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Thanks to everyone who explained all the Catholic stuff for the goons who were raised godless heathens. Now give Alecto please 
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Sep 20, 2022 05:24
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DreamingofRoses posted:I’m also highly suspicious of the friendship bracelets. I'm waiting on the spinoff where gidirona and ianthe go on bffs forever adventures while constantly trying to brutally murder one another
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Sep 20, 2022 13:01
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This could be absolutely nothing but (NtN) Teacher from the first book had a multicolored threaded belt. I don’t feel like we have enough information but I feel like the friendship bracelets are related and maybe there’s more going on with that belt than was indicated? I always felt like we didn’t get the full story on book 1 Teacher and the whole ‘cramming 50 souls into one dude’ thing anyway.
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Sep 20, 2022 13:12
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Rereading Gideon and thinking about NtN: Do we think that Canaan house was built on top of the original research facility where the Jod dream narrative takes place? Did they use the same research facility, repurposed, for all the Lyctor experiments?
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Sep 20, 2022 15:31
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Danhenge posted:Rereading Gideon and thinking about NtN: Do we think that Canaan house was built on top of the original research facility where the Jod dream narrative takes place? Did they use the same research facility, repurposed, for all the Lyctor experiments? I think it's very likely that that's the case, both from a narrative perspective and also because he seems like the type who would stubbornly stick to using that place.
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Sep 20, 2022 17:14
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For Jod so loved the world...
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Sep 20, 2022 17:17
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The wairarapa is a plain that's ~60 meters above sea level, so it would take some extremely vigorous climate change to make that into very deep water. I just checked and if all the ice caps melted it would only ("only") be 70 meters.
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Sep 20, 2022 19:38
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redcheval posted:This could be absolutely nothing but (NtN) Teacher from the first book had a multicolored threaded belt. I don’t feel like we have enough information but I feel like the friendship bracelets are related and maybe there’s more going on with that belt than was indicated? I always felt like we didn’t get the full story on book 1 Teacher and the whole ‘cramming 50 souls into one dude’ thing anyway. I think you're overthinking it sometimes a friendship bracelet is a just a friendship bracelet
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Sep 21, 2022 01:47
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Entropic posted:I think you're overthinking it sometimes a friendship bracelet is a just a friendship bracelet Maybe. But what if instead it's a friendship with benefits bracelet?
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Sep 21, 2022 03:00
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I really hope that we get more Ianthe POV at some point, I loved that one short bit we got in HtN.
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Sep 21, 2022 03:11
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Speaking of which, if AtN follows the current trend of the namesake being the primary pov character, presumably that will be Alecto in her book, which I admit to feeling a bit ambivalent about. If anybody can pull it off it's Tamsyn though, so I'll just trust in her yet again.
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Sep 21, 2022 03:18
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Entropic posted:I think you're overthinking it sometimes a friendship bracelet is a just a friendship bracelet Gideon the Ninth posted:Two nights had passed without Harrow sleeping in the Ninth quarters, or changing out of dirty clothes, or refreshing her paint. Gideon cogitated:
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Sep 21, 2022 03:42
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Paul kinda sounds like Pal.
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Sep 21, 2022 03:43
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How do we actually know that Gideon doesn't have any necromantic abilities? Is there any evidence other than the Ninth not teaching her, which could easily have been a choice they made for their own reasons?
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Sep 21, 2022 04:54
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Danhenge posted:How do we actually know that Gideon doesn't have any necromantic abilities? Is there any evidence other than the Ninth not teaching her, which could easily have been a choice they made for their own reasons? she might be psychic and able to fly too, we have been given no reason to think otherwise
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Sep 21, 2022 05:11
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Danhenge posted:How do we actually know that Gideon doesn't have any necromantic abilities? Is there any evidence other than the Ninth not teaching her, which could easily have been a choice they made for their own reasons? She does have something funky and unexplained going on since there's never been a reason why she was immune to nerve gas as a baby that I can recall (though I wouldn't be surprised if that plot thread just gets dropped since it's been untouched for 2 whole books)
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Sep 21, 2022 05:11
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Foxfire_ posted:All necromancers have noodle arms. Gideon has enormous biceps and does chin ups for fun. If there isn't yet another twist I thought it was because She is the
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Sep 21, 2022 05:23
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sebmojo posted:she might be psychic and able to fly too, we have been given no reason to think otherwise tbf she is the literal daughter of god, but i personally hope she doesn't become a necromancer, it's complicated enough already.
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Sep 21, 2022 05:24
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Hey, I can't remember, do the books ever address why necromancers need cavaliers? They can do bone magic. What's a sidekick with a sword gonna do that the bone magic can't?
