#the symbolism because it's nona but gideon WANTS to see harrow so badly the way the eyes aren't visible

[gideonisms]

special addition nona gideon????? am unfamiliar, pls elaborate?

Hmm well. There's apparently one where Gideon looks like this:

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and the Gideon on that ntn cover has HAUNTED me ever since. society if this person did prints

[thewhitefluffyhat]

Day Four

[This is the fifth part of a collected liveblog/analysis of Nona the Ninth! See here for the other parts.]

A short day for Nona means a shorter liveblog from me as well. Have some mid-book general opinions to make up for it!

Chapter 17

-Another new chapter image - a leaf or flower of some sort. I still don’t have any idea what that could mean, other than these symbols of life contrasting with the deathly skulls and barren Tomb.

-p231 Of course CamPal use the recorder to talk to each other. It’s still asynchronous, but must at least be better than text. Especially for difficult conversations, since it preserves facial expressions…

Another conversation of what the meaning of love and freedom are. Themes, ahoy!

And again bringing up the idea of Nona as a true gestalt. But even a gestalt couldn’t understand an RB’s speech, I imagine. Unless Nona is actually a THREE way gestalt…

-p240 Ah, so Angel isn’t House, just formerly shepherded. And as expected, she’s not a human doctor. I was thinking vet, I wasn’t expecting zoos to still be around!

-p246 Hmhm, so what did Nona draw that scared the Angel so badly? Noodle’s skeleton, maybe? Wake’s portrait?

-p246 As the narrative becomes more serious with Ianthe’s arrival, we deprioritize the comedy characters. In this case, that means gently escorting the kids offscreen. …Or in other words, the Knight of Cerberus has appeared, so it’s time to Shoo Out the Clowns. Because even after all these years TV Tropes has still ruined my vocabulary. 

-Speaking of Ianthe - did the Babs fusion make her immune to Herald madness? That seems to be what was implied.

Or perhaps - hm. We know that either the wrong body or the wrong soul can protect a person. The person sounds like Ianthe, but has Babs’ hair… therefore, Ianthe possessing Babs’ body to be able to get to the planet with her sister on it despite the RB?

Also on the subject of Ianthe, I’m really curious how Corona is taking all of this!

-p248 D’aww, it wouldn’t be this series without a little bit of gay romance implied! Beautiful Ruby together with Born in the Morning, good for them. Is this the first M/M pairing aside from Augustine/John and Cam’s two dads?

-p249 Hoo boy when Hot Sauce finds out what Nona and her family are, things will not be pretty…

Chapter 18

-p250 So that was definitely Pal checking Angel for something. I wonder what…

-p251 Ahh, Nona was drawing an Earth animal. Or even an ancient Earth animal? I’m not familiar with the term “cradle creature,” but it sounds like an early ancestor that other species in a group are descended from.

Alternatively: If the trillionaires didn’t just populate the galaxy with humans, but also other animals, perhaps this is one of those original animals they brought with them?

-Also, more planet names! First New Rho, now Lemuria and Miró.

[Later me: Lemuria is a mythical/hypothesized lost continent, and Miró might be a reference to an artist? There doesn’t seem to be any particular pattern or connection between planetary names that I can see. I wonder who named them? Settlers descended from the trillionaires?]

-p256 hmhm? Difficult to make out, but it seems like the Angel had a House implant, but was working for Eden and did know about the “Troia experiment” - Nona being a semi-Lyctor?

-p260 Ahh. So it’s inter-BOE fighting. And hey, we finally get to see Pash’s face! Fanart should have fun with the electric blue hair.

-Kind of hilarious/sad that no matter who they are or where they go, Gideon and Harrow and now Nona still end up being someone’s dubiously ethical science project baby.

-p262 Finally, someone does the obvious thing and calls the Lyctor a lich.

Now here’s a silly question: which is more of an accurate term, zombie or lich? As blatantly incorrect as zombie sounds, for BOE’s purposes it probably is more accurate - after all, to kill a Lyctor you want to target the brain, not waste time searching for a hidden soul container to break!

-p265 Okay, wow. Speaking of brains, it was suggested with the thumbs in HtN that Gideon-in-Harrow had healing powers beyond even normal Lyctors, but this is full confirmation. Lyctors can’t heal from a bullet to the brain, and Nona just did.

