessary to get it functional for the presence of some of the best and brightest of the empire, and while the house is obviously too big to keep in full repair on a skeleton crew, they had some lead time to get some contractors in, for the quarters at least! The general decay of the situation feels like a flex; “you; treasured scions of the great houses, are not special enough to merit anything but birdnets over the holes.”

Here we get a confirmation of my earlier assessment that Skeletons have essentially taken the niche of robotics technology in this setting; the skills involved in making a skeleton are described in similar terms to coding and precision engineering. This stand-in for robotics technology is notably not a one-to-one thing that could be swapped out for actual robots, or clones, or a similar servile construct race; the one-to-one necessity of human death to provide energy and materials for each skeleton integrates the technology directly into the story’s themes. 

Alright, enter Magnus. The way that Gideon juxtaposes Magnus with the horrible teenagers of the fourth (and I love their affect, incidentally, I used to do something similar to my roommate all the time when I wanted to bother him) is interesting. The first descriptor is “Wholesome.” My knee-jerk reaction is that Gideon is casting about for a parental figure of some sort and he’s the first candidate she’s really encountered; I find him mildly endearing if a bit overbearing. There is a Specific Bit that he’s leaning into, the same basic bit that semi-parodic characters like Sir Hammerlock from Borderlands are leaning into. Polite-to-a-fault pseudo-British Gentleman adventurer, except probably less divorced from the imperialist connotations.  We’ll see how things go with him.

Gideon’s description of Canaan House- deceptively lateral in its layout, with no obvious path to the upper lower sections, but still deeply confusing- is interesting, because this clearly was a house at one point. What was it like when this place was in use by humans? How many humans was it in use by? Was it a Winchester-house situation where the handful of people using it thought it would be funny to make it impossibly complicated?

Gideon’s earlier lack of recognition of plumbing-like, as a concept- are reiterated here; she doesn’t understand the function of the pool, constantly calling it a “Pit,” incapable of understanding why there would be ladders leading down into it- but she does immediately recognize the rest of the space as a gymnasium, which tells you a lot about her priorities. I get a lot of chatter on this site about the “Pool Scene,” and you know what, I actually really heavily doubt that this scene was that.

Oh, she can’t swim, can she? She’s on an ocean planet, A Pool has very pointedly been presented as a place of narrative importance, and she grew up on a bone-dry rock. She can’t swim. 

Alright, this door will be relevant later. And I’m not just saying that because I’m perpetually six chapters ahead in the book of the chapter I’m writing these about, expanding on my initial notes as I go. It’s a big black door with an exquisitely-described skull that only Gideon knows about.

Alright, enter the thirdlings. First real in-depth examination of them.

Naberius is interesting because he’s hitting on basically all the observations I’ve hit upon about the mind games being played at Canaan house- the deliberately-squalid conditions, the funny little mentor man, the shuttles being pushed off the platform- except he’s approaching the matter from the perspective of these mind games’s target audience, that is to say, someone extremely entitled who views these things an affront to someone of his standing rather than, say, as a gigantic red fucking flag that they’re all about to be killed. He’s talking about writing to the heir’s fathers about it.  Now, Naberius is implicitly a badass because he’s the cavalier from a House that’s got it’s shit together, so this might account for the discrepancy, but this is still pretty unique; it’s like if the fodder children in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory exhibited suspicion of Wonka’s set-up as a test of character intended to thin them out but plowed ahead with the offending behaviors anyway. He knows what kind of story he’s in but hasn’t internalized it.

I can’t tell which twin is which in the “second voice and third voice” sequence, but I can tell which twin Gideon is very, very into. The takeaway here is that Ianthe is the booky one, Coronabeth is the golden child, and....

oh god. That took a turn. Coronabeth treats Naberius like a dog, and the narration uses that imagery. Ostensibly she does this on the behalf of her sister- the golden child standing up for the maligned lesser twin- but look me in the eye and tell me that this isn’t coming from a place of royalty-inculcated sadism. And then Ianthe, despite being the offended party in theory, despite being the more abrasive of the two by far, is the one to get Coronabeth to simmer down; not on any moral grounds but because she’s wasting time. And then Coronabeth starts being chummy with Naberius (Babs!) again like nothing happened. It’s been implied to me that Ianthe is the evil one in the dynamic? (and what is the dynamic, exactly? Three or four different reads on this sequence. They’re siblings. They’re a preppy clique. They’re... a third secret thing.)

