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troisoiseauxMy plan to re-read Harrow the Ninth and then Nona has turned into reading the series from the beginning. Who could have seen that one coming?
Re-reading Gideon the Ninth after Nona had me, like— I felt like I was cooing nostalgically over pictures of my kids' first day of school, but it's like, aww, look at them, back when the worst that Harrow and Gideon had to deal with was their childhood trauma and trying not to murder each other and/or get murdered by a haunted house! Everyone's in their own body and everything! (Well, almost everyone— every time I re-read Gt9, I'm amused by how unsubtly Muir positions big blinking lights of something's wrong here around Protesilaus, and how I absolutely did not catch this the first time around.)
Some thoughts, post-Nona:
- I wondered whether the two priests of the First House that aren't Teacher were Ulysses and Titania, John's first attempts at resurrection, but that did not turn out to be the case. (And then I checked the cast list of Ht9, which helpfully lists Ulysses and Titania as lyctors. Well! Not every theory can be a winner.)
- Relatedly, my understanding of the timeline is that John achieves lyctorhood —> John triggers nuclear armageddon —> John resurrects his friends —> they conduct experiments until they achieve lyctorhood —> profit??? ...but that seems... off, somehow. Is Canaan House John's cryogenics lab turned cult bunker? How did it survive the aforementioned nuclear armageddon? Or did it not, and they rebuilt the lab afterwards? How?? Also, is the implication here that John became God, resurrected his friends, and was like heyyy guys, I have a wild idea, let's figure out how to do this (which I already know the answer to, although we should make it more murder-y)? Actually, that part checks out.
- Apparently there has been some hand-wringing in the Fandom At Large over Gideon/Kiriona being OOC (read: angry) in Nona, and... have we been reading the same book? Gideon is so angry in this book— at the Ninth House, at Canaan House, at Harrow, eventually at Cytherea— so maybe people saying that she feels ~meaner~ is a reflection of the level of control Gideon feels over the situation(s) in Gt9 vs. Nona, or the different POVs...? Or possibly people are just bad at reading comprehension! (I am increasingly glad I've limited my fandom experience to, like, three of you on here, and a couple of IRL friends who I exchange fanart and shitposts with.)
- Okay, so Gideon is, like— kind of immortal, right?? She survived Harrow's parents' massacre of the innocents as a toddler + I'm pretty sure the fact she survived the siphoning experiment was because of her latent daughter-of-Jod powers + incorruptible corpse?? So, how does she die at the end of Gt9.
- "Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good" is almost certainly unrelated to the parallels between John and Pal/Paul in Nona, but it's *chef's kiss* in that context, regardless.
Re-reading Gideon the Ninth after Nona had me, like— I felt like I was cooing nostalgically over pictures of my kids' first day of school, but it's like, aww, look at them, back when the worst that Harrow and Gideon had to deal with was their childhood trauma and trying not to murder each other and/or get murdered by a haunted house! Everyone's in their own body and everything! (Well, almost everyone— every time I re-read Gt9, I'm amused by how unsubtly Muir positions big blinking lights of something's wrong here around Protesilaus, and how I absolutely did not catch this the first time around.)
Some thoughts, post-Nona:
- I wondered whether the two priests of the First House that aren't Teacher were Ulysses and Titania, John's first attempts at resurrection, but that did not turn out to be the case. (And then I checked the cast list of Ht9, which helpfully lists Ulysses and Titania as lyctors. Well! Not every theory can be a winner.)
- Relatedly, my understanding of the timeline is that John achieves lyctorhood —> John triggers nuclear armageddon —> John resurrects his friends —> they conduct experiments until they achieve lyctorhood —> profit??? ...but that seems... off, somehow. Is Canaan House John's cryogenics lab turned cult bunker? How did it survive the aforementioned nuclear armageddon? Or did it not, and they rebuilt the lab afterwards? How?? Also, is the implication here that John became God, resurrected his friends, and was like heyyy guys, I have a wild idea, let's figure out how to do this (which I already know the answer to, although we should make it more murder-y)? Actually, that part checks out.
- Apparently there has been some hand-wringing in the Fandom At Large over Gideon/Kiriona being OOC (read: angry) in Nona, and... have we been reading the same book? Gideon is so angry in this book— at the Ninth House, at Canaan House, at Harrow, eventually at Cytherea— so maybe people saying that she feels ~meaner~ is a reflection of the level of control Gideon feels over the situation(s) in Gt9 vs. Nona, or the different POVs...? Or possibly people are just bad at reading comprehension! (I am increasingly glad I've limited my fandom experience to, like, three of you on here, and a couple of IRL friends who I exchange fanart and shitposts with.)
- Okay, so Gideon is, like— kind of immortal, right?? She survived Harrow's parents' massacre of the innocents as a toddler + I'm pretty sure the fact she survived the siphoning experiment was because of her latent daughter-of-Jod powers + incorruptible corpse?? So, how does she die at the end of Gt9.
- "Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good" is almost certainly unrelated to the parallels between John and Pal/Paul in Nona, but it's *chef's kiss* in that context, regardless.
