#tlt liveread

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 18

Teacher’s order at the end of the last chapter to bring the bodies up isn’t followed by a jump cut to the parlor scene, as it easily could have been; instead, we get some insight into the logistics of getting two mutilated corpses and an unresponsive cavalier up a narrow ladder. The physical comedy implied by the process of getting Colum up the ladder is good bathos, but the fact that this takes them over an hour seems salient; whatever boogeyman Teacher was afraid of had over an hour in which to attack prone targets. And it didn’t show up for the hours on end that the houses spent attempting necromantic workings. My inclination is that either Teacher is feigning ignorance in order to scupper the investigation, or Teacher is genuinely afraid of something that still lies dormant and is projecting his longstanding anxieties onto the first blank crisis that presents itself.

Corona is very casually cited as one of the Colum liftees, alongside Gideon, which I feel like reading into a little. A quick runthrough of who’s even left reminded me that Corona actually is one of the most physically capable people remaining at Canaan house- Magnus being dead, Colum being in his state, Pro being attached to Dulcinea at the Hip, the teens being pubescent, Babs being mildly eaten…. Corona is, like, one of the taller/stronger people in the assemblage, right? But this gives off the vibe of a task that you’d assume, from her social butterfly persona, that she’d get someone else to do. And she’s doing it in her nightie, as well.  I pegged her and her sister coming down in the skimpy nighties as… not a head game, exactly, but part of their attention to presentation. This is not body-hauling attire. But she switches modes without hesitation, with only one word of textual acknowledgement that she’s the one who knuckled down. She actually spends a good bit of time in this chapter abruptly cutting the bullshit and knuckling down to try and address the situation at hand. I’m starting to like Corona.

The Second House were the ones to run and get Teacher. I’m reiterating my initial read on them; they’re there to keep up with the Joneses, with limited investment in the trial outcome or their own path to ascension through it. The Necro/Cav pair are barely visually delineated from each other, in contrast to basically every other dyad. They are not Of Necromancy, beyond its utility; they are Of The Military. They have limited respect for Teacher’s religious edicts about lines of communication off-world, and while it’s difficult to tell how much stock any of these people put in the theology vs how much they’re going along to get along, it’s telling that they lead the push to undermine the foremost religious authority in deference to military authority.

As an aside, I’m well-versed enough in this series via tumblr osmosis to know that the Emperor is, like, very much all that, and his personal power eclipses and obviates what any other house could hope to bring to the table, so usurpation as a goal is unlikely. Adherence to his religion is less like a matter of doctrine and more like acknowledging the sun’s ongoing contribution to the ecosystem. But inter-house infighting isn’t unheard of; the Eighth has it out for the Ninth, after all. I wonder if we’re witnessing an internal fracture between the military dynasty and the hardline religious elements of the empire; if this attempt by the Second to call things off and bring in reinforcements isn’t JUST a practical plan but is also them finally making the kind of power grab they actually know how to make.

“A Second captain don’t outrank a Third official.” Wait. Is Naberius supposed to have, like, a genteel southern drawl? Also, interesting that this is where Ianthe chooses to intercede on his behalf. “Prince Tern, if you please.” The Third does circle the wagons against outside threats.

Alright, Key ownership rundown. The Sixth has a key, Dulcinea’s gambit using Pro to brute-force check all the doors apparently netted her a key. It turns out that both mine and Harrow’s suspicions were correct; Silas did cue Abigail and Magnus in on the facility, using both the rationale that they aren’t NOT supposed to work together, but also under the rationale that the hated Ninth can’t be allowed to be the only ones with access to the facility. Unfortunate that Harrow does have someone ready and willing to validate her paranoia.

The exchange between Silas and Dulcinea is fascinating. Silas clearly likes Dulcinea; everybody does. When he finds out it was the Seventh Cavalier who put him out, he seemingly takes this in stride, and he’s unwilling to sic Colum on Dulcinea… but he is willing to have Colum duel Pro, which Dulcinea (and Gideon, by extension) gets predictably up in arms about. Dulcinea and Silas run parallel in that they’re both radically reliant on their cavalier to get anything useful done, more so than any other necromancer we’ve seen; Silas requires Colum for soul siphoning and general henchman work, while Dulcinea uses Pro as a caretaker and mobility device. Silas is significantly more, uh, cavalier about imperiling Colum over petty bullshit than Dulcinea is; the charitable read is that Dulcinea’s reliance on Pro gives her a significantly greater appreciation for him. The uncharitable read is that anything happens to Pro, she’s going to be in a pickle; he’s already saved her ass once by putting Silas out, and the crisis has barely started.

Coronabeth puts her foot down; “The Golden Butterfly was gone.” Her rousing speech noticeably gets everybody moving in the direction of productive action- The Second Cav passive-aggressively entertaining Teacher’s theory, Isaac committing to hunting a monster if it exists, with Palamedes putting on the brakes on his enthusiasm with a commitment to a scientific autopsy, an implied deference to Coronabeth’s call for unity, and a (not unreasonable!) entertainment of the possibility there really is a horde of vengeful ghosts in play. He even folds in Harrow and Silas’s dispute by making it clear that collaboration on the murder issue isn’t incompatible with continuing to compete in the lyctor trials. Third House’s hat, so to speak, is that they’re the rulers and governers- but Sixth house were previously mentioned to be the house with policy wonks, and there’s a synergy there! Palamedes knows how to align himself with Corona for maximum productive effect.

