#there have been some interesting takes on the necro/cav relationship so far

[apple-of-my-pie]

Given Ianthe’s eye color fuckery in HtN, Paul’s “there’s time for you and Naberius Tern” comment in NtN, and the consistent reappearance of pretty much every Locked Tomb character that the reader would assume to be dead, one of my top predictions for Alecto the Ninth is that we’re gonna see Babs again

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 12

Longest of these yet. In which we meet the sixth house, get even more of a sense of the shape of Gideon’s Harrow obsession, and analyse the incongruity of Canaan House as it relates to a certain suite of YA tropes.

We open with Teacher, the fucking comedian. The Tridentarius assessment was wrong; probing the priests produces zilch, The specifics of the trials, whatever they may be, remain unclear. Teacher, for reasons unknown but well-in-fitting with his would-be trickster archetype, fraternizes with the isolated weirdo.

Gideon’s rundown of the necros and cavs conspicuously leaves the sixth unaccounted for, bar their general absence; this feels important. Potentially they’ve gone the route Harrow did of sequestering themselves. Her commentary on the eighth provides some clarity; they’re second-to-last house before the Ninth, their aesthetic inverse, and apparently aggressively pious; there’s a religious schism at play. Very likely the eighth wants to assume the duties of the ninth, and given the ninth’s sorry state would have very good grounds to do so if it got out how badly things are going. Other points of note: The second house dyad seems to not want to be there. Earlier I speculated that at least one house was going to turn out to have sent someone primarily to keep up with the joneses; I suspected that it was Dulcinea, given how she seems like she’s about to keel over, but given that the second appears to lean more heavily into the conventional military side of things, it might be them.

Something of note is that Gideon isn’t disdaining the idea of breaking down barriers and making friends; when she alludes to the tried-and-true pillar of the John-Hughes industrial complex, it’s in the context of feeling unhappy that it hasn’t happened yet. Once again she’s offloading her failure to fit in onto Harrow’s “Ambience;” without really taking into account the whole, “never talking or expressing yourself” thing that she’s stuck to like glue thus far. You can argue that that’s also downstream of Harrow but Harrow, again, isn’t around to enforce anything she told Gideon to do, and hasn’t been for several chapters; I get the impression there’s a form of learned helplessness going on. 

Interesting progression of Gideon’s relationship with Dulcinea. Hard to gauge the degree to which Gideon MINDS Dulcinea’s (expressly) master-servant interpretation of their (friend?)ship. Does Gideon mind less when the desire for service is explicit? When the requests are clear and specific? How much of the dysfunction with Harrow is that Harrow has no carrot behind the stick, never actually asked for anything and just impeded Gideon?

So Gideon wanted to do war crimes in exchange for a Big Ti- I’m not typing the rest of that out. But I think I called the flower wars thing! They kill people for thanergy.

This highlights something I’ve found extremely interesting about Gideon’s character; she’s essentially a protagonized Legate Lanius. Her goal and aspiration was to become one of the frontline hapless shitsacks that I hunt for sport whenever I boot up Fallout: New Vegas out of nostalgia. Everything we’ve seen of her childhood in the Ninth, and the myriad of ways that this fucked her up- this would be information thrown in near the bottom of an optional dialogue tree, a brief concession to the material causes that create evil people, before the player goes right back to coming up with the most over-the-top possible method of killing this faceless, unnegotiable final boss. And the fact that it’s Gideon- funny, likeable Gideon- being the one to narrate this, with no attempts to justify or rationalize it, no pause indicating that she feels a need to, is a fantastic signifier that a moral lens is absolutely the wrong frame with which to judge this story and these characters. Everyone in Canaan house is some flavor of bastard, maniac or dupe; that that’s price of admission. All that’s left is to watch them bounce off each other, to follow the horrible inexorable logic driving their characters. You are not invited here to Pass Judgement on their horrific ideals or moral behaviors; you are here to Bear Witness and hope they muddle through the Situation (capital intended) that they are about to be in. I like this.

Oh yeah. Immediate follow-up section of the fantasy. Gideon wants what she’s doing to MATTER to Harrow. Hers is not a fantasy in which Harrow is dead or deposed. Hers is a fantasy in which Harrow is comfortably in charge of things and receiving letters about Gideon’s exemplary success.

