TRANSCRIPT — 22. For the Ninth!

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00:00:12 BAILY: Hello, fellow boneheads! Welcome to One Flesh, One End, a Locked Tomb re-read podcast. We’ll be combing through the series by Tamsyn Muir for all the context and clues we missed on our first read. I’m Baily,

00:00:26 KABRIYA: And I’m Kabriya, and we’re so excited to take a look through all the theories we can’t stop obsessing over.

00:00:31 B: Thanks for joining us on this journey through ten thousand years of history! We can't wait to spend more time with the characters putting the romance in necromancy.

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00:00:40 B: In this episode, we will be recapping the second half of Chapter Thirty-Six of Gideon the Ninth, which covers the end of the fight with Cytherea and the ultimate tragedy of the book.

00:00:53 K: Then, on a slightly more fun note, we are going to be going back to ranking the most iconic lines from Gideon the Ninth, and looking at the so-called “Western Conference” of our bracket this episode, and then we’re going to keep talking about the Resurrection in the books and specifically talk about the significance of it being a nuclear apocalypse that Tamsyn chose to write about from a New Zealand context.

So Cam tries to tell Gideon to take Harrow and go, and Gideon refuses: “‘Ninth,’ said the Sixth impatiently. ‘Get out of here. Take your necromancer. Go.’ ‘Hell no,’ said Gideon. ‘It’s time for round two.’ She considered that. ‘Wait. Is this round three now? I keep losing count.’” [laughs] It kind of feels a bit like that as the reader too at this point, I think. This is really one of those battles that keeps going on and on in this really cyclical way that I remember finding, it doesn’t feel neat at all in a way that feels more realistic.

00:01:47 B: I particularly want to point out this “round two, round three” thing, because in Harrow the Ninth, there’s a part near the end where it’s like– I can’t remember if it’s still Gideon narrating inside Harrow, or Gideon outside of Harrow or in Harrow’s body or something, but there’s a part in the final part of Harrow where she’s like, “Is this round three or round four?”, and so it’s kind of an interesting glimpse into the whole “Unwanted Guest” soul permeability dynamic of it all. We know that Paul has memories from both Pal and Cam, and can’t necessarily distinguish whose memory was whose, and so now it’s like, well, the same thing might be happening with Gideon and Harrow. [laughs] At least at the end of Harrow the Ninth.

00:02:31 K: Yeah, and we see this even become a bit of a bit here in this chapter, too. So it’s clearly something that has a point to being referenced again and again. But yeah, so Cytherea just gets closer, though. The threat keeps coming. It says, “She vaulted daintily into their part of the courtyard and smiled Dulcinea’s smile at Gideon: dimpling, bright-eyed, as though they both knew something extra nice that nobody else did. ‘There’s that two-hander,’ she said admiringly. ‘Want a closer look?’ said Gideon.” [both laugh]

00:02:59 B: Such a good line. [laughs]

00:03:02 K: Such a good line, yeah. And I do like how there’s these repeated references throughout as well to the fact that Cytherea is still who Gideon thought Dulcinea was, and this woman who she had this attraction and intimacy and all these conversations with throughout. We’ve kind of been presented with her actually being this horrible monster, and then there’s this convenient name change that makes you kind of separate them very much in your mind, especially knowing that she was never the real Dulcinea, but as the reader, we never knew the real Dulcinea either at this point. We only knew this version of her, this Cytherea talking with Gideon, and this is still her, and so I like how much that kind of comes up again and again too, that that’s who Gideon is fighting against, who she’s known this whole time.

