It’s not missing Harrowhark that makes Kiriona the saddest girl in the world. Or at least, it’s not just the lack of Harrow.
She fought all her life to escape the Ninth, fueled by the conviction that there was a better world waiting for her if she could just get out. As a kid, that was the fantasy of a super cool and important parent who could rescue her and punish the people who hurt her. Later, it was believing that as soon as she rescued herself, she would prove to everyone how awesome she was. She would make herself a hero, and she would be so valued and useful even Harrow would have to admit it.
Now she has every status symbol she ever yearned for, and none of it means anything. None of it feels good. She’s escaped, and it turns out there was no better world waiting for her. Kindness is rare, and the people who show it die meaningless violent deaths. The rest of the universe has proved itself to be almost as cold and dark and isolating as the Ninth, filled with horrors she’d never imagined.
Kiriona Gaia is the saddest girl in the world because she’s lost hope. She has everything she ever wanted, and it all sucks. So what is there left to want? What is there left to fight for? What is there left to live for?
i may be the last person on this webbed site to put this together but… that “ah, ah, ah” thing that Nona/Alecto and Judith/Varun do a few times? like this?
Hello! I loved Gideon the Ninth so much!! and would like to draw fan art, would you mind sharing any helpful summaries of what each character looks like? or must us fans hunt through the book for every offhand line of description? (not that I'm not planning on rereading it anyway)
I have let myself drift back onto Tumblr after two weeks, am deeply affrighted and excited at the idea that anyone has drawn my kids (I had an AMA on Reddit and as said there, my editor every so often hollered into my inbox about amazing shit people were doing, but I was too busy complaining back to him that my face had gone numb and that I no longer slept, but instead the darkness of the grave claimed me for four to five hours each night). Thank you so much to anyone who has already done this. Many people on my team have yelled and yelled.
Back early on in the piece I made a document for him about what characters looked like in terms of basic ideas/outlines for copyediting, covers and sense purposes, and I’ve dug out that document and slapped it up here for general delectation. As a note: I imagine specific things when it comes to my characters (I am a Kiwi: I write Kiwis In Space as a default) but as I have nothing but joy in my heart for how anyone would want to draw these characters, feel free to glance over this, then toss it out the window. It would bring tears of beauty to my eyes if anyone was like “Yes, but when I was reading I imagined Naberius Tern as a huge monitor lizard,” because absolutely yes, Naberius Tern was just a huge monitor lizard, godspeed.
I had only described below the specific cavalier-necromancer pairs, so that’s what you’ll find below, sorry if anyone wanted Teacher.
Pyrrha said it was puppy love, but Nona knew that puppy love was different, it just made you want to open the puppy’s lips and play with the puppy’s teeth.
nona don’t listen to anyone else you understand love perfectly
it’s so crushing to me that M–, in the middle of the nuclear escalation insanity, told john through the closed door of his bedroom that she knows this isn’t what he really wants, that they can still fix this together, that everything can still be all right if they just stop now. both she and A– believed in john’s goodness as a man, as a person, not even as a god or a leader, so much that they came up with the crazy ‘arming the bomb’ plan with him because they thought he would never actually do it. (they’ve got a recurring problem with judgement of character I suppose lol oopsie we enabled a genocidal monster sorry folks won’t happen ag– ah shit). C– tells him he doesn’t have to do this. the rest of his little found family, they all tell him this has gone too far, walk it back while we still can holy shit john!!! and he hides in his room because people are mad at him like a kid, but like a middle-aged kid with a doctorate who won’t take his finger off the one Biggest Reddest Button to end them all.
then, so many years later, cytherea says at the dawn of lyctorhood: we had the choice to stop.
and then. THEN augustine tells him, at the end of everything, “john, we still have the choice to stop, even now. you don’t have to do this anymore. even if there can be no forgiveness for what we’ve done, we can at the very least stop doing it.” without either of them knowing it he’s closing the loop of what M– said ten thousand years ago – they’re both begging him 'be the man I want you to be, not the man you apparently are’. and he still doesn’t listen.
what is this whole fucking mess if not a tragic ten thousand year demonstration of the unfortunate fact that no matter what you do, you can’t change someone through sheer force of loving them 😔
I just… godDAMN IT john if you had listened to the people who loved you ONCE! ONCE, at ANY of these points, instead of sunk cost fallacy-ing yourself into the fucking lightless depths of the mariana trench while getting high on your own supply and drowning the universe in blood, everything could have been so different. my head is in my hands my heart is in pieces on the ground my bones are trying to shake their way out of my body –
So… about Kiriona and why she’s Like That, and what’s been happening these past six months.
