Sorry My First Posted Gideon The Ninth Fanart Is This Lol

Sorry my first posted Gideon the Ninth fanart is this lol

I binged it in like 3 days and now it’s all I can think about

[Boneless Pizza Original]

what about the play making it clear ianthe does not know what happened with harrow’s ascension. she has no clue that gideon killed herself and forced harrow’s hand!!! she must think harrow was going mad from the guilty of killing gideon, instead of the regret of not being able to prevent gideon’s death and then the act of swallowing her soul. this puts such a spin on her relationship w harrow, and ianthe doesnt even knowwww. god! will she think less of harrow? she’ll def underestimate harrow’s regard for gideon, which we’ve already seen in htn but it wasnt like shit-talking she fr fr believes gideon is harrow’s babs.

I am still (1) riding the high from the *gestures vaguely* everything and, (2) hiding from how overwhelmed I am by all the implications for small shifts in what I thought I knew about lyctorhood, so I have not yet considered this detail with this level of granularity! I am assuming you're referring to the discussion in scene four about Ianthe's regret over killing Babs.

This lil' tidbit is doing a LOT of work! I had to go back and look up what exactly Harrow told him while she was visiting his river bubble. All she says is "Gideon has become the furnace for my lyctorhood" - no other details. We know that CAMILLA was there and knew what happened, and I cannot IMAGINE a world in which this didn't come up while they were furiously trying to figure out if Nona was Harrow or Gideon! I mean, I know they had a lot of other shit to talk about... but he MUST have known what really happened, right? If so, he sure didn't correct her! I think a lot of what Ianthe likes about Harrow is that she is ostensibly an intellectual equal, a peer, but she still has some power over her, putting her into the "Corona Proxy" role she so loves to fill. I think she already thought less of her for doing a bad job hiding her weakness... and she loved it, and exploited it... But if she realized they weren't alike in that way, that they weren't actually equals in their depravity...? Damn, that's fascinating! I'm really not sure how she'd respond! Like... she's obviously blowing steam in this scene, right? She ABSOLUTELY felt bad about killing Babs. This entire play is just Ianthe trying to lie about it and Babs forcing the truth! I recently pointed out how Ianthe calls Babs boring... but during the exchange when Pal is "trash talking" like Babs would, she notes that he's finally doing something interesting. So, which is it, Ianthe? She. Is. Full. Of. Shit. And it's possible that having a peer who also murdered their cavalier was helping her keep it together in more ways than the obvious (bedsharing and late-night girl talk and arm sex, etc). If she'd known the truth on the Mithraeum, would she have fallen apart? So much delicious food for thought! Om nom nom!!!

so I may have started reading Nona the ninth.

Now that I’ve finished it, here are more coherent/useful thoughts (under cut because spoilers)

Oh, this is so perfect. It’s SO perfect.

Ianthe loves being Ianthe. Ianthe loves being Ianthe more than anything else in the world—the closest she gets to loving any non-Ianthe person is loving her twin sister, and from the way Ianthe talks about Coronabeth, it’s pretty clear that it’s a distinctly acquisitive love, not a love based on knowing anything meaningful about Coronabeth as a person. Ianthe is, above all, extremely disinterested in getting to know anyone who isn’t the Most Interesting Girl in the World (Ianthe).

(I think that’s why she likes Augustine so much—he’s spent thousands of years crafting a perfectly blank persona, showing nothing of his interiority, leading Harrow to wonder if he even has any. Ianthe sees that and she’s like: awesome, finally somebody who’s not out to bore me with all their dumb complicated feelings, this guy’s the coolest ever, I want to be just like him)

So for Palamades to hit her with that—oh man. Oh MAN. Ianthe, in your quest to solidify Ianthe Tridentarius as an eternal unchanging paragon of Awe, you have become… not Ianthe. And you were too obsessed with your own Ianthe-ness to even see it.

You thought you could make the devil’s bargain with counterfeit currency and now the bill’s come due. Killing Babs is no big deal because “who cares about Babs?” Baby, YOU cares about Babs! You IS Babs now, bitch! Your perfect immutable self? You went and MUTED it!

God, it’s the perfect way to cut a self-obsessed person to the core. You love yourself so much? The person you love doesn’t fucking EXIST, Ianthe. You invited a permanent roommate into your soul and you don’t even LIKE him and now you’re on the lease together forever and you did it to yourself

The unwanted guest isn’t Palamades. The unwanted guest is Babs.

Dead at this

I think the most interesting, perhaps horrifying, part of The Unwanted Guest is the fact that Naberius Tern haunts the narrative much more than I previously thought.