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it saves your life in a situation where no one else would have been fast, strong, agile, and composed enough to do so.
your security team is immediately more alarmed by its presence than the attack that is obvious to you as the bigger issue at the moment
they insist it's dangerous and struggle to relax enough to take their weapons off of it
then a combatbot attacks your group
somehow this secunit, much smaller than the bot, unarmored, without any heavy weaponry on its person, manages to take it down. some real jaw-dropping action, all over in less than a minute
then it leaps into a room with two combatbots and not only survives, but it gets your unconscious friend out alive
then it immediately comes to your own rescue, disabling impressive combat armor
it then is dead-set on killing your attacker who is already immobilized and harmless
clearly this is an incredibly competent and dangerous and powerful person
then miki tells you that it IS rin and you finally put it together that not only is this person competent in the field, but it is also calling all its own shots and has truly come here all on its own and volunteered its services to help and protect you without needing to be asked or ordered
so this person is incredibly competent, dangerous, powerful, AND kind, AND fiercely protective, AND reassuring, AND intelligent, AND selfless
and it's still coming up with great ideas and still thinking proactively about how it's going to face down or distract another combatbot as though there's no doubt in the world that it, still bleeding heavily, still unarmored and barely armed, is ready for another round with a terrifying machine that appears to be nothing BUT armor and weapons
so you step forward to help treat its injuries
and it jerks back a step with the single most frightened face you've ever seen, as though you had lifted your arm to inflict pain and it was helpless to stop you
behind you, even miki can read the devastating expression that's breaking your heart and says "abene won't hurt you, secunit"
where did the fearsome fighter from moments ago disappear to?
Currently listening to htn, on the part of the assaults from G1deon. Honestly this part makes me tear up in outrage. No one cares. People help out of begrudging obligation. Even Jodâs care extends only so far. It makes the soup scene all the more cathartic. I kind of wish that she had souped everyone.
Interesting that these experiences on the Mithraeum are giving Harrow a feel for what Gideon lived through on the Ninth (and thus, bringing her to a greater understanding of the world she's never questioned until now): there is no safety, no end to torment, no one to really trust, no escape (except the way Gideon chose).
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when youâre 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.
I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:
That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:
We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.
So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:
I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now â and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:
Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."
At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.
Spoiler alert!
Still with me? OK, then.
In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden â there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars â but life was good.
And then the world moved on.
For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics â an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration â has collapsed. The world has moved on.
The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface â from our world and theirs â creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.
When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life â hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say â with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.
For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?
Well, yes â and no.
Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.
When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:
There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.
And the foundation â the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company â not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company â get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":
The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.
I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies â various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc â "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens â it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":
The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):
The ideology of economism â which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society â cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:
That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":
That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover â because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:
The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams â the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights â that radiated from our Dark Tower â antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."
They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap
Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:
In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:
Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.
When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge â the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?
The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel â as I do â that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
https://utaw.tech/
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel â as I do â that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity
Mr. Doctorow does the opposite of enshittify - he clarifies what the worst is and in so doing, shows us there is a path out of it. If we choose to take it.
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she's a hater. she hates god. she was having an affair with god's attack dog. she was having an affair with god's attack dog's bestie who timeshared in god's attack dog's body. she conspired with god's joy and god's patience to set up a joy/patience/god threesome in which she was not involved. neither of these god-related polycules were aware of each other. she's a sword. her name is awake and she was the sleeper. she fought space lancelot in hand to hand combat. she almost won. she possessed the dead body of her daughter's erstwhile crush. she named her daughter "bomb." god got her pregnant. god was not party to this.
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i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is âinternationalâ pride month just because something happened in the united states.
in aotearoa, june isnât our pride, itâs theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that âyou owe your rights to Black trans womenâ is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) MÄori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.
But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa donât even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we donât.
our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.
anyway, happy pride, americans. iâm truly sorry that most of you donât see the negative impact your nationâs culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and cultureâs queer history, donât accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.
Y'all, turns out there's lots of imagery and themes in TLT that Muir was already playing with in her earlier fiction. A lot of it is easily available online, in which case I'll link to it. (The short stories that aren't can also be easily read if googled, to be quite honestâthat's how I read The Deepwater Bride and Why the Mermaids Left Boralus).
⢠The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time (2011)
5K. Short sort-of-cozy romance (?) with (you guessed it) a time travel loop. Explores a very queer potential relationship. CamPal enjoyers might find a similar sweetness.
⢠The Magician's Apprentice (2012, Lightspeed Magazine)
5K. This is the one that stopped me dead on my tracks. It features an older, male mentor figure called John (a âvery ordinary manâ with âdark eyesâ) who introduces the young, female main character to magic that has a terrible costâand to literature such as Lolita.
This excellent post by @familyabolisher does an incredible job of analyzing the very deliberate intertextual links between TLT and Lolita.
