#gideon the ninth theories

[elvencantation]

@thursdayplaid thoughts/predictions for harrow the ninth

harrows hallucination is not new. nice to know. (she had that question after the first bit. we just finished chapter two and paused to chat)

whether she’s actually hallucination or seeing the body in a vision (is it internal or external) it doesn’t rly matter cause of what they cause to happen narratively. the result is the same

the body isn’t the first resurrection?

what would be the irony if you kill an entire planet to resurrect someone and that creates a crazy beast and then the person immediately just offs themselves (she means the body, though she did add this was more of a fun theory)

doesn’t like jod. he’s now a villain

he doesn’t have to play nice. he’s the only person in the book who could pretty much do whatever he wanted

the fact that there is consequences to killing a planet- very satisfying. like our world is being killed by ppl we cant touch and even if we can they’ll be replaced

jod needs to get another hobby

very happy the planets are fighting back

he doesn’t deserve eyes that cool!! we need to invent a new color that’s bad just for him

what should happen is- actually killing a planet slowly also creates resurrection beasts except they take longer to show up

he doesn’t even deserve to look upon soup!!! and also broth. no broth for jod. or stew. banned

even tho now it makes sense in hindsight, she’s a little sad the body wasn’t Gideon and just that harrow couldn’t bear to say her name

harrows gonna resurrect the body. or gideon. or both. might be almost worth it to kill more planets just to have more creatures to go after the emperor

jod is like if someone took like a shell ceo and made him god

like to charge reblog to cast that harrow brings about the death of the emperor and does it like three more times

she said i could copy paste this as long as i also told everyone that i am the best

bonus thoughts/theories about gideon the ninth under the cut

we’re right before the pool scene she’s like- oh something about dulcinea is off not saying she’s the bad guy, not that this story really has bad guys and good guys, but the ways she react dont really add up

“also it seems too far fetched that gideon would be like- the kid of the emperor or something” 👀 “her eyes and her hair are just such a unique color and other characters seem to emphasize that and be like ‘i wonder where you’re from’ but i think it might be a bit too cliche for this story if she was the kid of the emperor”

also theorizing about all the ninth kids dying being a necromantic experiment “maybe they accidentally created a biological weapon?” “maybe gideon was the first person who was resurrected, and she like absorbed life energy. and when she was a child she accidentally absorbed the life force from the other children and as she grew older she became in tune with the planet so she didn’t have to absorb from other people anymore” (almost reverse lyctor?) maybe she was a created child, like the person wasnt actually her natural bio mom omg she just said “alternate theory- harrow absorbed all the children oh wait nvm forget that theory it doesn’t make sense”

“my theory is gideon finally ends up escaping at the end of the book and the next book is harrow trying to get her back, maybe not in a traditional sense”

“what’s in the tomb? a disease that killed the kids? the emperor? the first emperor? is it not a tomb at all but a prison??” is gideon the thing that used to be in the tomb? “i think what’s in there is the first and only resurrected creature and that for some reason it’s tied to the ninth house or the emperor or something like that. maybe it’s like the emperors power source or something’

the heads of the ninth house saw their kids were dying and tried to wake up the thing in the tomb that knows the secrets of immortality and resurrection and tell it to bring back the children only they open the tomb and oops it’s a baby (gideon) who isn’t really of use, maybe she has the secret in her but she can’t tell them or maybe they tried to synthesize a cure from the baby but were too late harrow opens the tomb and sees its empty, or sees the lock is broken, and when the parents are like- you’re in trouble harrow does uno reverse and threatens to call the emperor and tell him they released his immortality baby i dont actualy think gideon is the tomb baby, but if she was, it would make sense why they were so obsessed with not letting her leave

is this a plot to kill the emperor?

[ourg0dsal]

Random but 10,000 years is crazy. Like actually bonkers. And that's 10,000 years SINCE the end of the world as Jod knew it. 10,000 years is his reign. 10,000 years is the Mesolithic period, before recorded history.(up to the point of this posts creation in the non myriadic year of no lord, 2025 anyways).

And so it's crazy that in the same time period that humans went from using small stone and sticks as tools, to having commercially available VR headsets, that a world fuelled by necromancy has not by themselves recreated Lyctorhood. Especially when their entire society is a reflection of the original lyctors. A necromancer and their cavalier.

