I also think a lot about how like ortus was one of the only potential cavaliers who knew exactly what it meant to be one. it would have taken away his own joys in life and he would have been forced to inhabit a role he hated and eventually it would have led to his death and he KNEW that and he still apologizes for not being there for harrow and it’s kind of like. He was trying to escape his death cult when it threatened his life! Harrow and Crux were preventing people from entering or leaving! yeah harrow was a child in the death cult but it was genuinely a him or gideon situation and he apologizes it wasn’t him! anyway I do often think about being a random 30 something trying to find some joy in the death cult and ultimately being killed by it and THEN making the best of the afterlife too
something i love about the soup scene is how many little details are COMPLETELY RECONTEXTUALIZED when you know what she’s planning. things you wouldn’t even question.
harrow is pacing and jumpy in the kitchen: she’s understandably on edge from repeated attacks and lack of sleep -> she’s worried someone will walk in on her and realize what she’s up to
harrow panics and adds “a great deal of water” to the soup at the last minute: harrow has no fucking idea how to make soup -> she’s worried the bone marrow will be more detectable if the broth is too thick
john tries the broth, sets down his spoon, and takes a “discrete sip of water”: the soup sucks because harrow has no idea how to make soup -> john knows there’s bone marrow in there and he’s just waiting to see what she’s going to do
harrow flinches when augustine makes a comment about confessing before they find a finger in the soup: harrow is sensitive about her shitty soup -> harrow literally put her own bone marrow in the soup and that comment has her severely on edge
harrow uses all of g1deon’s least favorite vegetables: she fucking hates that guy -> she needs him to drink as much straight broth as possible because she is going to kill him with the broth
it’s just. such a good scene. it’s such a completely different scene when you read it for the second time.
Harrow feels safe with Gideon. Fact. Harrow is also Gideon’s abuser. For the majority of her life, Harrow held an absurd amount of power over her - not just politically (SHE LITERALLY OWNS THAT WOMAN’S FREEDOM) but also necromantically. She can raise skeletons from her earring chips to turn Gideon inside out on a whim… and she has! She has done that!
And Gideon had, what, a sword? Sometimes? We SEE her get her ass kicked by Harrow on the page! If Gideon wasn’t Jod-spawn, and somehow survived the creche massacre, I have NO DOUBT she would be long dead before the events of Gideon the Ninth.
But she becomes Harrow’s cavalier! Yup! And cavaliers are at the absolute rock bottom of the power hierarchy - not just on the ninth, but on a societal level. Gideon’s choice to consent is ALWAYS loaded, and more so once she chooses a politically subservient role. For the average cavalier, consent is essentially an illusion.
And, no, Harrow absolutely did not deserve to be gaslit and abused by John, ostensibly one of the few people with more power than she has as a lyctor. It is a system perpetuating itself. There is a parallel between those relationships, and I think it’s very intentional.
Power always costs, and imbalances complicate EVERY relationship, and Harrow is learning that the hard way in her narrative. I’m not saying she is irredeemable. I think she is VERY ripe for redemption! She is questioning the hierarchy and learning the lesson that John has not.
I’m just saying, in light of the context we currently have… the situation is complex, and THAT’S what’s interesting about Griddlehark as a ship.
Abigail Pent literally brought her husband, and look where that got her!
Oh, I can’t be normal about this…
Ianthe is saying all of the quiet parts out loud about cavaliership in the Nine Houses:
She says “the cavalier’s job is to die for the necromancer” (Palamedes tries to gloss this to “protect the necromancer”, but concedes that “if this entails their own death, then they’re expected to accept that”). She talks about Naberius as a commodity, procured at birth, raised for a purpose, modifiable and disposable at will.
She wants to make it clear that she was terribly clever and has no regrets. Which is obviously why she’s been thinking about two people she deems “dull and stupid” to the extent that they’re her main touchpoint for explaining her position and that she name checks both of them, separately, during her responses… (poor Magnus).
Because the Fifth represent the opposite of how things turned out for the Third: an incidental cavaliership to a relationship of two equals who chose each other (against social currents, quite possibly on several counts). Ianthe made a choice at Canaan House. And Abigail made choices eleven and five years before that. And Ianthe has been thinking about those choices.
So Abigail Pent brought her husband on a research jolly to the First instead of bringing a slave to the killing fields (to paraphrase Harrow). And where did that get her?