And in the end, Ianthe is the one to hang back and deliver a cryptic warning to Gideon. “I would not attract attention from the necromancer of the third house.” And this could be in reference to her sister (who Ianthe appears to be the leash-holder for) and thus a warning, or it could be in reference to herself, and thus a threat, because Gideon already has attracted her attention. That’s what’s happening right this second. Yeah, no wonder Naberius went right to mind games. That’s just his lived experience with these two.

As a last note, the recurring theme with these three is that of boundries, and pushing them; they were introduced as arriving late, they brought one more person than they were expected to, their conversation was intensely mutually antagonistic but in a reasonable way until Naberius inadvertently crossed an unspoken line; Coronabeth’s response, in turn, is clearly influenced by the need to toe some line Ianthe has set; and as they leave, Ianthe takes time to communicate that Gideon is on the path to transgression but doesn’t yet merit corrective action. 

It’s actually a little reminiscent of Gideon’s own situation on the ninth- a upbringing defined by an endless state of rebellion that was still on some level coloring within the lines; the lines in question just being really, really weird. Gideon’s no stranger to fucked-up “what-exactly-is-the-nature-of-this-relationship” relationships, either!

As a last note, “Coronabeth” is an outrageously funny name to me. Part “Corona,” Part “Annabeth.” Faintly portmanteau-ish. Almost reminds me of. It reminds me of. You know what webcomic this reminds me of by now

Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 17

Alright, I’m done procrastinating on this. Before I start, some brief metacommentary on the skull mascots for each of the houses, which I only recently bothered to scrutinize;

First House skull is very big.

Second House Skull has a centurion's helmet.

Third House has jewels in the eyes;

Fourth has laurels- that was a military thing in ancient Rome, right?

Fifth has some kind of wavy crown thing. I bothered to check this in the first place because I thought it was going to be flat-out removed from the section header as an evolving credits thing.

Sixth has scrolls between the teeth; no surprise, they eat lots of books as children

Seventh has a rose jutting out the eye sockets (Hakahani disease AU!)

Eighth is blindfolded;

Ninth has absolutely nothing. Less, even. No lower jaw.

Okay, onto CSI: Canaan House:

"In the early hours of the morning, even Palamedes admitted defeat." EVEN Palamedes. Delightfully concise phrasing. This establishes from the start that we’re in the midst of the first group study session this rock has seen. It reinforces that Palamedes is first among equals in his headstrong sherlockishness. He could be the protagonist of this. You could rewrite this to do that.

“The early hunger of ghosts.” So ghosts are vampiric. Are vampires Vampiric? Are there vampires? Can Vampires be made to be, using necromancy?

Christ. The Fourthlings. This is another example of something that was funny until it wasn't funny. They had, like, a bit going with the Fifth, a back-and-fourth; their dialogue was almost exclusively rendered a punchline. Now they're voiceless on an entirely different axis. Shoo out the clowns. Rosencratz and whatshisface.

Taking note here that Gideon is capable of identifying what she refers to as the “minute” signs of Harrow’s exhaustion. She’s paid that much attention to her mannerisms in the past, despite their ostensible enemyhood. This book does such interesting things conveying the depths of their familiarity with each other while also being a story about how they barely know each other.

There is no way it's an accident that Coronabeth and Ianthe didn't bother to dress. Only solace of the night indeed. This is a power play. On the opposite side of the spectrum we have the “painfully useful” Sixth. See, when Palamedes shows up to work in his PJs, that's the opposite of a mind game. That's a mark of sincerity.

He apologizes to Abigail as he steps over the body. Jesus.

Palamedes gives his bedrobe to Dulcinea. Those two had a thing. They were the protagonists of a John Green type novel some time before the start of this book.

Palamedes and Harrow, once both cognizant and faced with a problem, are on the same wavelength. There was, somewhere out there, a place where Harrow would have fit in immaculately.

What should I read into Camilla’s overprotectiveness of Palamedes? Gideon’s narration makes her hovering sound unwarranted, but Gideon’s narration also set us up to think that Ortus was much more of a wet blanket than he wound up being. She’s not the greatest at assessing the personal circumstances underlying idiosycratic behaviors. Is Sixth House the terminal exaggeration of “Publish or Perish?” 

