#the unwanted guest spoilers

[cutetanuki-chan]

the unwanted guest made an unrepairable damage to my soul

[whimsicallywiddershins]

So we found out from Palamedes and the Unwanted Guest that lyctorhood is not perfect and leaves a mark on the necromancer. The necromancer devours the cavalier's soul, and unintentionally gains something from it, mostly emotions or new urges or something like that. Like Ianthe getting Babs' hatred/distaste of Gideon.

John devoured Alecto. For a little while, John and Alecto were one, two souls intermingling like two pieces of flesh bleeding together. Then John created her a body and poured her soul back in, unintentionally creating a perfect lyctorhood.

John didn't really know what he was doing. He was running on guesswork and instinct. So I think he and Alecto shared and gained something from eachother.

Alecto is always described as angry. Which makes sense, considering the circumstances. But when John killed and devoured the earth, he was furious. He was raging. He hated.

What if Alecto got most of her anger and hatred and rage from John? Some of it was hers, yes. But hatred? A never ending anger? What if Alecto got what John was feeling when he ate her, made her?

And John. What did he get?

The thing is, we don't know what Alecto's personality was like. She was a planet, not exactly a person with feelings.

But we do know what Resurrection Beasts are like. They are relentless. They hunt and hunt and hunt John. Angry, yes. But mostly unstoppable and stuck in a never ending cycle of hunting John no matter the cost.

John won't forgive the Trillionaires. He doesnt even seem that angry anymore. But he won't stop hunting them, not for anything. Augestine begged him to stop. John doesn't let his lyctors tell him to stop. John doesn't care how many worlds he kills, how many people he displaced. He doesn't care about the cost to the Houses. He is relentless. He hunts and hunts and hunts.

John acts like a Resurrection Beast. And Alecto acts like John.

[naomistares]

the unwanted guest spoilers

tamsyn muir when i catch u. tamsyn muir when i catch u tamsyn when i

(yes i died for a while but i came back exactly the same)

[chillyweirdoinacoffin]

“The Unwanted Guest” short story from the Nona the Ninth paperback is now live on Tor’s website!

[sydneysageivashkov]

nona the ninth / the unwanted guest

[tio-trile]

So that unwanted guest huh

[sofipitch]

Souls are permeable-> The more you interact with a person the more it changes you. This is obvious when it's in friendship, and or it is a chosen change. But even if you don't want to change, knowing others will change you will regardless, in ways you may not be able to predict. That is the nature of all relationships, we are not static things. Yeah. That's it, just gonna think about this one all day

[nepenthean-sleep]

by far the most hilarious parallel between ianthe and gideon throughout this book series is them both being like

externally: sex with harrow? ew, gross lmao

internally: (vibrating with insatiable lust) i need to know this tiny fucked up evil nun CARNALLY and i needed it yesterday

[theriverbeyond]

Nona the Ninth was like you are loved. whatever happens next, we did it it's done you can't take loved away. you were loved once and so you will always be loved. you were changed once and so you will always be changed. and let this cradle you, let this be your lifeline, let this tie you down when you feel like you're falling apart.

and then The Unwanted Guest came and was like.... love changes you. people change you. we change each other, just by existing right now together we rub against each other we bleed we mingle. we leave pieces of ourselves behind. you are the sum of the people who have changed you and sometimes you don't get to choose sometimes you don't want it to have been them. and you can try to run away from that, from them, but they will chase you they will haunt you they ARE you.

if this is the wind up move. i am fucking terrified of the horrors of love

[waterlilyvioletfog]