Interesting exposition on how only a select amount of Canaan House is accessible by default. A very specific section. This is a challenge.

And now Harrow is missing. Here we ought to note that Gideon only notices this because of how heavily she’s scrutinizing Harrow’s comings and goings, that she can notice no minute changes in Harrow’s bedsheets.

If “Harrow were the type (to run away) Gideon’s childhood would have been a hell of a lot smoother.” Okay. This is Interesting. Did Gideon think about cutting Harrow in on an escape plan at one point? If she tried 86 times, she must have thought to try this once. The incentives are there, for someone in Harrow’s position. I wonder if she got as far as voicing this idea to Harrow. I sense an AU point of divergence.

Big fan of the “their subsequent marriage” gag. I don’t remember if I’ve harped on this yet, but Gideon is a silent protagonist from the perspective of everyone in the story bar her own. To the extent that it is Gideon narrating, all of the commentary is for her own benefit. it’s just how she thinks. (I’m not sure if this is third person limited or not, there’s been a few spots where it felt like someone commenting on Gideon rather than Gideon’s internal monologue.) 

A brief detail in the prose search montage (which is very easy to visualize as a filmed sequence); the skeletons are cleaning the pool- the pool specifically, out of the entire massive complex- and neither Magnus or Jeanmary seem to understand why. But the space has been getting progressively less shitty over the last few chapters. How long is that door Gideon found going to go unremarked upon?

Once again, this focus on Gideon’s frustration at Harrow not THANKING Gideon. The written version of an old chestnut visual gag, wherein she  “gives up” and then immediately resumes the search in the next paragraph. The default behavior is to search.

So Gideon finds her way into a lobby space, accessible through an extremely unintuitive path. Even when this space was in use, this would have been a very roundabout way to get to what’s being framed as a very officious space, in comparison to the very residential space of the main living space. I’m a little unclear of the topography here, but I think Gideon is out of bounds.

Here we meet the Sixth House duo.  Ignore what I said above about everyone at Canaan house being dupes, maniacs or bastards; Palamedes and Camilla are the protagonists of a very different kind of YA story than Gideon. We’re looking at Holmes and Watson. Artemis and Butler. One of the meaner Doctors and more militant companions. Encyclopedia Brown and the girl he kept on hand to beat up his enemies (Am I remembering that detail right, that he had some muscle on hand at all times? Anyway. These are the kind of protagonists who start out within the system but then reason their way out from under their conditioning due to their Commitment To Higher Principles Like Truth, thus bringing the entire system crashing down. Inside the first few lines- “there’s a wrong thing here.” “Anything can lie.”

And, to scrutinize what he’s saying a little more- Canaan house is weird. The lack of rhyme and reason in the architecture is reflected in the age of the building- not even room by room, but down to the individual materials within one room. The oldest successful psychometric reading is 9000 years old; but if I recall correctly, this is after people supposedly stopped using Canaan house for anything. Both of Palamedes’s theories ring true; it’s possible that the building was fished out the garbage heap, or that it is lying on a molecular level. I’ve got a theory about what’s going on here, which I’ll get into at the end of this.

Camilla is the first woman Gideon gets the opportunity to fight. She’s attracted to Dulcinea- oh my god, the Dulcinea effect, Don Quixote, how did I not notice this earlier. She’s attracted to Coronabeth because Coronabeth is incredibly hot. Camilla, she seems to be attracted to on the basis of their mutual kickassery. The Canaan house dating sim has revealed its fourth candidate.

This is the second time we see a Necromancer in combat, after Harrow at the drill shaft. Palamedes’s stunt with the fuck-you-and-the-meat-you-walked-in-on kill field tells us three things. It gives us context for what a top-tier necromancer from another house looks like in a fight. It gives us context for how powerful Harrow is in comparison to everyone else- Palamedes is only sweating a little blood. And it gives us a sense of why Cavaliers are necessary; Palamedes couldn’t have executed this without Camilla keeping Gideon pinned down. As he says in a few lines- if he’d tried this solo, he’d probably be dead, and he couldn’t keep doing this in a protracted fight.

