#and I'm thinking about adding Gideon the ninth like SOMEONE STOP ME | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mayasaura · 1 year

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Call me a hopeless goth, but I kind of like the Ninth House's funerary practices and I wish we knew more about them. At least, I like what they could be: what I imagine they once were, before their culture was shattered.

The Ninth as we see it is a civilization in its death throes. It's a utilitarian horror show, hollowed out by tragedy and stripped of all dignity and sentiment, but we have good reason to think it wasn't always like that. They have a history of fine textile production and poetry, and occassionally forming hero cults to celebrate cultural icons. There used to be families who raised their children communally. Before the sea of tiny coffins, the Ninth may have known how to live, and even how to mourn.

There are glimmers of what their death culture might have been like in Harrow's prayer beads: made from the bones of her ancestors, a tangible link to her history and community. And in Gideon searching for her mother in the leek fields, imagining that a woman she never met is still present in her life.

In a living culture with a functioning community, the use of human bone as a crafting material could make mundane objects into momentos, ways to keep loved ones close after their passing. The skeleton servitors could be seen as a way individuals continued to care and provide for the community, even after death.

If their dead are routinely exhumed to be added to the chore rota, it would make sense for the exhumation, cleaning, and raising of those bones to traditionally be a cultural ritual like a graduation or funeral. Most of those skeletons would have had living friends and family working alongside them, when the Ninth still had generations. The skeleton sweeping the chapel used to be someone's uncle. People in these cultures do mourn death. We've seen them with the corpses of people they knew, and they're not completely desensitized; just very weird. There's a throw-away line once about Harrow having a pet peeve about personalising the skeletons, which means it must be fairly common to do that. What was to stop previous generations of the Ninth from getting scolded for putting funny hats on Cousin Balbus's bones? Nothing, that's what. Balbus liked hats, anyway, so I don't see how it was disrespectful.

I'm sure Wake didn't get a ceremony when she was raised as a servitor; the main beneficiary would have been Gideon, and god fucking knows no one ever went out of their way to make her feel like part of the community. I'm betting no one does raising ceremonies for anyone, anymore. The Ninth is as good as dead, and no one ever taught the youngest generation how to mourn. But for ten thousand years, the Ninth successfully lived in very close proximity to mundane natural death. It's fun to imagine what that looked like.

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #tlt worldbuilding #like.... the Ninth is based sort of on a medieval Christian monastary #in the small personal living quarters heavy emphasis on religion and communal living spaces #medieval monastaries were full of culture and gossip and functioned as a fairly close community #and when you factor in that the Ninth was hereditary and one of the commmunal duties was childrearing....#you get something much closer to a smallish tribe or clan #the prayer of the Locked Tomb has been passed down unchanged for almost ten thousand years #that takes INTENSE social cohesion and a strong commitment to cultural ritual #the amount of Ninth culture we will never know because we came in after their extinction event.... man....

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iviarellereads · 1 year

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Harrow the Ninth, Chapter 48

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For detail on The Locked Tomb coverage and the index, read this one!)

(Third House icon) In which Ianthe is either the reader's soulmate or mortal enemy.

Gideon knows, in retrospect, that she should have finished off Mercy while she was incapacitated. Instead, in the moment, she chased Cytherea. Instead of finding her, she finds Ianthe.

"Harry," she said. Harrow, she was genuinely delighted to see you. The smile on that thin white face was real. "Harry, you're--" I moved closer and totally fucking ruined her day. "Alive, bitch," I said.

Gideon appeals to Harrow's better nature for being shitty to Ianthe, because she knows Ianthe lied to Harrow's face about not seeing Cytherea's corpse, as well as messing around with Harrow while she was vulnerable, but someone had to give Ianthe a little what-for. After some verbal sparring, they continue down the corridor together. They run into August, who says Harrow should've come back if she lived…(1) but cuts himself off when he sees Harrow's face. Her eyes.

I've seen a lot of things in my time […] but I have never seen anyone look at anything the way these Lyctors looked at us. Mercymorn looked at us like we were the picture in the dictionary next to /unhappiness/. Augustine looked at us like we were the last thing he'd ever see.

He breathes "John," and then "Joy." and books it. Ianthe and Gideon book it another direction, and Ianthe gives Gideon one of Harrow's letters, addressed to Gideon.(2) The letter is wrapped around the sunglasses, which she puts on to hide her eyes. She already knows what it says, so she's not sure why she's surprised to read

ONE FLESH, ONE END.

Gideon gets angry at Harrow because she gave Harrow her flesh and Harrow made no end of it.

Ianthe speaks familiarly of Harrow, and Gideon tells Ianthe to fuck off, she doesn't know anything about Harrow and she certainly didn't make any progress romantically. Ianthe asks if Gideon did, since Harrow has accumulated nothing of her, and went so far as to lobotomize herself to cut Gideon out of her brain entire.

Gideon tells Ianthe that Harrow has been in love with the corpse in the Locked Tomb since she was ten years old, and Ianthe puzzles a bit over that.

"Don't think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me," I added. "If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don't know anything about her and me. I'm her cavalier, dipshit! I'd kill for her! I'd die for her. I did die for her. I'd do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I'm her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off." Always your sword, my umbral sovereign;(3) in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me.(4) I died knowing you'd hate me for dying;(5) but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I'd had your full attention.

Ianthe explains that she and Harrow are Lyctors now, the centuries will pull them together despite themselves. Gideon starts making jack-off motions, and Ianthe threatens to show her Harrow's kidneys. Gideon says that's the problem, Ianthe has to stop thinking about any of Harrow's body parts, or what she wants to do with them.

"What can I say," she said ."I love a little gall on gall." "Reverse everything I just told you," I said. "Let's get married."

Ianthe brings them back to the point: she's bringing Gideon to see God. He needs to know what's going on, and he's the only way to get Harrow back to her body.

If you'd come back, maybe I wouldn't have ended up following Ianthe Tridentarius to see God. But you didn't; you were gone. Might've been a good thing in this instance, honestly. I still didn't know if you were going to kick my ass for that conversation, or if you would be sorry for me. I knew which one would have been worse.

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(1) The phrasing here suggests to me that he didn't know what Mercy was going to do. He isn't surprised to see Harrow walking. So, did Mercy really operate alone? What was her plan? (2) Why would Ianthe still have one of Harrow's letters? Recall the epiparodos: Ianthe was left with two letters, "to be opened only in the event of [Harrow's] death or of the other happenstance". Harrow had hope, after all, that Gideon might yet live, even if she herself did not. (3) Ah, the silliness from book 1 again. Finding absurd and flowery ways to refer to Harrow as her superior. (4) A callback to the vows. Do I mean the cav-necro vow or the marriage vow? "Yes", I say, since they're both from the same verse. (5) She obviously doesn't know where that hate comes from, though. Harrow hates a universe without Gideon so much she had to erase her memory to stop living in it, trying to preserve her as long as possible, so that even if Harrow didn't know it, she still lived in the universe where Gideon Nav was a possibility. Gideon still thinks Harrow didn't care for her. More, she still believes love is impossible between them. (Yes, this all directly countermands the Kiss Truther stance from Gideon chapter 31, but I care not.)

#the locked tomb #tlt #harrow the ninth #htn #harrow the ninth spoilers #htn spoilers #gideon nav #ianthe tridentarius #augustine the first

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