Not to harp too hard on this scene, but "Gideon had to stare pretty hard at skimpy nighties to get over that one." Best way to cap off the reveal of how Third House necromancy works; also a pretty good explanation of why they go out of their way to keep up appearances otherwise. This is not a faction that could get away with being both cannibalistic AND ugly; they've browsed Tumblr. They know that as long as you're alluring you can eat a few fingers. As a treat.

Dulcinea's not allowed to get involved in the investigation. The Seventh sent a Necromancer who isn’t allowed to get involved in hardcore necromantic exertions? Something weird is going on.

And NOW the Eighth House show up, having taken the time that nobody else did to get fully kitted out. And they specialize in spirit magic.

Silas is a soul siphoner. And Harrow knows this- despite someone else’s exclamation in this sequence indicating that soul siphoning isn’t a widely known technique. Know your enemy.

Oh my god. That's why his Nephew looks older than him, isn't it?

Silas was probably expecting this to be a big-damn-heroes fix; instead he (predictably) nearly kills Dulcinea and finally causes someone to throw a punch, tensions being what they are. Making a note here that Colum seems to not give a shit that his Uncle has been laid out and held at swordpoint; a direct side effect of the siphon, or an indirect one in the sense that he's not gonna lift a finger to help his charge if not expressly ordered? Like Artemis Fowl if Butler thought his charge was a little shit and kept trying to rules-lawyer a permissible way to let him die.

A schoolyard fight broken up only by the arrival of Teacher, who is, for the first time, AFRAID. And demonstrating a coherent and involved necromantic knowledge; nobody was supposed to be allowed to die in this section of the facility, because something very, very bad happens if you leave a dead body down there. He's giving actual, actionable suggestions. He is telling people that they are wrong. Absolutely wrong. Everything is absolutely wrong.

Gideon The Ninth Liveread: Chapter 7

My kneejerk reaction to the description of First House from orbit is that we’re looking at a flooded Earth with the tops of the skyscrapers visible. This is the house of the first, but apparently, He (The Emperor) doesn’t or can’t live there. I’m curious to find out why.

So aviator sunglasses exist in this setting. ANCIENT aviator sunglasses. Totally levelling here, it's close to impossible to exist on Tumblr and not know that the setting of the Locked Tomb is the future of a contemporary Earth; but without additional context I assumed that Aviator sunglasses of the kind Gideon wears on the cover were a pre-apocalypse cultural import by an Emperor who’d lived through the whole thing. Something people were still actively making and manufacturing in line with his sensibilities. But these are ANCIENT aviator sunglasses. So now I'm kind of left wondering what fashion looks like in non-bone-cultist areas of this empire.

We get to the description of Canaan House. A Beautiful corpse indeed. I can relate to Gideon’s assessment; giant fuck-off ruins are the best, and all contemporary megastructures should be built with an eye to how cool they’ll be for our far-off future descendants to explore following several hundred years of decay. If this IS some variant of Earth (I know it is, but for sake of argument) this is a variant of earth that's implicitly undergone TWO collapses-first the big fuck-off flood, then some time passes in which you get this superstructure built in conversation with the new sea level, and then THAT gets left to rot too. If I had a compensator (I call skyscrapers compensators) this size, I wouldn't leave it to rot on a whim. Something bad happened here. But not something so bad that it physically destroyed the structure, which is interesting. They still use this for things; they just don’t live here.

Teacher is interesting; a parallel in personality and demeanor to the religious weirdos of the Ninth, except he’s adjacent to actual efficacious power in a way that makes him sound like he knows what he’s talking about instead of like an overzealous maniac; the kind of mad preacher you scrutinize the gibberish of because context indicates that he might also know spells. Reflected in his physical description; zealous, but in incredible health for his advanced age, in pristine and ostentatious clothing. The other end of the outcome scale, when it comes to committing to this faith.

The Vriska has landed. Given an initial burst of characterization via the third house’s tardiness. This our first look at what a Cavalier is supposed to look like (Kind of a dick, according to Gideon) but it’s balanced out by the fact there clearly aren’t supposed to be two necromancers. Interested to see where they’re going with this one. (Also! I wonder when she gets the skeleton arm? I know her name is Ianthe, she’s an asshole and she has a skeleton arm.)

