2022-08-22 22:24:03 ¶ ● ⬈

nav-ix:

> ok new nona theory

> I think it was @swordrogue that made a post about schizophrenia in the locked tomb, and how maybe The Body is a hallucination that harrow’s mind supplied because she needed a reason to live.

> I’ve been thinking about this more and it makes SO much sense. Over and over again in HtN, it’s reiterated that harrow does not want to die! she wants to live!! and while that’s framed as a result of her wanting to live for whatever’s in the tomb, I think it’s a good reflection of her character outside of that. when she opened the tomb and saw the body, it makes a lot of sense that as a mentally ill, extremely traumatized child, her mind would give her exactly the thing she needed to see.

> also, it would make a lot of sense how John reacted to people trying to break into the 9th house tomb! When he asks Wake why she was at the ninth house 19 years ago, he says “There’s nothing there.” (this ties into the theory that I’m still convinced of, that the 9th house tomb is false and Alecto’s real tomb is at Canaan house).

> especially because like, idk, The Body is almost too beautiful to harrow. how beautiful would a sleeping stranger have to be that you dedicated your life to them on the spot? unless maybe you were desperate for your life to mean something, unless maybe your mind provided you with the perfect person to live for. I think it makes a LOT of sense given what we know about The Body- it looks REALLY similar harrow (especially with the details about her philtrum and how they match the descriptions of harrow from gideon’s POV), and it wears what Harrow wears throughout HtN. (and I’m not gonna start on how horribly sweet and sad it would be that Harrow hates herself, but when her mind comes up with the perfect person to love and to live for, it looks almost exactly like her).

> I’m also wondering if there’s any functional difference between a ghost and this sort of hallucination. a soul who cares about something SO much that it manifests in the world, and attaches to something that matters to it? a hallucination created by the mind of a little girl who was desperate for something to live for? symbolically, at least, it could function similarly.

> So did harrow need a reason to live so badly that she created a version of herself that was important enough to her that it manifested into a real soul? I feel like it’s possible; she’s got souls to spare. John says that her parents essentially committed a kind of resurrection, he says he knows because he did the same thing and paid the same price. Bear with me, because I’m also tying in my Alecto-is-Earth’s-RB theory, but I think that that would set a precedent for all of those dead children dying at once and coming together to form a kind of pseudo-resurrection beast, a kind of collective revenant.

> I know it’s far fetched but hear me out, I think maybe The Body is a sort of resurrection beast, maybe formed from all those souls killed at once by the creche gas, funneled into harrow and then given a purpose by her desperation. AND I think maybe that is the soul that’s in Nona.

> Nona is like a child, she knows nothing about the world, but she is characterized almost entirely by her love of being alive. Her name is Nona, which means nine, and what better name for all the souls of the ninth? She loves herself and her body (Harrow’s body), and thinks she’s beautiful. Sure, it could be an amnesiac Gideon or Harrow, but we know from the narration that Nona knows it isn’t her body (she talks about being on borrowed time, not as if she’ll regain her memories soon, but as if she’s a different person entirely). And if you bear with me on the idea that Alecto is actually buried at Canaan house, then Alecto has no reason to be in Harrow’s body! But The Body does—its been there the entire time.

sorry to self reblog but I can’t believe I didn’t include this as evidence in the original post- at the VERY beginning of harrow the ninth, in the dramatis personae section, G1deon’s name gets clumsily exchanged for ORTUS. Gideon Nav, however, is NOT replaced in the same way, instead it’s unreadable, and definitely looks like a ton of names all written on top of each other over and over. there’s something going on there and I think it’s part of this theory, I think those 200 souls are still with her