#out of canaan

[keplerspacecraftofficial]

electing to believe this is what griddlehark looks like to everyone else

[cutetanuki-chan]

sometimes I see people being confused where alectostasia ship came from so here's a little bit of run down

I'm not really good with words so it might be clunky

what we know from the text

Anastasia tries to achieve 'perfect lyctorhood', something goes wrong during her ascension, John kills Samael, Anastasia fails her attempt

Anastasia moves to the ninth, continues working on the house or only founding it at that time

John asks Anastasia to help build the tomb 'I built that tomb with Anastasia, designed every inch of it.'

somewhere between working on it and Alecto's entombment, Alecto and Anastasia make a vow where Alecto basically swears as a cavalier to her 'Alecto said, I remember my vows. As I swore to Anastasia I swear to you. I am in your service until you bid me the favour, and whatsoever you appoint I shall perform, and consider the vow rendered. This is what I promised, until such a time as you deal with me as you see fit.'

as John leading Alecto to the tomb, she asks to see Anastasia 'She had said, There are almost no beautiful things left. Where is Anastasia? Let me talk to Anastasia.'

presumable Anastasia is the one to inflict to the ninth house importance of keeping her bloodline and worshiping of the tomb through all of those years

Anastasia's bones are in the tomb 'She looked back beyond, and she saw Anastasia, tucked where nobody would find her: Anastasia, all bones. Not really Anastasia. But Anastasia’s body without the meat on it, snuggled right into the curve of the rock, ready to close the door whenever it was opened. She remembered Anastasia.'

Alecto immediately getting chill after tasting Harrow's blood 'The child was silent; but her blood was on Alecto’s lips, and through that blood Alecto was made to understand what it was, and was astonished exceedingly. Alecto put away wrath and said: Thou art the blood of the tomb-keeper.'

Alecto saying sorry for Samael

the implications

the vow on itself is very interesting, at first we all know how usually normal cavalier and necromancer relationships are. then for Alecto to comply to that, indicates she should be pretty trusting of Anastasia, and their relationships at least somehow better than with other lyctors who were terrified of her

then there's also the tombkeeper blood thing, what serves as a check note for Alecto after waking up, and means the initial purpose of the ninth house was actually waiting for rock to roll away

and one part of the vow seems to imply 'if anyone beside a tombkeeper wake you, slay them as they came to hurt you', as could hinted on a protection from other lyctors who wanted to kill Alecto? (Then Alecto remembered the vow, and turned back upon the altar to face the second child and raised the sword with wrath in her heart, for they meant to bring destruction upon her.)

then the matter of Anastasia's bones laying in the tomb next to the rock. not sure if it's just her skeleton or she made herself a some construct mechanism from her bones. and not clear if she got entombed on her own volition or John closed them both there, but being entombed together five feet apart cause we are not gay

there's also some oddness in Alecto immediately after waking saying she's sorry for Samael, but I won't go into that here, anyway Anastasia was trying to find a better way to lyctorhood and I think in her more close relationships with Alecto she figured out something that John wasn't telling them, before or after her ascension

and some theories

I think I first heard this theory from @/mayasaura, that ninth house tradition of telling secrets while submerged in the salt water could've corelate with Anastasia trying to have a talk like that with Alecto since she feels the most at ease in the salt water, so means pool time for alectostasia too

another one that I really like but not sure how much legs it actually would have in canon, one of the reasons Nona was so enamored with her body cause Harrow is a spitting image of Anastasia, first saw @/corvophobia talking about it

coming back to Harrow, could there be anything more to her taking immediate affection to the Body a la some fuckery with Anastasia's spirt/tombkeeper's blood

more people explained it better, I try to reblog most of the theories in my side blog, you can check it out there but some of it explicit just in case

anyway in conclusion, as I keep procrastinating with my work, I don't think they were making out 24/7 in Canaan house in canon but something for sure happened there between them

[beguilingcorpse]

it drives me crazyyyy that like. palamedes is out at canaan house with tenderness in excelsius for dulcinea. the perfect regency era gentleman. every moment is the pride and prejudice hand flex scene. if the pov character was attracted to men even a little bit the narration would be filled with swooning. he’s lowering her gently into chairs and handing her tea so that their hands brush and looking at her with those big grey eyes of his. and all of it is WASTED because it’s NOT dulcinea it’s CYTHEREA. FUCK

[fkapommel]

"Nav, when I saw her face, I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up."