Dulcinea is interesting. And from this Dulcinea sequence we learn multitudes upon multitudes;

First, Dulcinea herself. Fascinating character. She’s clearly at Death's door, she apparently should have been dead a while ago, and yet she was sent to learn how to be a Lyctor; is she the most qualified necromancer available to seventh house, or is her presence a last ditch attempt to give her an escape hatch from her death? Her very casual approach to her condition is inculcated and practiced, not the behavior of someone desperate for an eleventh-hour cure; a live-fast-meet-nuns-die-young approach, then? Still, it’s odd to respond to an imperial summons with a person who might not survive through the entirety of the training; Teacher himself is alarmed at her state. So I see four options: either everyone available to Seventh House is this far along in the progression of their illness and they’re pulling a Ninth-style con, Dulcinea’s presence is token without expectation she’ll make it through the whole thing, They’re heavily banking on Protesilaus to do the legwork for her, or- most likely- she’s got some card yet to be played.

Also- it would be funny if this were a flock-of-wolves situation, with every single house pulling some kind of con to cover for a massive internal deficiency of some sort.

Also also- maybe an odd connection, but she gives me Bonesaw vibes. The affectation. The strange view of beauty. Not sure how strong of a parallel this is. We’ll see.

I THINK this is the first explicit indication that Lyctorhood involves immortality rather than just being a rank-up in the hierarchy; I was inclined to say that it was interesting that Gideon is sufficiently casually aware of the apotheosis offered by Lyctorhood that she can mentally snark about Dulcinea being doomed while Harrowhawk will live forever, given the fact that she's as low in the hierarchy as it is physically possible to be. Either Lyctors are so mythic in their scope that even Gideon has heard of them, or else they had to tell her if she didn't already know in order to make the con work. The con which, incidentally, seems to have been adjusted on the fly to accommodate for the fact that Teacher knew Ortis was supposed to be the cavalier. I guess now the Con is that Ninth House sufficiently has their shit together to actually have already had a backup cavalier. Regardless, Harrow’s infosec isn’t as good as she thought it was. Teacher knows stuff.

Dulcinea's reaction to the presence of the ninth as a live-fast-die-young-affirming experience indicates that, beyond their own borders, The Ninth are perceived to be a BIG DEAL. Harrow- who is, again, a teenager with a chip on her shoulder- is dead-set against the Ninth House becoming appended to one of the bigger ones, but I'm starting to get the impression that from the Imperial perspective, the work done by the Ninth, whatever it is, is ABSOLUTELY important enough that that restructuring should have happened by now. Harrow's decision to Weekend-at-Bernies her parents was made when she was a grieving 10 year old, with all the forward-thinkingness that implies, and I'm getting the suspicion that our act one sitcom clown show might constitute a really deeply serious ongoing security breach; I was thinking of this in terms of teens fucking around at an outpost monastery that's atrophied, and thus the parent thing being a molehill mountain that nobody with perspective would care that much about; but it seems like it might at least in part be the other way around, the fucking-around CAUSING the atrophying. Which could potentially put Harrow in deep, deep shit.

But the big thing, the insight into Gideon I’m taking away from this, is that she fucking JUMPED at the opportunity to save a princess she’d know for half a second. Vaulted in with no hesitation. She’s got fundamentally heroic, romantic sensibilities in a context where they were of precisely no use to her, like a fish that’s really good at climbing trees but never has cause to find that out. She could be so, so good, in the most juvenile, Saturday-morning-cartoon implementation of the concept, if she wasn’t surrounded exclusively by people she hated; She springs into action to save the very first non-ninth person she sees in trouble. She’s neat!

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 11

We are now on Day three at Canaan house. This work does interesting things with time. Sometimes you get a chapter like chapter 6 that’s basically the equivalent of a training montage taking place over months; sometimes you get a three or four chapter run covering like an hour; here you get a chapter that officially begins to stretch out and volumize the total amount of time that the cast have canonically spent at Canaan house without much happening. I’m harping on this because of my ongoing conspiracy theory that this was a book written to maximize opportunities for fandom engagement; around the ring distribution scene in chapter 8, when I realized that this was like a very weird boarding school plot, I developed the theory that Muir was going to do some time jumps, leaving broad holes in the timeline where canon-adjacent stuff can be crammed in. This isn’t as drastic as what I was thinking of, but it fills a similar role; the rest of this chapter shows that while Gideon was sequestering herself, the tertiary cast spent two days getting at least somewhat acquainted with each other. 

Also; as much as Gideon is ragging on Harrow for her chronic truancy (and I’ve read a couple of chapters ahead so I know her complaints are grounded) Gideon is, from the perspective of everyone else at Canaan house, exactly as opaque and inaccessible as Harrow.

