Harrow The Ninth Spoilers - Tumblr Posts

My poor girl was losing her religion every day on that space shuttle

not the same event but I here's an old doodle from harrow the ninth's soup supper--

this post is making me want to draw the fifth's dinner as the last supper though tbh since that is a way better parallel

I just sat bolt upright in bed after realizing It’s the last supper. THE DINNER PARTY FOR THE FIFTH IS THE LAST SUPPER. Do you know how many fucking times I’ve read tlt and I just clocked this? I’m too stupid to live.

if aught but death part me and thee

Also, Abigail low key thinks Harrow’s never touched FanFiction of any kind before. Which would mean Harrow came up with these AU’s all by her lonely gay self. Which impresses the fuck out of Abigail (who intimately knows the history of FanFiction creation). And Abigail would feel really bad if she left a bad review to novel FanFiction AU idea. But also she just fucking can’t anymore. She’s so done with coffee shop AU’s.

I know the logical reason Abigail was so insistent about shutting down Harrow’s coffeeshop AU is because the teens were there and she didn’t want them to be in danger but “Abigail Pent knows what fanfiction is and has a deep-seated loathing of coffeeshop AUs” is about a hundred times funnier as far as explanations go

This reminds me of the missiles used to shoot down Cohort ships that Wake would never have done (she who hated all Necromancers), and the idea that nuclear irradiation was tied to Necromancers existing.  My thoughts fall apart a little bit in hearing that Augustine and John which other pre-resurrection. I also found it interesting that they called the resurrection the first resurrection, implying that there is a second or more. When John himself said that he never actually did another resurrection like he did the first; instead the new people for the ninth were sleeping from the first.   Is it possible that nuclear radiation created pre-necromancers before the big whatever-it-was happened? Is that why Wake would never have used those missiles? Did these pre-necromancers have since enough ability to show them what they hadn’t scientifically discovered yet? Did they use those senses to figure out greater possibilities between life and death? Did John have the power to create the first resurrection because he was already a perfect lyctor? Or did the first resurrection happen because he became a necromancer/lyctor during whatever happened to Earth? I’d be tempted to blame him as a sort of, him using the sun to power some necromantic work, but it seems his big hate on against the rest of humanity was that they did not help their native sun. And if not that why is he spent so long fighting a war against non-Necromancer  humanity? What exactly are his motives?

harrow: *mentions anything even tangentially related to alecto*

john: *immediately starts waxing poetic and/or talking about children*

Crack theory: Harrow enters the bottom of the river and falls through time. She is, in fact, The Body. She did not know it but she has finally learned to love herself. John and Anastasia were very surprised to return to the Tomb only to find it already filled.

more harrow the ninth thoughts bc my brain wont shut the fuck up

one line is TORMENTING ME

"Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, dropped dead, or both."

faraway in a land she had never travelled

what the fuck does this mean. so. We basically know Harrow went into the tomb bc she had the blood of the daughter of god on her hands so it was possible. The wiki says it's unclear but i think that's BULLSHIT.

and harrow with non fucked up brain (Gideon would call this debatable) corroborates this story in gtn. so we can be pretty dang sure it happened.

we don't know which subject clause this is modifying. or whatever. we learned about this in seventh grade shut up. is the tomb in a land she had never travelled, or is harrow transported to a land she's never travelled. the answer could be both. "faraway" is sort of a weird usage; it could just as easily say "far away," but it doesnt. which may be an honest to John copyediting error. "faraway" may just be muir's sort of flourishy elegant writing style. but it can also mean "dreamy or abstracted" so this could be a comment on harrow's mental state which implies that harrow is transported to a land she had never travelled while being kind of dreamy and out of it.

this is further corroborated by the fact that we know harrow has travelled to the Tomb so it wouldn't make sense to say she hasn't travelled it.

the "land she had never travelled" could also just mean the River, except that she has. she trained in the River a BUNCH.

so. ok. Harrow popped the Bubble right? which means there's no buoyancy. so she's essentially sinking. down into the river. which. what's at the bottom of the river. yeah. the portal to hell. which i saw a theory about, that it's a portal to another world (possibly ours? which i dont like imo it breaks my suspension of disbelief, but either way this theory still works). and the stoma only opens for like, resurrection beasts and god, right? but harrow is made up of 200 dead children. her parents committed resurrection. im guessing the stoma would open for her.

so. end of htn, pre-epilogue, harrow is now in another fucking dimension also ensconced in the tomb absolutely out of it. theory done.