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Sep 21, 2022 05:43
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tiniestacorn posted:Hey, I can't remember, do the books ever address why necromancers need cavaliers? They can do bone magic. What's a sidekick with a sword gonna do that the bone magic can't? They get the juice flowing.
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Sep 21, 2022 05:48
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tiniestacorn posted:Hey, I can't remember, do the books ever address why necromancers need cavaliers? They can do bone magic. What's a sidekick with a sword gonna do that the bone magic can't? they very much do. the cavalier is so you can have someone really good at swords to fuse with so they can puppet your body around while your soul is off galivanting.
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Sep 21, 2022 05:51
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Necromancy inherently makes you incredibly feeble. Your Cav is your Paladin and tank, and I'm sure in the Cohort your legal lieutenant. In the field you'd likely be surrounded by a guard battalion though, (unless you're fourth house and your job is to create enough death to begin the endless march of the skeleton.) Necromancers can only be born in the houses under the thanergetic wash of the system, which also makes birth extremely difficult even when done through science tubes. It's not specific but they point out many times that the population of the houses isn't much, and therefore the population of necromancers is also low. Youve got rare, powerful death wizards who are nobility. So you assign life bonded trained from birth best of the best loyal servants to keep them alive and be their fancy maids.
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Sep 21, 2022 05:54
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Uranium Phoenix posted:They get the juice flowing.  Murdering people to generate thanergy.
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Sep 21, 2022 05:54
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Cavs and their necromancers are also an incredibly romantic concept (in all the various senses of the word) that make for beautiful propaganda back to the Houses' own people about... everything. It humanizes the necromancers, it's good for love stories both salacious and courtly, and it gives a lot of non-necros something to aspire to within the Houses. Imagine all the necromancers without their cavaliers in the first book - without a cav around to moderate their impulses and help with their image, nearly every one of them would've deservedly been shoved out an airlock by their peons at first opportunity. EDIT: Normal necros also have actual limits. Even prodigies like Harrow are seen breaking out in blood sweat a lot more easily early in GtN. Your average necromancer probably benefits greatly from having someone reasonably buff and trained by their side so they aren't risking burning out defending their own lives should it come to it. disposablewords fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 06:15
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I was a little behind finishing Nona because I was listening to the audiobook. Moira Quirk has done an admirable job differentiating between a HUGE cast of characters, though some of the individual voices were a bit challenging. Spoiler-free thoughts: The dramatic change of vibe in Nona makes me really excited for Alecto. It was really nice to hang out in the grungy, ordinary parts of the locked tomb world. I don't often read things that I would describe as cozy and apocalyptic, but this was both. As a lot of people have mentioned already, the way gender and selfhood are handled in this book is really refreshing and exhilarating. I'm also a huge sucker for stories about families of choice, and this had that in abundance. I friggin lost it when Nona was demanding details about the mustache ride shirt Pyrrha got her for her birthday. It was so sweet and such a heartbreaking payoff of the relationship between Nona and her caregivers. I also thought it was really interesting that at the very end, Nona was desperate to keep forgetting who she was, because she wanted to continue loving everyone. Maybe on some level, Alecto/Earth knows she wants to love her children (she thinks of all living and dead humans as babies at the end), but she's kind of too ancient and too righteously angry to do so, unless she's under someone's control. Given all of the emotional attachments Nona created in the city, I wonder if we're going to see Alecto go back there at any point, and if so, would she be able to reconnect with the gang and etc? Sidenote to that—I was a little bummed out that we didn't see the gang convene at Hot Sauce's hideout, which was kind of set up to be a set piece later in the story. Unless I glazed over it somehow? Audiobooks can have that effect. I'm curious what other people make of a small detail—when John is talking about the moment he sets the nukes off, Harrow questions him about a discrepancy. Since I listened to the audiobook, I don't have the text in front of me, but iirc John fudges the order in which the nukes go off—I think at first he states that OG Gideon's suitcase nuke goes off first, and then later retcons it, stating that he himself sets the first nukes off via zombie president (or vise versa, I forget). When Harrow asks about it, he gets briefly defensive. Did that pay off in any way? Was it just a way to show that John has been telling himself a sympathetic version of his own story for 10,000 years? Or am I reading too much into it? I'm fully prepared to believe that there's even more to the story of the destruction of planet Earth, but otoh i have no idea where this story is going next. Overall, I'm really grateful that this got to be its own book, because I think if Muir had tried to compact it all into Alecto, it would have sucked all of the breathing room out of the narrative.