⢠The Woman in the Hill (2015, Lightspeed Magazine, originally for Dreams From the Witch House anthology of Lovecraftian horror by women)
4K. Possibly my favorite! It's a straightforward Lovecraftian horror, centered on the image of the woman (is it human though?) trapped in an unnatural pool inside a cursed cave. Chain imagery too. It does something different from Alecto, mind, but you can see links, ways of playing with facets of a strong central image. It's fun to consider how reliable the two narrators are.
Here's an analysis and afterthought from Reactor Mag.
⢠Chew (2013)
4K. Zombie abuse and cannibalistic revenge story ft. an uncanny woman revenant, told from the eyes of a traumatized German boy. I was strongly reminded of Harrow's conversations with the Body.
Tamsyn gave an interview on the themes and her intentions. Interesting to read in light of Alecto, I think, although I don't think she's going the same route in TLT: âthe idea of post-war rebuilding connecting to rebuilding the body of the zombie; a Frankenstein who once rebuilt doesnât act as planned or desired. [âŚ] I love cannibalism [âŚ] itâs innately spiritual [âŚ] any afterlife she goes to, heâs going too.â
⢠Apothecia (2014, published on Tumblr and tapas.io)
Short webcomic where an alien monster tries to corrupt the ruthless human girl who holds it captive. Musings on responsibility and murder, mention of child abuse. The alien's speech patterns remind me of a Resurrection Beast. You get wonderful dialogue like âMurder is a profession. Job. Employment, you tiny leg dog. There you are, walking along. Walk walk walk. Now you are a walker. Good job. Special child. Murder is like this.â
Art by Shelby Cragg.
⢠The Deepwater Bride (2015, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)
The opening line is: âIn the time of our crawling Night Lord's ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie's Dream Car.â Need I say more? Extremely fun. A novelette where a young queer girl from a clairvoyant family struggles with an apocalyptic event while being annoyed by another very plucky girl. Lots of descriptions with nerdy marine zoology terms. Close in tone to Gideon.
In the background, someone dies EXACTLY like that one death at the end of Gideon, which makes me wonder what happened to make Tamsyn interested in this particular image. I also liked that Tamsyn is aware of Nightwish.
No link, but you'll get a PDF immediately if you Google.
⢠Union (2015, Clarkesworld Magazine)
5.5K. Very weird, extremely Kiwi story about a town that gets sent lab-grown wives by the government, but they're not made the usual way so they're Weird and people have feelings about it. Fascinating and eerie description of non-human (in some people's eyes, sub-human) women (?) who cannot be observed to have recognizable feelings or thoughts, yet have some sort of inner life. Quite touching, very uncanny.
Short novel (~200 pages). Very funny. I was reminded of Coronabeth because the whole plot is âprincess finds herself branching out into decidedly non-princess-like activitiesâ, but other than thatâthis is a fairytale for adults about people who make eachother worse. No particular links to TLT but a very fun read with some gut punches. Extremely Tamsyn through and through, what with the dubious morality and all.
⢠Why the Mermaids Left Boralus (2021, in Folk & Fairy Tales of Azeroth by Blizzard Entertainment)
Set in the World of Warcraft universe. Haven't read this one yet, will report back lmao.
As with The Deepwater Bride, no link but I easily found a PDF of the entire compilation. It's illustrated!
⢠Undercover (2022, from Into Shadow, Amazon Original Collection)
The more I think about it, no, I don't think John or Harrow took Gideon's heart.
I think it was Ianthe.
And I'd really love a scene in Alecto the Ninth where everyone is trying to steal it back and there's lots of tossing and kicking and dropping the slippery thing and almost losing it, like a bank heist by the most inept thieves ever, only the team is Pyrrha, Paul, Pash, Aiglamene, and Noodle (who almost eats it).
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Okay, so I have had to work out something that flew over my head during the first reading of the TLT series and maybe flew over it again. Putting under the cut so I'm not spoiling for anybody. Don't look if you haven't read:
So, John killed everyone in the nuclear blasts but there were like three (?) FTL ships escaping. He got at least one (?) but the others got away?
I'm assuming that is where BoE came from? These folks took off to another part of the solar system and slept for 10,000 years (?) and when they came back and saw how John remade everything, were like Oh FUCK NO and have been at war ever since?
Is that...close?
And:
Since we didn't see the moment when Harrow "ate" Gideon's soul to become a Lyctor, do we assume the part she ate was Gideon's heart (she was vomming a lot in HtN)? Or did John take that? I'm assuming as in NtN, she may only be cynically joking that her heart is missing.
John, we're told, took G1deon's arm before he was sent off with the nuke and kept it for reasons I do not remember (if we were even told). Perhaps John kept Gideon's heart for a similar reason (like making a clone/copy, which is also suggested in NtN).
In fact, my first thought was that Kiriona was being puppetted by Ianthe, but seems she spent enough months around her and "dad" to have become just as hateful toward them as she was toward the Ninth, only she was more obliged to keep it hidden under an Ianthe-inspired cynicism toward everything else (while she waited for the chance she took in NtN?). Gideon appears to have lost her soul in more ways than one and only cares about Harrow (as she reminded her in GtN).
Wonder what Pyrrha would say/do if she knew how the Ninth treated Gideon?