Well, The Unwanted Guest rather confirms Abigail’s heretical speculations about the River: it is not the end, but a purgatorial passing point through which one can travel lightly to the further shore, or sink down to the horrors at the bottom. Abigail may not have gained ultimate power and posters of her face, but she did end HTN going off to cross the River to what, in the implied cosmology of TLT, sounds rather like heaven.
And as for Ianthe? Jod’s “indelible sin” may not be the most reliable account of Lyctoral River theology, but Lyctors do not seem to travel lightly in the River…and the Stoma did try to grab Ianthe back in HTN. The newly created Paul offers Ianthe - and Naberius - a second chance and she rejects it.
And now the Death of God has been released, Ianthe has bet on God, God is having a mid-dismyriad crisis, and the girl Abigail Pent risked a second and total death to help knows the truth and is off to harrow hell.
Ianthe Naberius used her cavalier for the rotten true purpose of cavaliers, and look where that got her.
tfw that nerd from the sixth informs you that the cavalier you killed like a piece of meat is now slowly but surely becoming an indelible part of you and you just have to live with that
copy-pasting my tweets here from the site formerly known as twitter because the chances of me over-explaining my art are always slim but never zero
didnt realize this was such a divisive question. highly encourage explanations in the tags or replies
this is 48/52 rn i did not expect it to be this close!!!!
i know its only been a day but this has been fascinating. the comments tags and replies are overwhelmingly in favor of it being g1deon and yet pyrrha currently leads. silent majority ig
i looove cytherea as a “nicest* person here was secretly the villain the whole time” reveal cause like. my problem with those is usually that they do a complete 180 in terms of personality and suddenly they’re a totally different person. they absolutely do not give a shit about these people they just spent so much time cohabitating with. they developed absolutely no empathy or compassion or remorse for the people who worked with them, trusted them, confided in them, tried to help them. it just never seemed realistic to me. i always end up wishing for more nuance. it feels like the authors tend to go for shock value over the actual substance of the character, unless they’re angling for a redemption arc.
cytherea, though.
cytherea is 10,000 years old and she’s been inches from death the entire time. these people’s lives mean something fundamentally different to her than they do to them. she kills jeannemary in a shocking and brutal and unnecessarily dramatic fashion, and then she offers gideon genuine compassion and comfort in the aftermath, and both of those things are true and authentic and both of them are motivated by the fact that lyctorhood is fucking terrible.
the way she was interacting with gideon was always a little weird and the fact that she does genuinely understand never goes away. she’s fucking old and weirdand bored and in pain and she will gore a 14 year old in front of you and then she will hold your hand and give you well-meaning advice while you process the trauma. she will tell you how terrible it is that people are taking advantage of you, she will cradle you and pet your hair and tell you that you’re worth more than this, and then she will kill you like she killed all the rest of them. and it really is a shame that you don’t understand how that’s a mercy, too.
cytherea is scary because the kindness was never fake. and that’s why i love her.
hey, kid. yeah, you. commere. now look, the order of the deaths in gideon the ninth isn’t an accident, okay? they all mean something. look me in the eye. listen. abigail and magnus first, right? and that causes a dramatic shift in tone from which the series never truly recovers. magnus and abigail were Kindness, you get me? capital K. they’re the lighthearted, the feel-good, the healthy relationship. they make you feel like everything’s gonna be ok. but everything’s not gonna be ok, so they die first, right, and that’s the moment when Kindness leaves the situation. then jeannemary and isaac. they’re Innocence. stop looking around, look at me. their deaths dispell the notion that anything is sacred or that anyone is safe. they’re just kids, they didn’t do anything wrong, and that’s—don’t back away, stay right here—that’s why the brutality of their deaths is so shocking. Innocence died screaming, right? it’s got to. and judith and marta are meant to be Order. this is important. their deaths represent the loss of stability and the dissapation of understandable rules, signaling the beginning of a free-for-all in which the previously understood conventions no longer operate. but here’s the thing, kid. judith fails to die. she doesn’t finish the job. she gets right up to the finish line and refuses to cross it. and the thing– the thing you’ve gotta understand is, that doesn’t mean Order isn’t dead. that means Order was never alive in the first place. the rules never actually existed. there was no stability, there was no script or formula, the whole time it was just a bunch of people dying for no reason. no fucking reason at all, and everything i just said was absolute horseshit. i’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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