Ianthe admits to being in possession of the last key, distressing both Babs (who she took the key from) and Corona, who expected to be privy to this information. Something I find interesting about this is that Ianthe is pretty clearly a Machiavellian operator; if nothing else, she had the key, and kept that fact to herself. But! When it comes down to it, she’s also willing to come clean and put her cards on the table in a crisis situation. She was in the trenches necromancing right along everyone else; there are parallels here be drawn here to her sister’s willingness to drop the butterfly routine in the name of getting the situation under control. On the other hand, it’s also possible that this is a rehearsed ruse; Ianthe, as the obvious evil Twin, publicly taking the fall by positioning herself as the only one from Third House who hypothetically could have had access to the facility at the time of the murders. This is conceivable even if the Third genuinely have nothing to do with it; an implementation of a general strategy they’ve worked out amongst themselves, painting Ianthe as the heel in contrast to the Great Golden Butterfly, establishing the narrative that Coronabeth doesn’t have complete control over what Ianthe does. Campy Wickedness as a cultivated affect, overlaying a subtler, realer scheming nature. “Ianthe is a Vriska,” “Ianthe is Rancid,” all these no-context Ianthe posts have got me going full Charlie Kelly over here. 

The meeting adjourns. Palamedes works off Coronabeth’s cue to lead all interested parties to the freezer, including the Second and Seventh houses. Gideon chalks this up to Seventh Houses broadly morbid tendencies, but it also strikes me as likely that Dulcinea might have applicable medical knowledge as an outgrowth of constantly dealing with her condition, or at a minimum could effectively rubber-duck for Pal while he talks out the implications aloud. Second House I’m assuming are along for the ride because they realize they live in a universe where they have to at least begrudgingly entertain the ghost thing, but they want to be in the room concurrently with any autopsy that might reach “ghost murder” as its conclusion, to make sure there’s no funny business going on.

Pal, conspicuously, stops to have a word with Harrow. Harrow is characteristically concerning; her singlemindedness (on display in full force at the end of the chapter!) is poorly suited to such a radical shift in the circumstances. She’s the least willing to change her focus during the meeting beyond what’s necessary to avoid getting fingered as the murderer, and Pal’s word might very well be words of warning or reprobation that he had the tact not to deliver in front of the peanut gallery.

The scene with Silas starting the process of bringing back Colum is interesting; I think that Silas’s utmost confidence in Colum’s ability to make it back is the first time we see any expression of regard from Silas towards his Cav, and while it’s a strong endorsement of Colum’s capabilities, it’s part and parcel with the extent to which Silas is taking Colum for granted. Earlier I drew parallels between the necro/cav dynamics of the Seventh and Eighth houses, but there’s also a strong parallel between the Eighth and Ninth houses- each with a zealous, thoroughly stick-assed Necromancer , each of whom are paired at the hip with a Cav with a stoic demeanor and a frosty-and-best attitude towards their Necro. This line of thought is causing me to re-evaluate the lens through which Gideon has been assessing Eighth house; no Necro/Cav pairing is remotely Normal About It, but Eighth and Ninth have some parallels in their dysfunction. The key difference being that Silas routinely, habitually makes use of his Cav, and Gideon’s beef with Harrow is at least partly informed by the fact that, up until very recently, Harrow gave her absolutely no opportunity to be of use. Colum represents the path not taken, the grass that’s greener, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gideon pays so much attention to the Colum situation right before Harrow shows up to drag her off towards another once-longed-for stint as an accomplice. Is Harrow’s attention an improvement in her circumstances, or has she this whole time unwittingly been dodging Colum’s sorry lot?

The sequence with Jeannemary is heartbreaking. They’ve hit the hero-worship beat a couple times now, the idea that she’s looking up to/admiring/(crushing on?) Gideon. It’s interesting that the “Bad Teen,” up till now an irksome background presence, is the one to finally break Gideon’s composure in a semi-public, not-technically-a-live-emergency setting- quietly and quickly enough that the illusion is probably still largely intact, but it’s a significant break! Also significant is Jeannemary’s insight into a suspicious detail nobody else seems to have touched on in the meeting; Abigail specialized in Ghost magic. Jeannemary’s love of Abigail means that her awareness of this fact cashes out as a belief that Abigail should have been able to defeat a ghostly threat regardless of magnitude. But the unstated second truth is that whoever or whatever killed Abigail, simultaneously got rid of the necromancer best suited to the necromantic forensic work everyone else was struggling with in the last chapter. This doesn’t feel like a coincidence. 

Harrow’s barreling forward on the heels of Colum’s return to the land of the living feels like a great for-want-of-a-nail moment, and another example of Harrow’s too-clever-by-half tendencies snipping a thread that she really, really should have followed up on. Jeannemary has an important insight here! If Colum had been seventeen minutes late instead of fifteen, Harrow might have limped into the middle of a very illuminating exchange.

In closing, I’m pretty sure we’re looking at two memes in one here. Harrow’s “I’m sick of these people” bit reads to me like a reference to Dr. Manhattan’s, “I tire of Earth. These people” monologue and the resultant meme panel. “An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times” reads like a reference to the Egg bit from It’s Always Sunny. Bonus points because the specific Dr. Manhattan line that I believe is being referenced here comes during his myopic dark night of the soul, where he’s conflating his own depression with the true meaning of the universe and letting his heartfelt belief that he already knows everything important blinker him to some important fucking details he hasn’t noticed. Just like how Harrow is overlooking potentially massively important information in her rush to capitalize on her perceived information advantage. Assuming I’m correct that this is a reference and not just random apophenia, this is, like, sliding past the point of mere pop-cultural meme reference into the realm of meaningful literary allusion. Which is a real good way to integrate your meme references! Nothing there just to convey that you’re hip and with it, everything acting as a character beat or a thematic vector. I’m going to go right ahead and adopt a hardline policy of treating every apparent meme reference as an indicator of deliberate thematic depth, and there is absolutely no way that this might potentially cause me to spill over 500 words of ink over something that just turns out to be a vaguely similar sentence construction to another work.