So I like kind of mentioned this in a previous post but like. It’s weird?? Right?? That when Harrow re-constructs the bubble over and over again at the start of HtN Act V she does 1) role-reversal AU 2) Arranged marriage AU 3) Coffee shop AU. Because those are FANFIC TROPES. (The arranged marriage AU being especially unhinged to me because she doesn’t even know John is Gideon’s dad at that point!! Her brain had to come up with “what if Gideon were royalty omg??” ON ITS OWN.) And like the fanfic-ness always was insane bc of course yeah that makes sense from a Doylist perspective, ie, Taz Muir’s an author notable for her inclusion of internet humor and culture, and she has personal experience with fanfic. But it didn’t make sense on a Watsonian level because sure, Harrow’s clearly a Romantic, but this isn’t a genre language that I think Harrow naturally speaks. Harrow doesn’t read smutty romance novels!!! She’s a repressed little nunlet obsessed with bones, her only options of sexual interest in her adolescence being 1) GIDEON 2) a corpse she views as holy and sacred— no really safe options for exploratory crushes or sexual experimentation here. So how is she thinking in fic/romance tropes? Either A) Harrow is significantly less repressed than everything I’ve ever read about her would lead me to understand, B) fic tropes are so transcendental that the agonized, wounded, thrice-haunted mind of Harrowhark Nonagesimus could, in its death throes, find itself in this specific genre of text she has no personal reference for, or C) according to the Sex Pal Theory of Permeability, Harrow has gained an understanding of romance tropes via soul osmosis, from Gideon/Alecto/Wake/Palamedes during the bubble visit???, and that explains why she dreams in fanfiction. I’m going with option C. Thank you Unwanted Guest for solving this little mystery for me 🙏🙏🙏

[scholarhect]

palamedes: Is the natural state of the soul quiet or chaos?

ianthe, wearing a taco bell cap and headset, leaning on the counter behind the register: Look buddy, it’s transient, shifting like water

[b1cr1ptic]

Something something Battle in The Centre of the Mind

[smapis]

backstage not so quick change

[nonasbirthday]

I always thought it was kind of weird that "legendarily unamorous" Gideon the First would have started sleeping with Wake, but chalked it up to the weird circumstances of one half of the pair thinking they were already intimate (since Pyrrha started sleeping with Wake first). But I think Muir pretty much just said lol no G1deon was being influenced by Pyrrha's desires and habits the whole time. Because two souls in the same body are incapable of remaining unaffected by each other.

[shiroikabocha]

Now that I’ve finished it, here are more coherent/useful thoughts (under cut because spoilers)

Oh, this is so perfect. It’s SO perfect.

Ianthe loves being Ianthe. Ianthe loves being Ianthe more than anything else in the world—the closest she gets to loving any non-Ianthe person is loving her twin sister, and from the way Ianthe talks about Coronabeth, it’s pretty clear that it’s a distinctly acquisitive love, not a love based on knowing anything meaningful about Coronabeth as a person. Ianthe is, above all, extremely disinterested in getting to know anyone who isn’t the Most Interesting Girl in the World (Ianthe).

(I think that’s why she likes Augustine so much—he’s spent thousands of years crafting a perfectly blank persona, showing nothing of his interiority, leading Harrow to wonder if he even has any. Ianthe sees that and she’s like: awesome, finally somebody who’s not out to bore me with all their dumb complicated feelings, this guy’s the coolest ever, I want to be just like him)

So for Palamades to hit her with that—oh man. Oh MAN. Ianthe, in your quest to solidify Ianthe Tridentarius as an eternal unchanging paragon of Awe, you have become… not Ianthe. And you were too obsessed with your own Ianthe-ness to even see it.

You thought you could make the devil’s bargain with counterfeit currency and now the bill’s come due. Killing Babs is no big deal because “who cares about Babs?” Baby, YOU cares about Babs! You IS Babs now, bitch! Your perfect immutable self? You went and MUTED it!

God, it’s the perfect way to cut a self-obsessed person to the core. You love yourself so much? The person you love doesn’t fucking EXIST, Ianthe. You invited a permanent roommate into your soul and you don’t even LIKE him and now you’re on the lease together forever and you did it to yourself

The unwanted guest isn’t Palamades. The unwanted guest is Babs.

[astrid-beck]

Ianthe is special bc she has finally achieved the perfect, beautiful, most annoying lovechild synthesis of "I was expecting a battle of wits but you appear to be unarmed" and "your mom suck me good and hard through my jorts"