#gideon is mega dead

[mayasaura]

I think we might be thinking of "perfect lyctorhood" the wrong way. It can't be 'discovered', because it doesn't exist. No one is hiding any secret knowledge, and no one has ever created a lyctoral bond without killing their partner. John brought Alecto to life, in a new body he created, but that isn't the same as having never killed the Earth. The Earth is still dead.

Whether or not the kind of perfect lyctorhood Mercy imagined—the kind where no one has to die—is even possible is still up in the air. Anastasia thought so, but we still don't know exactly what, if anything, went wrong in her attempt with Samael.

It may not be possible. Souls may not work like that. But if it is, the method has yet to be invented.

#this really opens up a lot of space for Gideon and Harrow #they don't have to figure out some secret 'right way' to complete what they've started #they just have to figure out what they have and what they want and find a way forward they can both live with #not that their lyctorhood would be done without anyone having to die either #gideon is mega dead #and even if she's brought back like Alecto it won't change that she died #hm #the locked tomb #ntn spoilers #lyctors #lyctorhood

[topchomp]

her divine highness, first lieutenant of the cohort, emperor's life guards, heir to the emperor divine, first of the tower princes--

#kiriona gaia #the locked tomb #the locked tomb spoilers #nona the ninth #gideon the ninth #tlt #harrow the ninth #EEUEUEUUEUEEEUEUEUEHEGH please clap for the cape i do love how it came out #subtle nod to the cow wall in the starburst #...and she's mega dead!

[jewishsuperfam]

interesting that gideon uses “mega dead” as a moniker ONLY to describe harrow’s dead puppeted parents and herself-as-kiriona

#using ‘mega dead’ as a descriptor specifically for the puppeted dead and herself as the corpse prince….. #she really does think of herself as a hollow puppeted corpse now huh #the locked tomb #the locked tomb spoilers #gideon nav #kiriona gaia

[bisexualgenderclown]

kinda sad that Pal and Cam combined their given names and got "Paul", when they could have also just as easily combined their last names and arrived at the objectively superior "Sext"

#gideon would have been mega dead if they did that though #queue endless puns two electric boogaloo #Sex Pal has evolved into Sext! congratulations #camilla hect #palamedes sextus #palamedes the sixth #gideon the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #nona the ninth #ntn #tlt #tlt shitposting #tlt spoilers

[wingedeclipsed]

rolls up to the Kiriona Gaia Fashion Show 2 months late with starbucks (alt text included)

#ianthe style finger epaulets. that is all. #third one is unfinished but it looked cool next to the others #anyways! i love you mega dead girl!! #the locked tomb #gideon nav #kiriona gaia #ntn spoilers #my art

[arweenie64]

thinking about how when jod tried growing flowers they ended up being all messed up and having teeth ("I made flowers grow for them out of the garden, but they came out … weird. Some of the roses had teeth.") and how when he brought Gideon's (the "first flower" of her house, as Harrow says in GtN) corpse back her wounds had teeth in them....... like is there anything here am I reading too much into this like I'm kind of going insane over here

#ALSO its mentioned he caught the tooth rose bouquet lol which obviously correlates to how he creates alecto as his 'other half' soon after #ofc the imagery of teeth where they shouldn't be is obvi symbolic of corruption but it also gives me vibes of there being *too much life* #like the flower is already a living creature so personifying it more by adding teeth is what makes it disconcerting #it also makes it super ironic considering gideon is hashtag mega dead #im also rlly curious as to whether or not jod intentionally put the teeth in gideons wounds or if it was accidental like with the roses #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #gideon nav

[procrastinationaccount]

Foaming at the mouth thinking about Harrow quoting Annabel Lee to Gideon

#her unfortunate memory for poetry strikes again #The one piece of the old world that John really gave her #'I was a child and she was a child/In this kingdom by the sea/But we loved with a love that was more than love-/I and my Annabel Lee' #'But our love it was stronger by far than the love/Of those who were older than we-/Of many far wiser than we-' #'And neither the angels in Heaven above/Nor the demons down under the sea' #'Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee' #I know it was originally supposed to apply to Alecto (especially with the tomb line) #But it applies even more to her and mega-dead Gideon #harrowhark nonagesimus #gideon nav #griddlehark #harrow the ninth my beloved #Alecto the Ninth predictions

[griddlezeeninth]

Happy Halloween from Prince Kiriona Gaia the first!