[makoden]

So 4 chapters in and Harrow the 9th is essentially WH40k mixed with Disco Elysium and a lot more obvious lesbians. I can work with this

[alltheprettygirlsintheworld]

I know it’s all leading up to a serious scene, but I am laughing so hard at the idea of Harrow obsessing over making soup and trying to smile (and terrifying Ianthe in the process)

[justanotherautie]

thank you!! also, brain damage buddies :3 i hardly ever see people talking about that on tumblr

but yeah i Really enjoy people's tlt livereads, i binged yours of gtn and htn last night and sent so much to my partner like "HEY LOOK GOOD TAKES" also not to fangirl (gender neutral) but the thing about ortus and what you said about the validation of someone from the same situation acknowledging the shittiness absolutely BROKE me

if it's not too much trouble, would you please ping me when you start the Nona liveread?

I can certainly promise to try to remember! I have some brain damage and forget things at inconvenient times, so no guarantee as to my success. It's shocking and exciting that anyone would care enough about me reading a book to want me to notify them, so I think the odds are high!

[jasper-the-menace]

Starting my livereading of The Lightning Thief. I know this book well, since I reread it recently, but I’ll still have some quips.

Block the “tlt live reading” tag if you’re not interested in this.

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 16

This initial sequence is the first time that Gideon has demonstrated real awareness of Harrow’s internality; she identifies frustration, self hatred, “fury at herself rising like Bile.” One goddamn chapter ago, Gideon was incapable of assessing why an anal-retentive perfectionist from a dying house attending a cutthroat state dinner for the first time in her life might be feeling anxious. I think that this is a result of whatever freaky mind-meld they’re doing.

As a side note; “Necromancy,” as the singular overriding magic system, encompasses some stuff that’s not typically lumped in under Necromancy, such as possession and implicitly some degree of biokinesis. I wonder if it’s a cladistic failure, the necromantic applications of magic being discovered first and then swelling to include stuff you generally wouldn’t cram in under that paradigm.

Okay, upon cracking the mind-meld, we enter bossfight mode. Necromantic constructs apparently adhere to crit zone logic. I wonder if it HAS to be that way, or if it’s specific to this construct (which context quickly reveals is in fact part of the game.)

We get two detailed descriptions of Gideon taking out crit spots, then another prose implementation of a montage. In an animated version (the only appropriate way to adapt this) you’d get three or four lovingly detailed hits to a triumphant crescendo, before it devolved into a Samurai-Jack style multi-cam POV of Gideon slashing at the camera.

Okay, the monster drops a box. The box- rather pointlessly- is an electronic affair with a slow count-up to opening rather than something purely mechanical. It’s a Lootbox. This setup was engineered by someone with a strong understanding of co-op games.

Okay, Gideon shouldn’t have been able to see the energy signature; I assume that a door goes two ways, and that she’s getting visual input from Harrow. (Pacific Rim AU. I swear to God, Muir has a fuckin’ checklist)

The visuals on this keep emphasizing that overuse of necromancy leads to hemorrhaging, blood sweat, burst capillaries. Is the logical endpoint a meatsplosion? Will I get to see a necromancer explode? That would be neat. Not for them. Or for anyone standing next to them. 

Our first unabashed, barely-qualified compliment from Harrow. A firsthand experience of what it’s like to Gideon in a fight for her life; of what being a cavalier MEANS. And once again both parties play it down, in tried-and-true enemies to lovers fashion. Focusing in on the specifics of the downplay- which feel a lot like Harrow trying to remind herself of everyone's station- reminds me of a lingering question I’ve had- namely, is EVERYONE in the empire subordinated within a house, or are the houses JUST the ruling class, with a Helot type of underclass? Anyway, my theory that Harrow could have avoided a lot of hassle by just making Gideon feel welcome and wanted swells in its power. Reinforced by the subsequent line-

“It betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed with sheer collusion.” I really do want a full looney-toons type of story about the two of them constantly playing cat-and-mouse with each other for 17 years.

“She’d eaten a good meal. She’d won the game. The world seemed less maliciously unfriendly.” This is the last chapter in act 2. I am reading this on a computer blown up to 200 percent text size. I physically cannot see any words below the current paragraph. But I know that they are not good words.

Oh, hey! “Bronchial” passages. Like Lungs. I bet if I went back with a pen and started circling, I’d first off really fuck up my screen, but I think I’d also notice that there’s a very body-centric cast to the description of things due to the cultural implications of so much of everything being modeled off/made using human anatomy. Neat worldbuilding detail.

Magnus and Abigail died

[artbyblastweave]

The following commentary on The Locked Tomb is definitely going to reek of the whole “getting a lot of Boss Baby” vibes from this, because I simply don’t read a lot of books anymore and a lot of the current big-on-tumblr SF/F wave flowed around me as water flows around an insensate rock. But one thing that I’m feeling as I get further and further into Gideon The Ninth is that this series has forcibly inserted a new wedge into the whateverpunk genre wheel by creating the thematically-cohesive and lovingly detailed Necropunk society; techonology and culture that are centered on necromancy, with aesthetics lifted from the Roman Catholic church and assorted flavors of Gothicisms, and a focus on self-sacrifice and/or sacrifice of the other as a core pillar of the social order. A niche that steampunk etc. have tried to colonize at times but never really completely absorbed without it feeling like a mashup with something else. It feels like something was finally codified here.

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 17

Alright, I’m done procrastinating on this. Before I start, some brief metacommentary on the skull mascots for each of the houses, which I only recently bothered to scrutinize;

First House skull is very big.

