also Harrow and Gideon's relationship specifically is absolutely loaded with the hate vs pity quadrantflipping dynamic. it's so good and so weird to see outside of ao3 lol. after I finish this series I'm definitely going to go back and read TSG from the start.
I was instantly smitten with Harrow in part because she was just so fucking mean in those first few chapters. Like god damn woman can flirt pitcher than tar jesus christ.
I started getting inklings of concern for her like halfway through the book. The details were just lining up in certain ways. And then it happened and I was never more angry with Gideon before. Not even when I had just started the book and hated her. Just a very betrayed and grief-filled "IF YOU WEREN'T DEAD ALREADY I WOULD KILL YOU, NAV."
I downed the whole thing in two days, and probably at least a quarter of it in 45-second bites between shifting a mag drill around, so I'm not surprised I missed the hints. I got the definite feeling as I was reading that I'm going to reread it many times and catch something new on each one. but like. she was so alive :( and they JUST got their shit together, and they were going to be amazing together!!! they were going to be an incredible pair and do incredible things. I guess in a terrible way they still technically are :( but :(
It hurts more because she was a jokey shitfuck to the very end. God dammit, Griddle. WHY. And yeah that's fair. I read it pretty fast too. We're just. Good at picking tragic deaths out I guess? I've done similar things with other stuff too. OR MAYBE I AM JUST PARANOID. It could also be that. And yeah the books are in general very much things you catch stuff in every time you read through then. Which I like! Those are the best sorts of books! A book I can read more than once and think about is A Good Book. Otherwise it's just ok. I want my books to make me think and obsessively pore over them seeking to unravel all of their little secrets as I write my conspiracy theory essays about them.
all I know is I'm gonna find every stupid fixit fic out there after I'm done with the next book. please let there be a decent population of brain ghost!Gideon fic :pray: ...I mean, depending on what happens in the next book, or course. I can't wait to learn more about the Emperor and the history of the place.
I read all day at work and I'm just done with chapter 9. still no idea what the fuck is going on but I do love that it's becoming more and more clear that we seem to be set in your stereotypical Evil Empire. I mean it was kind of apparent in the first book, and I still don't know much about the relationship between the Nine Houses and whatever other collections of humanity exist in this universe, but like. they are an entire solar system of people who shouldn't be alive, whose very sun and planets radiate death energy that twists many of them into sickly beings of death energy themselves, whose colonization practice involves - as far as I can tell - reaching a planet, converting it into a death planet like their own, living there for a few generations while it slowly dies, then leaving its corpse behind and moving on to the next. the moment one of their soldiers kills one of your own, the snowball of the end has already kicked off, because every death gives their necromancers the power to kill even more. they will use every part of your dead against you, body and soul. they're nightmare people who worship the undying abomination who released nine even more horrible abominations into the universe. and if that weren't enough, their decor is about as clichéd as you can get. they think an arrangement of bleached skulls is a nice accent piece. they're completely horrifying. the emperor is a really good dude though I liked him instantly and like him even more with every word edit: "is this how it happens" what the fuck, man!!!!
Also are you reading the paperback version of HtN? There's a neat short story called As Yet Unsent after the end of the paperback version of it.
SICK. As Yet Unsent is like. Really good and probably my favorite thing in the series. So I just wanted you to know that it exists only in the paperback edition of the book.
To my knowledge, no. It's like the essay at the end of GtN, available only in the paperback physically. The newer ebook editions should have it as well. I'm like 99% certain you could find it somewhere illegally online as people did just kind of. Immediately mine it out of the Amazon previews a while back. But I'm not sure where one would grab that because it's been a bit since that fuckup on Amazon's part. For explanation...Basically when the paperback finally got up on Amazon for pre-order and preview, people were able to read through the entire book by way of using ctrl+F in the preview window. Which enabled people to mine the entire short story and a pronunciation and name guide for HtN. The issue was solved in the morning but by that point people had already gotten entire copies of it saved and had begun distributing the exclusive content.
