#jeannemary the fourth

[bugcowboyart]

Blades of the Cavalier Primaries Displayed for your Appreciation

In house order from top to bottom. I’d be happy to explain the choices if anyone is interested!

[automatonwithautonomy]

something something jeannemary chatur at five challenging an adult for her honour and colum 'i do not pick and choose my decencies' asht. the fourth cavalier raised as cannon fodder and the eighth as a battery. their siblings they would've had go watch die. clinging to the necromancers that refuse to eat them. dying horribly and preventably in canaan house. the only things they have are honour and their swords and their scraps of bloody family.

[the-butter-churner]

something something ulysses and titania being two "dead kids" and how the fourth house was founded by them and are meant to supply the military with bodies corpses generate more corpses and more often than not those kids die young something something jeannemary and isaac expecting to get shipped out at thirteen dying at fourteen something something fidelity fidelity fidelity

[space--daemon]

Would it be possible to hear more of your thoughts about the 5th absorbs the ninth au?

oh my god YES

i'm so deep in my tlt bre fic or i would already be writing this because i LOVE this au and will soon be reading EVERY fic with this concept (some of which are linked in the notes of the original post)

so i imagine this taking place a short while after harrow opens the tomb, a year or two at most

harrow is equal parts devastated w grief and fanatic with adoration for the body in the tomb

she is also NOT in the mood for the ninth to be absorbed by the fifth and is ready to fuckin throw down

of course by throw down, harrow means "glare at them until they go away and also bones" bc she's twelve and that's really all she can do

fifth's first trip to the ninth:

abigail: hel- those people are dead

harrow, currently manipulating the corpses of her parents: (drops from the ceiling like batman) begone, invaders, you are not- griddle!

gideon, who Should Not be there but saw a sword and thought "fuck it": (walks up to magnus) fight me old man

magnus and abigail immediately decide to adopt these children

magnus starts sparring with gideon and getting his ass handed to him, much to aiglamene's delight

abigail begins the daunting task of Earning Harrowhark Nonagesimus' Trust

she explains she doesn't actually want to take over the ninth and harrow can have it once she's eighteen

this inadvertently offends harrow and sets them back a month

the fifth quickly pick up that ortus is Not Into this whole cav business and make the pretty obvious connection that gideon should be harrow's cav and the equally obvious connection that both girls would Rather Die

cut to quinn and pent's epic quest to trick two preteens into accepting the fifth as their caregivers and becoming cav and necromancer

they also become the world's most awkward wingmen

magnus, during a sparring session: say, the reverend daughter looked very regal this morning, didn't she?

gideon, who has already adopted this man as a father figure: what the fuck mags how could you betray me like this

ortus is either besties with the fifth or actually fucking them like abigail pent would one hundred percent take one look at this chubby eloquent caring inept motherfucker and be like I Want That Bear Obliterated

at some point they get it into their heads that the girls need peer engagement so they bring jeanne and isaac to visit

harrowhark nonagesimus, who has never met a person younger than her, watching a nine-year-old jeannemary chatur vibrate with excitement: what the FUCK is That

gideon nav, whose only experience with people younger than her is harrow: what the FUCK is That

[6th-for-truth]

Anybody else picture the 4th as a couple of baby punks? Just me?

Available here

[sexybread-png]

thoughts on my beloved awful teenagers the fourth house

theyre menaces

love them

would probs either find them annoying if i knew them irl and/or b v friends. ngl.

[cal-adia]

Here is my contribution to the TLT Big Resurrection Event!

This piece is based on the fic by @nonasbirthday called The Hottest July. Check out the other works by @blueoceanarts here and by @owlqueen10 here.

[ratgraphic]

Jeannemary Chatur, Cavalier of the Fourth House, and her necromancer, Baron Isaac Tettares

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 15

In which we have the obligatory party/ball scene. Obligatory to what? Off the top of my head, Murder Mysteries and Fake Dating AUs

A few hours later. A lot goes unsaid with this; it’s a time skip, but it’s a telling one. It means that nothing happened in the few hours between Harrow collapsing and waking back up; Gideon didn’t leave, didn’t look around, didn’t see or examine anything new of import. She kept vigil, and the narration breezes right past it.

“Necromantic Theorem.” So the magic system is formalized and not just pure will. Gideon’s being glib but this IS essentially how I thought this worked, so it’s nice to have this clarified.