*jaw dropped*

But all their conversations about who had the hottest cavalier fail to take into account Cytherea met the new generation! Do you think she’d still agree that Phyrra was the hottest? Or would she now say someone else *Gideon* was the hottest?

Cytherea: Like, yes, Phyrra was incredibly beautiful and amazingly dutiful. But! She didn’t throw herself on the spear for Gideon. He still had to do the final act himself. Now if you want a real cavalier, one who is such a good girl and wields a real sword like you’d not believe possible. Mmmmm *licks lips* then I simply must vote for Harrow’s. Though that delightful dagger of a cav in the Sixth certainly makes the top five list.

Harrow: would you like more soup?

Sure do feel some kind of a way about Cytherea being implied to have had a cavalier kink. Didn’t think her vibe with Gideon could get any weirder but there it goes it just did

She kinda sucks at anything dessert adjacent but man does she make some killer soup.

AU where the Canaan house people are contestants on Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen XD would be hilarious

-looks at Harrow-

-continues to look at Harrow-

I mean.

You’re not wrong.

Ironically (intentionally?) Optus then returns

Ooh this meme is old-school

gideon nav lesbian jesus, gideon nav died for our sins #gonebutneverforgotten

so funny to me how augustine and mercymorn were like “don’t worry guys. we have a plan to distract god. just wait for the signal, you’ll know it when you see it.” and the signal was to just start having a threesome with god on the dinner table right in front of harrow and ianthe

I was vividly imagining the world ending and I imagined the lyctors came and said “you fucked it up” and they came up like flying on little saucers and wearing helmets and it really fucked my mind like think about that situation

So My sister is reading htn for the first time rn

Dealer: j got this new strain 💯 it’s called, “thanergy link to your daughters longsword” 😳🔥 gonna be blitzed off your titz

Me: whatever man I don’t feel shit

5 minutes later: dude I swear I saw some bitch in a hazmat suit at the bottom of that glass coffin

My girl Harrow, pacing: the eggs you gave me all died and you lied to me

Some good points, and if anyone in this series is playing 5-dimensional chess, Ianthe is.

But I also think the simple motivations make sense.

Ianthe is a pragmatist. She explicitly said sucking up to Augustine was a survival strategy - ingratiating herself so that he'd think twice about leaving her to be eaten by an R.B.

John is exponentially more powerful. Helping him in a rare moment of vulnerability is a completely in-character, strategic move. She saw a chance to make the most powerful man in the universe her grateful benefactor and she seized it. I buy that.

And also… she just found out John's death means her home solar system will be destroyed!

I don't know why everyone's overlooking that. When Mercy and August were talking about watching their people die up close, she seemed horrified.

If there's any one on third, or any place even, that she doesn't completely hate... or if she even idly suspects Corona might be near harm's way... her choice to save John makes perfect sense.

This too is part of her pragamatism. She doesn't care what he's done. She cares what his death will do.

“Based on various Ianthe analysis I have seen floating around lately, today’s Locked Tomb meta thought is: what does Ianthe think Augustine can do in the stoma?

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that Ianthe’s reason for tipping the fight between Augustine and John the way she did cannot have been out of desire to protect John.

Reasoning:

-She didn’t join in the prayer to John in the first scene at Canaan House. Previous meta I have seen discussing why Ianthe would have saved John has pointed to culture/religion, but from what we’ve seen, Ianthe is actually much less religious than is typical in the Nine Houses. It seems odd that she would feel more religious after living around John, and witnessing Augustine and Mercy confront him.

-Ianthe respects Augustine as much as she respects anyone. We see her seek his praise and wilt in the face of his criticism. She is genuinely interested in learning about necromancy from him. He is probably the second-to-last person I would expect her to sacrifice. (Corona obvs being the first.)

-Ianthe’s necromantic interest in the river and stomas. This ties neatly into previous mention of Augustine’s knowledge pool. Ianthe does not seem content with the idea that stomas are just garbage collectors. She wants to know what it’s like inside them. She is convinced there is an inside them to learn about. And based on her respect for Augustine, she would trust him to figure it out.

Final thought, more speculative than the rest of this, is, What if Ianthe not only trusts Augustine to explore the inside of the stoma, she doesn’t want John to learn more about them?? 

remind me to draw these three more often

The Harrowhark: The narrator had brain surgery done to make themself an unreliable narrator, and that's the least weird thing that's going on.

I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently

Ive rewatched this a million times it's just too good-

I couldn't put it as a thumbnail so here's just Gideon seperatly

this is the dumbest thing ever but I had so much fun with it