“‘You know you can’t do this, Gideon of the Ninth,’ she said. ‘You’re very brave—a bit like another Gideon I used to know. But you’re prettier in the eyes.’ ‘I may be from the Ninth House,’ said Gideon, ‘but if you say any more cryptic shit at me, you’re going to see how well you can regenerate when you’re in eighteen pieces.’” [both laugh] And I just– I like this exchange too, because, continuing the sort of, she’s still doing her flirty thing, but also, of course we’re living for the cryptic shit on re-read. But yeah, usually the characters aren’t so directly cryptic to Gideon or Harrow or the protagonist. It’s interesting that she’s really enjoying saying things about, like, “Ooh, you remind me of this other Gideon,” which obviously means nothing to you on a first read, but now we know what she’s talking about. And also just the emphasis on the eyes, drawing attention to the fact that she’s noticed this about Gideon particularly, and that’s gonna mean more later too.

00:04:27 B: Yeah! Well, so this just snagged on me when I was re-reading, because after the cryptic note that says Gideon’s name that Gideon picked up in the Second House’s lab, this is the first direct mention of Gideon the First, the Lyctor. And so if you had picked up on this, if you had word-searched for “Gideon,” not Gideon-protagonist, in Gideon the Ninth, you might have been less confused in Harrow, but, I mean, probably not.

00:04:57 K: [laughs] I feel like that was actually one of the things in Harrow that clicked for me quicker than other things. When she was calling him “Ortus” and that sort of thing, and there was also the Ortus in her memories replacing Gideon, I was like, “There’s something going on here with–”. I don’t know, I think that was one of the things that I was like, “There’s some weird name thing going on, or there’s something going on with these two Ortuses [Note from Baily: …Orti?] that are replacing,” obviously before I knew, but in the way that so much of my reading of Harrow the Ninth is based on, like, “I get that something’s going on here, but I don’t really get what, but I trust that I will understand very soon, so like, who’s this ‘you’? Surely it could only be… but I don’t know, in what possible way? I’m just gonna keep reading.” You know what I mean? It’s very much that, having a trust that it’s going to come, but sort of picking at the right pieces to be like, “This is gonna make sense to me at some point. I do believe it will.”

00:05:47 B: “I just don’t have all the information.” Yep. Yeah, I definitely felt that. No, yeah. I was still confused by the Ortus-Gideon thing until pretty much the very end of Harrow. Just like you, I knew there was something wrong, but I just could not figure it out. [laughs]

Cytherea continues, “‘Cry mercy.’ … The dimple was still there. ‘Please. You don’t even know what you are to me… You’re not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I’ve spared you before.’” What the fuck? [laughs] What the hell does that mean?

00:06:19 K: Yeah, again with the cryptic shit just continuing. Sort of the first hint of there being any sort of backstory or importance of Gideon being anything to anyone, or anyone having any idea who she was. Obviously we know she’s got this mystery backstory a little bit, but that’s kind of an interesting tidbit there. And also just the like, “‘You’re not going to die here, Gideon,’” like– just another knife twist, you know? Just another thing that Tamsyn’s peppering in that is just– it’s so rough on the re-read.

00:06:50 B: Yeah. Well, I guess, yeah, there is the foreshadowing, but there’s also, you know, it’s funny how Cytherea says that. Like, “You’re not going to die here, but, you know, if you beg for your life, I might not kill you somewhere else.” [laughs] But yeah, I don’t know. There’s just lots to unpack here. Like, why and when has she spared Gideon before? I guess she’s referring to when she killed the Fourth and had the opportunity to kill Gideon then, because she was just asleep, or whatever? I don’t really know. And then, Brm-911 on Reddit posits that she might’ve spared Gideon and offered to let her live, potentially because she planned to take her body to the Ninth House to open the Tomb. You know, Mercy said Cytherea would’ve known who Gideon was as soon as she saw her eyes, and they think that she may have had a part in Operation Ninth House, because Mercy last saw Cytherea twenty years ago, according to the Harrow the Ninth funeral scene. And Brm-911 continues, “Which would mean she probably knew about the plan to break Wake into the tomb and see if Alecto was alive and take samples.” Which is kind of– I mean, very plausible, right? We know from Nona that Cytherea was actively in contact with B.O.E. She was Source Chrysaor [Note from Baily: I misspoke and should have said Source Joyeuse], so it’s possible that Cytherea had this secret plan to do something with Gideon, but I don’t think we ever find out exactly what.

