I love how when Harrow leaves Gideon to rest in the room and leaves a note telling Gideon that she’s left some bread in a drawer it’s akin to being home alone as a kid and having like, leftovers left in the fridge for you, except that instead Harrow has just left a bit of bread. in a drawer.
I have so many questions and find this impossibly funny
Honestly one of Harrow’s many traits I relate to deeply is being Bad at Food
If the Harrow/Gideon relationship is the heart of this series, then the Ortus&Harrow bond is its kidneys or something. It’s so important to me, and it’s so hard to say why! Basically, Ortus and Harrow don’t like each other. They also don’t hate each other. Their relationship isn’t like the overwhelmingly emotional bond between Harrow and Gideon, Ortus and Harrow genuinely don’t care all that much about one another. But they still spent most of their lives side by side, each immersed in their own separate obsession, both suffocated by the solitude of the Ninth House.
And that brings with it the horrible intimacy of knowing someone very deeply despite not really wanting or trying to know them at all. The bond with the-other-person-who-was-there-when-the-thing-happened, the person who can restore your sanity and equilibrium just by acknowledging that the things that happened, happened. In this, Ortus&Harrow very much reminds me of a relationship between siblings, possibly estranged siblings. Ortus knows how much Harrow suffered, and he knows he could have reached out but did not, and he apologises, and that too little too late gesture is far more healing and far more truthful than anything Harrow could have ever gotten from another adult, including God. And Harrow in turn, despite mocking Ortus’s poetry, turns out to know quite a lot of it by heart. You don’t have to love something to know it way too well.
in addition to all the other reasons the soup scene is so funny, there’s also the element of like… pulling the reverse eucharist card on god in the game of catholic uno. make god eat YOUR body and blood for once, actually, see how he likes it. the heresy of it all
[video description: a minute and a half sketchy animatic of a scene from Harrow The Ninth book where Mercymorn hates everyone because they mockingly interpret her scribble of the Beast in not-beastly shapes. ]
I got procreate and I thought: what if I draw mercymorn like fifty times. and then i did.
edit: audio is from the audiobook! voiced by Moira Quirk!This animatic lives in my head all the time now. Friends who’ve never read TLT at all now joke about the “jail full of acid” because of this.
so funny to me how augustine and mercymorn were like “don’t worry guys. we have a plan to distract god. just wait for the signal, you’ll know it when you see it.” and the signal was to just start having a threesome with god on the dinner table right in front of harrow and ianthe
