#What is going on with harrow and alecto

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

i also hate the locked tomb but am obsessed with it. i dont know what to do anymore man. i want to but i cannot stop thinking about them

BRO YOU GET ME. I hate it. I love it. I have fanart of the characters saved. Fanart and textposts are constantly on my dash. Gideon and Harrow make me absolutely feral. Today, I was considering rereading it because maybe I missed something? But nah, I don't think I did lmao. The writing style is not for me at all, but I'll be fucking damned if the author doesn't know how to make characters that nest in your brain. Gideon and Harrow are a literal masterclass in how to make readers obsessed with characters. I started drawing fanart of them myself!!! Just today I saw art from a scene in the first book that really got to me. I'm genuinely so fucking obsessed but I'll never buy the second book.

[littlemsterious]

holy fuck harrow is a product of her parent’s genocide and alecto is a product of jod’s genocide how have i never put this together before

i’m trying to spell out my thoughts about this but i cant get past how a horrific number of people had to die in order for them to exist

[yuurionviktor]

Did not change much in the end

[mayasaura]

When Alecto woke up, she finished the sentence she'd started when she was put to rest. There's a continuity there, unbroken by her consciousness having moved on or shifted attention in the ten thousand years she was asleep or dead, despite her having been other people and done things in the interim. It reminds me of when Harrow woke up in the dream of Canaan House with her memory restored. It had been nine months, but by her perception she had only lost Gideon three days ago. She had split herself into two selves, but Harrow First and Harrow Secundarius were really all one Harrowhark wearing different clothes.

I think Alecto, Nona, the Body are the same way. They're all one person, separated by what they're wearing and what they can remember.

Alecto remembers everything up to her death, and she's wearing a body built for her as a prison out of her dirt and John's blood and bones.

Nona remembered nothing, and was wearing Harrow.

I think the Body was halfway between them. Her memory was vague, and she had no body. She knew things Harrow appeared not to, and seemed to recognize John, but she was confused when she tried to share information about herself. She was Alecto only half awake, summoned by a kiss from a crying child.

I'm looking forward to seeing how or if these three aspects of Alecto will mesh. The Alecto who woke up in the epilogue of Nona the Ninth didn't remember being Nona. She didn't recognize Harrow, or remember being the Body who followed Harrow for months, talking her through her fears and trying to hold her when she cried herself to sleep. Nona was afraid to become Alecto, because she didn't think she would know how to love anything, but that can't really be true. Every version of Alecto we've seen so far has done nothing but love. She just has to remember.

[nonasbirthday]

"why is there only 1 RB per planet. why dorsn't the moon get an RB. what even is a soul" are all good questions and i have another!

if john killing the planets produced the resurrection beasts, if the reason he killed the planets was to get a thanergy boost from their deaths, and a thing must have a soul for it to be killed, does this mean the fucking sun has a soul?

ugh you know before nona came out i was semi-convinced that alecto was actually the RB of the sun. which doesn't really make sense bc how could there be life on the sun. but john said he reignited the sun, and that he continued to power it, and his eyes kind of look like an eclipse, you get it. so YEAH i'm with you here, if john actually resurrected the sun then it seems like it's gotta have a soul right?!! IF john is telling the truth, which seems to be a big if, because in HTN right as we believe john's death is causing the sun to collapse he suddenly re-forms and tells augustine that he can't actually be killed by the RBs or by mercymorn, so no need to worry about Dominicus after all, except how it may have toasted the sixth a little bit there, whoopsie! BUT then in NTN john does say he "bit through the sun first" so like!! what is the deal!!

[thermodynamic-comedian]

im extremely entertained by the fact that at some point in alecto the ninth, its very possible that john's gonna see harrow and alecto together. what are you supposed to do when a fucked up fucking necromancer dates both your daughter and your ex. i would just die probably

[procrastinationaccount]

Abella Trine. Abella Trine is the name that Ianthe had in an early draft.

One of her love interests was a spoiled swordswoman who loved sexy parties. A swordswoman. Who Palamedes describes as disliked by the narrative.

Until she meets a tedious widower??? Saintly dead spouse??! After a couple of misunderstandings they get married???

In conclusion. Harrianthe wedding sweep?

[winepresswrath]

I am haunted by Alecto the Ninth's potential to give me the awkward family dinner of all time. I can see it already out of the corner of my eye. With every glimpse my yearning intensifies, matched only by my fear that it would be too powerful and overwhelm the narrative and thus won't happen.

[gideonisms]

probably my reading of tlt is always going to be filtered through the fact that I think sometimes, if your belief system has really made you miserable for your entire life, there's a lot to unpack there but you should just throw away the whole suitcase

[corpsesoldier]

trying to work out gideon’s motivations at the end of ntn got my brain chugging like a steam engine

obviously she can want two things at once, but I’m trying to sort out how much of her desire to get into the tomb is her stated reason—kill alecto and become god’s cavalier—and how much is directly related to harrow’s well-being/getting harrow back.

her being there because john is manipulating her into opening the tomb by using her desire to belong to someone makes sense, but did john actually “send her”? she says twice she snuck onto ianthe’s shuttle which was headed to new rho; how did she plan to get to the ninth from there? did she know ianthe was going looking for harrow?

she claims herself as john’s child and heir and states her desire to be his cavalier, but the moment harrow’s body starts falling apart she drops all (if any?) pretense. her priorities shift instantly. she tells paul to take all her blood if they have to; she tells them to kill her, if that will open the tomb and get nona’s exploding soul out of harrow’s meat. but even before nona starts bleeding, right after ianthe accuses gideon of kidding herself, she calls ianthe out for only caring about herself and, specifically, not about harrow—“don’t open the tomb, leave harrow to die, mneh mneh mneh.”

