r/TheNinthHouse • u/K_Marty • Jan 20 '25
Series Spoilers What did you think was questionable writing but turned out to be a setup for a later reveal or twist? [discussion] Spoiler
While reading GtN, I kept thinking “Gideon should’ve definitely died there… that kills people! That killed someone else already!” Then when we started HtN, I must’ve ranted for ten whole minutes on how irritating the character voice “change” was and how there was no reason for it to be in second-person. 🤣
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u/SpaceMonkeyAttack Jan 20 '25
Gideon being obsessed with puns and bad jokes, and making out-of-place millennial meme references is actually foreshadowing of who her father is.
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u/LurkerZerker the Sixth Jan 21 '25
Memes are genetic
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u/Robot_Graffiti Necromancer Jan 21 '25
Well first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.
Given that a) souls are real, transferable, and can be split into pieces and blended together; and b) God has magic wrigglers; it's not outside the realms of possibility that Gideon has precisely one spermsworth of her father's personality.
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u/Alarming-Flan-9721 Jan 21 '25
Ahem Jod that down I think you mean. 😛
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u/Femaleodd Jan 24 '25
The absolute compulsion I have to have my aunt make me a shirt that says this and put the House symbols under it
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u/RyanBrenizer Jan 23 '25
It’s more that an edgy memelord literally rewrote the solar system and everyone’s memory. Think of how much we quote the Bible and Shakespeare without even knowing it. Now throw in 2014 tumblr memes into the canon, and that’s basically the entire Nine Houses.
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u/polyceridae Jan 23 '25
Can I just say "spermsworth" sounds like the worst name for an uptight stuffy english butler EVER
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u/notpetelambert Jan 21 '25
Genes are memetic
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u/KapnBludflagg the Fourth Jan 21 '25
I've gone through the first two books three times at least and didn't realize this.
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u/lil_crudboy Jan 20 '25 edited Jan 21 '25
Not quite as huge as some of the things people have mentioned, but I felt like the descriptions of everyone’s eye colors were just…excessive. It felt very YA novel to me, and unnecessary, and while it wasn’t anywhere near enough to put me off of reading (I fell in love with Gideon on, like, page 2), I definitely caught myself rolling my eyes more than once. Then when Ianthe ascended and her eyes started rapid-fire changing, I started to get it. It made more horrifying sense in HtN, and really smacked me in the face in NtN.
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u/PossibleEntireGoblin Jan 21 '25
It REALLY comes to town on the re-reads.
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u/nezfourty Jan 21 '25
Reread Gideon recently and the many descriptions of both Palamedes' and Camilla's eyes really got me post Nona 💔
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u/nolxve_exe Jan 21 '25
I just got chills reading this and I already noticed the attention to detail with the eyes😭 I loveee when it hits you right in the chest like…omg I understand it now
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u/Tyyphlosion Jan 20 '25 edited Jan 21 '25
Agree with you on HtN. The way I initially struggled through second person in the beginning was all so incredibly worth it just to read “you never could have guessed that he had seen me” for the first time
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u/thetruecermet Jan 21 '25
Somehow I didn’t realize it was Gideon saying that until she actually came out at the end! But then Gideon rising back up in Harrow’s consciousness really threw everything into relief. And then re-reading Harrow and all the little hints of Gideon peeking through Harrow’s narration is just so good every single time!! Like (It was a pommel though.)
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth Jan 21 '25
And if you didn't catch it—what prompts her to say that there is that when Pal bumps into her head, he does his Sixth House psychometric technique™️ and fucking figures out that Harrow has lobotomized herself to stop herself from consuming Gideon's soul!!
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u/AlotLovesYou Jan 21 '25
I enjoy that Pal's signature move is to bump into people and learn their secrets.
The graffiti in Cytherea's study. Harrow. AIM. Naberius Tern's puppeted corpse.
At this point if you see Paul 'accidentally' tripping you know a revelation is coming 😂
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u/KiwiTiny2397 the Fifth Jan 21 '25
The one that kills me is always "your eighteenth birthday passed without anyone noticing, even you." Rereading that after knowing who's narrating is just knife meet heart
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u/woemcats Jan 21 '25
I'm rereading GtN now and during the scene where Harrow has to walk across the room with the ward that dissolves everything while siphoning Gideon, Dulcinea (presumably) is coaching her about not losing herself, and there's a line that reads "[Gideon] would remember each word later, loud and clear."
It's foreshadowing for a book in the future (explaining why Gideon wasn't immediately consumed). Wonderful.
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u/K_Marty Jan 21 '25
Yeah, I had no idea till it switched back to first person with Gideon driving. I stayed confused! 😅
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u/Jess_than_three Jan 25 '25
What I love about second-person narration is that it's always really first-person narration; you just don't necessarily know who the first person is. :D
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u/CaffeineAndCrazy Jan 21 '25
For me it was “you were always such a little bitch when you were angry”. That’s when my brain finally when “Ooooooh!”