Second House Skull has a centurion's helmet.

Third House has jewels in the eyes;

Fourth has laurels- that was a military thing in ancient Rome, right?

Fifth has some kind of wavy crown thing. I bothered to check this in the first place because I thought it was going to be flat-out removed from the section header as an evolving credits thing.

Sixth has scrolls between the teeth; no surprise, they eat lots of books as children

Seventh has a rose jutting out the eye sockets (Hakahani disease AU!)

Eighth is blindfolded;

Ninth has absolutely nothing. Less, even. No lower jaw.

Okay, onto CSI: Canaan House:

"In the early hours of the morning, even Palamedes admitted defeat." EVEN Palamedes. Delightfully concise phrasing. This establishes from the start that we’re in the midst of the first group study session this rock has seen. It reinforces that Palamedes is first among equals in his headstrong sherlockishness. He could be the protagonist of this. You could rewrite this to do that.

“The early hunger of ghosts.” So ghosts are vampiric. Are vampires Vampiric? Are there vampires? Can Vampires be made to be, using necromancy?

Christ. The Fourthlings. This is another example of something that was funny until it wasn't funny. They had, like, a bit going with the Fifth, a back-and-fourth; their dialogue was almost exclusively rendered a punchline. Now they're voiceless on an entirely different axis. Shoo out the clowns. Rosencratz and whatshisface.

Taking note here that Gideon is capable of identifying what she refers to as the “minute” signs of Harrow’s exhaustion. She’s paid that much attention to her mannerisms in the past, despite their ostensible enemyhood. This book does such interesting things conveying the depths of their familiarity with each other while also being a story about how they barely know each other.

There is no way it's an accident that Coronabeth and Ianthe didn't bother to dress. Only solace of the night indeed. This is a power play. On the opposite side of the spectrum we have the “painfully useful” Sixth. See, when Palamedes shows up to work in his PJs, that's the opposite of a mind game. That's a mark of sincerity.

He apologizes to Abigail as he steps over the body. Jesus.

Palamedes gives his bedrobe to Dulcinea. Those two had a thing. They were the protagonists of a John Green type novel some time before the start of this book.

Palamedes and Harrow, once both cognizant and faced with a problem, are on the same wavelength. There was, somewhere out there, a place where Harrow would have fit in immaculately.

What should I read into Camilla’s overprotectiveness of Palamedes? Gideon’s narration makes her hovering sound unwarranted, but Gideon’s narration also set us up to think that Ortus was much more of a wet blanket than he wound up being. She’s not the greatest at assessing the personal circumstances underlying idiosycratic behaviors. Is Sixth House the terminal exaggeration of “Publish or Perish?” 

Not to harp too hard on this scene, but "Gideon had to stare pretty hard at skimpy nighties to get over that one." Best way to cap off the reveal of how Third House necromancy works; also a pretty good explanation of why they go out of their way to keep up appearances otherwise. This is not a faction that could get away with being both cannibalistic AND ugly; they've browsed Tumblr. They know that as long as you're alluring you can eat a few fingers. As a treat.

Dulcinea's not allowed to get involved in the investigation. The Seventh sent a Necromancer who isn’t allowed to get involved in hardcore necromantic exertions? Something weird is going on.

And NOW the Eighth House show up, having taken the time that nobody else did to get fully kitted out. And they specialize in spirit magic.

Silas is a soul siphoner. And Harrow knows this- despite someone else’s exclamation in this sequence indicating that soul siphoning isn’t a widely known technique. Know your enemy.

Oh my god. That's why his Nephew looks older than him, isn't it?

Silas was probably expecting this to be a big-damn-heroes fix; instead he (predictably) nearly kills Dulcinea and finally causes someone to throw a punch, tensions being what they are. Making a note here that Colum seems to not give a shit that his Uncle has been laid out and held at swordpoint; a direct side effect of the siphon, or an indirect one in the sense that he's not gonna lift a finger to help his charge if not expressly ordered? Like Artemis Fowl if Butler thought his charge was a little shit and kept trying to rules-lawyer a permissible way to let him die.

A schoolyard fight broken up only by the arrival of Teacher, who is, for the first time, AFRAID. And demonstrating a coherent and involved necromantic knowledge; nobody was supposed to be allowed to die in this section of the facility, because something very, very bad happens if you leave a dead body down there. He's giving actual, actionable suggestions. He is telling people that they are wrong. Absolutely wrong. Everything is absolutely wrong.

[artbyblastweave]

Incidentally, the last TLT liveread was so delayed because I kept going back and forth on whether to end it with a detailed rendition of Magnus and Abigail in the quintessential Peter Griffin Broken Bone pose hidden under a readmore. I could have. I chose not to. And I’m announcing this because I’m sick of only getting the blame for when my impulse control cuts out and never being lauded for when I restrain myself with herculean effort. I want to create a new social norm where any time you don’t say something horrible it’s considered socially acceptable to loudly announce you just thought better of something. I am going to be the change I want to see in the world

[artbyblastweave]

No spoilers but I find some points you make in your locked tomb live read real interesting in the larger tlt context. Would you consider making a chapter by chapter follow up where you reflect on your initial reactions and how they compare to your final thoughts?

Probably not. On top of the time commitment, I think I've been pretty open about the fact that the reason I dig so deeply into the minutae is that I've been broadly spoiled on close to 80 percent of All Things That Happen due to being on tumblr; this liveread has largely been a clarifying experience rather than a revelatory one.

[artbyblastweave]

I'm really enjoying the TlT liveread and hope youare, too :)

I am, thanks. Chapter 17 soon.