And because of this, i think that was on purpose, that Jod hasn't had such a loose and casual hold over the nine houses as he might suggest. Or that his loose and casual personality might convey. That perhaps that issue of the accidental recreation of Lyctorhood has shaped a lot of decisions he has made about how to run the nine houses. I mean think about it, he thinks of the internet as one of the good things he withheld from the nine houses, but again, it's been 10,000 years and not a single person has ever conceptualized an electronic network that could allow the nine houses to communicate freely and share ideas and and work on projects together and learn from the other?

And i think someone probably has, but jod nipped that in the bud, because it wasn't in his vision for the nine houses. And the same for any promising necromancer. It's why the houses specialize in specific forms of necromancy rather than specializing in it as a whole. Because if everyone was learning all forms of necromancy then it really would just take one strong necromancer with an idea. And If the nine houses were able to readily recreate lyctors then Jod and his lyctors wouldn't be needed. Like sure Jod needs to be kept alive to keep dominicus running, it doesn't mean he gets to keep playing god.

The nine houses obtaining the knowledge of lyctorship, would be the downfall of Jod and he knows it. And so he keeps Lyctorhood away from the nine houses, and lies about (his version of) perfect Lyctorhood away from his lyctors. To keep the threat of him losing his power nonexistent.

[with-my-murder-flute]

the hunt for enneameter: new and completely unprecedented levels of alectopause brainrot

Elseweb I was trying to explain to someone why I felt that Ortus had a strong formative influence on Gideon and Harrow. And the reason is: They don't speak like normal humans. They speak like people very accustomed to recitation, especially reciting metered poetry. (My brothers and I grew up in a youth group that did a lot of memorizing and reciting old-ass fancy talk, and oh boy is there a difference between the two)

And the person said they guessed they could see it with Harrow but they didn't get it with Gideon. So to demonstrate, I pulled out Gideon's "the only job" speech from early in GtN. Which is where my troubles started.

As Harrow promptly tells her, it's structured in a set of three unnecessarily long and punchy descriptions. That's a remarkable level of rhetorical flourish and suspicious all on its own.

And then I started trying to explain how I thought it scanned in iambic pentameter, and some of it is long strings of iambs, but not all. Then I remembered that I hate doing this crap because what feel like very natural stress patterns to me are not how people from other accents or countries would say it. And anyway, I gave up on explaining the scansion, and just tried to break it into what seemed like natural lines to demonstrate the similarity to something like Shakespeare. I included syllable counts as I saw them in parentheses at the end of the line. Not all the lines were iambic pentameter, but 10 absolutely was the mean and mode number of syllables per line.

And then I noticed that with my pronunciation ('kicked' and 'flipped' as one syllable), Gideon's little speech was 96 syllables long. Not quite the 99 you'd think is appropriate for the Ninth.

...And that recognition of the structure wound up most of the way to spring, needing just one tiny bit more to fully click, led me to remember that sometimes Shakespeare breaks up his speeches between characters, and they make the larger structure together. Like, Romeo shows up in the balcony scene declaring the first part of a sonnet about Juliet, and then she shows up and Uno reverses it on him with the last octave.

So I looked at Harrow's next line.

It was 3 syllables long and completely punctures Gideon's rising bubble of hot air.

I'M GOING TO COMPLETELY LOSE MY SHIT HERE TAMSYN--

G: Nonagesimus, the only job (9) I’d do for you would be if you wanted (10) someone to hold the sword as you fell on it. (11)

the only job I’d do for you would be (10) If you wanted your ass kicked so hard, (9) the Locked Tomb opened, and a parade came out (11) to sing, ‘Lo! A destructed ass.’ (8)

The only job I’d do would be if you (10) wanted me to spot you while you backflipped (10) off the top tier into Drearburh.(8)

H: That's three jobs. (3)

People who are good at cryptography and poetry scansion please help. Before I go off to tear all my pillows apart with my bare hands while weeping, I'll leave you with one last thing:

those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard never to draw it forth for the battle

28 syllables. Harrow says it doesn't scan; Ortus refutes this and says it's "enneameter" (after the Greek word for "eight") and therefore does. Casual reminder that the Ninth is positively shitty with people keeping secrets from each other using complicated codes and ciphers. How does enneameter work?