She hasn’t just been living her worst monkey’s paw life as Ianthe’s chew toy and bored prince, acting as emotional support for her new dad in his dismyriad crisis. Which would all be bad enough on its own. At least half that time she’s also been actively deployed. Like, in the military, in a combat zone. Probably in a command position with very little experience and exactly zero training.
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From the scattered mentions we’ve seen of Antioch, Kiriona was most likely deployed there to quell a rebellion. No doubt a terrible experience that would have expected her to do horrible things. Then these things—the devils—turned up.
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Anyone who was infected by the devils, she had to dismember them and burn the corpses. Edenites, House, and civilians. That means regular old people who had nothing to do with the fighting, and people under her command. Either they became shambling zombies with mouths for eyes, or they were mercy-killed and burned before they could be taken.
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How many people did she see die? How many people did she kill, and how many of them did she consider herself responsible for?
So if we’re counting the reasons Gideon might seem a little off, we might want to take into account how she took a detour though a fucking zombie apocalypse while we weren’t looking. Shit.
One thing that really stuck me about gender in Nona was the sexism in the teacher’s perception of Pyrrha. She sees two young women living with someone she perceives as being male, and on learning they’re not related, her immediate assumption is that Pyrrha is taking sexual advantage of them. How incredibly unfair that assumption is to Pyrrha, to assume this about her and to continue assuming this despite how clearly Nona adores her. What it implies about the broader setting that this was apparently a somewhat reasonable assumption to make, and that there are battered women’s shelters for her to try to gently direct Camilla to. How starkly it throws into relief that this assumption has never once been made in the series before.
That’s what really hit about the scene. This was the first time a perceived-male character had been assumed to be a sexual threat. It was the first time being a woman or a girl had carried an assumption of victimhood. I had already noticed that the Nine Houses seemed to lack any kind of gender-based hierarchy, and didn’t show any signs of misogynistic gender roles, but it really struck me again in that moment how freeing it had been. To have had two whole books from the perspective of teenage girls with no concept of sexual violence. To have had a whole setting where those assumptions just didn’t exist, and would never have occurred to anyone.
And I think that’s one thing that really holds me back from agreeing that ‘Nine Houses’ = Bad and 'Not Nine Houses’ = Good. The societies outside the Nine Houses are still the legacy of the billionaires who left the Earth to die. They’re still capitalistic, they have plastic bags clogging their bays, and after ten thousand years, they still haven’t been able to put down the misogyny juice. I don’t think it was a mistake that this information about the setting was communicated the way it was, using this assumption about Pyrrha. The delivery cuts way too deliberately to the putrid heart of gender bias; where misogyny, misandry, and transphobia are all just different angles on the same damn thing. A total milf perfectly playing the part of loving and beloved father, but still assumed by observers to be a sexual predator. That’s not a culture I want to champion.
In Gideon the Ninth Gideon says at some point that she refrains from hitting Harrow because “she’d never hit Harrow before and was afraid that once she started she wouldn’t be able to stop.” Now. That’s insane. All of their fighting for seventeen years on the Ninth and Gideon never hit Harrow. What does that mean? It seems clear that a lot of their scuffles were probably Gideon v Bones especially because I get the sense that it’s considered a little gauche to like? go directly for the necromancer? they seem to be ranged fighters for the most part. But that also means that when Gideon and Harrow had their big blow out that resulted in harrow getting so much of Gideon’s blood on her hands that she was able to open the Tomb Gideon STILL didn’t hit her. She tried to choke her to death, yes, but she never hit her. And that’s so. God these books make me insane.
okay nona the ninth spoiler fandom annoyance time! all evidence points to not taking this word choice literally, but this is so common that i’m making this post since i reached this bit again in my ntn reread! 🙃🙃🙃
yeah, nona’s perspective describes “white teeth peeking out,” but then LITERALLY THE NEXT LINE is pal saying it’s consistent with reported injuries. if it were literal teeth and not just bits of rib bone sticking out a bit like teeth, don’t you think pal would have made a note of it? wouldn’t that be rather inconsistent with reported injuries?
ok, is this a plothole in tlt, or am I missing something?
the tomb was constructed after anastasia’s botched attempt at lyctorhood, and the ninth house sprang up around the tomb.
