“Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had-that we would live to see it through… And pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop… But my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”
like. did she expect me to MOVE ON after that?
it’s late so this isn’t as cohesive as i want it to be but like. sometimes i think about how mercy/augustine are kind of almost a parallel or foil to harrow and gideon, and maybe wake and g1deon/pyrrha is too? certainly not in every way, because the necro/cav dynamic isn’t really present. maybe not a parallel, maybe its more that they all function as parts of the same conversation.
but like the way they hate each other so passionately that they are tied inextricably. how mercy and augustine couldn’t escape the systems that trapped them in their hatred. how not even death could separate wake from her hatred. how in every alternate world that harrow dreams up, she and gideon are still inextricable, but increasingly free of their hatred and the system that traps them there. my bones will rest easy next to your bones. when i am in heaven i will remember your mouth and when you roast down in hell i think you will remember mine. you are my only friend i am undone without you. etc
i tried to write a diplomatic header but i could not. here’s the dickhead “i told you so” essay instead: anastasia is the body. john constructed a decoy tomb on the ninth, then locked anastasia inside it. the real tomb, which lies somewhere within canaan house, will open in atn.
most of you started piecing together details but some of you weren’t convinced. so i am now going to blitzkrieg the absolute shit out of those people with more evidence. this isn’t a “cool theory,” it’s canon. tamsyn muir should write me a fucking check for following her labyrinthine trail of bread crumbs. we’ll start with the epilogue and penultimate line of the book
on the bright side, i think i figured out why wake refused to redirect oxygen away from baby gideon’s bio-container at the expense of her own life. and coincidentally answered a series of seemingly unrelated questions that had plagued me for weeks, like why wake pursues harrow into that river bubble after saving gideon-in-harrow from mercymorn, why harrow alters her memories of canaan house so drastically when abigail assumes harrow only needed to excise all references to gideon, etc etc…..
i literally cannot paraphrase this without sounding insane so uhhhh fuck it here goes. did mercy and augustine devise both gideon and harrow’s conceptions as part of their plan to jailbreak john’s shitty blood ward?
…………hear me out. bc i think i may have explained half of htn in one fell swoop
one thing i wanted to add about parallels- i think harrow’s interaction/timeline with the body mirrors wake’s story with gideon. part of why htn was pretty confusing to me on the first read-through was because wake, who is NOT the body, is referred to in the dream as “the sleeper”. for the whole time, i was associating “the sleeper” with “the body”, and i was surprised when they ended up being two completely separate people.
not only that, though! when Abigail tells harrow that she’s not insane, she’s haunted, i feel like its a bit of a misdirection because Wake’s revenant only explains half of harrow’s symptoms (the bits of the letter that harrow keeps hallucinating on the bits of paper/flimsy). but what about the entire way that her insanity is introduced to us, and the way it manifests most regularly throughout the book? the presence of wake’s revenant does nothing to explain why Harrow sees the body. so is she just crazy and haunted?
possibly this is just super fucking obvious and i’m just saying what everyone already knows, but i think that when harrow rolled the rock away and entered the tomb and saw the body, the soul of Anastasia (bc that’s who i’m convinced is in the 9th tomb, i agree that alecto is at canaan house) latched on to harrow (mirroring how Wake’s soul latched on to Gideon’s sword) and has been haunting her the whole time. the body only began appearing to her after she opened the tomb. that would explain also why it mirrors what she wears and how she looks- because it’s in her body.
