something very important to understand about coronabeth tridentarius is that she’s not Cool. she’s hot, she’s audacious, she’s intoxicating, but she isn’t Cool.
she likes the worst fucking puns in the entire world so much. she isn’t good at comebacks. she’s obsessively codependent with her creepy and wet twin sister. she has the fucking audacity to call someone else a nepo baby and think she made a point. she wants anyone who doesn’t want her. she wants camilla to hug her and hold her the way camilla hugs and holds nona. she asks people’s opinions about her and then gets upset if they say anything too honest. she wears such gaudy jewelry with everyday outfits that she bypasses “fancy” and wraps straight back around into “playing dress-up.” she cried when her sister didn’t kill and eat her. she’s not good at pretending to be a necromancer, but her true love is the sword, but she’s not particularly good at that either. she’s down bad for judith fucking deuteros.
if everyone wasn’t so distracted by how hot she is then the truth would be more obvious, and the truth is that coronabeth tridentarius is deeply lame (affectionate).
Me reading GtN and HtN: what a fascinating universe! It’s an odd mix of futuristic and almost medieval, wherein they have incredibly advanced technology like space travel, but at the same time humanity seems to have regressed to a rather archaic level!
Me reading NtN: oh okay the nine houses are just freaks.
I think what’s so interesting about Gideon as a narrator at the anniversary dinner is the fact that there’s clearly tensions that she’s just not picking up on because she’s only there to eat a dessert.
But these people are all the immensely powerful leaders of the Houses and consider themselves to be in competition for literal godlike powers and the favour of the emperor.
There’s so many little snippets that are potentially intriguing: why is Teacher trying to prime the Ninth to consider the Fifth a threat? Why are the Third and the Sixth “sizing each other up like prizefighters”? The Fifth absolutely knew what they were doing when they sat the teen heads of the opposing cults near each other.
Through Gideon’s lens, Magnus’ speech is a little awkward jokey thing. But…the seneschal of the House that is known to be actively trying to absorb another House is saying it’s such a shame they’re all so remote from each other and what do they all have in common (and it’s so quiet you “could have heard a hair flutter to the floor”) - that had to feel a bit different to people who aren’t Gideon.
Palamedes’ is dissecting the meaning of “Master Warden” and at one point compares it to a prison warden. ‘Dulcinea’ asking about whether Magnus and Abigail have children is perhaps less small talk and rather more pointedly political. Harrow’s apparently stilted conversation with Protesilaus is clearly her actually probing his limitations like he’s a bad Chat GPT-run chatbot.
And then 'Dulcinea’ tells Gideon she liked the dinner because it was “useful”. In her typical “I never lied to you” way, Cyth wasn’t lying when she said Abigail had to die because of her hobby - Abigail Pent let loose on the Facility would have risked blowing Cyth’s cover sky high. But what does a Canaan House look like where after the dinner party, the Fifth go down to the facility, get a key, and survive to continue their 'the Houses are going to get along or else’ agenda? We’ve seen Fifth House soft power on a smaller scale in HTN: and it looks like inviting a teenager round for coffee, lulling her into a false sense of security with small talk, and then physically preventing her from leaving the room until she does what you want, while smiling the entire time. A series of little coffee chats could probably have led to a lot of cooperation in Canaan House, one way or another.
Gideon jokes about Silas marrying Ianthe because of their similar colour pallete, but it does raise the fact that there seems to be some tension around the Third, its succession, and the *point* of Ianthe. Why is Silas openly saying Ianthe should have died at birth? Combined with Judith’s comments in the Cohort Intelligence Files about succession on the Third, it feels like there’s something else being said here that Gideon isn’t picking up on.
And of course, Harrow wasn’t the only one desperate to become a Lyctor because her con was unsustainable. Presumably at some point Corona and Ianthe would be expected to marry, or at least take on more separate roles as Corona prepared to take over the throne and Ianthe was funneled off elsewhere. At some point, their package deal would have become unsustainable and Corona’s cover would have been blown. But much as Harrow wants to become a Lyctor so she can reveal the state of the Ninth without repercussions, Ianthe is probably in part motivated to become a Lyctor for the same reason. Because otherwise, what would Ianthe’s expected role have been? Amidst the suggestion of anxiety about the Idan succession, the dinner party also presents the fact that the reason Abigail and Magnus’ infertility isn’t a succession crisis for the ruling family of the Fifth is that Abigail’s younger brother dutifully married in his early 20s and had kids. We know there are branch families in Ida - Babs is from one. He may be a prince, but he’s not treated well, and you do get the sense that the stakes to stay in power in Ida are high.
We don’t learn anything about the political situation in the Houses themselves during HTN or NTN, but in the wake of Canaan House, you have to suspect there are a number of tensions and concerns.
Harrow: my deepest darkest trauma is that my parents killed a bunch of children in order to make me into a powerful necromancer. they died for me. their blood is on my hands.
Gideon: that sucks dude. anyways I’m going to sacrifice myself to save your life. you’ll be an even more powerful necromancer. pretty sick, huh?
Gideon: why are you so upset about this
Gideon: is it because you don’t like me
Gideon: my deepest darkest trauma is that nobody ever cared if I lived or died, except for you. the thought of being forgotten entirely by everyone is so terrifying to me that I have never cared if you loved me or hated me, as long as you were as obsessed with me as I was with you.
Harrow: that sucks dude. anyways I’m going give myself a lobotomy so I forget about you entirely. this will preserve your soul so you can maybe hypothetically come back someday.
Alectophant is my exhaustively researched and very serious theory that Alecto’s problem with the body John made is not that it’s a blonde barbie body, nor simply that it’s a physical or human body at all, but:
Nona chortled. “Not one bit.” Nona hated having hands.
“Well, tell me your theories,” Nona demanded, feeling much better from sheer excitement. “Say them out loud. Am I nice? Am I good-looking? Do I have lots of friends? Does everyone listen to me? How many legs do I have?“
Nona made her body stand on its two feet. Two feet—the worst number for feet; not so many that they were ever useful, not so few that you didn’t have to think about them.
John had made her so ugly, so unbearably ugly. The terrible face, with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, and the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief.
her ideal body is an elephant.
Problems Nona has with human form:
hands are dumb
two is a dumb number of feet
(her only specifics about the body John made) nose too short, ears too brief
Features of an elephant:
zero hands (who needs them!)
four feet (a useful number!)
enormous (and practical!) ears
a VERY long nose that’s way more useful than stupid hands
And, finally:
Nona looked down at the animal she had drawn, and thought perhaps she understood. She said, “No, I made it up. It does work, I promise. See these things? They’re its ears,” she said, in much the same tones as she would have explained to Kevin. “This thing is its nose, and you can’t see it because I didn’t draw it, but the mouth is under here. When first it was born it used to live in a river, but then it got cold so it had to get large. I know the legs can’t rotate, but you don’t think that’s stupid, do you?” She looked up at Camilla and the Angel, then said, “Am I in trouble?”
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