00:08:04 K: Yeah, whether she had the full secret plan and knew what they were up to or just had a plan of knowing she would do something because of realizing the significance of who Gideon was. I think that’s very clear here, that she’s like, “Something can be done with this, and you are important.” But then, you know, so Cytherea’s saying this to Gideon, she’s saying, “Cry mercy,” all of this, but for Gideon, it just says, “Something ignited deep in her rib cage,” and she says to Cytherea, “‘Jeannemary Chatur didn’t ask for mercy. Magnus didn’t ask for mercy. Or Isaac. Or Abigail. I bet you Palamedes never even considered asking for mercy.’” So again, those names being right there, those people being what this is all about and who Gideon is fighting for in this moment. Very sad. And then Cytherea continues and just says, “‘Of course he didn’t. He was too busy detonating.’”

00:08:52 B: Get her ass! [both laugh]

00:08:53 K: Stop. And like, yeah. Oh!

00:08:58 B: I’m obsessed.

00:08:59 K: Poor Pal. It’s a little bit too brash.

00:09:03 B: Cytherea goes right for Gideon’s heart, but Gideon meets her thrust and they begin to fight. Gideon manages to knock Cytherea’s sword to the ground, and when she retreats, Gideon follows through with, quote, “a huge, perfect overhand cut. It ought to have cleaved the Lyctor open from the shoulder to the gut. She’d wanted it to. But the edge of her sword sank into Cytherea’s collarbone and bounced off, like she was trying to cut steel. There was the faintest pink mark on the skin—and then nothing. Her two-hander had failed. Something in Gideon rolled over and gave up.” Sad!

00:09:36 K: Oof. The two-hander had even failed! Yeah. I think this moment and Gideon’s reaction to it just really also keeps establishing Cytherea as this very impossible enemy, in order to set the stakes for what has to come. Because we’ve seen Ianthe think that she has the upper hand, and immediately be trampled on by her. We just sort of see over and over again, she’s so much older and so much more powerful than anything they can manage to do, and Harrow’s already managed to accomplish something beyond anything any necromancer from the Ninth has done to try to hold the bone construct down, and in the end Cytherea’s still coming for them. Ianthe is now a Lyctor herself and tried to fight her and they thought that could be enough and it wasn’t, so it’s really the sense of this impossible stakes of how do you as three babies fight this horrible ancient monster? You can’t, right?

00:10:22 B: Yeah. Cytherea goes in for the kill, but Gideon manages to evade slightly, and instead Cytherea’s rapier cuts into Gideon’s arm. Quote, “[She] sank the tip deep into the soft flesh above the bicep, met the bone, splintered something deep in there.” Mm, ouchie! And so Gideon’s struggling to hold her longsword – I mean, she needs both arms to do that – despite, quote, “determination coursing through her body.” So, you know, she hasn’t fully given up hope, but she’s having a rough time. They’re continuing to spar, she sees an opening, she thrusts towards Cytherea’s heart, and Cytherea again catches the sword with her hands. [laughs] It goes– I know.

00:10:59 K: Still a great move. Every time.

00:11:00 B: “Cytherea raised her free hand and caught the blade before it carved through her sternum. She had to step back with the force of the blow, but her frail, worn hand wrapped around the breadth of the blade and held it as easily as Naberius’s shitty trick trident knife had her rapier, all those years ago in the training room. Gideon shoved. Her feet slipped for purchase on the ground, her knee screaming. Her arm squirted blood with the effort. Cytherea sighed. ‘Oh, you were gorgeous,’ said the Lyctor, ‘a thing apart.’” Ohhh. I like this quote because she characterizes her duel with Babs as “all those years ago,” right. It just feels like it was in a different world.

