harrow + very weeny constructs, only a micrometer thick:
(all images have been transcribed in alt text)
ALT(GtN p. 220)
ALT(HtN p. 289)
ALTALTALTALTharrow + very weeny constructs, only a micrometer thick:
(all images have been transcribed in alt text)
ALT(GtN p. 220)
ALT(HtN p. 289)
im re-listening to harrow the ninth (again, x 5000) and im just… overwhelmed by how fucking sad is is. it’s so sad. and moira quirk’s narration is simply incredible. god. Gideon’s loss echoes through every word, and Harrow’s desolation is just so palpable. and it’s such a massive tone shift. even the end of GtN is… fun. like it’s not not sad! it’s terrible and a tragedy that Gideon dies at the end but she does so while saying “see you on the flipside sugarlips”. she dies and then her ghost-halucination makes fun of harrow and calls harrow a dick (affectionate). it’s fun. and then harrow the ninth comes and drowns you in an ice cold bucket of grief
as much as i would love a visual adaptation of the locked tomb (aka the perfect-for-me version that exists inside my brain only) i feel At Peace knowing that it simply cannot be adapted. everyone is too gross all the time. it simply wouldnt be widely profitable, and is therefore Free. everyone is entirely too covered-in-blood and puke and other fluids and dirt and grime and dust, constantly, for it to have a Mass Visual Appeal. every character in the locked tomb is just. disgusting all the time. constantly covered in unmentionables and dirt. except maybe coronabeth but i think she just does it in a slightly sexyier way. canaan house is literally rotting inside out with mold. Gideon and Harrow spent 5% of their time in sexy cool face paint, and the other 95% of the time in various stages of having their facepaint smeared around, sweat through, and slough off. dulcinea is spitting phlem and snot and hacking up half a lung every other page. silas seems like he is deeply jaundice with a liver deficency. there are so MANY scenes where every character present just get absolutley splattered with gore and then they just. don’t clean up. harrow bleeds out of every orfice and spends at least 20% of the story vomiting all over herself, and another 50% in various stages of undress but like, not in a sexy way, in a covered-in-dust-and-old-blood-and-bone-dust, and ripped up hospital gown, and bags-too-big-for-airplane-carry-on under the eyes from sleep deprivation. ianthe spends 95% of her time on the mithraeum wearing clothing that is deeply ugly in both color and style, and that absolutley does not fit her. i feel Comfortable and Safe knowing that the locked tomb is simply too wonderfully grotesque and beautifully gross and wildly slimy to ever be visually adapted for a mass market audience. it’s Free.
thinking abt how harrow needed the grave dirt placebo for the shuttle ride with ortus but didnt need it for the shuttle ride with gideon. thinking abt how harrow was too overwhelmed and overstimulated to start the prayer at canaan house with ortus but not when she was with gideon. im thinking. sir this is my emotional support griddle. weeping.
the inherent plot releventness of incredibly sexy anime eyes
I want to see a lyctor’s power limit. Harrow, diet lyctor, half a lyctor, only looked upon her lyctoral limits… once? maybe twice? and all times specifically in the context of seeing her limit stretching out so far before her it’s almost incomprehensible. and most of the Lyctor Stuff we see is like… The Real Housewives Of The Mithraeum. Fucking around, fucking eachother, and acting out a myriad of petty grievences. Even Mercy atomatizing God was more about… opportunity and a myriad of study, not raw power.
Augustine plunges the entire Mithraeum into the River and he still has enough power left over to fight God and grapple with the stoma. He doesnt even seem winded. And he wasn’t even the Lyctor River Expert! Mercymorn repairs Harrow’s obliterated body, that is a black hole to her, without even batting an eyelash. With only a few touches. Ianthe, a baby lyctor not even fully integrated yet, could fucking. teleport!!!! through pools of blood!!!! Harrow (diet lyctor) made a full construct out of diluted bone matter, from inside of G1deon’s body (one again!! a black hole to her!!), and she only had to concentrate so hard because she was 6 days without sleep. G1deon was a thanergy void, the ultimate enemy of a necromancer, and that didnt even seem to be a thing he had to exert effort to do. I don’t even have enough examples of lyctors doing Powerful Things to emphasize their sheer power but i know it’s there. rattling the bars of my cage!!! i want to see it!!!
ok so….. why did wake want HARROW so badly?
she let gideon-in-harrow’s-body go. she SAVED gideon-in-harrow’s-body’s life. but in the battle between Wake and the Canaan River Ghosts, she was hell bent on killing harrow and taking harrow’s body. she already had a lyctor’s body – Cytherea’s, which was made whole and then frozen by God, so it wasn’t suffering from turbo cancer anymore. so she had a body to walk around in and kill god with, already. so what did she need harrow’s body for specifically? it’s driving me insane
so far the pattern has been the cover art is of the main POV character (gideon for GtN, harrow for HtN). im SO EXCITED to see what the nona cover has….. from the preview Nona seems to be the main POV character. so will the cover art be of a recognizable character, which could give a clue as to what body Nona is inhabiting? like gideon or harrow? could it be a totally different chatacter like ianthe? will it be a MYSTERIOUS unknown person? will it be a dog???
ok so. in the beginning of HtN they use the river to travel 40 billion light years in 5.5 minutes. so im thinking maybe what if getting shot through the river ended up scattering the four of them (Pyrrha, Gideon, Ianthe, Jod – minus Augustine, RIS [rest in stoma]) all over the galaxy? hence how pyrrha could have ended up with cam on the BOE planet, way far away from where the mithraeum was. i wonder where everyone else ended up…..