(Final tidbit if you need extra incentive: He also says enneameter is "the traditional form". This may be a quotation from his own work, or it could be from some other mouldering old book in the Ninth's library. Just how old?)

[beguilingcorpse]

weaponry in the locked tomb is so interesting because when you break it down it's like:

guns exist in-universe but are used by the freedom fighter terrorist organization almost exclusively

swords are (were?) commonplace enough that gideon was able to find and train with a decently well-balanced two-hander on the ninth, despite the fact that the ninth has no military force or even interplanetary traffic. gideon's sword is at least 20 years old, probably older

swords are definitely still in use within the empire, at least by cavaliers, but likely within the cohort as a whole. to my memory there are no mentions of cohort members carrying military-issue guns

even though they're trained in a variety of weapons and techniques, cavaliers (are supposed to) carry exclusively rapiers. gideon prefers her two-hander and cam carries twin shortswords, but these seem to be rare and shocking exceptions to the standard.

rapiers are used by cavaliers explicitly for the purpose of lyctorhood. they're light enough that a scrawny necromancer without swordfighting experience can pick it up and rely on their cav's training without needing to build the muscle to wield the sword effectively

because of the secretive nature of the megatheorem, and lyctorhood as a whole, most people just follow the rapier rule because it's tradition. it is what is done. harrow makes this pretty clear at the beginning of gtn

cavaliers can carry a variety of offhand weapons. it seems like the full spectrum of middle age weaponry is possible - but still, no guns. not even secretly, as with cam's dual blades. some cavs choose to carry material for their necromancers as their offhand - ortus carries a bowl of bones for harrow, and i can only assume "the powder" mentioned as harrow's choice for gideon's offhand towards the beginning of gtn is some kind of bone dust

from a doylist perspective, all of this creates a aesthetic that starts very analog and gothic and gradually grows into a more standard sci-fi space opera through the series. by ntn, we've hit most of the established genre weaponry tropes that we've come to expect from older futuristic space media like star wars and alien. blasters and guns are standard fare, and it makes sense to hold off on introducing them until the scope of the story gets broader and more interplanetary

from a watsonian perspective, it's a little more difficult to draw concrete conclusions without the context that atn will inevitably provide. but if i had to hedge a guess, i'd say that, as with most things, It's All John Gaius's Fault. when he resurrected the galaxy i'd assume that he wanted to keep the aesthetics of medieval imperialism, and given his 21st century liberalism probably didn't want guns to be part of the equation. but they were anyways - we know this because wake carries a big one - and instead of standardizing firearms within his military and for his lyctors, he clings to the aesthetics of swordplay. please correct me if i'm remembering it wrong, but to my knowledge every gun shown in the series is either directly linked to boe or implied to be sourced from them. jod dooms his own lyctors and military by refusing to update their weaponry.

all of this poses a lot of questions about atn: who will carry a gun, and why? where did the gun come from? why DON'T the lyctors just use firearms? and most importantly: will they be fighting zombies with swords???

[schizononagesimus]

so, my partner read gideon the ninth in a single day (which is great and all their takes are correct). among other questions i had disappointing answers to (mostly "no we never learn what's wrong with the eighth house"), there was one i had no answer for: why did no one on the ninth have another kid after the two hundred died to make harrow?

their reasoning: "infants existing suggests that there are at least a few people of childbearing age who could potentially have had at least one other child, unless the gas that killed the kids made everyone infertile, i dunno"

[all-eggs-one-basket]

Pyrrha says Gideon the First’s ORIGINAL name, here, change my mind:

Compare the G dash to the standard em dash above it…it’s longer and thicker, just like the placeholders in John’s speech. AND it’s followed by a comma, which isn’t standard if it’s just indicating interruption.

That’s G’s real name, and somehow not even Alecto can hear it…so what did John DO?

Audiobook folks, does this stand out in the audio version as much as it does visually??

[llovelyclouds]

"NEVER LEFT THE PLANET, DIED IN THIS SELFSAME TOWER"... ok. ok. so. okay so. if we're operating under the assumption that canaan house is john & company's labs, and that the other skeleton servants also died at canaan house and never left the planet, then one can assume that the bone servants in gideon the ninth are all of the cultists & ex-cultists in nona the ninth.

wow. so. after the cultists killed johns friends... he didn't fully resurrect them but instead kept them all to work for him and his pals and make food for them and rot until they couldn't even remember how to write anymore. okay. the implications.

haha. anyway

[friendoffrogss]

The best part of Alectopause is that I know there is more story out there. I have no clue how I will act once the story is over. I might die. Who knows.

