March 2023

I found your tags in the locked tomb reading order post and they are hilarious. How do you even finish that book without context? what was it even like?

And also do you think it makes less or more sense (before the end) to read it without having read gtn?

belugabear:

Omg hi.

So, in my slight defense, when I first got into the series I was working a baking job, so I was waking up early and listening to the audio books on my shift. I like to tell myself that if I’d been looking at the physical copies every time I might have noticed some sort of “sequel of” or the like. It’s a nice little bit of hope I keep for my own sanity.

For most of my first time through HtN, I legitimately thought that Muir was just very anti-hand holding. I read a lot of dense SFF through my undergrad and it seemed plausible enough that an author would just dump you in and have you figure out wide scale things like the entirety of the cavalier system. The entirety of Harrow’s amnesia also made sense to me as an entry point like “ah we’re discovering this along with her”.

It doesn’t help that I struggle with audio processing and a short attention span (typically why I go for physical copies or multiple listen throughs) so I was also writing off a lot of my confusion to just assuming that I had forgotten names or glazed over plot points.

The last third or so was when I really started to think something was up. I’d tried really hard up to that point to avoid spoilers but at that point I broke and started looking things up on the wiki so I could try to make some sense of it. That was when I found out my mistake, but I was so drawn in at that point that I couldn’t NOT finish it so I just buckled down and did my best listening, and dove IMMEDIATELY into GtN when I finished.

I honestly think the first part of the book might have made a little more sense with my blind read, just because I had absolutely no context for who Harrow was, and I wasn’t filled with the burning anxiety and fear of “oh God what happened to Gideon” that inevitably would have followed the proper reading order. That being said, the emotional impact was WAY more rewarding with the proper context.

Long story short, I have now learned that when consuming audiobooks I need to be triple extra sure that I’m doing it in the right order.

Okay, but consider:

G1deion raises Gideon

Harrow eats Ortus Canaan house

Brings Gideon to the Mithraneum, because his daughter wants to learn the job and what better way to learn cohort fighting then by watching dad kill a Resurrection Beast. No one knows he has a daughter, they never ask about his day when they get status reports from them and no one has opened his Christmas cards in 500 years to see the family pictures

No one even meets up with him after he arrives, except for him having his moment of being like "yeah it's months not years"

The reveal is had after Harrow tells John about G1deon popping open a cold one with the girls, and John is like "look, Harrow, G1deion would never do that he as no amorous interests"

Then Gideon finally walks into the cafeteria during the day for the first time, because Pyrrha immediately caught on Harrow and Ianthe were Gideon's type and encouraged her to start socializing instead of just leaving her room for food and and the training room

Everyone is like "who the fuck is this" and G1deon is confused as fuck because he's been sending family pictures of her for 18 years and talking about her during breakfast for the last couple months and apparently no one has been listening to him

liesmyth:

NO ONE HAS OPENED HIS CARDS IN 500 YEARS ok that’s rough but also absolutely exactly what happened.

G1deon: you should socialise with the girls! *blacks out wakes up to multiple condom packets strewn across the room* Pyrrha was showing Gideon how to make a dental dam and then they just got sidetracked and started throwing condom packets at each other

@chaos-has-theories this tags are killing me

I found your tags in the locked tomb reading order post and they are hilarious. How do you even finish that book without context? what was it even like?

And also do you think it makes less or more sense (before the end) to read it without having read gtn?

belugabear:

Omg hi.

So, in my slight defense, when I first got into the series I was working a baking job, so I was waking up early and listening to the audio books on my shift. I like to tell myself that if I’d been looking at the physical copies every time I might have noticed some sort of “sequel of” or the like. It’s a nice little bit of hope I keep for my own sanity.

For most of my first time through HtN, I legitimately thought that Muir was just very anti-hand holding. I read a lot of dense SFF through my undergrad and it seemed plausible enough that an author would just dump you in and have you figure out wide scale things like the entirety of the cavalier system. The entirety of Harrow’s amnesia also made sense to me as an entry point like “ah we’re discovering this along with her”.

It doesn’t help that I struggle with audio processing and a short attention span (typically why I go for physical copies or multiple listen throughs) so I was also writing off a lot of my confusion to just assuming that I had forgotten names or glazed over plot points.

The last third or so was when I really started to think something was up. I’d tried really hard up to that point to avoid spoilers but at that point I broke and started looking things up on the wiki so I could try to make some sense of it. That was when I found out my mistake, but I was so drawn in at that point that I couldn’t NOT finish it so I just buckled down and did my best listening, and dove IMMEDIATELY into GtN when I finished.

I honestly think the first part of the book might have made a little more sense with my blind read, just because I had absolutely no context for who Harrow was, and I wasn’t filled with the burning anxiety and fear of “oh God what happened to Gideon” that inevitably would have followed the proper reading order. That being said, the emotional impact was WAY more rewarding with the proper context.

Long story short, I have now learned that when consuming audiobooks I need to be triple extra sure that I’m doing it in the right order.

i have absolutely no clue if this is like common fandom knowledge but i know from ~~secret word-of-god sources that blood of eden names are always [literary quote] + [national anthem] + [pop song] and i think we should all be making up boe names for ourselves just for fun ok that's all

liesmyth:

Is that ALWAYS the format? I thought it was a broader [literary quote] + [politically relevant text] + [song lyrics] but that could be just because I choose to believe that somewhere out there’s an Edenite named after the Communist Manifesto and 19th-century opera

Anyway yes we should. I’m gonna spend all of today trying to decide mine

@carys-the-ninth has made a pretty hilarious one

It was before nona so it matches wake’s style strictly