Trying to break down that one part of htn like. There’s three characters in the scene: God, a teenage nun, and God’s dead daughter (who is currently sharing a body with the nun and is also kind of the nun’s girlfriend? They didn’t really get a chance to define the relationship before the whole dying thing). God doesn’t know his daughter ever existed. The nun has forgotten that she ever existed. The audience does know she existed, but they don’t know she’s present in this scene. The daughter knows that she exists and is here but doesn’t know that she is at all related to God.
And then God looks the nun in the eye and says “If I ever had a daughter, I’d want her to be like you,” and no one involved has enough information to know how fucked up a statement that is.
Ortus’ murder from the point of view of Harrow the Ninth is like. So turns out Crux isn’t just Harrow’s seneschal, he’s her nurse. He was her touchstone for reality for years, the person she turned to to ask “did that really happen?” or “is that real?”. And he lied to her.
She didn’t believe him, about Ortus. He didn’t succeed at pulling that one over on her, but he tried. Which kind of makes you question how many times he might have tried it before, and how many times he wasn’t caught.
Once again thinking about Ortus’s guilt that he, a grown man, didn’t do more to help Harrow even though he KNEW she needed it.
Oh man. I hadn’t considered Ortus’ perspective on this. Because Harrow didn’t come out to him as psychotic until after his death. He knew things weren’t great for her, before. He knew he had a responsibility to her that he was too preoccupied by his own troubles to fulfill. But he’d had no idea how bad it was.
Now the whole time he’s in Canaan House, getting to know her better, serving as her interpretor when asked, he has to be thinking “Who did this for her before?”. And he has to know. And he has to realise just how profoundly he failed Harrow, as an adult in her life.
i don’t remember exactly but i don’t think Crux lied to Harrow. not exactly. he just…didn’t tell her. i think that’s how she knew.
i do wonder though how many of the attempts on her life that Gideon blamed on Harrow were actually Crux.
i wish Ortus had had the strength to be there for them both.
ALT
He lied.
Ouch also makes me think about in Gideon the Ninth when Harrow doesn’t tell Gideon about finding Protesilaus’s head I thought it was because she didn’t trust her/bad communication but it was probably also because she was worried the whole thing was an hallucination and that’s why she kept the head in her closet: as proof
fav part of gideon the ninth is for the first pre-canaan house chunk of the book, she’s all “ugh I’m so normal surrounded by all these weirdo goth freaks when I blow this popsicle stand everyone will see how cool and normal and charming I am” and then she gets to canaan house and realizes that while she might have been a normie jock in the ninth house she is not exempt from being a goth weirdo who hides important doors behind tapestries and sneaks around in the dark so she doesn’t have to talk to people. like we talk about her being a jock forced to be goth but nature v nurture babey she’s not shedding that bone freak skin anytime soon