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Sep 21, 2022 06:35
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Speaking of theorycrafting, did anyone figure out (NtN) what exactly was meant by Nona referring to her own mind as “the middle thoughts” as opposed to “upper” or “lower” in the megatruck sequence? What immediately sprang to mind for me was if Harrow’s body had pieces of Harrow, Alecto, and Gideon inside, it would correspond pretty well to the Freudian model: repressed nunlet Harrow as the superego, That the mind stuff didn’t start happening until after Crown started reminding her of things (Cam, Pal, and Pyrrha had a strict rule on not prompting her) reminds me of Harrow’s plan falling apart when she met Cam on the planet complete with nosebleeds, then Hot Sauce shooting her in the head allowing Lyctoral regeneration… Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 08:35
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Luigi Thirty posted:Speaking of theorycrafting, did anyone figure out (NtN) what exactly was meant by Nona referring to her own mind as “the middle thoughts” as opposed to “upper” or “lower” in the megatruck sequence? What immediately sprang to mind for me was if Harrow’s body had pieces of Harrow, Alecto, and Gideon inside, it would correspond pretty well to the Freudian model: repressed nunlet Harrow as the superego, Alecto as the ego, horny and impulsive Gideon as the id. I think the middle thoughts are the Nona thoughts instead of the awake Alecto—upper or dead dreaming Alecto—lower since the thoughts start when she’s starting to remember who she is and really stand out when Pyrrha almost says her name. I’m apparently going to need to get an ebook copy so I can cite better.
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Sep 21, 2022 10:56
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Entropic posted:I think you're overthinking it sometimes a friendship bracelet is a just a friendship bracelet If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these books it’s that it’s impossible to overthink any of it!
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Sep 21, 2022 12:52
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Speaking of overthinking... on one hand "The Kindly Prince" is a title used to refer to John (quite a bit in Harrow the Ninth, less so in the other books), and the punctuation pretty clearly indicates it's a descriptor of "The King Undying", on the other hand it seems somewhat unlikely that it is an accident or coincidence that the very first page of Gideon the Ninth begins (emphasis mine):GtN posted:IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:15
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Another interesting tidbit that I'm sure I'm not the first to notice is that necromantic dating is limited to as far back as the beginning of Jod's reign.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:57
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Danhenge posted:Another interesting tidbit that I'm sure I'm not the first to notice is that necromantic dating is limited to as far back as the beginning of Jod's reign. I mean, prior to that, your only option would have been Jod, and he probably wasn’t up for anything back then, even casual drinks.
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Sep 21, 2022 17:04
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Hedningen posted:I mean, prior to that, your only option would have been Jod, and he probably wasn’t up for anything back then, even casual drinks. 
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Sep 21, 2022 17:37
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Hedningen posted:I mean, prior to that, your only option would have been Jod, and he probably wasn’t up for anything back then, even casual drinks. I don't know about that. I mean you could try a decent dinner, an average rosé. Maybe a movie and see where the night takes you.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:42
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DreamingofRoses posted:I think the middle thoughts are the Nona thoughts instead of the awake Alecto—upper or dead dreaming Alecto—lower since the thoughts start when she’s starting to remember who she is and really stand out when Pyrrha almost says her name. I’m apparently going to need to get an ebook copy so I can cite better. Yeah, Nona, not Alecto-- the Nona thoughts are pushed to the forefront by the best dog in the universe. But I definitely think there's some Harrow brain fuckery going on here! Speaking of overthinking, I found a really long Tumblr post about where the Paul stuff might be pulled from and where it might be going, going from everything from Hegel to Crowley and Jesus Christ, how did we get here I just wanted to read about gay necromancers. Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 19:34
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Here's something interesting: In Harrow, John mentioned that he wished he'd mastered time instead of death. In Nona, John talks about the FTL tech that the first ships out used, which he didn't understand, and said in the dream "it would take me ten thousand years to understand the math." It has now been about ten thousand years since then.
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Sep 21, 2022 20:40
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Hrm. There's also the bit in HtN about "we tried ftl, but it didn't really pan out, so we did the stele" and I'm still not completely sure what that means, given what we've learned since...
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Sep 21, 2022 20:43
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I'm still a little confused as to what a stele actually is. I get that it uses necromancy to fuel space travel...and I think that's it? I hope it gets elaborated on a little bit more.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:27
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https://twitter.com/tokiimon/status/1571926315468558338?s=46&t=t9hvs0uojPMrdvLUV80WOQ
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Sep 21, 2022 21:40
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silvergoose posted:Hrm. There's also the bit in HtN about "we tried ftl, but it didn't really pan out, so we did the stele" and I'm still not completely sure what that means, given what we've learned since... It seemed to me that the flashbacks with John implied that you couldn't really "aim" it so you kind of ended up where you ended up, maybe based on where you started from?
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Sep 21, 2022 21:50
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Follow up question, y'all think Muir will sink to a "kneel before Jod" or "kneel before God" moment before Alecto is though?
Danhenge fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 21:53
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