and of course that sets us up perfectly for anastasia to surface in harrow’s body just in time for nona the ninth. (not to mention that nona means nine, and anastasia is like, the founder of the ninth house. in a lot of ways, anastasia IS nine)
(i’ll admit this theory isn’t perfect, bc it doesn’t really explain the stuff about how nona is able to understand languages the way that she can. the only thing that makes sense that i’ve thought of so far about that is that it IS alecto’s soul in harrow’s body, and she knows how to speak those languages because she’s the revenant/resurrection beast amalgamation of all the earth-souls that were killed pre resurrection. i admit there’s still something missing here, especially with the parallel between alecto as an RB and harrow as practically a mini-RB. its also possible there’s just magic we haven’t accounted for? but its weird that TM would introduce some new part of the magic system at this point. imo its important to remember that ntn was originally the first part of atn, so i think its likely that we would have been given most of the puzzle pieces worldbuilding-wise before the third book. sorry that this is kinda the least impactful or convincing concluding paragraph ever)
something interesting i noticed in As-Yet-Unsent about the description of Gideon’s body. Camilla is good at medicine and very precise, and I don’t think she was ever directly told Gideon’s actual age. But we know Gideon is older than seventeen, the series puts a lot of focus on her age (and her age relative to Harrow, who IS seventeen).
The only thing I can think of is that maybe its an indication that Gideon did die when she was gassed at two years old with the rest of the children, and that she came back. It makes sense that that was the case, combined with this incorruptible corpse business and with the fact that whether she actually died and came back vs just fell unconscious in the avulsion trial is kind of up for debate. I just thought it was too specific a detail to ignore, and too out of place. We KNOW this is wrong, and we know Camilla doesn’t tend to be wrong about stuff like this
the locked tomb rearranged my brain chemistry (yes obviously because of the fucked up weirdo lesbians that i can’t stop thinking about) but also, and more concerningly, i cannot stop making your mom jokes
so um. ya kno how muir likes to do her thing with heavy handed foreshadowing? the multiple times muir writes about harrow theoretically killing ianthe in a substantially similar way to mercy’s attempt at killing john…
ALTALTALT
….. three times… and then harrow’s intimate description of ianthe’s ribcage/clavicle in the bone arm scene… i think i have a bold speculation about what might happen in the next two books…
omg this is galaxy brained… I also think it adds to it that in the first quote it’s phrased as a descriptor in the future tense. like it could’ve been “for which you wanted to” but no it’s “for which you would one day” and obviously the surface level reading of that is that it’s just harrows thought or fantasy - but when you combine it with the other quotes like that I think it totally totally has a second meaning
br0 not to go crazy on the analysis here but u KNOW i love a parallel. i already have been thinking about how mercy/augustine are kind of a parallel for some version of harrow/gideon’s dynamic (trapped in a mutual hatred so all-encompassing and so lonely that they have nothing and no one except each other). and harrow is a parallel to mercy in other ways too (extremely clever? shrill and tedious? ball of wretched grief, anyone?)
anyways this is an extremely interesting detail and i think the mercymorn/god dynamic is gonna be mirrored by harrowhark and ianthe, respectively.
ianthe is interested in liminal spaces, the place past the river, etc. seems like in a lot of ways she and god are interested in the same thing. more notably, though, god has a loved one he refused to kill, choosing instead to leech power from the people who had sworn devotion to him. ianthe also has a loved one she refused to kill, and cannibalized her sworn cavalier instead.
both of them play their cards close to the chest, both of them epitomize a hierarchy based on cannibalizing the thanergy of those who swear devotion to you, but neither of them could bring themselves to kill the person who was most their equal.
i’m curious to see whether this parallel holds up, especially with some of the more notable differences (coronabeth’s whole role in this/whether she parallels alecto, harrow’s lobotomy, what grudge harrow might have with ianthe). i kind of already felt like ianthe was gonna end up the antagonist of this whole ordeal, and now that i’m seeing all this heart-eating business, i think that we’re gonna see mercy and god’s dynamic played out on a new stage with harrow and ianthe
hey - i think "No older than seventeen" in the online version of "as yet unsent" might be an error. i just checked in my ebook copy, and it says "no older than eighteen" in that version
whoa, that would certainly render my theorizing moot, lol. it would also make a lot more sense. although still a little odd, because Gideon is nineteen, not eighteen, right? either way, good catch!
I’ve seen everyone talking about the ridiculous names that gideon calls harrow but no one talks about the ridiculous names that harrow calls gideon. they’re low effort but precise
funny how harrow’s lobotomy blocked out the name “gideon” when she literally never called her that. I think if she had accidentally encountered a griddle in the mithraeum kitchen her frontal lobe would have imploded