“It was in this abandoned state....“ Okay, Gideon, as much as I ragged on Dulcinea for objectifying you in the last chapter, I assess your current state as more than slightly self-inflicted. Dulcinea wants you around. Harrow- the main functional constraint on your behavior, or at least the one you blame everything on- has no leverage here because she isn’t around. This whole dueling sequence indicates your ability to carve out a niche fairly easily. And really, you aren’t adequately questioning the idea that sticking like glue to Harrow’s charade is the only way out of your situation on the ninth. You could cheat! There are people around who might help you cheat! To the degree that you’re abandoned and without prospects, it’s because you’re hiding away! 

....As I write from my lightless bedroom. Hmm.

Okay, enter Coronabeth. Alright. Listen. Somebody must have at least floated the idea of a Canaan-house dating sim, right? I can’t be the only one whose mind went here at this point, with the knuckle-kissing.

Jokes aside, I get the impression that Gideon is astoundingly attracted to Coronabeth and extremely susceptible to her charisma, but it’s unclear to me if she actually likes Coronabeth. The descriptor “an expression like an artillery shell mid-flight” indicates a level of discomfort; Gideon feels less in love and more ensnared, off-balance, following Coronabeth because she succumbed to Coronabeth. Coronabeth is in general treated by the narration of having a gravity that makes everyone defer to her like this.

I’ve decided that I like Magnus, at least in part because Gideon clearly does. This sequence is full of a lot of little signifiers that he’s actually a decent guy; he’s the only person in the room actively friendly to Gideon when she walks in, he’s fiercely but deftly protective of the fourthlings when Naberius is being a dick, he’s humble, he’s a wife-guy, he’s a fun-uncle, he cracks puns and immediately endears himself to Gideon by doing so. I think I called the Hammerlock thing; he’s like the empty, goofy, sanitized signifier of Empire, the fun aesthetic parts, the nobility and sportsmanship, but at a distance from any of the genocidal sausage that goes hand-in-hand with the real-life version. He’s very pointedly not good at being a cavalier- a teen with three months of training thrashes a grown man who self-identifies as the boy toy of the competent person in his dyad. He’s never seen real combat. My read is that he’s either going to die ineffectually (thus removing a voice of reason from play) or be secretly evil, but in the increasingly unlikely scenario that this turns out to be a takedown of his archetype, I am gonna say that he feels believably likable in the way such a person would need to be to have the social power associated with the gentleman adventurer role.

Also, to briefly revisit the AU logic from earlier- I’ve got this guy pegged as the “cool teacher.”

“Three Moves, Magnus!“ I love these little assholes. I love how these little pesterings are structured as intrusive asides rather than as part of the ebb and flow of the dialogue.

Alright, if Gideon’s implicit.... thing with Dulcinea is rooted in an aesthetic fascination and acts of service, Gideon’s impending.... thing with Coronabeth is rooted in the fact that Coronabeth is apparently aroused by Gideon’s massive capacity for violence. Nobody on the rock is capable of desiring Gideon for hinged reasons or being at all normal about it. 

Can’t tell if Magnus’s “Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?” is a good-natured face-recoupment bit, or if the Fifth actually does have a “divorce your spouse if they’re inadequately martially competent” norm. Or if it is a joke, but a joke contextualized by that norm. And where is Abigail, anyway?

Also: Interesting that Gideon clearly has some residual affection and respect for Aiglamene. Heart growing fonder, et al, et al.

Okay, the whole Babs sequence adheres like glue to a lot of. A lot of high school and sports movie tropes. Scrappy underdog on the back foot until she breaks protocol, and then being lauded for being the more practical combatant even if her well-bred opponent is more skilled within the rules as defined. Preps vs… Goth-nerds? Gerds? Spiced up, however, by whatever deranged under-the-hood dynamics the thirds have going on. Is Naberius, like, a sibling to the twins, a boyfriend, an unholy fusion...? Also interesting is that Coronabeth seems interested in defusing Naberius rather than providing solidarity to him; her approach to the aftermath of the fight is definitely based around keeping in both Babs and Gideon’s good graces. 

Also; Naberius is suspicious of Gideon. He knows enough about the Ninth’s MO that Gideon actually being good at Cavaliering is not usually how the ninth plays things. And he’s right- Ortus, martially incompetent Bone Donkey, should be there in Gideon’s place. This is another example of the dynamic present his introductory scene in chapter 9; he’s vastly more insightful and observant than the elitist prep snob archetype normally is, but he deploys that insightfulness basically purely in service of playing his archetype to the hilt by being a classist, self-absorbed dick. 

