#obviously cytherea wants harrow dead for a lot of reasons that are not in harrows best interest LMAO

[g1deonthefirst]

i've been thinking about a really telling line near the end of gtn: when cytherea thinks she's going to kill gideon & co, she says something along the lines of "thank god the emperor will never have the chance to get his hands on her (harrow)" which is really horrifying when you consider that: a) this is exactly what happens in the epilogue and b) although cytherea is not at her sanest during the final fight, she was a young woman chosen by john. she knows what it's like. and she thinks that death for harrow is preferable to being one of god's favorites.

this has been sitting in my inbox for several months i've just been staring at it. thinking about cytherea as a young woman around dulcinea's age when she was chosen by god and taken into a group of his followers who were already all a couple hundred years older than her by that point. and thinking about the way they all talked about her and the condescension of it. eugh!

[paradoxcase]

Chapter 34 of Harrow the Ninth

I sat on this for a while, because I was trying to work out exactly what was going on. Then I wound up getting my Sims 2 back into a playable state and inadvertently spent a lot of time playing the Sims 2 haha

Anyway

Is this just because BOE is in a constant state of fighting against the Nine Houses and thus all their stuff is a bit battle-scarred, or was this shuttle in particular involved in a fight recently?

So Palamedes will become an animated skeletal arm instead of a talking skull. I should have realized that this story puts too much effort into having accurate anatomy to have talking skulls with no attached lungs or vocal tract

Also, I guess Palamedes is either not attractive enough or not female enough to get a sexy arm-creation scene with Harrow

If Camilla would get in trouble with BOE if they found out Harrow was making animated skeletons possessed by the ghosts of dead necromancers for her, that means they probably don't know and didn't plan for her to meet up with Harrow on this planet. But she knew Harrow was going to be there, she was specifically looking for her in the exact right part of the planet and everything. Probably only Harrow would do - regular non-Lyctor necromancers (like for example, Judith) can't do necromancy on thalergenic planets or in space without a bunch of people dying to generate thanergy, and the other Lyctors have no particular reason to want to do Camilla a favor (most of them don't even know who she is). So, somehow Camilla found out that Harrow was going to be on this planet at this time without BOE finding that out (since I'm sure that BOE would probably have objected to Judith being within range of a Lyctor they don't trust) and convinced BOE to let them go to this planet (I'm guessing, since Camilla later says they are still with BOE, and therefore they didn't like, escape from BOE in this shuttle or something). Based on Judith's dialog about a BOE mole, that leads me to suspect that the mole is Mercy, who is the main person who would be able to engineer Harrow being on this planet by herself for this period of time, which makes some sense, since we know that Mercy has some secret that she is bribing Augustine to keep from John. But if that's the case, I'm not sure why Mercy would share information with Camilla and friends that wasn't shared with BOE proper, since as previously stated, Mercy has no particular reason to do Camilla a favor that I know of

This seems to be suggesting that the poster is of Gideon, but no one was making posters of Gideon, and also, I wouldn't describe her as "unsmiling" and "adamant". But if Commander Wake was Gideon's mom, it both makes sense that there would be a poster of her inside this BOE shuttle and also that her appearance would remind Harrow of Gideon strongly enough to cause this reaction

What dangerous information could per-Work Harrow have thought that Judith (or for that matter, Corona) would have that Camilla did not? Or was there more to the letter that Camilla received that asked her not to talk about certain things?