00:11:42 K: Yeah, you have this simultaneous, everything feeling very fresh with all of the death that’s just happened and how much that’s still weighing on them against the fact that, how much this entire experience has aged them and how completely different they are from the people they were when they arrived and how much they have gone through in this time at Canaan House, really simultaneously existing here.

So Cytherea keeps coming after her, admiring Gideon’s swordplay, but manages to start driving Gideon back a bit, until: “‘Step off, bitch,’ said Harrowhark Nonagesimus, behind her.” And we see Harrow has awoken, has arrived!

00:12:15 B: She’s back!

00:12:16 K: She’s “bookended by skeletons.” It’s described as these skeletons “too huge to have ever lived inside the greasy meat sock of anyone real. Each was eight feet high with ulnar bones like tree trunks and wicked bone spikes spiralling over their arms.” So Harrow’s getting creative here, and Cytherea’s just like, “‘I wish the Ninth House would do something that was more interesting than skeletons,’” but you know what? I am personally having a great time, and I think this is a fantastic entrance. I think this is like the fifth fantastic entrance of this chapter so far. It’s so good. The drama is peak.

00:12:46 B: Plus, also, all Cytherea’s doing is skeletons, man. Like– [laughs]

00:12:52 K: Yeah! Let Harrow have her giant tree trunk skeleton constructs! Oh my god.

00:12:58 B: Harrow’s constructs are flinging themselves at Cytherea, but Cytherea's managing to dash them away and shatter them, and Gideon watches as all of Harrow’s skeletons begin to reassemble, but she realizes there’s no way Harrow can afford to expend this much energy. It goes, “Harrow wasn’t stinting on the perpetual bone, and if she kept it up she was going to be a perpetual corpse.” Ooh. Now, Cytherea summons the construct monster from inside the monster, and it comes exploding out, having torn itself out of Harrow’s shackles. And it’s now smaller, but still horrible. “It wasn’t fair. Cytherea had been right all along: there was nothing they could do. Even half-destroyed, the bristling tentacles and lappets were raised a hundred strong in the air. It staggered and aimed itself in their direction, and there was nowhere to run, no dodging, no escape. The Lyctor said: ‘None of you have learned how to die gracefully … I learned over ten thousand years ago.’”

00:13:52 K: Mmm! Again, the number of references towards foreshadowing that I kind of keep point out here, too. This idea of none of them knowing how to die gracefully, and how it just kind of snowballs to keep building up to the choice that Gideon is about to make here, and that will be framed in this sort of noble way just really jumped out at me from that. I think I’m just being very sensitive to everything, but I just found that really ominous as well from Cytherea. But Harrow’s the one who replies to that.

00:14:22 B: Yeah. Well, obviously she’s referring to Loveday, right? Not herself. She never died. Yeah.

00:14:29 K: No, exactly. She witnessed that, and again, the fact that that’s associated with something for a cavalier to learn, and Gideon hasn’t learned in this case, is sort of what’s being highlighted. But, ohhh. Yeah, and so Harrow’s the one who responds, and just says, “‘I’m not done.’” Which is great, but also, Gideon can tell that this is taking a lot out of Harrow. It’s not really looking great for them. And so Harrow then closes her hands. Gideon sees all the debris of her constructs come rattling towards them through the air, and they harden in this shell around Gideon, Harrow, and Cam as the tendrils from the construct strike them, and this acts as a shield around them. Another throwback! [Baily laughs] All the hints come in here in the final chapter. And so Gideon sees this happen, and “Harrow swayed upright in the gloom as the beast tried to crack them open like a nut and looked at Camilla and Gideon through a face that was mostly blood. Not even blood sweat: just blood. Beneath her skin blood vessels had detonated like mines. It was coming through her pores. She’d figured out how to make perpetual bone, half-destroyed a giant dead spider from hell, and now she’d raised a solid wall six inches thick and was holding it up with sheer nerve. The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she keeled into Gideon’s arms.”