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Chapter 15

In which we have the obligatory party/ball scene. Obligatory to what? Off the top of my head, Murder Mysteries and Fake Dating AUs

A few hours later. A lot goes unsaid with this; it’s a time skip, but it’s a telling one. It means that nothing happened in the few hours between Harrow collapsing and waking back up; Gideon didn’t leave, didn’t look around, didn’t see or examine anything new of import. She kept vigil, and the narration breezes right past it.

“Necromantic Theorem.” So the magic system is formalized and not just pure will. Gideon’s being glib but this IS essentially how I thought this worked, so it’s nice to have this clarified.

Ha. Gideon remembers the name of the fourth Cavalier but not the fourth necromancer. Priorities.

“Fan Mail.” Possibly a concept Gideon picked up from the backs of the comic books. and from this fan mail we derive that Abigail and Magnus have a dynamic. Stern cop Jovial Cop.

Harrow jumps right to a (I assume) completely appropriate assessment of the genre they’re in and starts hypothesizing assignation plots. Gideon, meanwhile, demonstrates greater Machiavellian acuity than I’ve previously ascribed to her, purely because her first-ever dessert is on the line. She’s like Roger Rabbit with the Handcuffs. Extremely conditional trains of thought.

Harrow is nervous about the function. Gideon assumes that this is because she wants to get back to the trials, since she used to run Ninth House functions without a sweat. This brings us back to Gideon only really being able to model Harrow in a combative context; it’s cripplingly obvious why Harrow is afraid of this function. She ran a transparent con against addled, devoted, elderly clergy, many of whom were literally blind. This is a gathering of High Society, which Gideon herself just painted as a potential hotbed of information gathering and Machiavellian politicking- a thought that apparently literally stayed in Gideon’s head for the exact amount of time it took her to win the argument, and no longer. 

Glad Rags! Magnus is great.

Abigail Pent, Intense Librarian. Very curious how things are between her and Magnus, just generally. Political marriage? According to Teacher (they (helpful exposition dispenser) She’s a spirit-talker. A necromancer in the traditional use of the term. That’d be Fifth House’s bag?

Interesting exposition on the Fourth and The Fifth here; The Fourth has been implied to be subordinated to the Fifth a few times. Magnus I think is actually the dreadful teens Uncle, and Isaac is apprenticed to someone outside his own house. Did the Fifth swallow the Fourth the way Harrow is afraid the 9th will be swallowed? Is there precedent that she’s afraid of?

The Third and the Sixth are facing off before Teacher (conveniently!) defuses things by announcing the main event.

Gonna read stuff into the seating arrangements. Gideon is with Palamedes, her lady-love Dulcinea, and the fifth Cav. Harrow is with the Mayo dyad, Ianthe, Seventh Cav super mutant, and Naberius. Putting eighth and ninth together feels like some kind of power play.

“The same middle name.” Good God. Coronabeth is either laughing too hard on purpose as an ingratiation play, or she is, in fact, compatible with Gideon on two levels.

Okay, there are on-site greenhouses. That explains where the food is coming from. I was wondering.

Alright, Magnus and Abigail can’t conceive. Slightly adjusting my assessment; they have the affordance of being nice because they’re weird, and on the outs within the political system they’re ostensibly on top of. Abigail is interested in pure scholarship and Magnus is interested in Abigail. I refer back to my previous assessment of Magnus as embodying the fun aesthetic parts of courtly empire w/o the inherently monstrous decision-making power.

 And Dulcinea is, in fact, good at picking up on what her conversational partners care about and feeding it. It’s not a Gideon-specific thing; she’s honing in on Abigail’s interests as well.

“Post Resurrection, Pre-sovereignty, pre-cohort.” Aaaaand Gideon turns away from the exposition because that’s just what she does.

Okay, from the Young-Uncle-Ianthe-Babs interaction we get the following; young-uncle has something against… intervention in births? A religious taboo? Ianthe was premature, extracted by C-section; The Eigth (Silas, I checked the cast page) calls this a “wasted opportunity,” which feels like a deliberate inversion of real-life Catholic Abortion Dickishness ™. Babs jumps in to defend Coronabeth, as he did before; Ianthe tramples him verbally. From this we derive that Babs is into Coronabeth specifically, although it doesn’t end well for him no matter which of them he’s talking to. And he has opinions on Bucklers, which Gideon wants to hear. It’s always interesting to encounter someone who has your exact interests but is so massively dickish on every other axis that you can’t capitalize on it.

This is Gideon’s first interaction with Jeannemary, and it’s this. I like that even when Gideon is interacting with the fourthling directly, there’s a shift in the dialogue from when Jeannemary is speaking normally and when she’s doing the nasally whine thing. She’s great. (But is Isaac great? I can’t tell if they’re trading off on doing the bit, or if it’s all her, all the time.)

And Gideon gets to eat! That’s good.

Okay, so Harrow, given a chance to dig into things with Teacher, can make him look thoughtful. A theological discussion? Applied Theory? Most of the others haven’t gotten far enough in the trials, so far as we know, to be able to talk specifics in the way that Harrow now can.

Is Dulcinea’s bit about the Biceps a Gravity Falls reference?

Oh, Jeannemary was, like, jealous. And possibly Crushing. Okay, this is back to cute. I like how the vocal affect reflects their tone but also their physical distance from Gideon and Dulcinea; also, question answered. It’s all Jeannemary. Isaac is the voice of reason, ish.

