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thinking about nona the ninth

i feel like the entire plotline of nona and the kids from school didn't lead to quite as meaningful of a conclusion as it could have.

like, the scene where Hot Sauce trusts her is really nice, but it's also very fast and slightly anticlimactic. it's good, i just feel like more on top of that could have contributed to it.

for a plotline that took up so much of the book, it feels oddly secondary that all they really get from it is one bit of information for finding palamedes' friends.

but on the other hand, there's something i really like about the main purpose of that plotline being just, its own sake. because once you get to the end of the book, you're losing nona. her purpose was, in the end, to make it to the tomb and unleash/turn into alecto. if we only look at her purpose, we lose everything valuable about nona.

nona had fun hanging out with the kids at school not because it was supposed to matter, to lead to something, big, but because it was who she was.

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so in reading the Locked Tomb with the timing that i did, i may have been knowingly engaging in a little bit of

allow me to explain

so, i saw a lot of people talking about how hard it was to understand nona when they forgot so many details from gideon and harrow. it really seemed like a series where you needed to remember and understand everything well to fully understand the next book. i saw people talking about doing rereads just to make sure they could get everything from nona.

now, a reasonable person would see this and think that they should wait for the series to conclude before reading it

however, i am someone who values more... experiential relationships with stories. i like how something sticks with you when you can't just finish it all at once. it's a little disappointing when you read something and finish it and it's done, and that's it, it doesn't get to become a part of your life for any greater period of time. i love experiencing serial stories released week by week, engaging in discussion, feeling the parts of that story become associated with a time in my life as it cooks in my head.

so when i saw people saying they were frustrated at not remembering enough from the earlier books when nona came out, i was like, oh fuck, i need to read it soon or else i'll miss out on that interesting experience

and now i'm sitting here, having finished last night, like

why did i do that, it's gonna be such a pain in the ass to try to remember all this shit when alecto comes out

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I gonna miss your life blogging. It's a shame that we'll have to wait until Tor releases the new short story in Fall and your Alecto acquisition to have more of it.

Thank you! It makes me feel nice inside that people enjoyed my posts, both for good reasons and just because I crave attention and love. I have successfully pivoted my consumption of media into something slightly creative and expressive of my own, and used it for internet validation. Honestly feels great.

I probably will post here when Alecto's out as well, though I'm sure that will be a different experience.

Guess I'll reply to some of the comments I got as well:

Thank you too! I feel somewhat proud of the number of things I guessed, but it definitely felt like there was way more I had no idea about. I think there were only a few where I really locked in a prediction instead of just raising possibilities. I did get totally hooked into trying to figure out all the lore, and that combined with the liveblog inciting me to go slowly and think through everything that happened so I could post something about it, really made me figure out a lot more than I would have otherwise.

Good to hear! I'm hoping that as time goes on I feel rewarded as well. I think that with lore-driven series like this, one's relationship with them is really different when you compare reading it to think about it afterward, and I'm just hoping the positivity carries through for me.

I do feel like I probably should have called that Nona was Alecto way earlier, but that's for meta reasons. I knew that it grew from one book into two, and I could see how Nona could have been conceptualized as an arc only to turn into a full story. Following that logic it's kind of obvious that it'd have to be the same character, since the book probably wouldn't have been planned with a protagonist switch, I don't think.

It's insane that you and others were able to predict Alecto being the earth though. I don't even remember the speech very well. I'll have to find that again.

You know, a really tragic part of the end of this book was that Nona is just... gone. I really liked Nona. Second best character, after Palamedes. I know she had come to terms with her own death and accepted it was coming (ironic compared to how much Alecto feared death), but still, the idea that she's just... gone, a subsumed personality below a more complete person, is just hard to accept. So if Noodle becomes relevant, then maybe I can hope that this also brings something of Nona back out. She did love dogs.

I hate to break it to you guys (and I hate to make a joke that I'm sure has been done too many times by now) but it's:

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Small things to look for :

The veey first line of GtN has foreshadowing for Gideon to be called a prince .

There's a secret code in the John's chapters of Nona.

At the beginning of GtN Gideon says she's not anyone's son or daughter, by the last chapter she's a daughter of 9th in Nona she almost does call herself a Ninth: she stops herself before saying WE and continues using YOU to refer to the house.

Cool stuff? Is the secret code some number letter cipher? I remember all the numbers being below 26. But there were two numbers in each, so maybe one is the number to shift them by? I'm gonna be honest: I am not going to go through the effort to decode them. Back when Gravity Falls was airing I liked reading about people finding the codes but not looking for them myself.

