rizz-mah-Taz

6th House is on mercury and 9th House is on pluto so they're on the opposite ends of the dominicus system

9 is 6 uspide down and 6 is 9 upside down

the Ninth House and the Sixth House are religion vs science

Gideon and Harrow are (were) childhood enemies, Camilla and Palamedes are (were) childhood friends. Gideon and Harrow had a hard time trusting each other, Camilla and Palamedes trusted each other with everything.

Gideon and Harrow are all about forgetting ("But I don’t even remember about you most of the time", the whole lobotomy situation), Camilla and Palamedes are all about remembering ("I’ve carried you, Warden. And I’ve carried your memory … I’d rather carry you", "Palamedes remembers everything: That was his problem. I always remember him. That’s mine")

Gideon and Harrow are water (the Pool Scene, Gideon being in the "well" in Harrow's mind, Harrow deciding to stay in the River and Gideon "dying" in the River), Camilla and Palamedes are fire (Palamedes's first death, Palamedes and Camilla's lyctoral ascention)

in griddlehark's case the necromancer carried their cavalier's soul, in campal's case the cavalier carried their necromancer's soul

Gideon and Palamedes sacrificed themselves, Harrow then carried Gideon's sword even though it was killing her and Camilla carried Palamedes's bones even though boe electrocuted her for it

Gideon and Camilla are both "devotion's casualties"

Harrow and Camilla risked permanent brain damage to save the souls they carried

Gideon barely had any training for her position and Camilla trained her whole life, but they both didn't normally use their rapiers and were both set on fighting rather than on traditional duelling

the 6th and the 9th are both poor, underestimated, dying houses. Harrow and Palamedes have been leading them since they were very young and they do anything to try to improve the situation

Harrow fell in love with the Body when she was 10, Palamedes began writing to Dulcinea when he was 8. both into old dead chicks (as Gideon phrased it) while also loving their cavaliers

Camilla watched Gideon impale herself to force Harrow's ascention, Gideon watched Camilla light herself on fire during her and Palamedes's ascention

"This was your shell but it was all filled up with me" & "It's not you. It's me wearing you"

"I keep turning around to find you, and there’s nobody there." "I know the feeling." & "You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?"

"Kiriona Gaia was staring politely at the side of the truck, as though there were something really interesting on the paintwork" & "Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there"

"It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face" & "Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn’t speaking to anyone else in the universe"

AND

AND

AND

AND

she can't be god's favourite even tho she's the only loyal Lyctor, because he has a daughter and that daughter is her crush's situationship, who she always looked down on because she thought Gideon was stupid, but now she gets all the good stuff for nothing?? she found her sister but apparently Corona became an enemy of the empire and she sided with the Sixth House of all people?? and then she gets outplayed by Palamedes Sextus, someone she always disdained and he proves to her that she's slowly becoming more and more like Babs. and then she watches Camilla and Palamedes perform the grand lysis and she realises that they weren't stupid for rejecting traditional lyctorhood and that she could've had something like this with Corona but now it's too late.

Necro/Cav relationships have more bearing on Dominicus society than gender relations (as seen by Harrow's conversation with Abigail and Magnus) and that coupled with the fact that there is a very complicated Dominicus social system Muir did not explain; being a necro, a cav or a normal citizen is basically akin to a secondary gender.

+ these words from Abigail Pent (Ch 45, HtN):

“Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”

Because Pluto can be another name for Hades, the god of the dead. But it's often one that's used to either euphemistically separate him from the fearful concept of the lord of the underworld (as in the Iliad - from which a number of Ninth names are drawn, including Harrow's parents), or to refer to a more complex or even positive idea of the god, particularly in relation to underworld-transcending cults such as Orphism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Which makes me wonder if there's to some extent a deliberate split between Harrow and Alecto's association with Pluto, and the way John is figured as Hades in HTN? Hades as death and control and coercion, vs Pluto as death and rebirth as natural yet potentially escapable cycles?

Muir has also suggested that ATN might start with something akin to the Harrowing of Hell - Jesus' descent to hell to rescue those who died before him. Though in Christian theology, the hell referred to is sometimes also called "Hades", to distinguish it as a liminal resting point of the dead, more akin to the neutrality of the classical conception of the underworld, rather than the place to which those judged sinners might be confined.

So we have Harrow - her very name referring to the idea of souls being rescued from some infernal waiting place - also associated with concepts of transcending the underworld. Which is, of course, Abigail's heresy: that one can cross the River. That there is something Beyond. Abigail is heavily figured as the classical chthonic psychopomp Hecate, who is also associated with underworld-transcending mythologies.

And it's Abigail who introduces the idea that there is something wrong with the River, that she has written notes about this, and that her brother might find them, which would rather seem to be setting us up for some kind of reveal, perhaps one that will connect to what the end of NTN suggested about where John has been putting souls and how that might be going rather wrong.

I'm having trouble articulating my point around this, but:

Thinking about the "abused wife" archetypes you often see in older media (not to say these don't still crop up nowadays, but they were much more blatant and accepted in decades past). Particularly the following two flavors: 1) the irritating, stuck-up, "bitchy" wife whose suffering the audience is expected to find funny/cathartic, because she "deserves" it, and 2) the long-suffering "good" wife (not framed as "deserving it") who the audience is meant to view as a tragic but morally-upstanding (and therefore aspirational) figure of Christian womanhood

and

knowing Tamsyn Muir's propensity for pulling the old gendered-trope-switcharoo

thinking about how neatly Babs and Colum slot into those archetypes

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Notably Muir is not only inverting these tropes on a gendered axis but subverting them, too, on a narrative axis, given that Colum is clearly positioned not to be a figure of aspirational cavalierhood to an audience of literally anyone outside of his Eighth House cultural context, let alone the reader, and that she has Pal outright state that Babs didn't deserve what he got.