Hello! I loved Gideon the Ninth so much!! and would like to draw fan art, would you mind sharing any helpful summaries of what each character looks like? or must us fans hunt through the book for every offhand line of description? (not that I'm not planning on rereading it anyway)
I have let myself drift back onto Tumblr after two weeks, am deeply affrighted and excited at the idea that anyone has drawn my kids (I had an AMA on Reddit and as said there, my editor every so often hollered into my inbox about amazing shit people were doing, but I was too busy complaining back to him that my face had gone numb and that I no longer slept, but instead the darkness of the grave claimed me for four to five hours each night). Thank you so much to anyone who has already done this. Many people on my team have yelled and yelled.
Back early on in the piece I made a document for him about what characters looked like in terms of basic ideas/outlines for copyediting, covers and sense purposes, and Iāve dug out that document and slapped it up here for general delectation. As a note: I imagine specific things when it comes to my characters (I am a Kiwi: I write Kiwis In Space as a default) but as I have nothing but joy in my heart for how anyone would want to draw these characters, feel free to glance over this, then toss it out the window. It would bring tears of beauty to my eyes if anyone was likeĀ āYes, but when I was reading I imagined Naberius Tern as a huge monitor lizard,ā because absolutely yes, Naberius Tern was just a huge monitor lizard, godspeed.
I had only described below the specific cavalier-necromancer pairs, so thatās what youāll find below, sorry if anyone wanted Teacher.
"I've lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you."
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i finished Gideon the Ninth yesterday, and oh boy. that ending š please no spoilers for the rest of the series, i am going in blind and i'm very excited
honestly no wonder harrow forced ianthe to lobotomize her so she could save gideon. listenā¦LISTENā¦if i was a secret-war-crime cult nunlet princess worshipped by my entire planet and the only person that (barely) kept me in check was my childhood nemesisāa butch a year older than me, towering over me in stature and physical prowess, and so hot it made my teeth hurt from how hard my jaw clenched in her presence, who wielded a two-handed seven-foot sword and had irritatingly huge biceps and told very lewd stupid jokes and also learned how to wield an entirely new weapon and be my bodyguard with startling accuracy in three monthsāonly to have us finally learn to trust each other because we got invited to a magic murder mystery and then before the bubble burst i spilled the worst secret about myself that i was born because my parents murdered an entire generation and tried to Kill Her along with them and she just wouldnt die, and i told her this expecting a swift death i believed i deserved, only for her to fucking cradle me in her big butch arms and kiss me on my forehead with her soft butch mouth and just. forgive me for a shameful weight ive carried my entire life and then MAKE AN ACTUAL NECRO/CAV VOW with me despite every evil thing i have done to herā¦ā¦to have her tell me, in the end, bleeding and broken after putting up the most beautiful and glorious fight of her life, that she understands purpose and she understands duty and she knows loyalty more fiercely than ever now, that she knows who she is to me, that there is no her without meā¦.to have her backed into a corner and make the ultimate sacrificeā¦..for meā¦..to recite scriptural wedding vows of eternity to me in her last wisps of soul-consciousnessā¦..if i thought there was even a snowflakeās chance in the pyre that i could save her by turning myself into her very own locked tomb, iād be begging ianthe tridentweirdius to crack my skull open and turn me to mush too, goddamn. i understand you harrowhark girl you donāt have to explain a thing to me. god said you couldnāt undo the lyctorās bond bc itād kill you. you told god and his angels that not even a lyctorās bond could outshine the power of female spite and lesbianism and they didnāt listen. they didnāt believe you. but i heard you loud and clear and i was 17 and hormonal and hopelessly romantic not too long ago unlike those fucking dinosaurs and iām saying itās valid itās what i would have done and really everyone should be thanking you for not being worse and more wretched about it, all things considered
to the people who want to have a conversation about john's being an indigenous man, a mÄori man, i would like to remind you that the first time we see mÄori spoke onscreen it goes as follows.
one person in this room is interested in the cultures and languages of the world that came before, to the point her name and mission in life are respectively a human chain reaching back ten thousand years and justice for the destroyed earth: a mission that allowed her to persist beyond death, which brings her to being in control of cytherea the first's corpse. the other is john, who is disinterested in her idea of justice for them and speaks over her multiple times.
that human chain, her name? he doesn't respect it just as he doesn't respect her. this conversation is beneath him and so is her full name. he is annoyed into reciting it.
mÄori is spoken by john here, and it is spoken with contempt for the woman who wishes to avenge earth and whose name preserved a part of the language that he helped annihilate, along with aotearoa and all other mÄori people.
