...

Harrow the Ninth: Finishing Thoughts

5/4/2026

Well, I finished Harrow the Ninth at work today... and it drove me so insane that I immediately ordered Nona the Ninth from Thriftbooks. And since I also got some birthday points this month, I'd racked up enough points to get a free $5 book... so I found a used copy of Homer's Oddyssey and ordered that, too. There aren't any used copies of TLT books on Thriftbooks yet, but new copies are still a few bucks cheaper than retail. And also you still get points from purchaing new books, albeit not as much as used. Which is a good system, I think. Most of the books I get from there are used, not just because they're cheaper, but they have some personality to them. A couple of the used books I have came with little notes or names inside the covers, and I just think that's neat.

Anyway, onto my actual thoughts on the book! It took me... a while to finish it. I ordered it back in February and only just finished it... but it took me much less time than it did to finish Gideon the Ninth, which I ordered in September of 2023 and only finished this year. It's not even that I didn't like it, I loved it, I'm just much slower finishing books than I was as a kid. I blame it on my AD(H)D, baby.

Anyway!!! It was really good. I barely understood shit for like half the book, but things finally started making sense near the final act. I'd already seen spoilers about Harrow's self-inflicted lobotomy, but like I've said previously, spoilers don't usually ruin a story for me, and without context that specific spoiler didn't explain much, anyway. All I knew was that Harrow fucked with her own brain somehow, and Gideon was completely absent because of that.

...Except she wasn't absent at all! That was a twist I hadn't seen coming. The fact that she never stopped being the POV character even after her death, even if both we, the reader, and Harrow were completely unaware of her presence for most of the book. The moment where the narration briefly swapped to first-person after meeting with Palamedes threw me for a loop and then had me almost screaming, "Gideon??? Is that you???" And then, of course, once Harrow is stabbed by Mercy, the narration goes full first-person, Gideon talking to Harrow directly, even if she can't hear her. And it was brilliant. And god, I missed her stupid ass humor. Despite the gravity of the situation, her chapters had me laughing more than the entire rest of the book until then. First-person disguised as second-person is an insane thing to pull off, and I'm here for it. It also explains why some of the narration seemed discordant with Harrow's voice, and why the "flashback" chapters were still in third-person.

And speaking of those chapters, wow. I had initially thought that they were just dream sequences made up by Harrow to fill in the blanks where Gideon was erased, and I was mostly right about that, but for some reason it didn't occur to me, even after meeting Palamedes, that she had straight-up just summoned the ghosts of her fallen compatriots into a play of her own unconscious making. In the afterlife. In bubbles. Dream bubbles. Everything always goes back to fucking Homestuck in the end. But that was a cool twist, too, and explains why her "recreations" of the survivors of the first book all died off so quickly. She couldn't summon ghosts that didn't exist, so she subconsciously created doppelgangers to kill off. It also explains why the Seventh House were so different than Cytherea and the corpse of Protesilaus. Harrow had summoned the actual ghosts of the Seventh necormancer and cavalier, even though she had never actually met them. Though, how her psyche still managed to make the connection between the real Dulcinea and still somehow remembering that Cytherea had killed and disguised herself as Dulcinea is still a mystery to me.

In addition, I'd initially thought that the Sleeper would be Gideon. Or, well, not actually Gideon herself, but a manifestation of her, Harrow's repressed memories of her true cavalier forcing their way into the narrative and killing off the fakes to try and make her remember the truth. That was way off-base, but the Sleeper being Gideon's mother coming to hijack both Harrow's false memories and her body was something I could never have seen coming. Holy shit. Another thing I maybe should've seen coming: the Noniad actually being narratively relevant. I think I was mostly focused on the obvious Chekov's gun of the Emporer's murder, and I was looking more at the bigger picture, so I didn't catch some of the smaller details until I was piecing things together later.

I also like how fleshed-out of a character Ortus was in this book. He seemed to be a throwaway character in Gideon the Ninth, a cowardly joke of a cavalier who died off-screen, and perhaps to both Harrow and Gideon, he was, but oh, how wrong that assumption would turn out to be. It's true he sometimes lets his fear guide him, but if he were truly as cowardly as Harrow believed him to be, he would've bowed out of the play the second he got the opportunity. Instead, he stayed, so that he could truly fulfill his duty as Harrow's former cavalier primary, to protect her. His conversation with her in the end, about his death and about Gideon, really rounded out his character pretty well, too. Despite his outwardly dreamy, dreary, and cowardly demeanor, he's a very level-headed man, and he takes responsibility for running away, unknowingly sending Gideon out for slaughter, and doesn't blame Harrow for his murder, even if she still blames herself. TLDR: good character. I like him.