00:15:43 B: Ohhh.

00:15:44 K: Ohhh. “Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile. ‘Harrow, come on, I’m here. … Siphon, damn it.’”

00:16:02 B: Ohhh my god! “Tiny smile!”

00:16:06 K: Harrow has just given everything. Her tiny, tiny smile as she has blood pouring out of her face from all of her pores, and she just can’t do any more, you know? It’s so evident here. But Harrow refuses to siphon from Gideon after what happened with Colum and Silas. She says that she refuses to ever again. But Gideon is trying to point out to her that this is not a solution, this is not gonna last forever, that she can’t hold this shield forever and eventually the bone construct’s gonna come through. But Harrow says she doesn’t have to. She says that Gideon should take Cam and get into a brace position, and she’ll break them through the wall and drop them down to the sea below. She makes reference to the fact that bones float, you know, “You’ll be fine.” [laughs] And she just sort of says, “‘All you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.’”

00:16:58 B: Oh, my god!

00:17:00 K: Ohh. Harrow tried to be so self-sacrificing and just, “All you have to do is live, Gideon. You have to get away from here.” And Harrow’s so determined to just hold this as long as she can, and it’s just absolutely devastating.

00:17:16 B: “‘Harrow,’ said Gideon. ‘This plan is stupid, and you’re stupid. No.’ The Reverend Daughter reached up to take a fistful of Gideon’s shirt. Her eyes were dark and glassy through the pain and nausea; she smelled like sweat and fear and about nine tonnes of bone. She swabbed at her face again with her sleeve and said: ‘Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb—’ ‘Don’t do this to me.’ ‘I owe you your life,’ said Harrowhark, ‘I owe you everything.’” Oh no! [laughs]

00:17:46 K: Your life, Gideon! Your life! Yeah, feeling very screaming, crying, rending garments, et cetera, about this. But I also think what’s so key in this moment is then immediately after this, when Harrow lets go of Gideon’s shirt and flops back, it also notes in the text that her paint has all come off her face. Obviously she’s had blood bleeding out of her all over, and so again, it’s this moment where we see Harrow being very vulnerable with Gideon, and something very significant about the fact that her face is bare in that moment and what that means for her as a character being repeated again as a symbol of that, I think is really important here, really clever. And it’s all just excruciating.

00:18:22 B: Yeah, there’s also this interesting dynamic going on here with how Harrow has come to respect and appreciate Gideon as an equal, but is still expecting her to do her duty by the Locked Tomb and her duty to the Ninth House, I guess not necessarily still as an indentured servant, but as what she promised to do.

00:18:41 K: Mhm. Yeah, it’s mixed together that she’s saying, “Gideon has to live,” she owes her this life, she owes her everything, but also what she’s associating that with is, “Well, you need to live because you need to go back. You need to do this duty to the Ninth House,” and the way that that’s gotten mixed up for both of them, where obviously what they care about in this moment is each other, as well, but also it’s this sense of, that has become important to Gideon because it’s important to Harrow. That is now something that Harrow is associating with Gideon being alive and all of that, and it’s just kind of very interesting, and I think really demonstrates how tangled and messed up that dynamic is with not just who they are to each other but who they are to the Ninth House and how much it has been this omnipresent thing in their lives.

00:19:20 B: Yeah. Gideon’s trying to think desperately of another plan. Cam volunteers to provide a distraction if they let her out so that the two of them can escape, but Gideon won’t hear that either. She says, “‘I’m not getting haunted by Palamedes Sextus’s crappy-ass revenant all telling me doctor facts for the rest of my life, just because I let you get disintegrated.’” [laughs] Which is very funny. But Cam points out that Harrow’s plan isn’t going to work because they won’t be able to hold Cytherea off. And Harrow says, “‘Then we hold her off as long as we can.’” Cam closes her eyes and relaxes, and the sight of Cam actually at rest makes Gideon realize, “We really are going to die.” And she looks down at Harrow. Harrow’s only keeping herself conscious with great effort. It goes, “Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek. ‘Nav,’ she said, ‘have you really forgiven me?’ Confirmed. They were all going to eat it. ‘Of course I have, you bozo.’ ‘I don’t deserve it.’ ‘Maybe not,’ said Gideon, ‘but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow—’ ‘Yes?’ ‘You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,’ she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. … ‘I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary, I never could’ve been.’” Sad! Sad! Sad!