I guess my question is: does gideon even know what she wants? she’s obviously deeply, cosmically miserable about her situation, and yet she probably does believe that if she can make herself indispensable to god then she’ll finally have the security and even love she’s always wanted after losing literally everything else that’s ever mattered to her. but how much does she buy that that’s what she really wants? how much is she lying to herself and how much is she lying to everyone else?

[countingnothings]

my spouse has moved on from “nona is the soul of a dog” (true, valid, what nona would say about herself) to “if varun the eater possessed judith deuteros, but everyone except nona just sees her as having the same issue as all other necromancers in the presence of a resurrection beast, then every necromancer in the presence of a resurrection beast is experiencing possession by said beast via a thanergetic link. the resurrection beast’s soul is travelling along that link innately and is too large a soul squashed in too small a body, so of course shit gets unhinged. also tamsyn loves literary foils, and what is nona if not the soul of a planet in a human body, a body that has an expiration date because it physically cannot contain that much soul?”

which you know what? i’m here for it. i hate it, but it makes a twisted kind of sense, especially since we know that revenants can possess bodies when the souls of said bodies are sent away (see: eighth house shenanigans; whatever is happening on the ninth at the end of nona), or there is some kind of emptiness (see: wake possessing the parts of harrow where the memory of gideon should be; alecto possessing the parts of harrow that harrow has abandoned to curl up in her river bubble), and we know that resurrection beasts are revenants of planets. and we see in the river travel at the beginning of harrow the way souls seem to be magnetically, automatically attracted to living bodies - even john’s, which is arguably a unique body, and even those of lyctors, whose empty spaces are filled with dead cavaliers. perhaps the revenant of a human does not have the “weight” needed to muscle into a mostly-full space, hence why necros aren’t walking around getting possessed by every two-bit ghost they come across, but the revenant of a planet might just be heavy enough to press in. to make emptiness by compression, something along these lines.

what is number 7 trying to communicate when it screams through mercymorn’s mouth? christabel (dead, not a necromancer) fills up her body when mercymorn is in the river, or perhaps by virtue of being dead is not attractive to the revenant number 7, or perhaps by virtue of being not a necromancer can’t have a thanergetic link with anything, or perhaps a combination of all three is the magic formula that is a side effect of the lyctoral process (or an intentional outcome; who even knows with john). but when mercymorn surfaces into her body, suddenly that body is again attractive, or capable of necromancy, or riddled with empty spaces, or all three, and number 7′s herald is close enough to send the saint of pfaugh!! into a gibbering tailspin. gideon, of course, doesn’t speak planet the way that nona does, so she hears only screaming, but what is number 7 trying to tell her?

and this is also why john has to hide from the resurrection beasts and the heralds, as possibly the most attractive and necromantic body out there. he already has (most of) a planet’s soul inside of him. he cannot possibly fit another one - there isn’t the space (or, says my spouse, he is worried that the beasts might travel along his thanergetic link to alecto, a body built to contain a planet, and who KNOWS what would happen then). and if somehow even john’s fullness can be compressed by the weight of a resurrection beast’s agonised soul, what might it try to say through HIS mouth?

[youaremysunshine-court]

Oh btw blossoms by the amazing devil is going to be The alecto the ninth song trust me

[frontlinebicepsoftheninth]

gideon knew nona was alecto from the start right??? was part of her shock after the kiss seeing her own eyes in harrow’s face???? gideon was standing right there when mercy said “Your child... Alecto’s eyes” so she knows all that like she HAD to have figured out nona immediately. ALSO did harrow not realize alecto had gideon’s eyes in the epilogue??? or during the sixth months where she was in hell or wherever did she piece together what she was already starting to subconsciously realize (according to tazmuir - i forget which interview though) re: the AUs hinting at gideon’s parentage because do you really think a harrow who was unaware that gideon is the daughter of god would not absolutely freeze up and/or faint at THE BODY IN THE TOMB having GIDEON’S eyes????

[themoonstonechronicler]

So I just finished Harrow the Ninth!!!

what the fuck

[fingertipsmp3]

Self explanatory

[iamthescalesofjustice]

idk if ive ever mentioned that my primary obligatory ‘throw my ocs into the series i currently like’ scribbleplot involves keres being at canaan house and jj only showing up onscreen in ntn (barring maybe a cameo in ayu), and their presence, identites, and abilities not being explained until the very end of ntn or after. 

crucially, keres has had a supremely high-level ‘shroud against undead’ effect up the whole time, so nobody falling under that unbrella, including anybody who has so much as touched the river, is able to perceive their existence or the direct results of their actions. the only people at canaan house not subject to this full-on stranger effect are the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and magnus.