And on the topic of characters we were wrong about, how about God? Double whiplash with that guy, huh? All throughout Gideon the Ninth, he's referred to as such fearsome titles as "The Emporer Undying" and "Necrolord Prime." My initial impression of him, just based on the brief mentions of him, was that he would be some great intimdating figure, some kind of evil asshole. And then you meet him at the end of the first book, and he's just some guy. And throughout most of Harrow the Ninth, as you get to know him alongside Harrow, he continues to be just some guy. He's just a normal guy who happened to become God: he's down to earth, he's kind of awkward, he references long-dead memes. His name is John. And then you get to the end of Harrow the Ninth, and find out that not only is he all of that, but he's also some great intimidating figure, and kind of an evil asshole. He'd been lying to everyone the whole time, lying to Harrow, lying to us. And he's Gideon's fucking dad??? God damn. Talk about a plot twist. I really did think it was going to be Gideon the First. I guess it's kind of ironic, then, that John told Harrow that he wished she'd been his daughter. Not knowing that his actual daughter was right there when he said that.

And Gideon being basically lesbian necro-Jesus does explain some things in hindsight, too. Namely, how she survived both plummeting to her likely death and the mass murder of every other child in the Ninth House. She could only ever die on her own terms, which is very Gideon of her. Someone on Tumblr also brought up that she might have initially been meant to become a necromancer, but though her life was spared in the mass sacrifice, her necromantic power was not, and given to Harrow instead. In fact, in one of the interstitial chapters flashing through several not-quite-right memories, we see a universe in which Gideon was a necromancer: seemingly a timeline where Harrow's parents didn't sacrifice 200 babies to ensure their child was a necromancer. Harrow wasn't born a necromancer, and they disowned her, adopting the necromantically gifted Gideon and naming her the Reverend Daughter instead. Also, the tagline of Gideon the Ninth is, "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" Necromancers, plural. Which would mean anything.

John also seems fairly nonchalant about the sudden reveal that he's Gideon's father, and he doesn't seem to care all that much other than making dad jokes and sparing her more out of a sense of duty than of care. He doesn't want to give his kid an ultimatum after only knowing her for like five minutes, and she's in Harrow's body, and he'd "rather not punish Harrow for [Gideon] acting out." And more on that quote, he's treating Gideon's justified anger at him for lying to and trying to kill Harrow as if she's throwing a tantrum. Maybe I shouldn't be judging him based on his actions immediately after being murdered, but from just that brief interaction, he really doesn't seem to give much of a shit about Gideon. Which, he didn't know she was his daughter until like a few minutes ago so should he really be expected to, but still. It feels pretty callous compared to the care he showed Harrow, real or not, and the other saints, real or not. But I guess I'll see what happens once Nona the Ninth comes in.

Jesus fuck, that's a lot of words. Sorry, I have a lot to say about this book! I liked it!! I think I had more to say, but it's past midnight and I'm forgetting shit, so I guess that's where I'll leave this "review" for now. If it can even be called a review. I don't really do those, I just kind of vomit all my insane thoughts about the things I'm obsessed with onto the page, which maybe is a kind of review, but probably not.

But hey, if you managed to stick around through all that, here's a treat for making it to the end: the Griddlehark playlist I made on YouTube while reading the book. It'll probably change a bit over time, but here it is.

ADDENDUM: Can't believe I wrote all that shit, shared a Griddlehark playlist, and then just completely neglected to talk about Griddlehark at all. I have to amend this immediately, because the doomed yuri was the best part of the book.

Harrow gave herself a lobotomy, fucking surgically removed Gideon from her memory completely, because she just couldn't bear a reality where Gideon was truly dead. She did so out of grief, and an attempt to save Gideon's soul from being completely consumed by hers... either not knowing or not caring how deeply she was disrespecting Gideon and disregarding her autonomy in the process. Gideon herself makes it clear how pissed she is at Harrow for this little stunt. In my absolute favorite quote from the book, on page 434, she says, "Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I'd do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me. Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night."

Harrow, in her conversation with Ortus, seems convinced that Gideon only sacrificed herself out of desperation, that she didn't have a choice, that Cytherea forced her hand. Gideon did have a choice. Cytherea wanted to spare her, wanted her to come to her side. Not only that, but Gideon had the choice to keep fighting alongside Harrow, and die alongside her, and maybe Harrow would've preferred that, but that wasn't what Gideon wanted. She chose her convictions, and Harrow's life, over her own life. She sacrificed herself so that Harrow could survive, and become a Lyctor, not only because it was her duty as Harrow's cavalier, but because she loved Harrow, even if she believed that Harrow could never love her back. And Harrow, in turn, loved Gideon, but believed that Gideon could never truly love her. Harrow, in her grief, convinced herself that Gideon's martyrdom, her act of love, was one of desperation instead. She made her hero into a victim in her own mind, and used that belief to justify denying Gideon her dying wish. If I were Gideon, I'd be pissed, too.

But despite her anger, Gideon still loves Harrow. She knows that Harrow herself was angry that Gideon chose to sacrifice herself for her. That doesn't necessarily justify Harrow's disrepsect towards her, but when have these two ever actually respected each other? It's funny, really. They despise each other. They beat each other black and blue. They're terrible for each other, yet they're made for each other. Not even death could do them part. And death would be their reunion. One flesh, one end, indeed.

Okay, I think I've successfully redeemed myself. Thank fuck. I would not have been able to sleep easy tonight if I'd knowingly left the tragic yuri unaddressed. Now this entry is complete, unless I wake up in a cold sweat tonight, remembering another important thing I'd neglected to talk about. Fuck my shit memory, man. Anyway. Good night.