00:20:47 K: It’s exactly what we were just saying, that it’s not about who they are to the Locked Tomb, it’s about who they are to each other at this point. I think the fact that Gideon is “brokenhearted” and thinking they’re about to die and trying to communicate that to Harrow really says so much. And it’s also really interesting that she tries to shrug off the cavalier role, too. She’s trying to say something to her that isn’t about being her cavalier primary, that isn’t about that, but also is mixed up in her feeling not good enough at the same time, because that role is so entrenched in what she’s supposed to be. You can’t just take it out of the picture, you know?

And obviously as this conversation is happening, there’s still tentacles of the bone monster attacking their shelter over and over again. [Baily groans] There’s a crack that starts to open in the roof and sunlight coming through. This is a very precarious situation. It’s obviously not going to hold very long, and this is not tenable. And Gideon, it just says in this moment, she doesn’t care. She’s ignoring all of it as if it’s not there, the monster’s not there, the wall’s not there. It even notes, “Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there.”

00:21:44 B: God!

00:21:45 K: Which I love that she’s just letting them have this little, very intense emotional moment. But none of that is there for Gideon. It says, “It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face. Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. ‘Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,’ she said hoarsely, ‘you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.’” [Baily groans] Ohhhh, you can’t see us, we’re clutching our faces.

00:22:18 B: We’re clutching!

00:22:20 K: We’re both clutching our faces right now. Feeling super normal and fine. It’s just excruciating. And again, there’s something about Gideon trying to say to Harrow, “I’m not– it’s not about the Locked Tomb, it’s not about doing this for the Locked Tomb, this is about me and you. I’m not even a good cavalier anyway,” and Harrow responding in this sort of laughing at her, and saying, “No, of course you’re a good cavalier, you’re the best we’ve ever,” but again, it’s locking Gideon into that role, it’s saying, “You are good enough at this thing. You can be this thing that is a role of cavalier, you can be good enough for the Ninth House,” and all these things. They’re still so locked into that in this moment, and knowing where this is going with Gideon, how much she’s about to embrace that, it does feel very tragic to me how much they can’t quite get out of that dynamic in this moment, but it’s being framed and positioned as this really powerful thing, that Gideon has never felt good enough for this House that she belongs to. She’s always felt ostracized, and she has been, obviously, and then this is this moment where she’s being told she is good enough, but embracing it as this really good message maybe isn’t what she should be doing here. And I think it’s interesting how much that really builds in this moment, as we’re about to see, into this really powerful arc for her, and then so much of later in the books really deconstructs that into, actually, that’s not a good thing and this is not a good system of how these relationships work between people.

00:23:48 B: So after Harrow says that, we get: “That was enough. Gideon the Ninth stood up so suddenly that she nearly bumped her head on the roof of the bone shield.” [laughs] She can’t take it either. Gideon paces back and forth. She’s studying the space they’re in, and it goes: “The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. Camilla—Camilla looked back at her, but she was already moving on. She couldn’t do this to Camilla. The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes of the railings.” Ooh, hm! Oh, hm! Ah, hm! “‘Yeah, fuck it,’ she said. ‘I’m getting us out of here.’” Oh, god, it’s so bad.

00:24:23 K: It’s so bad. And just the moment– the heaviness of it, and the moment as we get into this very next bit and these moments and the attention being drawn back to the iron spikes– I just so remember, as a reader, realizing with this dawning horror, what Gideon is starting to consider and what she’s going to do, as it happens not really believing it, and it’s built in so well here.