This is hilarious, I can just see them fighting over the pen here

Is this the rapier that Gideon brought with her to Canaan House, and then abandoned during the fight with Cytherea in favor of her two-hander? Ianthe obviously took Naberius's rapier for herself, but there were several other dead cavaliers whose rapiers were never mentioned again, and whose necromancers weren't around to collect them (Magnus, Jeannemary, Colum) that she could have taken from, and I think Colum's would have even been in the same room as her after he died, and based on the early scene in Gideon the Ninth where they were trying to find a decent rapier for her, those others would probably have been in better shape. I wonder why she took Gideon's

On this read-through, this makes me think that Camilla's letter probably did say something about not talking about certain subjects, and that she conveyed this information to Judith and Corona while Harrow was in the River

So, after the last chapter of Gideon the Ninth, but before the epilogue when Harrow was rescued by the Erebos, BOE arrived at Canaan House, rescued/captured all of the non-Lyctor survivors, including Judith who would have clearly been an enemy officer, and stole Gideon's body. Why? I guess since Judith used regular EM-frequency radio to contact the Erebos and tell them about what had happened, that could have been intercepted by BOE and maybe they thought there would be something useful there? I guess they could have already been in the system, given that Commander Wake probably went to Pluto and died there at some point in the not too distant past. I guess they probably know something about Lyctors, and also how to recognize Lyctors, if they left Harrow and Ianthe alone - Ianthe might have seemed too injured to still be alive, but I don't think Harrow was that injured at the end of the book? And also there's the thing where Commander Wake probably knew Gideon the First personally. I guess they might have just taken them all because they couldn't leave them alive to inform the Erebos about them, and they maybe aren't the sort of people to just kill people like that, but why take Gideon's body? Did they recognize her as Commander Wake's daughter?

John said before that he thought that Cytherea was working with BOE, which sounded like a conspiracy theory back then, but if Mercy is working with BOE and BOE turned up at Canaan House just after Cytherea died, that might actually be a sensible conclusion to draw. BOE probably does benefit from that, there could have been potentially eight new Lyctors as a result of the Lyctor trial, which would have tripled the number of extant Lyctors. Cytherea's main damage seemed to be about the nature of Lyctorhood and not stuff that BOE probably cares about, but I guess she could have been both working with BOE and also doing it for her own reasons

[thunderon]

Talk rarepairs to me

anon you are opening my pandora’s box. first of all im a multishipper and it takes very little for me to be like “yeah i could ship that” and muir gives us a book full of characters i can point at and say “gay” so im a kid in a candy store

right now i have an extremely niche set of rair pairs i am interlocking in my head. this all has pretty much 0 canon context but im having fun. so hear me out on something i diehard shipped in gtn: judith/marta. immediately shipped it on my first time reading gtn and we’re finally up to 5 whole fics in the tag.

the two most recent ones here and here captured pretty much the dynamic i had imagined for them

before i say anything: marta dyas is 100% my favorite minor character and i have a Lot of Feelings about her and i ship her and judith in gtn. i really like the dynamic of them both being ‘perfect’ soldiers but they allow a level of comfort around each other that they can’t have with anyone else. it’s so obvious that they have an implicit trust between each other and that marta would follow judith anywhere and judith is totally confident in the fact that marta will have her back. and the fact that tamsyn muir says that if cytherea hadn’t showed up, no one but ianthe would have become lyctorhood, i can reasonably believe a scene where judith would be forced to choose between gaining ultimate power to enter the emperors service as lyctor and marta, our perfect necromantic soldier would choose marta.

i think this ship could get really interesting with just how different the seconds necro-cav relationship is. again, the second necromancer’s specialty is the opposite of the eighths. while the eighth drains their cav like a battery, the second is said to augment a cavalier. i am so curious about the science behind it, and im assuming it works sorta like the final fight scene in gtn when harrow gets in gideons head and talks to her. i wanna see judith give marta some gogo juice so she can kick ass. in my head i view it as a pacific rim type “drift compatible” thing and i believe in the inherent eroticism fighting in sync with someone and trusting them more than you trust yourself, knowing them better than you know yourself.

i would just love to see that specific dynamic and power between marta and judith. and just a side note but i can imagine they got paired together pretty young like isaac and jeannemary, and i think that’s a skill they’d develop over time. i can imagine when they first got paired marta could see judith as nervous/bossy and i could for sure see judith struggle to trust marta at first, but i really want to see how they developed into the unified team they presented at canaan house.