#what up I’m mega dead #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #gideon nav #tlt #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #cosplay #tlt cosplay #prince kiriona gaia #kiriona gaia #Kiriona cosplay #even being mega dead it was so fun being this hot #so many compliments #a twink also asked me to stab him with my sword? #somehow feels very in character to happen to griddle even as Kiriona #saddest girl in the world…. #saddest girl in the universe #undead lesbian Jesus

[chekhovs-tantrum]

How much of Harrow's corpse kink is related to the fact that her parents conceived her during a massacre, then regularly reminded her about it from the moment she was verbal until she was nine

#mega-dead #gideon the ninth #tlt meta #gtn spoilers

[she-tragedy]

honestly it’s so weird from time to time to see people disliking Kiriona or full on thinking she is some different from Gideon entity just because she was somewhat rude (i personally wouldn’t even call it rude tbh), like come on if i spent a single day in company of Ianthe and Jod, by dinner time i would start constructing a pipe bomb to killing everyone in the room and then myself and that’s me not including into equation all the tonns of trauma Gideon went through (girl died, girl’s soul started to get consumed then got locked away and forgotten, she thinks the girl she sacrificed herself for doesn’t love her back, she learnt that she was just a bomb in the eyes of her mom, once again she is literally mega dead and has an incompetent god for a deadbeat dad and IANTHE as a “bestie”)

#tlt #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #kiriona gaia #gideon nav #im loading a glock and passing it to kiriona

[notedchampagne]

another thing about kiriona i like is that she always seems to be Taunting. she tells pyrrha shes so ever too late to come into her life and talk shit now, she tells pal about once stealing his girl, she tells crux about his cruelty to her and if hes ashamed that hes been badmouthing gods child, she talks about how shes got a new shiny title now and is gods prince but never does she really reveal anything about herself in this state other than the fact that she is indestructible and mega dead.

everything else is relative to being GIDEON. yeah shes alive* and walking and talking again but she has figuratively been stopped in her growth as a person. now shes festering in her soul while making wish fulfillment for gideon nav and not considering that those wishes might have changed

#kiriona gaia #nona the ninth spoilers #nona the ninth #chat #tlt meta

[necrolord-prime-camilla-hect]

"The enthroned Lord and Lady should have taken charge of the sacred ritual, but they couldn't, because they were mega-dead."

(Gideon the Ninth, pg 38)

"I'm Prince Kiriona Gaia the First, Her Divine Highness, First Lieutenant of the Cohort, Emperor's Life Guards, non-auxiliary-- honorary title but who cares-- heir to the Emperor Divine, first of the Tower Princes. And I'm mega dead."

(Nona the Ninth, pg 370)

#jester rereads the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #nona the ninth #kiriona gaia

[theriverbeyond]

i hate the tiktok term "unalive" but i had the realization that it truly is a very funny and deeply accurate term for whatever is going on for so many tlt characters. palamades in his little bubble was unalive. alecto in the tomb was unalive. john when he briefly got atomized by mercy? unalive. the eaten cavaliers, their souls eternally fueling the fire of the lyctor's necromancy? unalive.

gideon is dead tho. mega.

#trb.txt #tlt thoughts #going thru my drafts rn #the locked tomb

[lady-harrowhark]

I can’t get over how Kiriona “wakes up” and immediately starts making moves to black out her “Recognizable Gideon Nav Traits” bingo card. Sex Pal! Yope! Mega dead! Hitting on Corona! Mumfucker Prime! Creative insults for the Harrow stand-in! Pew pew pew, one after another.

It makes me think of when you’re a little bit drunk and trying to hide it and you put so much effort into acting Normal that it circles around and gets weird again. She’s trying so hard to act like the Gideon they knew, to convince them she didn’t Come Back Wrong.

You gotta wonder who she’s really trying to convince, though... The others?

Or herself?

#the legendary Gideon Nav Repression™ strikes again! #nona the ninth spoilers #kiriona gaia #gideon nav #Nona the Ninth #the locked tomb #tlt #ntn #my tlt thoughts

[chainsaw-raven]

Reverse hot take: Harrow and Crux's relationship?

Oh this is a fun one. I love me some weird caring paternal units in fiction. I don’t have many coherent thoughts so bear with me.

On the surface he’s kind of just this crusty old punching bag who should be fun to hate, but then you get this snippet into their past in HtN and its suddenly oooh. Like yes, he is a rotting old man corpse, but hes a rotting old man corpse with a heart, and that heart belongs to the poor little meow meow Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

it gives depth to both their characters.

He’s sort of like Marcus from Arcane, he’s there, you don’t have any love or notice for him, but if you revisit the story again and give more time to it, he has to catch your attention. They’re both characters who read very strongly as “I’ll do anything for my daughter”, even at the expense of others.