00:24:50 B: Well, and, I don’t know, it’s just so interesting. I’m trying to figure out the moment that I myself realized. It might’ve been around here, it might’ve been slightly later, but it really was so funny to me. I was like, “Oh, shit. We’re really going there.” Like, the protagonist is gonna die at the end of the book, and I was thinking back to books I’d previously read where the protagonist dies at the end, or someone really important dies at the end, and it’s like, there really aren’t that many, right? There’s the second book in the Shannara trilogy, where Amberle turns into the tree, and then, what was that wolf series we read as kids, where the main wolf sacrifices herself at the end? I was like, “Nobody’s doing this! This is too scary for me!” [laughs] It’s too scary, I’m scared!

00:25:29 K: Oh yeah, that book devastated me! Oh my god, yeah, The Sight. Great book! Big recommend, if you enjoyed, sort of–

00:25:35 B: Wolf fiction. [laughs]

00:25:38 K: Yeah. What’s the word, when animals are depicted like humans a little bit?

00:25:41 B: I guess anthropomorphic?

00:25:42 K: Kind of given interiority.

00:25:44 B: Anthropomorphic! [laughs]

00:25:45 K: Anthropomorphic, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you enjoyed all those stories, and Redwall and Watership Down, and all of that, recommend The Sight even though we’ve also just massively spoiled it. But it’s good.

00:25:51 B: Stop, yeah! [laughs] Give it to your kids, give it to your kids. Devastate them for life.

00:25:57 K: Book came out like twenty years ago.

00:26:01 B: Wait, yeah, I was like, “Oh, my god, this is gonna be one of those! Oh no!”

00:26:03 K: Yeah, no, exactly.

00:26:05 B: But it all makes perfect sense. In terms of the character arcs.

00:26:08 K: It does make perfect sense, and it feels so inevitable once you do realize, because the stakes have been established so clearly here that there is truly no way out, and Cytherea is truly this horrible thing. I think, to me, again, like you said, it’s that feeling of, “Oh, we’re really going there,” not just because of the significance of it, but also because again, it feels like just when you think you kind of have the full stakes of where this book is going, as a first book in a series especially, Tamsyn just keeps upping the stakes so quickly. It’s not just that Ianthe’s become a Lyctor. Now we have the original, now Gideon’s doing this– you know what I mean? It really, right when you think you have any sort of expectation of scale of what might be covered in this first book, she’s just already stepping past it so that you have no idea what could possibly come next. And obviously that is the experience of reading Harrow, being like, “What the fuck is happening right now? Because I have no framework for this.” But I think that that is one of the things that I found so great about the first book is that everything that it possibly sets up that you could maybe imagine would be a down-the-road thing you might encounter. It’s all just happening right there in your face, and obviously it’s horrible.

00:27:06 B: Yeah. Well, also, like I mentioned when Silas and Colum had their inevitable showdown about their duty to each other, and I sort of commented on how, even though we didn’t really– these characters were introduced quite briefly, we got a couple scenes with them, but it seemed so inevitable and perfect that that’s how their arc ended. It really seems to be the same with Gideon’s arc in this story. We don’t realize it as we start reading, but it’s a treatise on the nature of cavalierhood and how they’re subjugated necromancers and stuff, and so everything slots into place so perfectly. It’s horrifying, and it’s shocking, but it also feels like, “Oh, of course. That is such a perfect ending for this story.”

00:27:48 K: Yeah, exactly. When you learn what the Lyctorhood process entails, there’s this horror at what it is, and also because this is what Gideon and Harrow have been working towards, and obviously that can’t be where this story is going, so what’s gonna happen now? Or what’s gonna be the change in direction? And so it does feel quite impressive that, then, the surprise is really that you do end up getting to where you thought you were going in this book, it’s just, it is that much more horrible. And I think you get the hints of knowing that the original Lyctors all went through with this and imagining how they possibly could, knowing that Cytherea went through with it. It mentions her cavalier going willingly, and kind of imagining how that could be the case, and what that dynamic would be, and then realizing you’re already entrenched in that dynamic.