I may be 10,000 years late to the party but holy shit. HOLY SHIT. She decided at 10/11 to become a lyctor, to live forever in order to see Alecto awaken. She pushed herself the entirety of her pre- and post-pubescence to be the greatest necromancer of a generation in order to become a lyctor; she devoted her entire existence to the rarest improbability she could actually piece the Eightfold Path together on her own, as John's invitation was so unbelievably unlikely. And that's why she was willing to use Gideon as her cavalier, that's how she could stand the agony of asking for help and depending on the bitch she swore to hate, that's why it was so goddamn important to have a competent cavalier. And when the true purpose of cavaliership was revealed with Ianthe's ascension, after she had realized how much she couldn't live without Gideon, she was willing to give up her whole life's purpose, the one thing in the world she had ever truly wanted- Alecto - for Gideon!! screaming crying throwing up disemboweling etc etc

[tiffanyachings]

“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.

“Inexplicable, Warden.”

“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”

“Indubitable, Warden.”

“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”

“Maybe the building’s shy.”

“That is just tough shit for the building.”

[scalierpepper]

Some of the more environment-focused scenes I drew for Reinaeiry's Take Me To Church but it's EPIC video!

Here's a link to the animatic! And if you haven't already go check out her music asap

Some notes about my artistic inspiration under the cut:

It was so much fun to dive a bit deeper into the details of Gideon the Ninth and try to make the environments come to life, especially Canaan House. For Canaan, I specifically took a lot of inspo from Neo-Gothic/Gothic-Revival architecture, including Larnach Castle in New Zealand! (The girls are Maori!! And Nona the Ninth shaped my visualization of the first house tons) occasionally some elements were an artistic battle of balance between description and visual tone (overgrown disrepaired gold-shot marble rainbow tile mosaic wood floors, anyone?) but nearly everything I was using as inspo fit so perfectly into my mental image/what I was trying to achieve and I couldnt be happier with the way some of these turned out. For Drearburh I very loosely combined a gothic cathedral with an ossuary and then Pluto-ified the color scheme!

I especially love this scene:

It set the tone for how the rest of the animatic was gonna be colored and it fit my mental image of canaan house vibes so perfectly

Overall I put a lot of love into including as many canon environmental details as I possibly could, and taking meaningful creative liberty where there were gaps in Muir's descriptions. Some parts involved a little logistic puzzling but I'm ngl I love the challenge of translating textual desc to artwork. Working on this was such a treat

[mayasaura]

Harrow got so unbelievablely horny dreaming about Gideon's rolled up sleeves exposing her lean, taut muscle, a little dewy with sweat and steam but you know what.... thinking about it. Gideon does not disrobe basically ever, except in private to bathe. A tantalizing glimpse of forearm may legitimately be the most Harrow's imagination has to work with

[creekfiend]

something that makes me absolutely batty about dog fancy in general is how no one will acknowledge that the whole concept of Preservation Breeding Because Dogs Are Our Cultural Heritage requires a minimum level of buy-in of nationalist concepts. like. this is baked in and unavoidable. insane

[loverboy1717]

Have we considered the blue light that appears in and around Abbigail when the 8th first siphons in Gideon actually has something to fo with Varun?

Cytherea screams and at first I thought it was an act cus she didn’t want the others to realize she wasn’t Dulcie, but what if it has something to do with the RBs and she’s actually terrified for a second? Obviously she doesnt have time to explain that whole mess when Pal confronts her. Am i reaching here?

The next time siphoning happens in the facility one of the devils shows up and we know they have something to do with the resurection. I just feel like tamsyn doesn’t do coincidence and we know Varun has a blue light.

Please discuss.

[katakaluptastrophy]

Once again thinking about how nightmarish the River bubble was...

It lasts for nine months. The ghosts stuck inside it can't quite keep track of time passing, but think it's been around eight weeks.

And of those perceived eight weeks, they don't fully work out what's going on until a 'week' or so before Harrow awakes in the bubble.

These people spent what they perceived as two months of moments of horrible realisation and forgetfulness as Harrow's unconscious mind tried to construct a simulacrum of Canaan House and "enforced certain rules to keep [her] cast on-script".

We know about the "wrong" and "confused parody" NPC versions of the living scions of Canaan House, but what did Harrow's storytelling mean for everyone else? Were they always in control? Did they ever find themselves in places or doing things they didn't remember deciding to do, or distinctly remembered doing before? Imagine having flashbacks of your own awful death while your companions look on incomprehending. Imagine being the only one in the room not claiming to recall that this all happened differently before. That conversation a 'week' before Harrow's arrival must have been so validating and so utterly devastating.

And they still all chose to stay.

[whoopseydaisy]

hey do y’all think canaan house is made up of a bunch of the dead john didn’t save when he nuked the world and that’s why it’s so haunted. it’s just cows and conspiracy theorists and everyone on melbourne’s working tram service.