now for the angst. marta dyas is 100% a person who would die for something she believed in, and i think it’s very clear that she believes in judith. marta followed judith’s lead unquestionably and it was judith who made the call to fight teacher and signal the emperor: a call that directly led to marta getting killed. that scene where judith refuses medical attention and tells them to help marta, who is obviously dead, just kills me every time. judith refusing to leave marta’s body and her line where she says “no one should have to watch their cavalier die” had me choked up so bad tbh.i think that’s a decision judith has to live with in htn and i think it is really going to change her in some way.

as for ships with them in htn, i like the idea of judith/coronabeth etl arc and i really like the idea of dulcinea/marta (yes i said dulcinea/marta) in the afterlife. i have a whole mental storyline of how those relationship arcs would go but for the sake of brevity ill stop here lol. i have a lot of feelings about these characters tho

[ghostmartyr]

/clears throat/ so, Immi, I hear you like the locked tomb, which is fantastic! from one person also escaping the snk series into TLT to another, what did you think of the characters and plot in HtN? are there any things you're most excited to see when Alecto comes out in 2022?

-pats lifeboat- This baby can fit so much trauma.

SPOILERS, naturally.

With another paragraph informing the curious that unspoiled is the way to go into HtN, since if you aren’t lost and confused, are you really reading Harrow the Ninth?

I read it all in one day, and that was a choice. It does mean my memory and understanding of what all went on is slightly dependent on someone else on the internet exploding over a particular set of paragraphs and explaining their significance to me, but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

HtN disappointed me on one front in that I was hoping seeing more of Harrow 1.0 would help out any future fic endeavors. On everything else, like the first one, being told the story is such a good time that I’m willing to wait on a full comprehension of where it’s going.

I also really like second person.

What I loved most about HtN is how even without Gideon mentioned until very, very late in the book, you can feel her absence everywhere. In the wrong bubble flashbacks you’re commanded to examine the strangeness, but even in Harrow going about her day, the isolation and the wrongness of it decorate her every action. She’s alone, and she shouldn’t be, and the loss she’s unaware of bleeds into a constant echo of grief.

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated absence as a narrative tool so much. Obviously griddlehark hours go hard once they start in HtN, but even before then, there is so much power to their connection that looking into a world where it never exists still manages to punch you in the heart with how much each one inhabits everything the other is.

The whole series is amping me up with a few thoughts on loneliness, honestly. Gideon and Harrow grow up alone on the Ninth, save for each other. It takes leaving for that to be any kind of good thing. The first book is tag team Among Us with everyone in their little clusters, slowly learning what other people are about as they all drop dead.

The second book has a different vibe and different plot things going on, but it’s similar in that the protagonist gets thrown into a world they don’t fit and have to put on a show. Only now there are even fewer people to familiarize with, with that number correlating directly to how they all killed the person closest to keeping them from being alone.

Lyctorhood is taking the person dearest to your heart and trapping them there forever while they’re stripped of everything that made them who they are.

...Also Ianthe is there.

Gideon, Mercy, and Augustine are the last Lyctors standing after 10,000 years. There were only seven, starting out. Sixteen acolytes who came to the First. The only pair who didn’t succeed in condensing themselves is separated from the pack and sent to live away from their peers on a tiny planet that no one has anything good to say about.

Alecto is John’s -- who even knows, past A Lot, and he puts her to sleep and locks her in a prison no one but he can get past.

God has seven friends. More if you want to count the people in the Cohort, but realistically, he has seven friends. Then they keep dying.

Harrow spends HtN in a spaceship with five people.

One is trying to kill her.

One ordered that one to try to kill her.

Two could not care less about the useless baby Lyctor.

One is Ianthe.

There is no real endgame. There is surviving life, and life has become a game of running as far away as possible so you don’t share your ruin upon your inevitable death.

It’s bleak and sad.

Harrow’s healthiest relationships are with dead people, and some of them she didn’t know at all in life.

Reiterating it, the most plot significant bit of the world is finding someone else in the world, swearing yourself to them, and smashing your souls together until you’ve lost the connection entirely.