But wait, there's more.
Little Harrow didn't need to kill anyone to enter the Locked Tomb. She had Gideon's blood under her nails and that seems like it was the main thing.
In Nona the Ninth, when they are trying to break in again (how did little Harrow and/or her family lock it up again, if it needed John's blood wards?), suddenly Gideon's blood is not sufficient, they need a dead body (bye by Crux). Still checking to see if I missed something, but not finding it.
ETA: if Gideon/Kiriona's body has been tampered with so much they can't even draw blood, how did they use her blood to open the door? I have to assume Gideon can just rend her own flesh somehow or something. Would have looked pretty silly if they got to the tomb w/Gideon/Kiriona and she couldn't produce any blood to open the thing.
Gideon, when she realizes her new super powers have fucked things:
Also: I don't think I saw anything in GtN about what happened to the families of the 200 children that were killed on the Ninth House. Assuming they were all of childbearing age even after that horror, did no one try to have another kid? I might check again, but don't recall this being brought up again. Everyone is simply described as painfully old, but what's the context? What's their idea of "old?"
It's still wild to me that Muir went with this idea in the first place: why would a religious cult that is quickly drying up and dying out kill off an entire generation, just for one necromancer? Did they absolutely positively need to kill all 200 of them? Could they have got the same result if they had killed say, ten? None of it acceptable, of course, but what an EXTREME. Harrow was right to be horrified by it.
I get the parallel with John killing off everything to start over, but did Harrow's parents (Muir?) even consider there would be no way to do that unless kids were born? The deal with Harrow becoming a Lyctor and John supplying her house with new blood feels a little tacked on: Gideon wasn't accepted and always considered an "outsider," so how would the faithful on the Ninth House feel about being repopulated with strangers from who-knows-where? An issue that could still come up.
Also:
In GtN, after the murder of Magnus and Abigail, everyone and their sister is trying to call them back, with no success. In HtN, after her "failed" Lyctorhood, Harrow is able to summon pretty much everyone from Canaan House, unconsciously. John does mention Harrow being powerful (thanks to the baby genocide), but that powerful? A measure of things to come?
Which brings up another thing: are those spirits still attached to Harrow or, now that she had "died," no longer around?
Is there also a possibility that the River is used to create alternate realities? While there, Harrow "hallucinates" where she is at a ball, some Cinderella-like tale where she is one of many vying for the hand of "Her Divine Highness," a title she would *never* have heard of at that point (as it didn't exist until John captured Gideon and re-fashioned her as Kiriona). That title existing in NtN gives some leeway that there are some dreamlike shenanigans going on, but the text doesn't really suggest it? So...a stretch.
(Aside: The Noniad is another example of a story-within-a-story and while Mattias being summoned is hilarious, his presentation is right out of Ortus' book: how did that happen?).
The text also doesn't suggest that Nona's kiss to Gideon transferred anything, either, so...? Would love some clarification on how souls exist in and around different bodies.
Moving on.
Are the "friendship" bracelets something Ianthe uses to control Gideon/Kiriona? Maybe Gideon isn't completely in charge of herself. Gideon would absolutely not have come up with that, but it definitely feels like an Ianthe touch with a hidden weapon.
Also? Why did John enhance her physically without repairing her body? He doesn't want a real kid of his own, just a tool that can go places his Lyctors can't (?) and do jobs for him (like Antioch) that he isn't about to go do himself? If Gideon were completely restored (with John's DNA), does that make her more of a threat to him somehow? There's no question that love is not a factor, something I would hope Gideon understands and is just going on with shit (after telling John to "Go to hell" in HtN) so she can find Harrow. Gideon has made very clear how she feels about Ianthe and John and isn't warm and fuzzy.
Or is it all like Magnus said: she can never come back and her revenant-self can only be sustained for a limited amount of time?
For Alecto the Ninth some stuff I'd love to see:
Gideon getting a shot at defeating Naberius (and kicking Ianthe's ass
Circling the parallels between Harrow puppeting her parents to John possibly puppeting Gideon/Kiriona: both Gideon and Harrow have experienced reversals that give them a better perspective of what life for the other must have been like, and Harrow freeing her parents and dropping the Ninth House charade should be part of that.
Harrow working with Paul and Pyrrha against John/Ianthe/Kiriona with Alecto an unpredictable factor with a not-so-obvious agenda of her own
Front Line Titties of the Fifth - for real
"Die in a fire" better not be foreshadowing of ANYTHING
Harrow *remembering* Nona
Pyrrha being the parent to Gideon that she deserved
Palamedes and Camilla reunion (in the River?)
A Great Expectations-style ending (maturity and mutual understanding and possibility of a future together for G and H).
My office computer has automatically updated and the damn company sent out an e-mail telling us about *wonderful new* copilot now installed and UNREMOVABLE. STUPID USELESS PIECE OF SHIT TECH POPPING UP ON EVERY PROGRAM. CAN'T GET RID OF IT.
PISSING ME OFF.
But yeah, at least I could access and disable this feature.
dededos
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
2087
romaincrisis