[chilly-weirdo-in-a-tomb]

Harrow, at some point in AtN:

[grievingbovine]

“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did."

Nona liked that. “That’s why I love Hot Sauce and Honesty and my friends so much. They don’t have to like me, and it was a huge surprise when they liked me, but they do.” “Being unexpectedly loved is so wonderful or terrible, isn’t it?” “Wonderful, I think,” she said.

Fascinating parallels between GtN and NtN.

[cicadascribbles]

Wait hang on you guys, you know when Nona dies in Ntn how her body and organs split at the seams and her skin kinda starts to slough away? That’s like strikingly similar to what happens to people with acute radiation poisoning i.e. nuclear weapons. Irradiated soul Alecto causing Harrow’s body to fall apart?

[narsildur]

Okay bear with me if this is answered in text I have only read GtN twice and the others once, but do we ever get confirmation exactly which houses are on which planets??? Obviously the Ninth is on Pluto, the First is Earth, and then in GtN we learn the Sixth and Seventh are Mercury and Venus - although not which is which at that point. I just… i am so very interested in who’s on what planet. AND do we ever learn how Jod terraformed them??? I know he like banished their souls or whatever but is it ever described if it’s just that process that makes them habitable or if there’s more steps?

We know the Ninth is described as being one huge vertical crack in the planets surface and then they’re all living inside basically glorified shipping containers like they never go onto the actual planet’s surface, so is there something like that for say?? Jupiter??? It’s just floating base installations inside the gas cloud?? I just !!! I love world building and I want to know specifics of how each house actually *works* within the planet they live on.

[ourg0dsal]

I don't know... it's probably been said before. But it's the fact that Gideon was originally supposed to be of the "two hundred dead daughters and sons" that she wasn't supposed to live. She wasn't supposed to live a life intrinsically connected to Harrow's, or ever leave the ninth. She was destined to die and become one with Harrow. All just to live long enough to die and become one with Harrow.

I'm drunk so maybe in the morning this won't make any sense, but if Gideon was always going to die. Was always going to become a catalyst of Harrows power. And there is a reflection of her importance to Harrow in the power she gives Harrow. Had she died as part of the 200 she wouldn't have done anything extraordinary at all. But she lived and loved Harrow and became the catalyst for lyctorhood. A power equal in everyway to her importance to Harrow.

I'm sure someone will get the vibes.

[lady-harrowhark]

what is the secret door theory?

Excellent question! In short, we don't exactly know.

It's mentioned just once in chapter 27 of GtN:

“I don’t know how the hell they did it.” “I do,” said Harrow, “and if my calculations are right I can replicate it. But all this is more than unsustainable, Sextus. The things they’ve shown us would be powerful - would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability - if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.” “Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth.” She bristled. “It’s a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we’ve got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower. That’s what’s called hard evidence, Warden. Your megatheorem is based on supposition and your so-called ‘instinct.’” “Thanks! Anyway, I don’t like how many of these spells are about sheer control,” said Palamedes. “Don’t be feeble. Necromancy is control.”

Basically, given that context, it seems that Harrow believes there's a massive continuous source of thanergy hidden somewhere, accessible via "secret door". I would imagine that this theory may have sprouted from whatever she deduced from the information she's collected through her time "counting doors" and mapping out the premises.

Any further than that? Entirely speculation at this point.

[letsnotdieartless]

Working on big things (the project currently has 64 layers and not remotely finished), so have a Griddlehark doodle from my algebra class

[transbutchblues]

hi locked tomb fandom !!

i made an analysis document that compile important informations about the series, comments on every single chapter of every book, theories, biblical and classical parallels, name meanings (not limited to those in the prononciation guides, and linked to character theories), and other things. i spent a very long time on it and it’s still in progress, but i think it’s long enough to be shared now, since it’s over 100 pages.

please tell me if you have ideas of things to add, any theory you’d like to share, anything you think might be relevant. and please share this, writing it really helped me understanding and connecting things better, so i think it could be useful for others