My brain’s not in the best place so I can’t do more than gesture loudly at it, but a few people have mentioned that the series’ thesis is a counter to Ianthe’s statement that love is acquisitive.

Harrow tightens her hold around Gideon until Gideon would rather she just strangle her and get it over with, all things considered. It fucks them both up, and when they start working to get past it, circumstance wraps a chain around both their throats.

The necromancers who become imperfect Lyctors have all acquired their cavaliers, and besides the cav, it kills that bond.

Harrow’s rejection of that is why Gideon’s soul is still in the world of the living (and John blood).

She has spent her entire life eating pieces of Gideon to keep herself a horrid imitation of whole, and when she is finally offered that, she refuses.

Grief and how Harrow just can’t are active elements of the book, and Magnus gives her more therapy in five minutes talking about it than she has ever had in her life, but the reason why that isn’t the end of Gideon is because, unlike all the other Lyctors, Harrow turns the offer down.

With the exception of Babs and Ianthe, the relationship between cavaliers and necros about to do the Lyctor thing is cavaliers promising to burn for an eternity while their necromancer lives off the fumes.

Fuck that is Harrow’s response.

Cytherea says, in the aftermath, that they had the choice to stop.

Harrow stops.

A lifetime of doing exactly what Gideon is telling her to do with her death, and Harrow chooses to stop.

Harrow remembers Ortus’ poetry. She regularly sees her congregation off to their deaths. She keeps Gideon’s glasses. She views Palamedes, head exploded and all, as an infinitely better person than she is because of the quality of his exemplary character. She pulls Gideon the First from the incinerator on the night she plans to kill him.

Kiddo has so many fucking issues, but somewhere, she has learned to respect people for being people. That’s why she and Gideon are the heroes of the story, ultimately, and Ortus saying that they’re heroes worthy of the Ninth doesn’t fall flat. They’re actually trying.

Where that puts us for Alecto, I don’t pretend to know.

Since the first book is the temptation of an end to isolation, only to have it snatched away, the second book is the continuation of isolation with a few promising sparks of human connection that pave the way for hope...

That leaves the third book to shed the isolation and allow the connections to thrive.

With Gideon and Harrow MIA.

I know that the books kick things up into high gear in the final acts each time, but if they’re both gone for the majority of the book, no matter how much fun it is, I’m going to miss them. They’re the core leads, and I don’t want to be without them in the final part.

The 2022 release date has aged my soul. I deliberately planned my GtN read to land a month before HtN came out, then suffered when that was delayed. When really that was nothing at all. I hate waiting.

(Insert note that I’m very glad they aren’t forcing Muir to rush anything out. It’s been a rough time, but also, just in general authors should have the opportunity to create the best versions of their art they can, so the extra time hurts, but it’s obviously for the best.)

What I’m most excited for is probably the cover art. The first two have been awesome, and the artist said he’d likely do print sales for all three when the third’s revealed. My wallet cries but my heart does not.

What I dare not be excited for is the potential for Gideon and Harrow meeting again and perhaps hugging. In their own bodies.

I’d take other bodies, but ideally, y’know.

Also I would love for Harrow to finally meet her popsicle girlfriend.

I doubt it would be a wholly positive experience, but by golly I want it. Maybe they could hug too. It would probably kill Harrow again, but who doesn’t expect several people to die again in the third book?

However it plays out, I’m expecting to enjoy AtN. The writing’s the sort that I’ll happily follow wherever it goes. For everything else, there’s fanfic. The only real worry I have is the whole book will be narrated by Ianthe, and while I mentally groan at that, I actually find Ianthe’s commentary delightful, so even in the worst case scenario I’m having a good time.

Thank you so much for the ask.