That last bit really hints at some identity issues for Gideon. Over time (one short night of sleep) I've sort of come to terms with how she is now. Like, who are we as an audience to demand that she stay the same funny naive person we knew, after she's been through so much more? Maybe Harrow will accept her as a proper Ninth later, once we're done with that John fellow. Or maybe the series won't have a happy ending.

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responding to more comments i got after finishing (catching up with) the series

I kinda figured it was something like that but didn't check. I've known enough guys named Varun that I kinda just took it as a name and didn't question it further. Awesome for it to be Neptune though. That's the best planet. Fastest winds in the solar system!

aaaah I forgot that meme lmao

oh my fucking GOD

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idk if this has been confirmed by the author or if it's just a fairly common fandom interpretation but Paul was named after Paul the Apostle! there's a reasoning behind the lame name :)

Paul the apostle wrote the "love is patient, love is kind" quote, very on theme with the whole message of loved not going away in ntn and the author essentially saying that cam and pal's relationship is the purest form of love. Paul the apostle was created after his predecessor, Saul, was smote by God, which is a great thing to name yourself after after you've recently been reborn. He was also a founder with a goal to unify Christianity to create something that would last, which could possibly hint toward the future of Paul tlt.

There's also the less bibley interpretation that it may be to contrast John, both being mundane and common monosybillic names.

This makes sense. Specific biblical parallels beyond the generalities of jesus figures tend to go over my head as it's just not something I have or want a strong education in. But considering how genuinely interesting it made the John - Jesus parallels, when normally that kind of thing is kind of lame, there's definitely more to this. Jesus parallels tend to be like, "this guy is the savior, the big man, here's some idea that parallels the immaculate conception or the crucifixion or whatever." But the way it used his struggle against the rich, his struggle with healing everyone, his struggle with the need to become a cult leader in order to influence the world, had a lot more to it.

I'm not sure whether Paul will end up uniting people, although he technically already is united people so it's definitely a path his character could go down. I definitely really appreciate the love we saw between the two. It fully pulled off the purely non-romantic, non-sexual vibes, while still making it feel absolute and extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, as monosyllabic names go, John is just a way cooler one than Paul. I know that Paul, obviously, by nature of this post, has a very long history, but it still sounds like the name of like... some guy in the 60s who smokes too much. While John has that timeless energy (the name, but also the guy).

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If you have gnt, I would recommend looking at the very end of chapter 5 🤭 for something that was humorous but after hnt you see it for what it is - foreshadowing (and an example of Harrow being Harrow despite the lobotomy) (and if you don't have it, I can send you a screenshot if you want it)

Somehow I saw this ask and forgot to reply to it for ages. It's just been sitting in my inbox collecting dust. Just checked it and lmaoooo.

I have all three books with me, but I'm probably gonna return them to the library by Saturday or so. If anyone else wants to let me know little details to check for, be they funny, foreshadowing, or otherwise of note, I'd love to hear them!

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thoughts on nona the ninth epilogue and thoughts on the book and series overall

Some of you might not have checked the blog today and will just, come back to this post to find that I decided to read 2/3 of the book today and finish it. It was good but it wasn't just because it was good, I kinda just felt like finishing. I'm kind of exhausted and I'm not sure how much my lack of understanding of what's going down at the end comes down to the book being confusing, and how much is me having no more energy.

anyway

alecto breaking out

oh great we talking all shakespeare like now, this is really making it easy to follow (i am just very sleepy)

which fuckin child is who

okay so harrow is awake now (the fuck was all that going on with the tower then)

alright from alecto's attempt to kiss

i can understand why the lyctors would have called her a monster

okay so the ninth is the line of anastasia

so alecto is swearing herself to harrow

and gideon called her a slut

as it should be, i suppose

damn and she just

went and said hi to john

and stabbed him and he said good morning

man what the FUCK does any of this imply

i do not have the brain power to process any of these layers

like, what the fuck did john plan on, or want to happen

the river is DEAD? the fuck does that mean

what the fuck is any of this shit

give me answers

j;aijdgoiahdhuipfuoifhnoanononho;oi;oi;hasdi

asid;uihadso;fpihaj[POUIAHNDSO['IGH

gadzoinks

DOUIUHGIOWEOG

Anyway yeah I'd say this was the best book in the series so far. I generally enjoyed Nona's character more than the prior two protagonists. I enjoy when childish, whimsical, naive personalities are expressed realistically through prose. I also enjoyed gradually learning more about how Nona thinks and just what she is.