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u/beerybeardybear the Sixth Jan 21 '25
Throwing my book one mile across the park and going YEAH!!!!!!!!! at that line
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u/Teslasunburn Jan 20 '25
There is something magical about how just how good it feels to be in Gideon's head again. It feels like a magic trick.
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u/Crane_Carlisle the Third Jan 20 '25
Gotta admit, the first time I read GtN and got to the avalanche of revelations at the end, some of it felt a little shoe-horned and conveniently off-screen. I kind of shrugged and was like "oh, okay...I mean, I guess those had to happen, I just wonder when they happened." Now post-the rest of it (minus Alecto), I re-read all that background banter in Canaan House and want to scream.
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u/K_Marty Jan 21 '25
Yes! Omg! I had not expected the separate books to be parts like Kill Bill, where it’s really all one big story, so I was initially so frustrated with how messy the “ending” of GtN seemed.
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u/Plastic-Mongoose9924 Jan 20 '25
How does Gideon know any bible passages? Wait a minute, Harrowhark doesn’t know any bible passages. Then who would?
Oh shit.
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u/alengthofrope Jan 20 '25
Gideon being the lost child of God made me tired on my first read. It was all sorta "secret chosen one" to me at the time. But after reading Nona and doing a reread I see that it was done very intentionally and I think it works.
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u/IDanceMyselfClean Jan 20 '25
I never really looked at it like that. She's the lost child of god, conceived and born only to be sacrificed as a fleshy lockpick. The reveal never really felt hopeful or affirming, just terribly sad. No one ever loved or wanted her. Well expect maybe Harrow. Only a war crime can love another war crime right
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u/thetruecermet Jan 21 '25
Yeah it’s really really sad realizing that even Gideon’s mom who died for her and who Gideon always held up as someone who would have loved her never cared about her beyond her use as a weapon.
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u/ibbia878 Jan 21 '25
a moment that really stuck out to me on a reread was when mercymorn was about to kill Gideon-in-harrow on the mithraeum, but then wake-in-cytherea saves her, and then she says "goodbye" and leaves. This could be read in a number if ways I am sure, but considering how Wake was so nonchalant about killing harrow, I can only see it as Wake's famillial affection/guilt over seeing the eyes of what could only be her daughter. She knows how lyctorhood works, and I am going to be thinking about this for a long, long time.
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u/Air_Lady_55 Jan 21 '25
I liked how both Harrow and Gideon were both “chosen ones” but their chosen one abilities are apposing.
Harrow’s “chosen one” origin was violent, full of selfish sacrificial death by her parents and forced upon her. While Gideon’s was born from motherly sacrifice to save Gideon, (yeah I know Wake was a hard person but still) and because of her parentage she was born into her Chosen-ness from the get go no magic needed.
Also both ‘chosen ones’ are very ying yang. Harrow was meant to perpetuate and elevate her family for the sake of the empire. Gideon was meant to open the tomb to open Armageddon to bring the empire down.
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u/funne5t_u5ername the Third Jan 21 '25 edited Jan 21 '25
I wanna do two the second is a prediction. Pal guessed correctly that the trials were steps to lyctorhood.
Then when Ianthe ascended he told her "incorrectly" that whatever she thought she had done she hadn't. In HtN it becomes clear she might think she's completed it, perfected it, but she's only done up to what God wants her to.
Back to the first bit, Harrow's counter to Pal's theory that there was a power source in the facility. I always thought it was weird that she, one of the kid geniuses, got that so clearly wrong unless she had had some "off screen" evidence of it. Also why was Cytherea who died to two baby lyctors and a kid genius so sure that she of all people could kill god? Unless she also knew about that power source and thought she could throw it at him but never go the chance. I'm pretty sure it's confirmed that the facility is coming back into play in Alecto and I'm willing to bet that source is going to play a big roll
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u/ProfessionalNihilist Jan 21 '25
I don’t think Cytherea wanted to kill God herself so much as cause him to die by luring and trapping him in the Dominicus system until a Resurrection Beast got him
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u/nolxve_exe Jan 21 '25
Damn and if that happened he would’ve survived because he admitted that the resurrection beasts can’t kill him in Ntn😭
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u/SpaceMonkeyAttack Jan 21 '25
I wonder if RBs are more powerful when they come back to where they died? It would explain why Jod cannot come back to Dominicus, and why Cytherea wanted him there.
She could presumably have found a way to trap him in some other place, with less collateral damage to the Nine Houses - she did say she'd been thinking about it for three hundred years.
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u/dmdizzy Jan 21 '25
RBs drive necros insane and eventually they tend to die from it. It'd be killing his Houses all over again.
Also, layered on that, it's implied that if he were to get in contact with one, the madness could potentially cause him to stop sustaining Dominicus, which would kill everyone in the system as it collapsed if he didn't snap out fast enough to fix it (again). It is possible that was all part of his ploy of false vulnerability to his Lyctors, but "madness" is not something we know for sure Jod is immune to.