Ha. Gideon remembers the name of the fourth Cavalier but not the fourth necromancer. Priorities.

“Fan Mail.” Possibly a concept Gideon picked up from the backs of the comic books. and from this fan mail we derive that Abigail and Magnus have a dynamic. Stern cop Jovial Cop.

Harrow jumps right to a (I assume) completely appropriate assessment of the genre they’re in and starts hypothesizing assignation plots. Gideon, meanwhile, demonstrates greater Machiavellian acuity than I’ve previously ascribed to her, purely because her first-ever dessert is on the line. She’s like Roger Rabbit with the Handcuffs. Extremely conditional trains of thought.

Harrow is nervous about the function. Gideon assumes that this is because she wants to get back to the trials, since she used to run Ninth House functions without a sweat. This brings us back to Gideon only really being able to model Harrow in a combative context; it’s cripplingly obvious why Harrow is afraid of this function. She ran a transparent con against addled, devoted, elderly clergy, many of whom were literally blind. This is a gathering of High Society, which Gideon herself just painted as a potential hotbed of information gathering and Machiavellian politicking- a thought that apparently literally stayed in Gideon’s head for the exact amount of time it took her to win the argument, and no longer. 

Glad Rags! Magnus is great.

Abigail Pent, Intense Librarian. Very curious how things are between her and Magnus, just generally. Political marriage? According to Teacher (they (helpful exposition dispenser) She’s a spirit-talker. A necromancer in the traditional use of the term. That’d be Fifth House’s bag?

Interesting exposition on the Fourth and The Fifth here; The Fourth has been implied to be subordinated to the Fifth a few times. Magnus I think is actually the dreadful teens Uncle, and Isaac is apprenticed to someone outside his own house. Did the Fifth swallow the Fourth the way Harrow is afraid the 9th will be swallowed? Is there precedent that she’s afraid of?

The Third and the Sixth are facing off before Teacher (conveniently!) defuses things by announcing the main event.

Gonna read stuff into the seating arrangements. Gideon is with Palamedes, her lady-love Dulcinea, and the fifth Cav. Harrow is with the Mayo dyad, Ianthe, Seventh Cav super mutant, and Naberius. Putting eighth and ninth together feels like some kind of power play.

“The same middle name.” Good God. Coronabeth is either laughing too hard on purpose as an ingratiation play, or she is, in fact, compatible with Gideon on two levels.

Okay, there are on-site greenhouses. That explains where the food is coming from. I was wondering.

Alright, Magnus and Abigail can’t conceive. Slightly adjusting my assessment; they have the affordance of being nice because they’re weird, and on the outs within the political system they’re ostensibly on top of. Abigail is interested in pure scholarship and Magnus is interested in Abigail. I refer back to my previous assessment of Magnus as embodying the fun aesthetic parts of courtly empire w/o the inherently monstrous decision-making power.

 And Dulcinea is, in fact, good at picking up on what her conversational partners care about and feeding it. It’s not a Gideon-specific thing; she’s honing in on Abigail’s interests as well.

“Post Resurrection, Pre-sovereignty, pre-cohort.” Aaaaand Gideon turns away from the exposition because that’s just what she does.

Okay, from the Young-Uncle-Ianthe-Babs interaction we get the following; young-uncle has something against… intervention in births? A religious taboo? Ianthe was premature, extracted by C-section; The Eigth (Silas, I checked the cast page) calls this a “wasted opportunity,” which feels like a deliberate inversion of real-life Catholic Abortion Dickishness ™. Babs jumps in to defend Coronabeth, as he did before; Ianthe tramples him verbally. From this we derive that Babs is into Coronabeth specifically, although it doesn’t end well for him no matter which of them he’s talking to. And he has opinions on Bucklers, which Gideon wants to hear. It’s always interesting to encounter someone who has your exact interests but is so massively dickish on every other axis that you can’t capitalize on it.

This is Gideon’s first interaction with Jeannemary, and it’s this. I like that even when Gideon is interacting with the fourthling directly, there’s a shift in the dialogue from when Jeannemary is speaking normally and when she’s doing the nasally whine thing. She’s great. (But is Isaac great? I can’t tell if they’re trading off on doing the bit, or if it’s all her, all the time.)

And Gideon gets to eat! That’s good.