Okay, so Dulcinea pops the question- the big question- why are the houses like this. The dysfunction is obvious if not yet explosive; The houses are militarily and financially secure from the constant influx of spoils; The Emperor’s favor is both nebulous in its actual benefit and completely unrelated to the task at hand, which is pretty explicit (learn how to be Lyctors!) You’re inclined to say that everyone in Canaan House, categorically, has virtually no higher place to which they can climb within their hierarchies; that’s the point of pursuing Lyctorhood. Of course, the situation with the Ninth tells us that the assumed notion of security isn’t true in the slightest, the situation with the Sixth demonstrates that the Houses can have orthogonal interests like pure scholasticism, The eighth clearly aren’t in it for money…the more I think about it, the more Dulcinea’s remarks feel like that thing pretentious poets sometimes do where they wax cynical about an arrangement without putting much thought into the petty incentives underlying stuff. This might be deliberate; Dulcinea is clearly pretty clever.

Alright, something’s going on between Palamedes and Dulcinea. Gideon thinks that his weirdo obsession with. uh. Medicine that works…? gives him the hots for her.

“Magnus was nice.” I forgot to mention in chapter 12 that Gideon’s word choice in relation to Magnus is tied like an anchor to her current mood. When she’s in the pits, Magnus “tries pathetically hard;” when she’s well fed and high on Dulcinea, he’s “nice,” and she’s hurt on his behalf when Harrow ignores him.

And we end the chapter on this; Harrow thinks Pent is now in the running. Harrow is really, really committed to the idea that she has to WIN; this is, with added context, probably at least a little true, because the Eighth is probably an existential adversary and the Third strikes me as an opportunistic adversary if they get an opening. But it’s very telling that Harrow hears the Eighth- the most zealous of all the houses- just hand this information over to the Fifth without any cajoling and jumps to the conclusion it’s a race. What she overheard was an act of cooperation. And she was asleep for a major act of inter-house cooperation. She’s sticking to her initial paradigm, in the exact way that she stuck to her initial paradigm with the 163 skeletons. And Gideon, with her ability to actually make nice with people from other houses, might be the only effective counter to this tendency.

[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. 

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon the Ninth Liveread: Chapter 10

Harrow is still missing in action. Noted casually, because Gideon doesn't care per se, but this is absolutely a length of seperation that would be setting off alarm bells within any other necro/cavalier pair; for all her complaints about Gideon not being able to maintain the charade, Harrow's lack of regard for Gideon strikes me as the fundamentally weak link in their plan, most likely papered over only by the fact that the other houses have no frame of reference for how the Ninth conducts it's operations. Also, I’ve had the thought that the other houses might not care; the whole "fake cavalier" thing seems tailored to the scrutiny of a social environment much more heavily populated. Harrow was gearing up for some real court intrigue, but Harrow and Gideon are marooned with just 16 named characters, all of whom have their own shit going on.

Funny aside; Gideon doesn't know what Fish are.

More details on skeleton mechanics. Harrow's specific skill at boneology (and that line I've seen floating around, "we do bones, motherfucker" is shoring up my growing belief that each of the houses has a Hunger-games-like arbitrary speciation in their flesh magics; it's a sign of great skill when you can get skeletons up and running without the assistance of connective tissues or any other fleshy bits. This is potentially a cultural engineering thing- an attempt to delineate between living slave-and-indentured-servant castes and pure robotic servitors. An attempt to head-off the exact bullshit Harrow is pulling with her parents, in other words.

Trying to guess which house this new antagonistic house is. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh and ninth are accounted for; this is either sixth or eighth. I get the sense that the necro may have artificially arrested their aging somehow, and with it possibly their emotional maturity/brain development? It would explain at least in part their Cav's disgruntlement. Or maybe the fact that the Cav has actually clearly seen a ton of use as a meat shield while the Necro is in silk and chain-mail too thin to fulfill its function. Actually, this looks like the only pairing thus far that’s seen real action. Most of the rest are kids, or Magnus, who does not, you know. Have the vibe of a guy who’s experienced true horror.

Gideon's reaction to the necro's thousand-yard stare is telling; her recollection of Crux, of Sister Lachrimorta, of the Reverend Parents, all emphasize this need to be wanted; to be of use; Crux's version is painful because it conveys disappointment, the Reverend Parents because they convey fear. And as she leaves the dining hall, her response to the Lyctor Trials is that she feels "suckered;" she isn't wanted here, she isn't useful here.

"The Stinging Slap in the face that she didn't even have Harrow." Okay, here we get a sign that Gideon views Harrow as a comforting absolute even if she nominally hates her. I've been wondering more than a little what the hell the grounds for a turnaround in their relationship were going to be; here we get a single inch of concession. (Also, open call to the peanut gallery- what does/did the insufferable discourse surrounding this relationship look like? Abuse apologia? Power Dynamics? This whole series feels like a hotbed of Facewearer discourse.)

Okay, my Bonesaw assessment of Dulcinea swells in its hold on my mind. She wanted in on Gideon's personal brand of suffering because it seemed like a romantic way to die, and lost interest because of the aesthetic mismatch. I'm inclined to say that this is callous towards Gideon's situation but given Dulcinea's state it feels like a grass-is-greener situation more than anything truly appropriative.

So the seventh house deals with... reversing aging? Arresting the spread of disease? Or the progression? This is mentioned to be a hereditary issue, so perhaps their brand of necromancy was influenced by 10,000 years of trying to counter what’s happening to Dulcinea. And, as a point of comparison, I can imagine that both Ninth and First House’s skill with bone automatons developed downstream of their chronic manpower problems.

Dulcinea twigged to the sword discrepancy. This makes sense; Her Cav is proportioned like a super mutant and seems unlikely to have exclusively trained with toothpick rapiers. I’m not sure if Dulcinea is the only necro who's capable of noticing this discrepancy at a glance- there are other fairly militaristic houses present- but she’s certainly the only one paying enough attention to Gideon specifically to notice.