the beautiful, yellow eyed, dead looking woman that gideon sees saying “i know her sternum is shattered, we have to get that heart pumping” or whatever as gideon is “dying” is such a fucking. mystery. i think she is connected to how when harrow enters the tomb and she “dies” the chains are broken. the chains are broken. the body within the tomb is free. and…. galvanting around the universe preforming CPR?
and i think gideon saw her through the eyes of HER body. like gideon-the-soul saw through the eyes of gideon-the-incorruptible-dead-body, that her soul still has a connection to because ut is hers. revenant links and all that. so as gideon-in-harrow dies under the crushing weight of the River, her soul kind of…… fades in and out, hanging onto it’s link to her physical body. and sees this wildly beautiful dead eyed lady.
her body, which is with the edenites. and cam, and potentially judith and coronabeth as well. and….. who is the only other named character in As Yet Unsent? Commander We Suffer, whom Judith had never seen unmasked, who was treated as a bit of an outsider by the rest of the edenites. i’m just saying. could be connected 👀
ALTmost of my favorite parts of HtN i could never have guessed from GtN. the Universe’s Worst Polycule? inconcivable. Wildly Sexy Bone Hand Creation Scene? would not have guessed. literally anything In The River Bubble? i had no inkling. SOUP????? never in a million years.
the only things i maybe could have predicted were like: Harrow Is Sad Because Gideon Is Dead (which she IS, but only after she. forgets and then re-remembers her!!!), We Meet Lyctors (which we do, and they are TERRIBLE!!!), It Takes Place In Outer Space (which it does. but also it takes place in an ancient House Of Bones, and also in The River, and also On Random Dying Planets), and Gideon Is Lesbian Jesus (which. true, but again. the universe’s WORST polycule!!!! the universe’s WORST immaculate conception!!!)
anyway. rubs hands together gleefully i am so excited to be completely surprised and have everything i thought i knew gutted and then sewn back together in a new and more insane configuration <3
one of my most strongly held Vibes for nona the ninth is that we will see samael. mostly due to vibes but also due to perhaps an emerging pattern of ancient ninth cavaliers:
mattias nonius was brought up so much in GtN, then come HtN we not only get ortus’ poem about him, we get to see his ghost come back and fight
samael novenary comes up SO much in HtN. arguably more than anastasia does. i want to see him…. i want to see him fight….. (also i just think his led weighted pelvis chain offhand is just. so fucking cool)
tamsyn muir on how nona is doing in NtN vs everyone else:
ok so when tm said this:
it made me remember this, from the HtN epilogue:
it seems like nona’s “secret crush” could be camilla –but then who would the “biggest jerk” cousin be?
IMO it can’t be palamades, because he’s… palamades, and his worst crime is sometimes being a bit of a hard ass and a nerd. my off the wall prediction is that nona is anastasia (formerly Ninth, formerly First, now…. just Wandering Around) and the “out of town cousin” is the presumed dead cassiopeia the first, because myriad long arguments and thinking your fellow immortal is the “biggest jerk in the universe” (a very domestic epithet!) just seems like something that lyctors (or half lyctors) do
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ALTi know we’re all rightly obsessed with nona and noodle, but it looks like Ianthe saving Jod isn’t going too well for her……
psst tommy arnold posted about his progress for designing the NtN cover on his paetron. it has some interesting pieces of (it isn’t spoilery, and is NOT definitive, but definitly could be described “a few tidbits”) design feedback re: nona’s apperance from the editor that might lend weight to any of the [character]bod theories. im not gonna post the text here out respect and not wanting to tread on anyone’s toes (bc he did purposefully put it on his paetron, vs a public blog) BUT – i would recommend checking it out :3
lmao what the fuck was Cytherea’s angle with the Avulsion trial. she asked the Ninth to help her with it and I could believe her wanting to see Gideon (or Harrow) specifically in action or whatever, as a test. she saw Gideon’s singular gold eyes (and made the John connection) and she was a lyctor, so i’m 100% sure she knew that Harrow was 200 dead children. god she must have thought the Ninth was so fucking fascinating. i want to put her under a microscope.
except!!!!!! she genuinely did ask Palamades if he would help her. she asked him first. he references it, when he’s talking about the number of keys that are left, saying the Ninth had won two keys, but now only had one, “per the agreement [Dulcinea] offered me first” (GtN, p. 309). she didnt know Palamedes!! the real Dulcie gave her no useful information about the Sixth. she didnt know he would refuse. siphoning was “taboo” but like, necros are into freaky shit. again, she didnt know he would refuse.
so like. did Cytherea just do it for shits and giggles? was she like “dang mercymorn, absolutely killer trial you came up with *bats eyelashes*, it would be very funny to watch these babies try it and then die :)”
i cant stop thinking abt everything cytherea could have known. based on mercy’s assertion, we can assume she immediatly connected the dots with Gideon being the child of Jod and his myriad old lie. we know based on lyctoral abilities that she’d know on sight that coronabeth was not a necromancer. bc of those same abilities, im 100% convinced she knew that harrow was 200 dead children in a trenchcoat – im convinced she knew on sight what even mercy and augustine and g1deon and john couldn’t truly figure out, because by the time they met harrow, harrow had become a black hole to them. any other secret of the houses she probably could have figure out, if she like, cared to
and what did she do with this power and knowledge? fucked around and laid around and flirted aggressively. commited a little light murder and property damage to keep her con going. and im not convinced she killed the fouth but god. like until palamades confronted her she was just….. hanging out. she sealed off that one door but she could have destroyed all the contents. she could have sabotaged the keys. she could have done way more and instead she chose to hang out. im imagining her rediscovering and rereading the books she left there a myriad ago. processing her grief over loveday with her newknowledge that it was unnecessary. making a little ninth war crime feel very jealous and a little ninth cavalier feel very confused and flustered. i want to put her under a microscope.