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artbyblastweave · 1 year

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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 #gideon the ninth #gideon the 9th #gtn #the locked tomb #the locked tomb liveread #tlt #blastweave livereads #gideon nav #harrowhawk nonagesimus #palamedes sextus #camilla hect #thoughts #meta #analysis

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