the first time mÄori is spoken in the series it is spoken by an indigenous manāwho received an extensive colonial scholarship, who was alienated from his culture and sought respect and recognition in predominantly white academia, who was burned time and time again by the systems of oppression that formed the basis for climate change and the earth's abandonment by the trillionairesāwho speaks it with a tone of condescension and a complete lack of gravitas because it is irrelevant to him. genuinely sad, bordering on very funny.
the second instance of mÄori is when he renames gideon the transliteration of her name into mÄori. she does not identify with it and she likely does not know its significance.
she is also a corpse: killed indirectly by cytherea the first, who presented a threat to harrow's life that could only be dealt with via her ascension to lyctorhood via gideon's death, who groomed gideon into accepting her role as cavalier primary to harrowhark nonagesimus.
killed by one of the emperor undying's fists and gestures, killed by the ideals of cavaliership which he societally instituted, killed due to cytherea the first's disillusionment with him leading her to go on a killing spree at canaan house in order to gain his attention, killed due to john and john's actions and the systems of the society he created.
the only time we see john use the mÄori language in a way that isn't dripping for contempt is when he renames his daughter's corpse, wherein he clarifies that she is prince kiriona gaia, heir to the emperor divine and the emperor's only daughter, the emperor's construct.
construct, like the skeletons that farm leeks on the ninth. she is not entitled to resurrection: she is to ownership, to being the ninth's chattel in life and her father's construct in death. he uses the language to declare her his.
gideon is the name of his saint, his oldest friend, spoken by the ghost of the woman that birthed her, to the nuns of her houseākiriona is john declaring a corpse his heir, and his daughter his construct.
there is a conversation i would love to have about john's indigeneity: it's the one where we acknowledge that after wakes death he has preserved the legacy of the mÄori language by using it to name his daughter, a mÄori woman killed by his society and the consequences of his actions, something she doesn't feel any connection to.
john is an indigenous man, a mÄori man, who was born into a land settled by colonisers who rendered it rife with systems of oppression that alienated him from his culture, and led him to fall back on the same systems of oppression when he founded the nine houses. indigeneity describes a relation to colonisation and settler capital, primarily in the form of dispossession; when john declared kiriona his, did he do so as an indigenous man or as the emperor of an empire that ships populations between planets like cattle?
Took a break from the requests to draw Harrow with piercings. I came across this amazing setup on the piercing subreddit and fell in love with the small nose chain <3
Initially it was supposed to be a small doodle but then I couldn't stop and now it's.. two colored pieces...
I'm still kinda figuring out how to draw her but slowly getting there.
Thinking about Harrow's AU bubbles, not as fanfic references, but as expressions of her subconscious fears and desires, is so fascinating.
The Harrow Nova one is pretty obvious. Harrow's parents were obsessed with her being a necromancer, were willing to kill for it. It's only natural she'd wonder, "What if I hadn't been?"
And the answer Harrow gives herself is: Your parents and everyone would reject you (except, wildly, for Crux). Also they'd be alive cuz you'd never opened the tomb, and you'd be an unpopular orphan they'd abuse (Just Like Gideon). And you'd still be just as devoted to serving the Ninth with a blade. There's a lot there. But the other really telling bit is her relationship with Gideon. Harrow Nova professes to hate the reverend daughter even as she seeks to (re) create the necro-cav bond with her. But that hatred doesn't seem to be mutual. And the bit about the daughter intervening when Harrow was whippedā¦
That's Harrow's subconscious saying if their roles had been reversed, "Gideon would have treated me better than I treated her. Gideon would have protected me."
The Ball AU also seems like a reasonable extension of Gideon's childhood query: "What if my other parent is the most important guy in the universe?" Answer: Emperor Dad would throw a big party.
But alsoā¦ it's a bride-finding ball! That's so very telling. It could have been anything, but Harrow invents another scenario where she's fighting, competing to get to Gideon, to be awarded the role of her sworn partner (first cav, now bride), while outwardly claiming not to want it.
Now The BARI Star AU often gets described as a "coffee shop" one, but it's actually set in a cohort cafeteria. And normally I wouldn't split hairs over that, but I think the cohort setting is actually really significant. The Cohort was Gideon's dream, and also Harrow's rival for Gideon's attention. It's what she kept trying to leave Harrow for.
So now Harrow dreams that she's left Drearburh to join the cohort and will meet Gideon there. Not fight or compete for a role where they're bound to each other, but just meet her there. That feels like yielding. Like compromise. It makes me think Harrow's subconscious has matured past trying to keep Gideon with her always and is instead looking for ways that SHE can be with Gideon. Meet Gideon where she is.
(Also this may be a stretch, but I always find it low-key funny that Harrow imagines Gideon in the cafeteriaā¦ I like to think her brain is skimming lists of hypothetical military jobs like... what sees the least action... ah, coffee-adept, she'll be perfectly safe there...)
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