one of the genius things about the way gideon the ninth (and the locked tomb as a whole) is structured is the way that it continues to emphasize gideon as the pov character. we see the world through her eyes. we interact with characters only as much as she interacts with them. and when she blatantly misses things going on. she has no interest in the politics that are occurring and no basis for any of the existing relationships between the scions of the other houses. her priorities are (1) piss off harrow, (2) let the hot old sick girl flirt with her, and (3) sword. and that is mostly it!!
so especially during the third act, gideon - and by extension, the reader - is hit with WAVE AFTER WAVE of epic climaxes and denouements to plots that she literally was not aware were occurring. she stumbles into the aftermath of a bloody and lethal confrontation between teacher and the second house. she trips into babs’s murder and ianthe’s ascension into lyctorhood. she nearly ruins the crucial pull-back-the-curtain reveal between palamedes and cytherea because she literally tries to run into the middle of it to apologize because she didn’t know that she had been flirting with his almost-fiancée.
when you read the book for the first time, all of these things feel as overwhelming to you as they do to gideon. the uptight military commander is injured and the slightly less uptight military lieutenant is dead?? that prick with the quiff got cannibalized by his evil stick figure bully??? harry potter BLEW UP???
and then you go back to everything on reread, knowing the context for where things will eventually go, and go ohhhhh. all of the information was there the first time. you just never had any reason to care about it. it’s such a brilliant way to hide information in plain sight and play with an unwittingly unreliable narrator