The plot kept its momentum better than the second book, and followed through with a better climax than the first book. I've spoken about what I disliked about those aspects of the earlier books in prior posts. Here, the situation kept changing and developing enough that it didn't get too stale. Even without Nona driving most of the changes, it felt like she had an effect on the things around her.

I'm kind of hoping the next book begins right after we left off. We already did big timeskips twice in a row, and we haven't even answered everything that happened in the last one.

My brain is just muddled in so many questions about magic mechanics, character motivations, character history, et cetera et schmetera, that I don't even know how to put into words yet.

Part of my satisfaction here is that I think the pacing of reveals was really good in this book. It kept piling on more and more the closer it got to the end. But it really just slammed me with a bunch more questions by the ends. Reveals that raise more questions are great, and this is the right time for them considering it's the penultimate book in the series, but jeez, I am just brain strained right now. My brain has gone through one of those machines where you turn the crank and the dough goes through and comes out as spaghetti shaped. Except like, in reverse, because my brain is smoother now.

I think this has been an overall strong series, but it's somewhat unique in that the lore was the main thing I cared about. Or at least, I cared about it disproportionately to how much I usually do. That's not to say that there wasn't great character work here; I totally understand those who primarily love this series for the characters. I think I posted plenty about how interesting many of them are; hopefully that speaks for itself.

In general, it does tend to focus more on static characters. Not every character is like this, but a lot of them don't really change much (not during books), but instead only get tested at key moments to demonstrate their beliefs and conviction. Which is a totally fine approach, when the characters are interesting people, and you can instead drive things a bit more via learning more about them. When changes do occur, it's often offscreen entirely — just look at Corona and Gideon this book.

It kind of comes down to what drives you to read the next chapter. I almost always wanted to read more to learn about the lore. I often, but not always, was curious about where the plot would go next, how predicaments would be solved. And I was interested in how characters would grow or change... less than average, I'd say.

Though, the line between lore and learning more about who characters are was often blurred. I'm just not sure how much it will appeal to me personally once I already know everything about them. Maybe it'll work great on reread someday, maybe it won't.

I think I'd call this one a strong 8/10. Definitely gonna develop my thoughts on this more in the coming days but I really need to get to sleep soon.

I kind of wonder in what ways these stories will stick with me, when my experience was so lore driven. I feel like my opinion on book 2 has gone down slightly since I finished it, as the high of the reveals wore off and I felt kind of dissatisfied a few other aspects. I definitely liked the plot/characters in this book more, but I still just need to see how I settle on feeling about it all in retrospect. I mean the thing is, when you're that driven by lore, I prefer when it sticks the landing. If I don't personally like the answers in the final book I might lose a little love for the series as a whole.

Edit: To clarify this point a little, it's really that there's two kinds of reveals. There's the ones that are actual reveals, which tended to be really interesting. And there's the ones that mostly engaged me on the basis of "this tiny detail could be implying really insane things later." Some of which paid off, some of which still haven't. It's a fun feeling to engage with while reading, but for me it relies not just on the reveals paying off, but me being left with an overall feeling that engaging with the narrative in that way was worthwhile. If the series ends up not really caring about rewarding readers for paying attention that much (which I'm not saying will happen, it's just always a possibility) then that takes away a lot of my enjoyment retroactively.

Of course, it's also possible that if I did a reread, I'd end up appreciating the character work a lot more than the first read, and end up caring about the lore a lot less! This is just what I engaged with on this read and my present experience. I definitely can't say I understand everything about the characters, so there might even be whole layers to how they grow and change that I just didn't pick up on here.

Fun series and I really enjoyed liveblogging it! I hope you don't mind me kind of just, rushing through the final book today. Trust me, that was out of enjoyment primarily (also the library has kind of wanted these back for a while). I appreciate everyone who enjoyed my posts and commented things, and I'll definitely be sticking around and reading more comments as I try to make sense of all the shit I just read. I hope you enjoyed my first-timer thoughts.

