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Question for those of you who have finished Gideon the Ninth and have read Harrow the Ninth and perhaps even Nona.

sign: HERE BE SPOILERSALT

So as many of you may have guessed, I finished the first book a while ago. My reaction to the entire ending went something like this:

chekhov doodle goes "GASP! No!" while listening to audiobook and clutching pen dramatically.ALT
chekhov doodle goes "YESSSSS" with mad eyed enthusiasm while listening to audiobook and clutching pen dramatically.ALT
chekhov doodle cries while still listening to the audiobook, now having lost all hope. "Whuh... nooooooo..." they sobALT

So as one may guess, I have mixed feelings.

They’re not a mix of good and bad. They’re a mix of Good and Complicated Good.

I legitimately think it was a great ending… but I am also struggling to reconcile what appears to be the death of one of my favorite characters.

On the one hand, I don’t want to simply throw my toys off the table and yell ‘I WANT MORE HARROW AND GIDEON DANGIT, LOCK ME IN THEIR HATE-LOVE PURGATORY FOREVER’. On the contrary, I love the idea that we get to see Harrow’s side of things. I am fully aware that the world has not even been explored fractionally, and I want to understand more of it.

On the other hand……….. I have very few things to care about anymore. I care about Harrow, this is true. But the rest of the characters I had an attachment to (Palamedes, Camilla, etc) are all kinda. Dead.

I want to read Harrow the Ninth and consume its entire carcass, meat bone and all, almost as much as I want to push it away and hold off on starting it as much as possible. Because I want to enjoy whatever Gideon the Ninth had, because I don’t think the series will ever go back to that. I feel like from now on, it will be a fundamentally different story. And that’s not…. bad! I think I will enjoy that new story.

But I feel like clinging to the tiny bubble of Gideon the Ninth because the beyond of it all feels as unknowable and as incomprehensible as death. And that naturally kinda repels me.

So I ask you, fellow readers - are my worries justified? Did you share them?

I don’t want spoilers. I don’t want summaries. I just want to know:

Does the story’s soul fundamentally change here? Or is the soup still the same, even if the ingredients have been a little blended in the great mixer of plot?