Nona the Ninth Chapter 32 Brief(er than usual) Analysis
Spoilers, of course.
It’s both devastating and hilarious how both Ianthe and Gideon immediately stop their bickering and drop to their knees worried about Harrow’s body when Nona’s starts exploding blood. At the end of the day they’re so whipped for Harrow. Gideon breaks my heart so much this book.
At first I thought the “slim brown hand” cupping Nona’s face was Paul’s (as key word here is “slim” and I don’t think Gideon’s hands would be slim) but on second read it is probably meant to be Gideon’s as there’s a colon between the hand touching her face and “Keep it together. Wherever you are, idiot, I know you can hear me. Keep it together…” which is undoubtedly Gideon.
When Nona drifts back into consciousness to Gideon saying “Take it. Take it from anywhere. Take all of it.” she’s clearly talking about her blood. She would drain herself dry of blood in an instant for Harrow. Gideon is the first one to offer herself to be killed (again) for the thanergy blast, because of course she is.
This part of the last chapter before the epilogue is also where we find out how Harrow got that dent in her lips. I hadn’t caught this at all the first time and had to find out from seeing people talk about it without understanding where it had come from. It’s very Snow White of little Harrow lol. The kiss plus the “teardrop on the hand” (little Harrow must hand cried on her too, I can envision her bending down to her frozen hand to kiss that too and a tear rolling down onto it) is what made the link between her and Alecto happen.
The dreams Alecto states she recognizes Harrow from in the epilogue must be her point of view of Harrow’s hallucinations of her in HTN (and of her finding her as a child, since she seems to know about that). I’m unsure if this includes Harrow’s hallucinations of her following her opening the tomb as a child, those could have been just Harrow’s scitzophrenia like her other hallucinations (of nooses and the like) have been. I say this because those hallucinations had black eyes like hers while the ones in HTN have her yellow eyes and actually speak and know things only the real Alecto would know. It’s very possible her childhood hallucinations of her were also due to their connection but I don’t think the real Alecto was seeing through that one’s eyes in her dream like she presumably does later on.
Moving on, Gideon’s “you could have lived for her” speech to Crux is the most obvious piece of projection of all time. It doesn’t even make sense to be her actually referring to Crux. She’s talking to herself while appearing to talk to him.
I adore Gideon’s relationship with Aiglamene in this book, she’s so fast to stop Aiglamene from even proposing they sacrifice her. She also stops her because she’s set on killing Crux now, but it’s also because she loves her.
Wild that Gideon had John, Wake, Pyrrha, potentially G1deon if he could have been around to know about her, and Aiglamene as either parents or potential parent-figures (regardless of how shit) and yet she grew up considering herself an orphan. It’s raining parents. Hallelujah.
Enough has been said about the part where she kills Crux in this fandom so I won’t rag on about it but god is it depressing.
At the end of the chapter Ianthe starts following her and is most likely the person who howls “No! No— no!” from the shore. I touch on what Nona/Alecto says about Anastasia’s bones being in the tomb in my previous analysis of the epilogue.