Okay, so Harrow, given a chance to dig into things with Teacher, can make him look thoughtful. A theological discussion? Applied Theory? Most of the others haven’t gotten far enough in the trials, so far as we know, to be able to talk specifics in the way that Harrow now can.

Is Dulcinea’s bit about the Biceps a Gravity Falls reference?

Oh, Jeannemary was, like, jealous. And possibly Crushing. Okay, this is back to cute. I like how the vocal affect reflects their tone but also their physical distance from Gideon and Dulcinea; also, question answered. It’s all Jeannemary. Isaac is the voice of reason, ish.

Okay, so Dulcinea pops the question- the big question- why are the houses like this. The dysfunction is obvious if not yet explosive; The houses are militarily and financially secure from the constant influx of spoils; The Emperor’s favor is both nebulous in its actual benefit and completely unrelated to the task at hand, which is pretty explicit (learn how to be Lyctors!) You’re inclined to say that everyone in Canaan House, categorically, has virtually no higher place to which they can climb within their hierarchies; that’s the point of pursuing Lyctorhood. Of course, the situation with the Ninth tells us that the assumed notion of security isn’t true in the slightest, the situation with the Sixth demonstrates that the Houses can have orthogonal interests like pure scholasticism, The eighth clearly aren’t in it for money…the more I think about it, the more Dulcinea’s remarks feel like that thing pretentious poets sometimes do where they wax cynical about an arrangement without putting much thought into the petty incentives underlying stuff. This might be deliberate; Dulcinea is clearly pretty clever.

Alright, something’s going on between Palamedes and Dulcinea. Gideon thinks that his weirdo obsession with. uh. Medicine that works…? gives him the hots for her.

“Magnus was nice.” I forgot to mention in chapter 12 that Gideon’s word choice in relation to Magnus is tied like an anchor to her current mood. When she’s in the pits, Magnus “tries pathetically hard;” when she’s well fed and high on Dulcinea, he’s “nice,” and she’s hurt on his behalf when Harrow ignores him.

And we end the chapter on this; Harrow thinks Pent is now in the running. Harrow is really, really committed to the idea that she has to WIN; this is, with added context, probably at least a little true, because the Eighth is probably an existential adversary and the Third strikes me as an opportunistic adversary if they get an opening. But it’s very telling that Harrow hears the Eighth- the most zealous of all the houses- just hand this information over to the Fifth without any cajoling and jumps to the conclusion it’s a race. What she overheard was an act of cooperation. And she was asleep for a major act of inter-house cooperation. She’s sticking to her initial paradigm, in the exact way that she stuck to her initial paradigm with the 163 skeletons. And Gideon, with her ability to actually make nice with people from other houses, might be the only effective counter to this tendency.

[fourohfourlifenotfound]

Are non-audiobook readers aware that the voices for the 4th house teens are like really close to the Charlie the Unicorn voices? Like do you know?

[summersofsalt]

Here's my art for the TLT big resurrection event! It's a shot of the Fourth at Canaan House from @trans-bashir-julian's Isaac and Jeannemary fic, "when that which is perfect is come"

[bugcowboyart]

Canaan Fodder

Fourth is for fidelity, facing ahead.

not to be old, but fourteen looks younger and younger every day

[automatonwithautonomy]

ummmm anyway. how do we think jeannmary the fourth, jeannemary the half-orphan, jeannemary of five sisters, jeannemary the last-to-die, jeannemary the-left-behind felt when those bones speared her? do you think it was relief? it's very fourth to die; it's equally so to have to live. she didn't have to go on without magnus or abigail, she didn't have to live without her necromancer. she didn't have to face how terminally she failed.

"I want to die" she said afterward. "Tough luck." - Gideon the Ninth, chapter 25, page 284.

[thenot-so-polite-canadian]

BRB crying about Jeannemary and Isaac again

[pdalicedraws]

I’ve drawn Isaac with a bowl cut twice and then realized on my reread that he has “upswept” hair… sorry I deprived you of your punk ‘do, bud; this is my apology

(Also I don’t think people wear their house colours all the time in ‘real life’, but everyone at Canaan House was there as the heir/representative of their home planet, so there was definitely some posturing going on)

[6th-for-truth]

I really do love this moment for Gideon, though. Let the poor kid have a fangirl and a bit of dessert. Goodness knows she's earned a sliver of positivity smooshed between all the awful.

Available now on my Etsy here