And we leave off on the reveal that Harrow saw everything, after three chapters of total non-presence. Dollars to donuts that she’s gonna be pissy about Gideon doing things rather than politely tucking herself away like a piece of unused equipment while Harrow was AWOL. This is, incidentally, close to what I was predicting would happen as a result of Harrow siloing herself off from Gideon.

I should probably say something about the second cav, Dyas (first name unremembered) whose job in the story is basically to provide the above-validation that Gideon is the more practical fighter. I strongly suspect, given how little I’ve seen her name come up, and the fact her uniform is a literal red jacket, that she isn’t long for the narrative. I’ve seen chatter about the 2nd house necro, though. I wonder what she’s up to.

And, to round out, This chapter features the second or third time that Nonius, ninth-house founder, is referred to as some particularly-badass badass, anomalous in comparison to his descendants. I’m curious to see why said particularly badass badass set up his house in the middle of nowhere....

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 6

Okay. Here’s the first one and the big one; this is absolutely not going to be a competition. This is not the Hunger Games. By explicitly raising the idea that they aren’t sure if it’s a competition, and then having Harrow go all in on her assumption that it is a competition, the author has confirmed, via the law of dramatic irony, that whatever is about to happen is not a competition. That said. I think it’s completely reasonable for Harrow to assume it will be. To use TVtropes parlance, she’s wrong genre savvy; she knows what kind of story she’s in, and more to the point, this feels like the kind of society- literally, pointedly fueled by death!- that would in fact have a death-and-infighting oriented selection process for its highest ranking fueled-by-death positions, which the empire would in turn gussy up with glamourous and prestigious language in order to half-assedly elide the horror of how their government works. That feels like a very plausible thing that a native of this universe might expect an imperial summons to turn out to be. I’m only certain that that’s not what’s about to happen because I’ve got special insight as the all-consuming voyeur of these people’s lives. (Also, I once saw a post specifically dragging everyone involved in…. whatever’s about to happen for assuming they were in The Hunger Games.)

The launch sequence highlights, to my eyes, the three positive qualities that Harrow has as a human being. The first is an impeccable sense of drama (acknowledged even by Gideon!) The second is that she’s deeply fucking funny in the audacity of her lies; she tells the whole community that her parents are going down in the tomb to look at some communion wine and he’s bricking them up in there now, and everyone just rolls with it. Does she think she’s good at lying convincingly? Does she have a frame of reference for what lying means when everyone doesn’t automatically treat you as a mouthpiece for religious authority? 

The last thing, though, is that I now have a slightly sympathetic motivation for Harrow; she actually does care about the ninth. They are her flock, her people, and they are old, and she’s watching them die one by one. And to Gideon, who hates everyone here, watching Harrow “do the census adjustments in her head” when a hermit drops dead from shock is a funny one-off gag of no real gravity; that Hermit is a set piece. But to Harrow it’s probably genuinely distressing, watching a bunch of people she cares about and feels responsible for who are quickly moving past the point where they can take care of themselves die off one by one, potentially taking crucial infrastructural knowledge with which to care for the others with them! I am significantly more sympathetic to her goal of revitalizing the house now; at a bare minimum, she could pull strings to get some competent elder workers out there.

And Gideon is finally leaving the Ninth. As part of her cathartic moment, she has an imagine-spot of the entire facility collapsing with her departure, for lack of her perception of it; this feels, though, like less of a metaphor than she’s treating it as. The idea of leaving the house doesn’t make the house seem fragile- her leaving the house is very literally making it more fragile. Gideon has noticed this sporadically throughout the earlier chapters for the sake of jabs, but the three individuals keeping the collective house half-life above 10 years or so have vacated the planet. She's acting like it's some great leap of imagination that the whole thing's going to physically collapse and explode when she’s gone, but when a few more bone nuns die and the already-framed-as-sucky Terraformers cut out, it might! It literally might. I’m not sure Gideon has shaken the places omnipresence in her life thus far quite yet; she’s realized it’s just a place, but not how fragile of a place. She is, to sum up, experiencing a very, very different sort of story than the story Harrow is the protagonist of. Harrow is taking the inaugural steps of a heroic quest to save her doomed hometown, but we see that quest from the viewpoint of the town punching bag. Fun things, once again, being done with Genre and protagonist privilege.