Okay, Protesilaus is back. He reports that something is shut. What’s shut? Dulcinea sits and looks harmless, and she can afford to because she’s got her Cav off executing her plans for her, whatever they are.

So, final roundup! I sense a love interest. Noting, belatedly, that the very first thing Dulcinea does is give Gideon an opportunity to be helpful; and through this whole sequence it becomes clear that Gideon just kinda... does stuff if people ask nicely and make her, specifically, feel wanted and useful. She gets chased out of the dining hall, painted as a wrong and intrusive Thing, and moments later falls head-over-heels for the first person who makes her feel actively desired, even just for rote manual labor. Dulcinea’s appraisals of Gideon have this real.... charge, a suspicious charge, I felt like I was watching a spider wrapping up a fly with every request Gideon granted- and there’s a level on which it’s very sad, because a person less starved for affection would find being approached like this off-putting. Dulcinea is rotating her like a specimen! But to Gideon it’s a fantastic experience for reasons she doesn’t even have the vocabulary to articulate. I can’t picture her instinct being to confess everything at the slightest provocation to anyone else on this rock. 

Notably, however, I never have to hurriedly scroll past any posts about Gideon and Dulcinea being cute together- and unusually for this series, I have no idea why that is. This is one of the few elements of this story I’m experiencing completely blind, and I’m extremely excited to learn whatever fucked up circumstances lead to Harrow pulling ahead of Dulcinea as the intuitive romantic lead.

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon The Ninth Liveread, Ch. 2

Enter Harrowhark. We’ve got some extremely tragicomic visuals on the social dynamics of this place. Harrowhark with her herd of geriatric, wailing nuns following her around, tripping underfoot, constantly stopping to pray and exult her, a greek chorus adjacent to her loony-toons bit against Gideon's escape attempts A veritable flock of Penguins. But the absurdity of the image is undercut by the facts implied by it. Harrow is actually a big deal. Actually one of the last of the three humans-with-potential on the rock. Step outside Gideon’s wrathful POV for two seconds and it’s not hard to understand the provenance of the deluge of wet-rat meow meow Harrowhark art saturating this site; she’s got gifted kid burnout AND religious trauma AND near-complete social isolation from the word go.

Also fuck me I keep typing her name Harrowhawk. Like the bird. Hark makes more sense. religious connotations. Fuck

So Harrow apparently dug all night in order to execute her dragons-teeth trap. Mean, forward-thinking, meticulous, absurd willpower. Question for the class, though- Gideon (and with her the audience) realize her gambit a split-second before she springs it because she takes her gloves off and her hands are split and dirty from working. Did she deliberately abrade and dirty her hands, just to create that moment of dawning horror? Or did they just wipe out their shovel supply digging the big hole.

So here’s the big takeaway. This sequence, the start-of-book status-quo, feels to me like it’s doing fun things with genre. It feels specifically like a sitcom or a Tom-and-Jerry style of cartoon. I’m getting the increasingly clear picture of the Ninth House as a place that’s fundamentally devoid of stuff to do besides this inane scheme-of-the-week runaround. Gideon tries to escape, Harrow tries to stop her, the humans besides Harrow and Gideon are barely above the necromantic constructs in terms of agency and individuality, bishops instead of pawns, spear carriers and human props. 86 episodes of Harrow’s Zany Schemes. A little over three seasons.

But there’s also something really dark undergirding this; The reference to the mass dieoff of children that resulted in such a manageable main cast and such a paired down, interference-free rivalry; and there’s the allusion to something Gideon knows, some piece of powerful leverage that keeps the cycle relatively light and airy without Harrow ever just truly dropping the hammer on her. This is where we hit the first big point of comparison with Worm; Worm starts with a setting that maps to recognizable superhero genre tropes, and then works backwards to explore the material pressures, culture and incentive that caused those tropes to happen. Gideon feels like it’s doing the same thing; starting with a decent sitcom setup, but simultaneously working backwards to show how the greater context enabling all of this is not, in fact, all that funny. 

(The other point of comparison that jumped to mind- dead-enders on a dead-end planet, wrapped up in a zealotry-tinged, hateful but low-stakes battle forever and ever, which escalates from dumb fun to horror and tragedy as you start to get context for how the current set-up was arrived at- is Red Vs. Blue.)

[artbyblastweave]

Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 9

I like the subtle gag of capitalizing “Gideon’s First morning.” 

The bathroom sequence is an old standby- “fish-out-of-water-from-a-spartan-culture-explores-an-upper-mediocre-living-space” and paints an interesting picture of Gideon’s knowledgebase and ingrained Taboos. She knows what a Sink is from comic books but not what a bathtub is. She knows that soap made from human fat is an off-putting thing to wash oneself with, and uses the sonic in light of that, but at the same time grew up in an environment where all soap was human fat and thus there was no local taboo for her to pick up. Strongly suspect she’s never used soap before, just to spite the nuns; it’s also possible that she knows soap generally isn’t made from human fat (again via her comic books) but suspects that First House soap specifically might be, given their parallels to the religiosity of the Ninth House; This seems unlikely, given the lack of available humans, but it’s also unclear where they’re getting their supplies from, so, uh. Who knows. Anway this has been your daily three hundred word tangent about human fat soap.

Gideon’s complaint about Harrow upon finding the ring gone implies a previous track record of Harrow taking Gideon’s things; It keeps coming back to the fact that their Rivalry growing up was comically intimate and petty for how spiteful it was. Harrow knowing enough to cut Gideon’s attempted loophole abuse off at the knees also attests to this.