[cutetanuki-chan]

do you have any alecto/anastasia hcs?

I think my biggest hc is that Anastasia wanted to be present at laying Alecto down in the tomb, but something went not as planned, cause she helped design it and it's her house, where is she

and not quite a hc but I want Alecto snatch some of Anastasia's bones before leaving the tomb

but tbh the moment I got the ask my mind completely blanked out on everything I was thinking about them, I'll add more to this post if I remember some of it

but thank you for asking!

[s-aint-elmo]

throwback to when i first read harrow the ninth and i was convinced that The Body(TM) was not a genuine daily harrow experience but rather a consequence of gideon's erasure. like has harrowhark been having hallucinations of the body locked in the tomb since she was ten or is that just her mind filling in the sounds and sensations of gideon's presence in her life. is harrowhark really in love with the body or is that just her feelings for gideon finding another vessel in her absence. etc. etc. that was fun

[it-grrl]

Gideon Nav deserves to occupy her own living body on her own terms in AtN for no other reason than so she can finally say "Lyctor? I hardly knew 'er!" with her own joddamned mouth.

[g1deonthefirst]

wasn't alfred a hedge fund manager? i get where ur coming from re: the class divide post otherwise btw but am somewhat stumped ab this bc he was definitely the one making the most money and likely highly educated as well, and ended up a cav. ig it is STEM/nonSTEM divide?

hi! yes, alfred was a hedge fund manager — he was also augustine's brother and so comes from a similar (presumably very wealthy) background. this exception doesn't really disprove the rule to me: either way, john was disproportionately likely to make people who were highly educated necromancers and people who were not cavaliers. i want to walk through a couple possible reasons for this.

the first possibility is that john (1) believed that people who were more "intelligent" were more likely to be able to understand necromancy and (2) implicitly believed that people who were academically high-achieving like scientists, lawyers, doctors, etc. were more "intelligent." clearly, john and the lyctors all seem to think pretty highly of their own intelligence. john in particular went from being a poor māori kid to being an accomplished scientist, and i don't think it's a stretch to say he probably believed he deserved it on the basis of intelligence.

in contrast, both alfred and cristabel have their own talents and intelligence disparaged — john describes alfred as "useless, but a darling" and augustine describes cristabel as "not hav[ing] the intellect you'd ordinarily find in a sandwich or an orange." additionally, necromancy is talked about in scientific terms, which lends itself to the idea that you might need some scientific understanding to be good at it. i think it's entirely possible that john consciously decided that some people wouldn't be intelligent enough to hack it and made them the cavaliers, a problematic assumption chiefly in that it equates academic achievement with innate intelligence.

the second possibility, and to me the more likely one, is that john simply made the people closest to him necromancers while making people he wasn't as close to (essentially his friends' friends) non-necromancers. it's pretty clear that the people john made necromancers were people who directly worked on john's original cryogenics project with him, while the cavaliers were all people who got dragged into his cult by those original project members. alfred is a perfect example of this — he's there because he's augustine's brother. other people have made posts about the possibility that john did this to intentionally separate his friends from the people they loved.

but either way, i think this demonstrates who john as a character cared about. john, as a successful scientist, surrounded himself by people who were highly educated and successful, predominantly (as you note anon) people in STEM. people who are disproportionately likely to be white, neurotypical, and cis, or at least disproportionately likely to be able to conform to white/european, neurotypical, cis standards. not only is john not as close to people in his project-turned-cult that aren't as highly educated, but poor people aren't present at all. there are no janitors, no retail workers, no manual laborers, no farmworkers. i don't get the sense that john ever really unpacked his internalized biases or questioned why he primarily values people who are highly educated.

"but," i imagine my hypothetical reader who's somehow made it this far protesting, "of course he's surrounded by highly educated people. he's working on a cryogenics project!" well...precisely. tumblr user sophelstien's scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds essay touches on how this project demonstrates that john is not as progressive as some people assume he is, but what i'll say here is simply that john didn't have to make the people in his cryogenics project the leaders of his new society. and by installing the very people who our society rewards into positions of power, john — consciously or not — shapes the new society he's creating with the old society's inequalities.

[mayasaura]

Actually. Looking at the chronology. The last time Gideon and Harrow talked alone before the pool scene, Gideon accused Harrow of being a jealous creep for telling her to stay away from Dulcinea.

A whole lot of stupifying things happened in between, but really, it wouldn't be surprising if her first panicked reaction to Harrow disrobing was to think Harrow was making a move on her. Relationship definitely hurtling toward something.