#there's a lot of stuff with harrow and abigail and harrow and silas particularly that i'm excited about in chapter nine

[altschmerzes]

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

here's a clip from, as a bit of a curveball bc i was just recently reminded people also care for this project of mine and so very much do i, my gideon the ninth 'fix it but break it way worse first' resurrection fic :)

so, from my dead are mine (and yours as well as mine), from very far ahead in chapter 9, after the dust has settled and we all have to figure out what to do now, how to interact with each other in this weird new normal we're arriving to:

“Silas!” It’s impossible to tell which of the Fourth had been the one to holler the name from far across the room, and it takes Harrow a few moments to realize that this is because it hadn’t been one of them at all. The voice had been two voices, Jeannemary and Isaac yelling over in twin tandem, melting together into one high bird’s call that aims to summon the boy over to them for some unknown purpose. Glancing at Silas, Harrow is not surprised to see the hard, stone expression on his face or the rigid stiffness in his body. Colum is the only person she has ever heard refer to him by his first name. Harrow doesn’t know what sort of operation they’re running in the Fourth or Fifth, but she can’t imagine it’s smiled upon to take that sort of liberty in the Eighth House. He doesn’t react at first, just stands there and stares across the room at them. At his sides, Silas’s hands are held in tight fists.

“Silas, come here!” This time it’s just Jeannemary, exasperation tinging her voice as she yells to be heard from where she and Isaac stand, almost outside the room entirely. Harrow is not the only one who’s noticed the way Silas has reacted to them. Abigail, who’s seemed to materialize out of nowhere for the dozenth time, leading Harrow to wonder if that might be some kind of special necromancy they teach you in her House, gets his attention with a light touch to one tense shoulder. He gives a very faint, almost imperceptible twitch that Harrow might not have noticed if she hadn’t herself bit back enough flinches to know what it looks like when one is just barely not all the way smothered. “They mean it well,” Abigail tells him. Her own voice is quiet, deliberately kept low enough not to be heard by the teens she refers to. The sound of the words and the look on her face is not quite a warning, but it’s not quite not a warning either. “That’s probably our fault, Magnus and I. We’ve never been formal with them. But they mean it well.” There’s no reply. Silas barely glances at her before he’s looking back across at Jeannemary and Isaac, still impatiently waiting for him at the doorway. “If you must correct them,” Abigail goes on, once it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything, “I’d ask you please do so kindly.” This time she gets an answer, if only in the form of a quick, sharp dip of Silas’s chin. He nods to Abigail, ignores Harrow completely, then starts across the room to where two pairs of hands have started to beckon him, waving in the air like they might physically pull him over faster by doing so. If Silas says anything to them about the name, rebukes them for using it or orders them never to call him such a thing again, he doesn’t do it within earshot, even of Harrow’s sharpened hearing. The only thing that filters through the doorway in that deep, resounding voice unmistakable for anyone else, is, “What is it, then?”

[gallpall]

canaan bubble redux as a womb for story/character arcs

I’m sure most of this has been posted about before but: ever since my initial read I’ve been obsessed with the gross bodily/gorey stuff in the Canaan redux and I wanted to organize some of my constant+chaotic thoughts!!

TM has said that a lot of the motifs/events in the bubbles are actually “Silent Hill stand-ins” for story elements and she hopes we pick up on stuff, so here’s my Attempt!

At the same time that Harrow’s mind is being made a tomb for Gideon Nav Wake’s subconscious is pulled in to act as a womb for certain plot elements right alongside it. The chronology/time period of HtN mimics a full nine-month gestation. There’s a lot of very literal imagery here (which is below the cut), but I also think we’re meant to see it as metaphorical: we’re able to glean some things about character arcs based on how everything in the bubble goes down.

I’m particularly interested right now in those ‘side’ characters in the bubble who aren’t actually dead, who barely appear in the bubble at all except to get summarily offed, all in very distinctive ways. Judith, Camilla, Palamedes, and Coronabeth.

(cw below cut for some pregnancy/insemination imagery, canonical body horror and gruesome bubble deaths rehashed)

First of all just some quotes showing some of the imagery that I’ve attributed to being Wake manifesting pregnancy trauma stuff (there’s possibly some of Harrow’s conception trauma here, too) seeping through, for the purposes of this line of speculation. 

This isn’t nearly all of it, but some things that stood out to me as possibly comparing Canaan House 2.0 to a functioning reproductive system:

(ch. 21) a “collection of large, rusted pipette needles” -- turkey basters?

(ch. 35) “great, slithering, pulsing tubes” which contain “whitish-pearl bubbled globules”-- this perhaps recalls ovaries/fallopian tubes, with the ‘globules’ being follicles produced by superovulation for insemination, or corpus luteum that supply progesterone to maintain a pregnancy.