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter thirty-two

aw shit it's ianthe. of course she gets to where you're trying to go just a little before you. she's so fucking gary-moded. i need to sleep.

sext would be a better name than paul

friendship bracelets

remember everything i was saying about it being frustrating when people change but you didn't see it happen, when you no longer understand the person you cared about

x2 that for how gideon and ianthe are apparently besties now that is SO cringe

ok at least they disagree on opening the tomb

ok what the fuck this seems even less like the gideon i know. it's one thing to go in and kill alecto (cringe). it's another to fucking. just. decide your purpose in life is to be big g's cavalier now.

what the fuck did he do to her? or worse, what did she go through?

ianthe is implying john will BECOME something with alecto out. what? huh? but he sealed her? idk this seems funky.

uh oh nona is breaking

everyone is shouting about things like killing crux while nona is jsut fucking breaking

gideon shouts that she's god's child and crux is like fuck you idc and gideon is like ok then you disappointed god

damn

she killed him and it didn't feel good

i don't like this person gideon is now (i say, again and again)

shit i'm so confused

what happened to anastasia? i do not remember at all how much i know from previous books

she's still there? alive? dead? what? bones? birthday? and now she's there

brain hurt me sleepy

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter thirty-one

first, this comment

yeah, a lot of this stuff seems like things where if you compile all the info there'd be a fairly consistent implication. i just don't have it all in my head. i'd enjoy seeing some of the theories (links to other places are fine if it's too complicated to explain in a comment). honestly what really makes me curious is which things are basically settled, and which things are still only theories. plus there's just parts of continuity i still don't feel super clear on, like how the sixth house ended up in the situation they were in. dunno if that's something i should ask about or just wiki dive on.

don't send me anything tonight though. as soon as i finish the book i'm plopping to sleep.

we made it to the ninth

i wish gideon would stop being so mean, she used to be cool

damn wtf happened on the ninth

devils

DEVILS?

(all modern fiction is derived from Devilman)

i guess ianthe wasn't joking that they were dealing with more serious shit elsewhere. this is for the next book. wonder how it started.

i just wish i understood why gideon is the way she is now. like i can believe that her personality would have gone this way after hanging out with god for too many months. being forced into unpleasant situations like being dead alive dead. she kinda just can't have that naivety that she had before, as a lonely girl on the ninth who barely even experienced seeing any hot girls in person before dying.

but i wish i had seen it. meeting an old friend who has changed is okay, but not understanding why the person you knew is gone?

odd to see aiglamene again.

maybe it's less that a shadow of alecto escaped into harrow, and more that the connection between them was used for them to switch places. yeah like, why wouldn't that have been the thing that harrow's ending last book symbolized. of course. and they can then see each other's memories.

man

nona is so great

she shouldn't have to stop being

she deserved the silly t-shirt

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter thirty

nona is getting us places

river's different

big tower

my brain is running on fumes by now if it wasn't obvious

captain's talking about the hole again. varun right.

save the dog yeah

good work

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thoughts on nona the ninth john 5:4

ah, so god did remove memories. that explains my confusion about the eyes earlier.

and now it's harrow and john talking.

i wish this whole thing was less ocnfusing. so he resurrects people, plans his society, and has limitless energy due to drawing from alecto. but at one point they did switch eyes. right before the resurrection? was he not able to draw on her power before that? the continuity here is still kind of confusing.

so wait. he didn't correct the lyctors' misunderstanding because just... he thought it'd be too dangerous to have double lyctors running around? needed them reliant on him? i'm confused.

i'm also confused on why exactly he made all the resurrection beasts. was it for the energy to resurrect all of earth? this might have been explained a book or two ago though.

i like his speech about wiping it all clean. it's one of those things i think about with immortals, mainly all-powerful ones. when you have that much perspective, isn't it all a game? you realize that humanity, civilization, the universe, is all one giant ticking clock. and if you want to make a nice clock, you might have to start over a few times.

but y'know. that's killing people. that's bad.

interesting how he refers to the tomb as the death of god. thinking about what that means. does it symbolize him not acting as a full god or something? not fully wiping the slate clean yet?

i wish i better understood what harrow is asking with "I want to know how many of the Resurrection are left" etc. is that referring to humans or resurrection beasts.

and i still need to know more about all of this. why she was angry and why he was terrified.

she fucking split the river. and she didn't even use a beyblade.

a tower? the fuck? wasn't a tower referred to before. by varun? he said something about a hole at the bottom of their tower. this shit is getting wilder and wilder.