“Policy Wonks on the Sixth,“ huh. I’ve been wondering what the governance looks like in the rest of the Empire.

Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.” I love this book. I feel inspired to draw this scene specifically.

Gideon hears that Harrow may have maybe lost some blood and into mom-lifting-a-minivan overdrive she goes. In this sequence we learn that Palamedes is a man with an extremely strong understanding of Necromancy and that Harrow is panicked enough that she works right past everything he’s saying. This is an example of a situation where the narration diverges from what Gideon is actually aware of; We the audience get some juicy tidbits about the ins and outs of necromancy, and we get a description of how much of it Gideon retained, but this is implicitly being reported by a third party.

This is the first time Gideon has spoken in like 6 chapters; she speaks to a pair of individuals utterly unconcerned with addressing the discrepancy, instead focusing on the task at hand. I like the looks of these guys.

Everyone was issued a key ring and told not to open any locked doors. Well. It’s not a locked door if you unlock it first, and then open it.

It’s never a good sign when a lab is soundproofed.

So Harrow is in a Bone Cocoon. Gideon says she can take it from here; Palamedes pointedly (and rightly!) ignores her and runs a medical test on Harrow to make sure she isn’t about to die. Here we get an interesting split between “Curative Science” and Necromancy; presumably, there’s some stuff in this setting that necromancy can’t obviate the way it did robotics, and it makes sense that “making people healthy” is one of those things. (as opposed to “keeping them alive-” Hi, Dulcinea!)

Her fantasies where she.... dumps Harrow off the landing pad. Yes, Gideon. This is what you want to internalize the sensation of lifting Harrow up for.

Probably worth noting that the exact manner in which the bone cocoon collapsed was of interest to Palamedes; Gideon derides him for whipping out a ruler, but Palamedes has been pretty firmly established as a guy who Knows His Shit (tm). Anything of minute interest to him is probably worth remembering.

The last line- “I thought that would wake her up-” really cements my read on Palamedes as a little shit but also a fundamentally good person, which Camilla shores up with the “He did this for free” line; her loyalty to him seems earned. These seem like people who help people; they belong in another, happier series, where they walk the earth as private investigators, righting wrongs. It also shows that he’s self-aware enough in his little-shittery to simultaneously work over all of the egos at play, while still indulging his little-shit instincts.

So anyway. Here’s a thought I had, have, and will continue to have, which started around chapter 8 but, with the tomfoolery of chapter 12, is now basically cemented; I think that Canaan House is heavily, heavily in conversation with, and providing criticism of, the worldbuilding of Harry Potter. You’ve got the Houses, politicking and jockeying- except there’s an in-built artificiality, religiosity and militarism to it that makes it parse as rancid immediately rather than on reflection as an adult. You’ve got the kooky, wise-but-elderly mentor who clearly knows more than he’s letting on, who pays special attention to the outcast- except, as I brought up in chapter 8, he’s doing this from such a clear position of incredible institutional power that the Dumbledore routine is impossible to take seriously, because he’s a face of whimsy plastered over something bad. You have the massive, nonsensical academy, simultaneously labyrinthine and homey- except that Gideon the Ninth is holding the premise of a space like Hogwarts to the fire. It feels too big for the student body because it is, there’s only about 20 people on the whole planet, and upkeep is obviously prohibitive, and people are offput and unnerved by the space, they ask the questions akin to asking about why Hogwarts was built with so many moving staircases and hazardous flora. Out of universe, Hogwarts, and the whole wizarding world, is a thinly-conceived nonsensical playground, painted with a veneer of deep history but really meant as a vehicle for the core cast to get up to whacky, unsanctioned misadventures, all of which are, within the universe, not supposed to be happening. I think the exact same thing is happening in Canaan House, but it’s diegetic. I think that the whole space was engineered from the ground up, relatively recently, by people who’ve read YA, for the express purpose of providing a sandbox in which stuff like Gideon’s excursion with the sixies can happen as the candidates grope towards Lyctorhood. This has the energy of an unsanctioned sortie but it’s clearly along the lines of what they were eventually intended to do, given the keys. There is so much artifice, to all of this- and we have enough context about this society to know that it’s a sinister artifice. The light at the end of this carefully constructed tunnel is almost certainly an oncoming train. 