[strawberryybird]

i lied about being over my tlt posting have a quick lil post. for the funny.

sooo many locked tomb spoilers in here. dont read this read the books. anyway.

i have put a not-insignificant amount of thought into a locked tomb!au for fire emblem that i would design specifically for meee, but it’s edelgard as harrow, leonie as gideon, dorothea as coronabeth with hubert as ianthe and ferdinand is just my mental image for naberius. byleth for alecto. constance for cytherea. and everything goes down exactly as it does in the books. and it would slap. the character choices are all nominal and aesthetic apart from edelgard for Extremely Obvious Reasons and Leonie bc she fulfils the same narrative loadbearing weight as griddle.

like obviously these books are Saying So Much & it slaps so hard because who out there is doing it like tlt. doing actual legit discussion & analysis makes me stressed beyond comprehension so i dont do it, but i think the idea of class and ulitity is so rife in 3H that it makes for such an interesting point of comparison to tlt in my private little word document that no one may ever read (bc it’s just me warbling about gothic lit crit)

& the reason i think leonie is one of the 3H characters of all time is because of how she is ferdinand’s narrative corollary. even at surface level alone, they both parrot their silly little catchphrases, but where ferdinand’s is about his own sense of self & is about who he is at that moment (psychological reasoning aside), leonie’s repeated phrase is about who she wants to become, who she isn’t yet. neither one of them can have their desired place in society because their predecessor is still around and living it for them. it really does interest me how these characters only see development after their mentor figures die (ace attorney meta double dipping on that one). in fodlan society, they both represent the next generation of their social classes & how a) in FE style this narrative is inherited via dead dad and b) how in both of their default arcs, neither of them uphold this status quo. by ‘default arcs’ i’m taking this as black eagle ferdinand and leonie’s golden deer unmarried endings with refs to various support chains. ferdie reckons with his father’s legacy & edelgard’s reforms & herals a very different world than his father did. also gnc icon very interesting for my crest-gender thoughts. leonie inherits jeralt’s debt and disengages from a lot of the society she won the war for. it’s......... they switch goals. ferdinand wanted the safety of a known place in society and existing in comparison to his friends in an established dynamic. & leonie wanted her own path and economic stability. neither of them got what they wanted.

(nona spoilers from now) circling back into tlt and specifically nona the ninth - this book really just showed that each one of the characters (exept maybe ianthe who stayed winning the entire time) got the exact opposite of what they wanted. they became the inverse of the desires GTN set them up with. like an awful b-side. gideon the cavnecro, god’s own cav, wanting freedom more than anything instead just got to the top of the system & yet! still dead! still controlled! and pal having to borrow and exist via the work of another necro. cam’s fatal wound from a duel. judith the representative of law afflicted by the ‘blue madness’. harrow so desperate to make her own existance worthwhile now completely removed from the book.

also i have a little pet-theory for 3H about crests and gender that interests me specifically & is absolutely just a consequence of me having read gideon the ninth and getting my head blown up like pal my good man pal. but a) fire emblem class theory really does boil down to power vs oppression and b) lorenz and his gnc swag got me in a vice grip. it’s not quite like tlt’s necrocav gender dynamic bc frankly no one else is doing it like the tlt necrocav gender dynamic, and i’m having to reach so far i’m pulling my back out.

there’s just something that sticks in my head about the physicalisation of hamartia in 3H - even if it’s not your own, like sitri & aelfric - that contrasts so well onto the death and undeath of tlt series & being literally powered through the death of others.

also like the edelgard to harrowhark axis. i am looking directly at it & i am making so many jokes about war crimes. and like i said up top, ferdinand is my mental image for babs & i want to see him chomped on.

anyway. my brain is rotten like flotsam. (and im not interested in having actual discussions on tumblr dot edu about any of this because i am saying words recreationally. this is not academic submission work this is me having a little laugh and meme pls n thank.)

wait i forgot the point of this post: i’d go so hard for an au of these but bc the tlt characters are loadbearing pillars to the plot imo it’s really hard to do the indiana jones idol switch with them and not set off the boulder trap of consequences in my head. but the aesthetic veneer of fire emblem characters living out the tlt plot? gimme. gimme. i want to see hubert eat a cavalier. i want to see him eat ferdie so bad it makes me look stupid.