The general disrepair of Canaan House is interesting; they did the bare-minimum necessary to get it functional for the presence of some of the best and brightest of the empire, and while the house is obviously too big to keep in full repair on a skeleton crew, they had some lead time to get some contractors in, for the quarters at least! The general decay of the situation feels like a flex; “you; treasured scions of the great houses, are not special enough to merit anything but birdnets over the holes.”

Here we get a confirmation of my earlier assessment that Skeletons have essentially taken the niche of robotics technology in this setting; the skills involved in making a skeleton are described in similar terms to coding and precision engineering. This stand-in for robotics technology is notably not a one-to-one thing that could be swapped out for actual robots, or clones, or a similar servile construct race; the one-to-one necessity of human death to provide energy and materials for each skeleton integrates the technology directly into the story’s themes. 

Alright, enter Magnus. The way that Gideon juxtaposes Magnus with the horrible teenagers of the fourth (and I love their affect, incidentally, I used to do something similar to my roommate all the time when I wanted to bother him) is interesting. The first descriptor is “Wholesome.” My knee-jerk reaction is that Gideon is casting about for a parental figure of some sort and he’s the first candidate she’s really encountered; I find him mildly endearing if a bit overbearing. There is a Specific Bit that he’s leaning into, the same basic bit that semi-parodic characters like Sir Hammerlock from Borderlands are leaning into. Polite-to-a-fault pseudo-British Gentleman adventurer, except probably less divorced from the imperialist connotations.  We’ll see how things go with him.

Gideon’s description of Canaan House- deceptively lateral in its layout, with no obvious path to the upper lower sections, but still deeply confusing- is interesting, because this clearly was a house at one point. What was it like when this place was in use by humans? How many humans was it in use by? Was it a Winchester-house situation where the handful of people using it thought it would be funny to make it impossibly complicated?

Gideon’s earlier lack of recognition of plumbing-like, as a concept- are reiterated here; she doesn’t understand the function of the pool, constantly calling it a “Pit,” incapable of understanding why there would be ladders leading down into it- but she does immediately recognize the rest of the space as a gymnasium, which tells you a lot about her priorities. I get a lot of chatter on this site about the “Pool Scene,” and you know what, I actually really heavily doubt that this scene was that.

Oh, she can’t swim, can she? She’s on an ocean planet, A Pool has very pointedly been presented as a place of narrative importance, and she grew up on a bone-dry rock. She can’t swim. 

Alright, this door will be relevant later. And I’m not just saying that because I’m perpetually six chapters ahead in the book of the chapter I’m writing these about, expanding on my initial notes as I go. It’s a big black door with an exquisitely-described skull that only Gideon knows about.

Alright, enter the thirdlings. First real in-depth examination of them.

Naberius is interesting because he’s hitting on basically all the observations I’ve hit upon about the mind games being played at Canaan house- the deliberately-squalid conditions, the funny little mentor man, the shuttles being pushed off the platform- except he’s approaching the matter from the perspective of these mind games’s target audience, that is to say, someone extremely entitled who views these things an affront to someone of his standing rather than, say, as a gigantic red fucking flag that they’re all about to be killed. He’s talking about writing to the heir’s fathers about it.  Now, Naberius is implicitly a badass because he’s the cavalier from a House that’s got it’s shit together, so this might account for the discrepancy, but this is still pretty unique; it’s like if the fodder children in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory exhibited suspicion of Wonka’s set-up as a test of character intended to thin them out but plowed ahead with the offending behaviors anyway. He knows what kind of story he’s in but hasn’t internalized it.

I can’t tell which twin is which in the “second voice and third voice” sequence, but I can tell which twin Gideon is very, very into. The takeaway here is that Ianthe is the booky one, Coronabeth is the golden child, and....

oh god. That took a turn. Coronabeth treats Naberius like a dog, and the narration uses that imagery. Ostensibly she does this on the behalf of her sister- the golden child standing up for the maligned lesser twin- but look me in the eye and tell me that this isn’t coming from a place of royalty-inculcated sadism. And then Ianthe, despite being the offended party in theory, despite being the more abrasive of the two by far, is the one to get Coronabeth to simmer down; not on any moral grounds but because she’s wasting time. And then Coronabeth starts being chummy with Naberius (Babs!) again like nothing happened. It’s been implied to me that Ianthe is the evil one in the dynamic? (and what is the dynamic, exactly? Three or four different reads on this sequence. They’re siblings. They’re a preppy clique. They’re... a third secret thing.)

And in the end, Ianthe is the one to hang back and deliver a cryptic warning to Gideon. “I would not attract attention from the necromancer of the third house.” And this could be in reference to her sister (who Ianthe appears to be the leash-holder for) and thus a warning, or it could be in reference to herself, and thus a threat, because Gideon already has attracted her attention. That’s what’s happening right this second. Yeah, no wonder Naberius went right to mind games. That’s just his lived experience with these two.

As a last note, the recurring theme with these three is that of boundries, and pushing them; they were introduced as arriving late, they brought one more person than they were expected to, their conversation was intensely mutually antagonistic but in a reasonable way until Naberius inadvertently crossed an unspoken line; Coronabeth’s response, in turn, is clearly influenced by the need to toe some line Ianthe has set; and as they leave, Ianthe takes time to communicate that Gideon is on the path to transgression but doesn’t yet merit corrective action. 

It’s actually a little reminiscent of Gideon’s own situation on the ninth- a upbringing defined by an endless state of rebellion that was still on some level coloring within the lines; the lines in question just being really, really weird. Gideon’s no stranger to fucked-up “what-exactly-is-the-nature-of-this-relationship” relationships, either!

As a last note, “Coronabeth” is an outrageously funny name to me. Part “Corona,” Part “Annabeth.” Faintly portmanteau-ish. Almost reminds me of. It reminds me of. You know what webcomic this reminds me of by now