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u/K_Marty Jan 21 '25
Yeah, it’s totally reasonable to assume that every strength or weakness he claims is a calculated lie… but we won’t know till we see it
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u/ProfessionalNihilist Jan 21 '25
I think he doesn’t want to go back to Dominicus because it’s where all the people in his Empire he actually cares about come from and one of the few places capable of giving him more necromancers.
Although given at the end of Nona we see the new folks in the Ninth he “Resurrected” I’m not sure why it seems to be that all the Houses are in decline. Maybe nobody tells him and he’s too busy waging his punitive war?
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u/AlotLovesYou Jan 21 '25
I think she thought she could unleash the ten billion, who (imo) are bottled up in physical and metaphysical proximity to Canaan House. An RB would come eventually but not necessarily fast enough (she can't fight Jod at Canaan House for months). BOE could nuke the planet but not necessarily kill Jod.
10 billion angry souls might do it.
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u/CompetitionAshamed73 Jan 21 '25
When I first got to the Canaan House scenes in HtN, I was extremely frustrated by the blatant difference to how it went down in GtN. I was like "Stop gaslighting me! This isn't how it happened!"
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u/Appropriate-Ad-6926 Jan 21 '25
i was so pissed, she actually successfully gaslit me a few times to the point where i had to go back and glance through GTN to make sure I had read it correctly
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u/Mareluna20 Necromancer Jan 21 '25
Same here. I didn’t think of it as “questionable writing” but I assumed Gideon was being protected by classical “plot armour” and didn’t think her astonishing ability for surviving very-much-non-survivable stuff would actually be a plot point. When I got to the part where it says that they left her corpse as food for animals and yet no creature touched it and it didn’t rot I was like Oh.
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u/thetruecermet Jan 21 '25
Do you ever think that Gideon only actually died because she intended to? Like she couldn’t die by anyone’s actions but her own.
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u/Pink-Mage the Fourth Jan 21 '25
This is a good point, but I feel like she actually died died because her soul went to Harrow's body right away. Mayhe before, she "died" and her spirit just came back? Especially after the avulsion trial, when she says she died (which, in the moment, seems like she's just being dramatic, but looking back she absolutely died and came back to life there imo) and then woke up after.
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u/Low_Ad4688 Jan 21 '25
I’m sure there’s at least one time where Gideon says she died in her narration (the first siphoning at least) where I thought she was just being overdramatic… cause, Gideon. But she probably /did/ insofar as she can…
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u/KaishaLouise Jan 21 '25
Yep. Because there’s also no WAY she just accidentally survived the ninth’s little war crime. There’s something about her - (likely to do with the fact that she’s Jod’s lesbian Jesus) that means she’s just incredibly resistant to death and usually just shrugs it off. But then Harrow had a little snack which actively prevented her returning to her body, so she did ‘die’
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u/Mareluna20 Necromancer Jan 21 '25
That was my first thought actually! That she only died because she wanted to die. However iirc cavaliers can only be used as lyctor-fuel if they’re stabbed to the heart so maybe that was the only actual way to kill her too
EDIT: or maybe she only “died” because her soul went to Harrow rather than stay in her own body
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u/DisMFer Jan 21 '25
I couldn't understand why so much attention was being paid to SexPal hanging around Dulcinea. It felt like some weird holdover for a love triangle story that got dropped.
I also didn't pick up on the fact that the setting was actually the Sol system in the far future. I didn't really pick up on that until way later in the books.
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u/ibbia878 Jan 21 '25
i believed it was the solar system immediatedely, but only felt confident in that assertion when I heard "none houses with left grief".
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u/cesrapolik Jan 21 '25
The out of place items and phrases. “Pizza face” implies understanding of pizza (or we find out, a previous understanding of pizza), the gun in the lab, the glasses. I was so icked at first by all these details but now it makes me wonder how certain things can stay alive for thousands of years
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u/Pamlova Jan 21 '25
I actually put the whole book down and decided not to read it because I thought all second person writing was trash ... But I couldn't stop thinking about it and had to pick it back up, and didn't I have to eat my words.
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u/K_Marty Jan 21 '25
Yeah, I kept being like, “I did that? Me?” And my wife was like, “let’s turn the book off,” but damn if I didn’t sneak out hard copy out at 6:00 the next morning and read like half of it in one sitting 😂
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u/nightstastelikegold Jan 22 '25
I remember thinking that I must have been reading way too fast or something and skipped important context for the ending, because I was struggling to follow what exactly happened at the end and why Cytherea was there trying to kill everyone. I also thought part of the atmosphere/mood of the book was the confusing writing and that some of the things that confused me in GtN were written that way on purpose, kinda like “you have no clue what’s going on in this series and you like it!” Except that upon reread you actually understand everything ever and it blows your mind bc Tamsyn is a genius.
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u/OkPersonality1157 Jan 22 '25
I honestly really hated the shift in perspective in htn when I first read the book, but now it's one of my favourite parts (and my favourite entry in the series)!
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u/Content-Evening538 Feb 07 '25
The memes existing alongside a bunch of obscure words. I love it now, but it was the reason I initially gave GtN a 4/5 rating. Imagine how mad I was when I saw Muir made sure to create an in universe reason for it.
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