Harrow and him at a certain point in their lives had only each other to care about, maybe not healthy or wholesomey and with a very strange dynamic as he was both her keeper and her inferior, but still. They had a very tight orbit. I do think he saw her a bit as his child and that this paternal feeling had to be reckoned with also a reverent feeling. Where as Priamhark saw her as a sin for which he was damned, Crux saw her as a miracle to whom he was indebted. He saw her as a living being, and played a large part of taking care of Harrow, lemon water when she was sick, being a confident, confirming reality from hallucinations both draw weirdly on the heart strings. He was a fraction of Something she desperately needed, I don’t think there would be either a Harrow or Ninth house without him being the child puppeteer’s parental-apprentice. I do hope those sweeter memories arnt post lobotomy write overs and actual memories. It will be interesting to see how she reacts to his death in AtN. It would show quite a lot of growth for her to be able to directly grieve someone and actually accept someone dying, instead of trying to hold on to whatever scraps she can manage. (Gideons soul, her parents bodies)

Harrow has seen everyone who should love her/she loves, show love by dying for it, often in front of her own eyes. Going back to what you said about Paul taking place allowing for griddlehark to remain separate entities for foil reasons, I think that Crux might provide a minor foil along with her parents to Gideon/Kiriona being allowed to show love for Harrow by “living” (..or at least existing since Jod + Fence =Mega Dead Walking Talking Corpse Prince Hours. )

#does this mean anything #does this even make sense #gideon the ninth #the locked tomb #my favorite war crime #griddlehark #crux #does crux have a tag? #harrow the ninth #harrowhark nonagesimus #alecto predictions #Procrastination-account #asks

[corpsesoldier]

so. kiriona huh?

under the cut: full nona spoilers, plus me trying to process some thoughts and coming to very few conclusions

what a kick in the teeth that was, huh?

I want to touch on two main things about gideon's appearance as kiriona in ntn: kiriona's behavior toward the other characters and kiriona as revenant and how I think those things might be related.

so I'm open to both the ideas I've seen floating around wrt to kiriona's behavior in ntn, those being 1) this is an extremely traumatized, sad, and angry but functionally complete gideon nav and 2) that this is only a fragment of gideon's soul.

I think enough people mention "parts" of souls enough times for the fragment theory to have weight, as well as the interview in which tamsyn compares gideon's soul to a happy meal (yeah) and saying that harrow only ever ate the hamburger, whither the fries and drink, etc. maybe what we're seeing is the discarded plastic toy of gideon nav's soul.

however, there are things kiriona says and does that are absolutely 100% gideon. I think what's giving a lot of people pause is kiriona's apparent indifference to seeing her friends and allies again and, most significantly, her indifference over seeing harrow's body. for better or worse, one of gideon's defining characteristics is that she cares a whole fuck of a lot about harrowhark nonagesimus. kiriona acts aloof and unconcerned about all that for a good chunk of her page time in ntn, but particularly near the end we some behavior break through that facade that we would more readily associate with gideon (holding harrow's body and telling her to keep it together when nona starts to come apart; telling alecto to get in line when she offers harrow her service).

so, yknow, I think either option is fair game at this point, but unequivocally this is gideon, at least in part.

so then, this is gideon. and given that, there are some behaviors that I am having trouble reconciling with the gideon we've seen thus far.

I have a hard time believing that gideon would shove an injured and dying cam the way that she does, but hey, she's having a really, really bad day. just what we've seen her experience on page could fill her therapy appointments for the next myriad, and idk what eight months with only john "gaslight" gaius and ianthe "girlboss" tridentarius will do to a mf. I am withholding judgement.

but even moreso than that, I have a hard time reconciling the gideon we see in htn with whatever the hell kiriona's got going on with ianthe. gideon hates ianthe. gideon is furious with ianthe for the way that she treated harrow throughout htn, and yet kiriona and ianthe have friendship bracelets and a secret handshake. and so I'm wondering: how much does kiriona remember about the events of htn?

I'm also interested in why god made gideon into a revenant. he did not have to do that—he's god. presumably he could have fixed her body and put her soul back where it belongs, provided he had access to both those things. and yet kiriona is tied to her own mutilated corpse. is, in her own words, mega-dead. why?

perhaps because john wants total control over this asset, this weapon he's created. john, who "knows where remembrance lives in the brain" and is perfectly willing to exploit that. now, he did that with his lyctors while bringing them completely back to life, but gideon has always been a special case. gideon survived nerve gas as a toddler. gideon made harrow's much-abused skull go SPANG back into shape after a few minutes residence in her meat. maybe if john put gideon's soul back in a living body, gideon's healing factor has the ability to revert whatever alterations he may have made to her brain.

(this is assuming I know how revenants work, which is a big assumption. is whatever kiriona's got going on even being processed through gideon's brain, if that brain is dead? unsure. I am not a spirit magician.)

but regardless, we've had a couple examples of how integral memory is to identity in the locked tomb, the biggest one from this very book being nona-who-is-alecto, but alecto-who-is-not-nona. plus the lyctors with their memory of god's fallibility removed, plus harrow reduced by her half-remembered life.

and then there's what kiriona says to aigalemene, "don't—that's where my heart used to be."

is it possible that kiriona gaia is a gideon with the parts most inconvenient to god cut away?

#edit: I’m making this unrebloggable because I don’t totally agree with it anymore but feel free to observe my thought process #idk I don't usually theorypost but I've been thinking about my baby for the last twelve hours so this is what you get #be nice to me I got five hours sleep because I was laying awake thinking about gideon nav #the locked tomb #nona the ninth #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #gideon nav #kiriona gaia #john gaius #mine