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Drone Jett posted:Harrow epilogue: compare Camilla’s eye description to Palamedes’ in Gideon: ”his eyes were a perfectly lambent grey: unflecked, unmurked, even and clear.” Through the power of ebook search, I flipped through all the eye color descriptions in Gideon. 1) Muir likes to describe Palmedes, Harrow, Ianthe, Corona, and Duclinea/Cytheria's eyes a lot more than anyone else's. 2) In her one eye description (vs Palmedes 10+), Camilla's eyes are also flat grey, but darker than Palmedes 3) Muir really likes to describe Palmedes's eyes as 'lambent' So Camilla/Palmedes have Lyctorized, which begs the question of why the Emperor didn't want to tell the original Lyctors the better way to do it. Presumably Palmedes is not going to start Alecto with godlike powers, so the better way isn't the source of the Emperor's mojo, despite what Mercymorn & Augustine thought. My take on the epilogue is that Corona/Judith/Palmedes-Camilla are on a BOE planet with Gideon's body with a soul in it. They're not sure which soul it is and the soul isn't either. The occupant kind of likes bones and kind of likes swords, so everyone is confused. Also pre-Lyctor Gideon's Lyctor powers are still unexplained. I was expecting that to go somewhere when Harrow was missing the automatic regeneration part and baby Gideon had that (but limited to when she's in a mess of external thanergy since she doesn't have an internal supply).
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Sep 14, 2020 06:40
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:48 |
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Books written in present tense are the real horror.
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Sep 18, 2020 00:49
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Saving the emperor seems like the right thing to do to me, even if you think he is a horrible evil person. The old lictors at least believe that killing him will extinguish the star and kill everyone in their home system, they just don't care anymore. He also implies right after reforming post-Mercy blowing him up that he has to fix the star. Maybe he's lying, but that's a big gamble.Brain Candy posted:I suspect that if it's not that he didn't want to share being god, it's simply that he wanted more Lyctors reliably. Remember that Harrow is an exceptional necromancer, partly due to her parents crimes, and there was a hint that last time there was only one that of the last crop that was kind of on the right track. Harrow's epilogue suggests that Palmedes/Camilla did a mergy thing. Palmedes is very good, but not sacrifice boosted. For the classic batch, I think there was something where Augustine said his lictorization was mid fight and that Anastasia (the one who was doing it the right way where the emperor killed her cavalier mid-ritual) was the only one who was working in lab conditions.
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Nov 8, 2020 23:30
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Humerus posted:There can be an ending where Gideon and Harrow are both happy and not with each other romantically. Which is what I'm thinking will happen but I don't see myself being disappointed with anything that happens. There's one spot on her tumblr where Muir summarizes all three books thusly: - Gideon was about two girls crammed into a bloodstained get-along shirt - Harrow is about two girls who are not enjoying this Duke of Ed residential very much - Alecto will be about girls being annoyed that it is legal for their exes to talk to each other
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Mar 15, 2021 00:26
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The real pain is books written in present tense. Those are unreadable to me
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Jan 11, 2022 03:31
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Finished it, thought it was decent. It's easy to see how it was a not originally planned expansion. Lots of scenes don't actually do anything in terms of moving plot, they're characterization and making you like Nona, but they're executed well enough. It did have a few bits where characters do things for no reason I can see that bug me looking back. i.e. Pyrrha deciding to ditch Nona at school to go infiltrate the Barracks without telling anyone (or bringing her guns), or why Ianthe or Gideon do a lots of what they do The Cut of Your Jib posted:there is mention of a space elevator. The story also doesn't need John to be right, just pissed off. It would all go down the same way even if the decision to cancel cryopods-for-a-generation-ship research was a perfectly morally and logically correct one. No one in that group would be willing to say "Yeah, our plan isn't going to work out, resources should get redirected to alternate evac plans or to plans for sheltering in place
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Sep 16, 2022 06:43
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It's probably mostly "Writers are bad at math and also underestimate how big space is" The cryo plan as presented makes absolutely no sense as a practical thing. If you assume a svelte 130lbs per human x 10 billion people and want to get just that big ball of human meat to zip through Tau Ceti (12 light years away) after a 1000 year travel time (Ignore spaceship mass, fuel to keep everything running, stuff for the generations of people living on & maintaining these ships, orbital mechanics, and actually stopping when you get there. Just a 12 light year long straight line that you've given yourself 1000 years to cross), the meatball needs to be going 3600km/s and has a kinetic energy of ~8 x 10^24 J. For scale, that's about a year and a half of capturing the Sun's total incident energy across the entire Earth. If you have that kind of energy to fling around, climate change should not actually be a problem for you.