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter twenty-nine

so, they should name themselves Calamity. I think that's a fun combo of Camilla and Palamedes.

they went with fucking Paul. half of you was cool, and the other half was the biggest fucking dweeb, and i guess that half got to name you.

we goin'

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter twenty-eight

i feel like if i took this book slower i probably would have clinched in a "nona is not gideon or harrow" prediction that was obviously a possibility but wasn't something i was sure about, but i'm kinda reading most of the book today so i never got a chance to sit on it. ah well.

ah! okay, here we go. I have seen the letter A. Yeah I dunno what goofy shit I was on last post about Nona maybe being like the spirit of Pluto or whatever. It's Alecto. Memory-wiped Alecto, but Alecto. I vibe with this. What was happening at the end of book 2 again? Gideon (in Harrow) got a vision of Alecto showing up or something.

Maybe it's not the complete Alecto; maybe that's why she lacks so much. Just a shade of her that escaped the tomb with Harrow. Or the memories could have a totally different explanation. Maybe this book ends with reaching the Tomb and completing Alecto, which then lets the next book be called Alecto the Ninth.

Nona is leaking out of herself now, in the mental sense. Berating for Pyrrha for playing family.

i can only imagine the pain Palamedes is going through watching his mother talking to BoE

yo we're gonna go through the river. i think this will work. who cares that Palamedes isn't a Lyctor? he's on some jimmy neutron shit. he's got that big brain.

ah

well, they found a different way to do it

and now they're one

they were the best

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thoughts on nona the ninth john 1:20

so it's really just a single plan to get the trillionaires out and save no one else. wild shit. kinda reminds me of that part from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about people who disinfected pay phones.

it really is a fucky situation, because like, yeah, john could have been better. but can you really win, against what he was up against? nuke time.

lots of nukes time. he really controls the president. tf did they expect to happen?

the pressure keeps increasing. it keeps getting worse.

if john nuked them all and ended the world, then like... i mean, that's bad. no duh. it isn't the solution. and he's gone mad with power and lost sight of it all. but there's so many steps along how this happened, bad people doing bad things, that weren't him.

this kind of goes to show the problem with giving one person absolute power, but we also clearly see the problem with who has the power in real life

wait

he saw alecto's soul

is

is alecto the fucking soul of planet earth

someone who was dying that nobody cared about saving

did he fucking put mommy earth into a human body that harrow then later fell in love with

if this is real this is exactly the kind of wild twist i wish i saw coming and am glad i didn't

how many resurrection beasts are there. they come from the planets or something, right? were there eight? because one was alecto?

what does that make nona

what planet could nona possibly be the soul of

she's nona THE NINTH

it could be real she could be our little friend pluto (dwarf planet not a planet sorry)

why would this have happened? i don't know. but maybe it's why she can talk to resurrection beasts and understand any language.

everyone is getting shot now

he did the nukes but killed them manually

he tried to fuse with her

yo it's barbie (i'm hoping to see the movie soon)

harrow really has that level of basic ass taste lmao

he killed the planets but couldn't catch all of the escaping humans

not entirely sure why he killed the planets. to grow his power?

wild shit

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter twenty-seven

bunch of pyrrha and pash stuff that was fine but moving on

chekhov's horrorterror has activated

varun attacks

still wondering why he's named varun

my first thought was someone needs to kill it, but like

nona understands all language

she has to convince it to stop

and nona is schmoovin

hmm. what if the reason varun hasn't attacked before now is literally just that nona's been asking him to chill?

is judith talking about varun or is varun talking through judith

what is the green and breathing thing. varun is blue. wait is VARUN ATTACKING BECAUSE OF HOW NONA SCREAMED AND ASKED FOR HELP HOLY SHIT

varun poisons the universe to match their grief and will stop for eight thousand unjust bodies what does this MEAN

what is coming out of whose tower

fuck there was something i was thinking about that i wanted to mention before this chapter, but i forgot to

i wanted to mention that if gideon is kiriona, and harrow is busy experiencing alecto memories, then that means neither can be nona

but yeah, here we are, nona was never harrowhark. this was the only thing it could have been. if your book raises the question of one or the other, the real answer is neither.

man this book is going hard

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thoughts on nona the ninth chapter twenty-six

mmm, narratively this book needed a way to tie the children's gang back in, make them relevant. and of course, it was there all along; knowledge of where the convoy has been. cool stuff. beans and things.

also Pash berating Palamedes is exactly the kind of treatment his nerd ass deserves. glad someone is finally calling out my favorite character. best boy.

huh

i didn't expect us to actually go negotiate with Hot Sauce this chapter, and i didn't expect it to be so heartwarming

a year or two ago i'd have said this was wack but i agree now. hot sauce is the good stuff and spicy food is fun.