cytherea (at the age of roughly 27) joined the canaanites around 150-200 years post-resurrection. presumably anastasia and samael would have attempted perfect lyctorhood sometime after cytherea arrived at canaan house (considering that cytherea was there specifically to help develop the process)
all that to say, the ninth house was founded at some point post-canaan house.
so it goes: resurrection -> anastasia joins the canaanites -> cytherea joins the canaanites -> anastasia and samael attempt perfect lyctorhood -> the tomb is constructed and alecto is led into it -> the ninth house is established.
so why, in gtn, does cytherea say that she dreamed of being a locked tomb anchorite when she was thirteen? locked tomb anchorites wouldn’t have existed when she was thirteen. the locked tomb didn’t exist when she was thirteen.
and you can’t write this off as her being in-character as dulcinea, either, because a) she makes a very big deal later about the fact that she never outright lied to any of them and b) everything else she says in this conversation comes off very authentic, based on what we know of her.
so…have i succeeded in pointing out a very pedantic mistake, or is there something i’m missing here?
Hey can you explain how wake got in the sword? And how wake did the whole revenant thing? Her storyline after her and johns baby is sooooo confusing to me
I’m not the best person to ask about this tbh I’m sorry 😭 My thought process:
We know that she went directly from her bones to the sword (HtN 469), that anything strongly associated with her life or death will work, including anything that touched her murder weapon (172); however, Wake was kicked out of an airlock (so G1deon’s boot and No Air) and Gideon’s sword was still wrapped when she got it (418), so that seems like a dead end. We know that Gideon’s sword is of the Drearburh stock, which are traditionally not touched without gloves or bled on by anyone who isn’t the owner (323), and it’s at the very least the same type of sword Alecto used, but she didn’t overlap with Wake’s timeline, so that also seems like a dead end.
On the other hand, we have Nonius forming a revenant link through Ortus’ “sheer passion” (453) for him; Gideon certainly had passion for calling her mother to her in spades, so I wonder if she could have done it by accident? There’s also the emphasis on blood wards being transferable through the blood of direct relatives, so maybe thanergetic links work the same way and Gideon bleeding on the sword at some point let Wake use it as a vessel. My final, least textually supported guess is that at some point Gideon fought a skeleton that included her bones and damage to them still counted as interacting with her thalergy/thanergy, especially since her revenant was still in them. Idk idk.
Things become more clear-cut going into her HtN plotline. Since Harrow killed Cytherea with the sword she was in, she had a thanergetic link to her corpse and was able to use it to spook Harrow, alternately have sexy times and try to kill Pyrrha (and/or G1deon), and get her audience with Jod at the end. She also had access to Harrow’s head, presumably because Harrow washes the sword down with her arterial blood every night (59 - babygirl whyyyyy). Then Abigail and Magnus successfully exorcised her from Harrow and the sword, and Pyrrha destroyed her last corporeal anchor by destroying Cytherea’s brain (confirmed on 455 and 472)
Presumably she’s currently in the River living her best afterlife. I mean, even if she has no way of knowing this in the end G1deon died surrounded by comrades, her niece successfully nepotismed her way into one of the most important positions of her organization, her bomb got the tomb open, and Pyrrha is stuck technically working under said niece while caring for a parade of casualties of devotion. Honestly she’s the closest thing this series has to a girlboss winning.
A couple of additional thoughts, if you don’t mind me jumping in!
This isn’t confirmed at all, but I’ve been working on the assumption that Gideon brought the sword to Wake’s niche to show it off and may have touched her sword to to Wake’s bones at some point. I’m basing this largely on the bit in HtN where Gideon says, “I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.” Bringing her sword to show off to her mom seems like the kind of thing that would be in line with that, but again, that’s not confirmed at all.
Here’s what we hear from Wake directly when Mercy asks her where she’s been “hiding” for the last nineteen years: “‘Where - you - fucking - left - me,’ she ground out. "In my bones. Then a blade. In - that - fucking - hole.’” I’m assuming the “hole” in question is the drillshaft that Drearbrurh is in, but couldn’t say for certain.
It seems reasonable that she got from the sword into Cytherea’s body when Harrow stabbed her, but I can’t really figure out exactly when that transfer took place. There was the blow that killed Cytherea, but also on at least two occasions Harrow comes to lucidity with her blade in Cytherea’s body’s chest while on the Mithraeum, so it could be any of those times, or maybe she wasn’t staying in Cytherea’s body constantly. I don’t know!