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Sep 16, 2022 09:35
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Nona absolutely does not love burgers (along with not loving all other food either). She loves burger/fish & chip shop shirts. That was the big twist for the bookEveryone posted:Kiriona/Gideon is kind of cold with Camilla and "Sex Pal" because they're not really her friends. They've also taken possession of Harrow's body and apparently put some other person's soul in it. Still she doesn't slaughter the lot of them and drag Nona back to John. And she very much could. She does allow things to play out.
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Sep 17, 2022 01:29
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Entropic posted:I think you're overthinking it sometimes a friendship bracelet is a just a friendship bracelet Gideon the Ninth posted:Two nights had passed without Harrow sleeping in the Ninth quarters, or changing out of dirty clothes, or refreshing her paint. Gideon cogitated:
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Sep 21, 2022 03:42
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Danhenge posted:How do we actually know that Gideon doesn't have any necromantic abilities? Is there any evidence other than the Ninth not teaching her, which could easily have been a choice they made for their own reasons? She does have something funky and unexplained going on since there's never been a reason why she was immune to nerve gas as a baby that I can recall (though I wouldn't be surprised if that plot thread just gets dropped since it's been untouched for 2 whole books)
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Sep 21, 2022 05:11
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Reclaimer posted:Whatever happened, happened offscreen anyways. Last we see of Gideon she's literally willing to die rather than promise loyalty to the Emperor, and she's threatening to tear Ianthe's whole rear end off. Regardless of whether it's Gideon or Harrow voice narrating that part, neither has any major personal reason to prefer one ancient amoral superpowered guy over the other and it doesn't seem like they'd put a lot of weight onto "we must kill John (sacrificing everyone back home) to stop space colonialism".
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Oct 1, 2022 03:15
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M_Gargantua posted:There is almost nothing back home worth saving to them. Dominicus is capital D Dead and a breeding ground for malicious evil that kills even more planets. Whats a few million necromantic asses compared to trillions in the greater galaxy? At the end of Harrow, Gideon has overheard: (1) John lied about Alecto not being his cavalier (2) John lied about there not being a way to Lyctorify without eating the cavalier (3) John lied about being vulnerable to resurrection beasts (4) John had original recipe Gideon kick Harrow around to try to fix her (1) and (3) don't seem like things she'd care about at all. Augustine and Mercy are motivated by (2), but it doesn't seem that big for Gideon because she didn't get misled into anything. Gideon would have eaten a fence to save Harrow even if she knew there was a theoretically better Lyctor method out there, and without a threat to Harrow they wouldn't have done anything. (4) she's pissed about at the time of hearing it, but not that much and not rising to "kill everybody back in the houses, including the assholes in the Ninth (that Harrow cares about)". But her thoughts on Ianthe saving John are: Gideonvoice in Harrow the Ninth posted:Which was Tridentatrius all over. She got one choice, and not only did she blow it, but she blew it in such a huge loving spectacular way that you would've been impressed had you not hated her for it. Ianthe, throwing in her lot with the guy who has lied to everyone about everything. Ianthe, backstabbing her own cavalier all over again. Ianthe, with the world in the balance, reaching her hand out and pressing down on the weight marked BAD.
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Oct 1, 2022 21:24
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Idaholy Roller posted:Also if Nona is a RB why isn’t she massive and spooky and chitinous and everything??? The other RBS we’ve seen are terrifying Like how Wake goes from her skeleton -> Gideon's sword -> Cytheria's corpse and is trying to jump to Harrow's body, Earth/Annabelle/Alecto/Nona goes planet -> body made by John -> Harrow's body -> back to tomb body. If she was loose off in space, she'd probably be all weird too
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Oct 24, 2022 20:46
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Realistically, it's way too far in the future for any earth ethnicities, languages, or culture to survive at all. Think about how many memes you share with the average Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Culture person. That's about the same 10,000 year time gap. It's long enough for selection pressure in a closed population to plausibly turn Harrow into a translucent cave person, even if her ancestors started off with dark skin.
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Apr 13, 2023 02:14
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 11:48 |
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Everyone posted:Sure, but the cryogenic project probably would have saved more people if they'd gotten it to work. Even if you have physics defying freeze/thaw, getting even a couple thousand people's worth of mass to a different star along with something to thaw them is a harder problem than building enough sealed habitats for all of humanity nearby. Space is big. Physics defying FTL is a much better pick if you want to maximize people transported, transport is just also a poor solution
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Jul 13, 2023 06:02
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