(ch. 45) “stretched webs of organ [...] like nets of sticky venous spiderweb” --uterine walls, maybe; it’s all over the windows, totally encasing them in Canaan’s rooms, and arguably even contracting like a uterus would: “every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.”

in the next pgh we get some more of the tools Wake would have used to conceive/upkeep the pregnancy: “pipettes, broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid,” skeletons sitting atop piles of “capsules or pills” perhaps hormones/supplements. (also holding Drearburh tools, the way Wake’s skelly would have been doomed to do)

(ch. 43) “from that hole emerged a clattering pile of plex scope slides, the type you would preserve a cell sample between“ -- Wake would’ve had to carry out the IVF process for implantation, this also seems like apparatus for that

(ch. 47) there’s the “libation” Abigail uses to summon Wake which is... well. It’s a “thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold,” and the summoning involves a bunch of ‘come’ commands, which I think might be Muir making a very elaborate jizz-adjacent “silly buggers with the emissions” joke. 

Just a note, cause I’m hopeless about Pyrrwake: the Seconds’ quarters are almost completely preserved from the leaky body horror (though it’s still cold in there)--as if they represented a sanctuary in Wake’s subconscious. There are also letters in the nonagonal coffin room which spell out an anagram of “PYRRHA” (ch. 47).

So with all that in mind, I’d posit that the fake-ghost deaths are all metaphorical “rebirths” of various characters arcs for ATN. I haven’t delved into what this imagery might mean for Harrow or Gideon specifically because I know there’s a LOT and it’s probably above my theoretical paygrade (I would love for someone to tack on with that though!!) but I can talk about ‘side’ chars on a very big-picture level.

Judith’s simulacrum gets knocked off first (ch. 18); shot through the heart (both atria) while she and Marta’s ghost are trying to complete the winnowing trial. The Sleeper shoots her 7 more times after that, I guess partly just ‘cause she can, but Ortus notes that it seems like there was an element of "Anger” to it. It’s possible Wake wasn’t pleased to have someone messing around with Pyrrha’s lyctoral trial, infuriated that anyone would be attempting to replicate G1d/Pyr’s original downfall. She then ignores Marta entirely and climbs back in the coffin (now with the sword) once Judith’s out of the way.

[Marta’s] scarlet necktie looked redder too—by the time they’d gotten hold of Judith Deuteros the blood had dried hers nearly black.

Cohort red-and-whites being stained black with blood, like a certain high-collared BOE uniform... could be another little clue to Judith’s "heart” for the Emperor (and for Marta, and pretty much everything else she knew) being lost and her realigning--though not willingly, at least at first--with the other side.

Cam and Pal’s simulacrums are plainly executed (ch. 21), they have their “faces obliterated” each by a single gunshot, and it’s as if they just stood there and let it happen. In the bubble, “Harrow had never seen Sextus or Hect except from afar.” These simulacrums totally avoid having their features revealed to Harrow. I’m willing to bet their faces being obscured and then exploded is one of the clues we get to their eyes being swapped around the next time we see them in the epilogue and in ATN.

Regarding the twins: They are essentially non-extant in the bubble. Ianthe never appears because she’s still kicking and, in her own words, “doesn’t live alternate histories” (GtN ch. 15).

Coronabeth’s simulacrum scene (ch. 37) is SO vivid and cryptic. It fascinates me because it definitely is, in part, trying to tell us something poignant about the initiation of Corona’s “worse twin” arc in ATN.

[Corona] was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.

Sounds like the fake ghost preparing for that major shift in allegiance. Silas is the one to ‘dismiss’ her, with his “may the blood of your blood suffer,” which perhaps is a really Templar-y way of saying ‘now go wreck ianthe’s SHIT.’ When Harrow accuses him of sending Corona to her death, Silas asks “Death?”--as if he sees that what’s really just happened, at least metaphorically, is (re)Birth.

[Harrow] thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.

Sounds a bit like amniotic fluid/water breaking? Coronabeth doesn’t ever seem to hit the ocean (bodies of water=necromancy and that’s not her deal), she instead just kinda poofs, and Silas says she would have ended up “on her feet.” Coronabeth is ditching her family ties and is out for blood, and I think her charisma, willpower, and sheer desire for revenge will move her a long way in the ranks of Eden--probably even to the point of echoing Commander Wake’s ambitions and actions. I could delve into that damn portrait mirroring Ianthe’s obsession w/ Cyrus’ paintings on the Mithraeum... but that is a whole other post!

So all of these are fairly baseline observations and I think there’s a LOT more to be expounded on, if y’all wanna reply/reblog/DM with additions I would freaking love that, every time I open a page of this book I find something I missed before and it’s such a delight. Thanks for reading if you got this far!!

[st-just]

Hey the impression I've gotten from reading random tumblr stuff about Gideon The Ninth is that every single character is female. Is that, like, true? Did I pick that up wrong? Is there like a lore reason for it if it is?

You did get it wrong, I’m afraid. 

...Okay, having gone through the dramatis personae for the first book, the cast (not all of whom are particularly major, but not counting the ones I literally can’t remember getting a line) is 11 women, 9 men. Now, the two main characters are both women, and probably a mildly disproportionate number of the characters that get a lot of screen time? 

Now Gideon and Harrow obviously get, like 60%+ of all the fandom love, for obvious reasons. But in terms of fairly minor characters Isaac and Jeannemary and Abigail and Magnus both got lavished with a decent amount of attention, IIRC. (Because adorable teenagers and the parents everyone wished they had, respectively).  

And Palamedes and Silas are both pretty major and vital secondary to the plots. And, like, no one likes or respects Silas, but Pal and Camilla get a decent amount of love.