[aeondeug]

So while I was reading GtN and HtN I occasionally stopped to be like “Wow, it’s great how these can be just so gay!” And like. That is really great. Super great. I love that about them. But I also remember at least once stopping and going “Wow, it’s great that there’s no homophobia here!” And like at the time I just kind of nodded along to myself. Around when I just finished GtN, I remember being very fond of the bit after the book with like the guy explaining like. The deal with necro/cav relationships in The Media and throughout history and how actually none of these things have ever been romance. This is just a pure relationship, unaffected by naughty things like ROMANCE. WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE ROMANCE?! shouts the author of this paper. And I laughed at this. Because it reminded me a lot of people who do this shit with queer love. They do it with history and just go “Why does Sappho have to be gay, why can’t she just have passionate feelings for her BFFs”. Which is mindbogglingly stupid to me and anyone who has so much as LOOKED at some of the poem fragments. But like people do say that shit. And they do this a lot over like queer anything in fiction unless it like punches you in the face with rainbows immediately. “Why do Bubblegum and Marceline have to be gay? They’re just friends!” is a take that I legitimately saw on the day of the finale. And not just once. I saw it a few times. And I’ve seen that happen over so many ships in so many things, whether or not the ships end up canon. “Why does it have to be gay?” and the specific sort of outrage over it I’ve seen in essay length posts is just common, and that sort of outrage reads very similar to the argument that dude made about necro/cav relationships. It reads like that and close enough so that I made a joke about it even. I didn’t think too, too much on this at first though because I mean. We have Abigail and Magnus. They’re right there. A man and a woman, a husband and a wife. So like I was able to simultaneously go “omg it’s just like those why can’t they just be friends WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE GAY people” and also “wow it’s nice that there are spooky negative queer experiences of SADNESS here”. Which has got me thinking. Ok. So we have that essay. Now what else do we have in the books? I suppose could point at the entirety of Gideon and Harrow’s just furious refusal to admit that they might actually be in love with one another. Even though it appears to be obvious to literally everyone else in the galaxy. And is obvious to the readers. Hell, Gideon even has a moment of feeling like she needs to tell Harrow something the day before she dies. Something which is heavily romance coded, I don’t know the word for it. But like a “Wow I feel a need to tell them something and it’ll be my last shot” before a death just kind of always reads “It was an ‘I love you’. They needed to say it and didn’t get a chance”. So we’ve got that and, specifically, we’ve got their outrage at the suggestions. Gideon stresses that she’s JUST Harrow’s cav. And she’s very fucking insistent on that. Part of the why is that she knows Harrow is in love with a fucking dead girl in a casket but like. It just hits a certain way. There’s also Harrow’s just repeated disgust she expresses towards the concept of necro/cav relationships. She needs to explain away to herself that like, well, Abigail and Magnus were ALREADY married before he was named her cavalier primary so maybe that makes it fine. And even then she’s not like super duper comfy with the idea. A taboo has been broken, Harrow feels, and she needs to get really rules lawery to find any comfort with that. Other small things that feel of note to me here are the nature of the ways we know that these two are gay outside of like. Their weird thing for one another. With Gideon we’re introduced to it basically immediately with her joke about titty mags. Harrow specifically makes a comment at some point that some of the magazines Gideon gets are very gross, yes. Her interest in women is explicitly made sexual from the get go, and the idea that The Gays are just weird sex fiends and there is no love there is a frequent one. With Harrow meanwhile we know because she says she’s in love with the girl in the Locked Tomb. Who is very much dead. A thing that is fucky enough that like there is an entire song and dance about “GIDEON THE FIRST IS MAKING OUT WITH A CORPSE??????” and how Harrow is a hypocrite for being so offended by that all. Also the girl is behind the door. She is something that isn’t supposed to be seen or known about or, heaven forbid, woken up. That is all the ultimate taboo and Harrow not only fucking broke that but she looked at the girl and went “Wow I’m in love” on the spot. So we have this collection of things that could be read as some sort of metaphor for like...The taboo nature of queer love. “Why can’t they just be friends?” and issues of purity and the lack