A last note that, pardon the pun, haunts me: in the glossary included in the paperback of HtN, the Blood of Eden entry says, “On Wake’s Death, Blood of Eden withdrew somewhat out of the eye of the Houses to regroup, but were enlivened by the reappearance of their legendary commander in the form of a revenant.” I truly have no solid thoughts about how that could happen. Glaurica’s revenant made it back to the Eighth, but Wake seems to be an a whole other level than Glaurica, and also we really don’t have much info about the logistics of revenant travel or the timeline with regard to when Wake appeared to BoE. (I feel like there was a line in NtN that alluded to this but I’m about to go mow my lawn and I know if I start searching for that I’m gonna end up getting sidetracked and then it’ll be too late for mowing lol). Like was she going back and forth? Did she appear after Cytherea’s body was destroyed? Has she somehow learned to travel via the River? To quote Gideon, “So… what the fuck, basically.”
sorry to still be mentally ill over the locked tomb but for all that i keep seeing people emphasise alecto’s apocalyptic rage, alecto as an eldritch horror shackled into the body of a barbie doll, etc etc i feel like it cannot be overlooked that Nona Is Still In There. she may not remember it, but alecto is still nona. nona was still alecto. alecto’s rage and nona’s love come from the same depths. the nona who laughed at pyrrha’s stupid jokes and wore goofy t-shirts to make little children laugh and got excited for her birthday is the same nona who broke her hands and feet in a blind bloody screaming rage when she woke up to find herself (once again) in chains. i did not spend 480 pages watching nona love recklessly and wholly and extend that love to every small thing, every person and creature she connected with, loving a life lived with her little found family in borderline poverty in a warzone, to believe that alecto is the monster the lyctors described her to be or to believe that alecto won’t still love just as recklessly
thinking abt gideon’s corruption arc because for the longest time i didn’t believe that cytherea had killed issac&jeannemarie, because i didn’t understand why. killing dulcie&pro makes sense. killing abigail&magnus makes sense. but jeannemary? issac? it doesn’t make sense. they were kids, they didn’t even try the lyctor trials, and they absolutley would not have gone through with the process even if they had.
and THEN. in my most recent reread of GtN i realized that it was actually incredibly important for issac to die in front of jeannemarie and for gideon to fail in saving either of them, because this is the moment that gideon decided to die for harrow. right after issac gets skewered by like 500 bones, gideon has a personal epiphany that “nobody should have to see their necromancer die”.
i think that in a very big way the deaths of issac and jeannemarie were the tipping point for gideon’s corruption arc. the point of no return. other ppl have written about this more eloquently but the entire book, cytherea is shaping gideon into a Cavalier. because gideon isn’t initially. she’s pretending, and is not particularly skilled at it. during their time at canaan house cytherea basically instructs gideon in manners and servitude but what she really needs to teach gideon is sacrifice. what she needs to show gideon is what it does to a cavalier to see their necromancer die in front of them. what she needs gideon to see is a moment where a cavalier could have died to maybe save their necromancer, but didn’t. this is the moment where cytherea ties the noose.
I’ve seen multiple locked tomb posts about Gideon’s vocabulary and how many hyper-specific or uncommon descriptors she uses and such tracing this trait to her rivalry with Supreme Nerd Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Which is very fair, but I think it’s ignoring the real explanation for why they are both Like That in terms of vocab, which is that they were raised in critical proximity to Ortus.
“I hope Gideon and Harrow kiss in Alecto” this, “I hope god dies in Alecto” that, well I hope Gideon accidentally quotes a line from the Noniad half ironically and Harrow unconsciously finishes it. i hope Ortus’ poetry lives on in their fragmented remembrances.
The scene in ntn where Nona does such a spot on impression of Palamedes kissing Camilla’s hand that Camilla has to dissociate about it in the tub has me wondering about the first gen lyctors’ relationship with Alecto. Do you think that they were afraid of her because she wasn’t human enough or because she was too human?Do you think that she worried her lip like Cristabel? Do you think she walked with Alfred’s walk and laughed Pyrrha’s laugh? Do you think they saw in her flawless imitation a mockery of their dearest friends and of their greatest sins? Do you think they said to John “it is a monstrosity, it is unbearable, send it away from us, Lord. We cannot look at it.” Do you think he looked into the golden eyes of his own greatest sin and said “You are right, we should put it to bed.”
(Who are you? Where are you growing to?) As you inch towards the clues Bless whatever brings you here and to…
this started off as a quick companion sketch for my Nona (& Friends) playlist, but of course became something much more involved. If she’d had a portable tape player, I feel like Nona might have taken some moments to relax like this.
(fanart for the book Nona the Ninth, from Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series)
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