-p269 OOF. I thought Hot Sauce learning the truth of Nona would be bad, I didn’t think the kid would actually try to kill her! These books sure love making things as dramatic and tragic as possible!

John 5:1

-p252 The name being “Pan-Euro” rather than the “European Union” is yet another way the old Earth of these books is implied to be slightly to the left and/or slightly into the future compared to real life. (The most obvious difference being the presence of trillionaires instead of billionaires, of course.)

I’d be interested to see a compilation of all these differences that don’t just stem from John’s actions.

-p273 I do find it hard to believe anyone would really care about the cows that much. I think it would be more likely that everyone would harp on about the farmers who lost money because of losing so many cows, or about whoever’s bodies John has been using in his experiments. (Where DID he get all of those?) But then again, real life media fixations can get plenty strange…

-p274 Wonder which nation it was who wanted to puppet around their dead leader? The United States or Russia (or maybe even China?) all seem very plausible. Or maybe the big nuclear powers on this Earth are somewhat different from reality!

Also in light of this plot point, the fact that Nona came out right when the British queen having died is dominating the news cycles is just. Morbidly hilarious.

Also², this is now the third time corpse puppeting to hide an inconvenient death has been a major plot point. I wonder what John would have thought if he knew Harrow had been puppeting her parents since she was ten? …He would just have been even more “aw, she could have been my daughter :)” about it, wouldn’t he?

Chapter 19

-p276 Nona’s brain just got scrambled and she’s having a terrifying tantrum but what jumps out to me here is that she just thought of Crown as Corona in the narration.

I don’t think Nona even knew the name Corona. Are Nona’s memories coming back?

-p278 And now Nona is talking with not her own voice. Wonder who that was? Given how cold it sounds, if I had to say, I would guess Harrow. But Harrow being aware of all the Nona shenanigans and sitting passively by… that doesn’t seem right.

And who is the voice talking to? Harrow to Nona about Gideon? Gideon to Nona about Harrow’s body?

John 3:20

-p282 So John already had a necromancy cult in the old world. Pretty wild!

Also as usual we only have John’s word that the FTL guys were lying. I imagine that they will turn out to be lying, but again… John. Unreliable Narrator extraordinaire.

Quick Thoughts

-This seems as good a place as any to pause and do a few more general thoughts on the book so far.

-Hot Sauce just exited the narrative rather dramatically. Will she be back, or nah? I could see that going either way. On the one hand, she’s quite significant to Nona. On the other hand, so were characters like Aiglamene and Crux to Gideon and Harrow, and they exited from the narrative completely after the first act of GtN. In this space opera, the bit parts have rarely mattered… yet.

-Come to think of it, this book has fewer dogs than I expected. Noodle doesn’t even belong to Nona and we never see her interact with the other dogs on the guest list! 

0/10 Not Enough Dogs (Joking)

-On second thought, my current bet is that Harrow is still AWOL and that moment of Nona talking to herself was Gideon to Nona re:Harrowbod.

But if both Gideon and Harrow were present, that brings up another weird possibility: what if Nona’s dreams were Gideon and Harrow talking with each other in the River? I doubt that the narrative would have those two have their long-awaited meet up offpage, but it sure would be a bold choice!

HtN Redux?

Structurally, this book is very similar to HtN. Perhaps too similar. We’ve got a confused, amnesiatic protagonist. We’ve got dream interludes that recount past events spaced between the normal chapters, with the implication that these sections occur literally as the protagonist is sleeping.

And that moment of Nona hearing a second voice seems almost identical - in both placement and I suspect foreshadowing - to the HtN moment of Pal seeing Gideon in the River bubble, and the narration briefly going first-person. Given Gideon’s corpse showing up in the broadcast, I think it’s quite likely that we might also get Gideon herself making a surprise appearance in Act 5 as well.

All in all, it feels like NtN has the same shape as HtN but executed with less… sharpness? Impact? Unless the end of those John interludes can match the absolutely delightful sequence of AUs and then the Nonius vs the Sleeper duel (which would be very hard), then I suspect I’ll wind up feeling that NtN is a little bit like HtN’s less ambitious cousin.

I also absolutely loved HtN’s POV shenanigans, and I’m now far enough into NtN to regretfully conclude that it isn’t doing anything on nearly the same level at that. Ah well.

Which is not to say I’m not excited for NtN’s conclusion. On the contrary, I’m very invested!

Day Five, Part 1 >>