thereof. And we have characters who are very clearly in love but who can’t just admit that because they think there’s something fucking wrong with that. Gideon’s JUST her cav and Harrow is also in love with a dead chick. We also have Magnus and Abigail around who are just like. Happily married and fine with things regarding their whole necro/cav aesthetic. Ianthe doesn’t seem to give a shit that Gideon’s into Harrow at all. There’s a fondness for necro/cav relationships enough that there’s an entire romance genre centered on them and like characters in the cast are fond of those, some of them. Things appear to be Fine, at least as far as their friends are concerned. Maybe the asshole writing the essay that kicked this pondering off would have an issue and a stuffy old grandma would pitch a fit. But like their friends don’t have a problem with necro/cav shit. But we still very much have Gideon and Harrow being “Well no. We’re just a necromancer and their cavalier. GOD.” Now part of what got me thinking about this is that I recently decided to start watching Bly Manor. Because fuck it we haven’t yet. And specifically part of why is I remember seeing an analysis of it done by Rowan Ellis which had this bit where like the argument that “Bly Manor proves you can do queer stories without homophobia being a part of it!” is brought up and like...Ellis is like “Ok but we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out”. And lo and behold in the first episode we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out. In an episode showing that she’s like just unable to go back home for...some reason. And that she has some sort of difficulty with her relationship with her mother. No, the show is not having the character literally go “Wow I sure am in the closet and I kind of fucking hate that woe is me I am so gay”. But figuratively? It’s all over the place in that first episode. I’m not sure about the others because I haven’t watched them, but it is there in the very first one. And that’s something horror does very well. It takes things that are scary and uncomfortable and bundles them up in shades of metaphor. It hides them from  you by showing you the thing cleverly disguised. Maybe you do not notice it the first time through perhaps. Maybe you felt that a certain thing like the closet scene resonated very hard with you and you’re not sure why. But you perhaps don’t consciously go “Aha! It is the horror of being closeted!” Upon looking back on it or back through it though you might notice it. And be like “Oh that was there. Holy fuck.” Now maybe you’re also someone who isn’t like. Comfortable. With straightforward depictions of specifically queer suffering. Maybe it’s just too scary. But with this show hiding it in a metaphor you got to sit through that. You got to be brave enough to sit through a very, very scary thing. And afterwords you go to think about it. This is the power of metaphor and it’s something horror has been very, very good at doing for ages. Maybe racism or homophobia or whatever else is too nerve wracking for you to look at face on in media, but maybe you can watch a movie or a show where the horror of those things are very much there but cloaked in metaphor. And so maybe we are getting that with Gideon and Harrow’s weird issues around how “taboo” their feelings are. Two people who are just unwilling to believe that it might be that thing, in part because that thing is “taboo”. Except instead of the taboo being literally “They’re lesbians, Harold,” it’s instead cloaked in a comforting metaphor of necro/cav relationships and some dude who is really fucking offended at people’s space ao3 fanfictions about his historical favs. Which is important because every fucking scrap of anything one gets is an argument. It can’t just be that they’re in love. It’s that you must PROVE it and some asshole with a degree or just a bone to pick is going to come by and be like “WHY CAN’T THEY JUST BE A NECRO AND A CAV” about it all. And like I’m someone who’s known they’re into other women for a long while now. At least half my life. We have conquered that hurdle. But we haven’t entirely unpacked all the weird little societal bullshit that is still in there. Hiding. Lurking. And that societal bullshit specifically frames that sort of love as something gross and taboo and “Why Can’t They Just Be Friends?”. With that last thing hurting a lot. I’ve constantly run across people going “Why can’t they just be friends?” or going “They just have a sisterly relationship!” about things I shipped. Even when those things involved shit like the characters kissing on screen or mentioning that they’ve been dating in a sequel series. I can’t simply like my ships. I can’t simply see myself in romance. Because my sort of love is so taboo that it is, in itself, a debate. Maybe being shown the thing cleverly disguised as another thing might help me unpack that. At the very least it helps me look at it. When it’s something that hurts a lot to this day.