00:28:28 B: Yep.

00:28:29 K: That is what we have been building to with Gideon and Harrow with every step of the way that they’ve become closer together. That has always been accompanied by Gideon more embracing the role of cavalier–

00:28:35 B: And self-sacrifice.

00:28:36 K: –and being Harrow’s cavalier, and Harrow being her necromancer. And all the ways that we frame that in a way that you are reading them getting closer, and it feels like this– you know, we’ve squealed all the times that Gideon called Harrow “her necromancer” and that sort of thing, but then, having this realization here that actually that dynamic is not just a, “We’re closer than ever,” it’s a horrible thing. We’ve called ourselves One Flesh, One End, we’re modeling ourselves on all this, but it is this really awful, awful relationship that does lead into this dynamic where Gideon can feel like this is what she has to do to be Harrow’s cavalier. That is the ultimate thing that it was always going to lead to. The nature of cavalierhood and necromancy is to fulfill Lyctorhood in this way.

00:29:17 B: Yeah, to truly be one flesh, one end, as horrifying as that is.

So Gideon has this realization, and it goes: “She made her voice as calm as possible: in a way, she was calm. She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand.’” And Harrow does not understand yet. Harrow sort of gently warns her that she can’t hold the shield for much longer, and it goes: “She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot. She said, ‘Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.’” Oh, boy! [laughs]

00:30:12 K: Ohhh. There’s our title drop! But yeah, like we’ve said, there’s a lot to unpack there in, “‘That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you.’” It’s presented in this very romantic, very devoted way, but like we just said, it’s actually really, really horrible. And so it goes: “A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face.” “Her necromancer,” again, there. “‘Nav,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,’ said Gideon. ‘You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.’”

00:30:49 B: “‘You’ll know what to do!’” Ooh, ooh, ooh!

00:30:52 K: Ohhh. “‘The cruelest thing anyone’s ever done to you.’” But also, you’re doing this, Gideon. What? Ugh. It says, “Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.” Oh. I’m getting really, like, “Okay, Orpheus and Eurydice,” a bit here too, because I think there’s that notion of being on the edge and not being able to look back, and that entailing there. That’s to come. I saw Hadestown recently. It’s fresh in my mind. And then we get this thing again, building up the sense in these final thoughts of Gideon's chapter here, of this embrace of being the cavalier and this embrace of the Ninth House that we haven’t seen. It says, “She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore. WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster. ‘For the Ninth!’ said Gideon. And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.”

00:32:15 B: Oh my god! What a fricking chapter end.

00:32:18 K: And thus ends the chapter. I just– all of this, it really, obviously, it’s horrible, and you’re horrified as you’re reading it, but what struck me so much on this time around was this really sickening feeling of how she does it with the sense of embracing her being of the Ninth House. I think it feels so similar to what you see in a lot of books where there is this “Chosen One” protagonist sacrifice thing happening, even if it’s not in a final death way, but where it’s like, they’re doing this thing because they represent something greater than them, they represent this relationship or this dynamic, everything. And Gideon, who has been this orphan, outcast, whoever, for so long, gets to feel this sense of identity by embracing it, but it’s so twisted that she’s doing this at this moment, where the way that she feels she can embrace it is to literally kill herself for Harrow. It’s so horrible. And it’s so tragic. It gutted me on the re-read all over again, even more than on my first read, I think.

00:33:22 B: Yeah, I mean, it’s such a good point. It’s really, I want to say, almost an inversion of that trope, because I feel like we as the reader really struggle with embracing the Ninth House in the same way that Gideon does in this moment. I wanted to quote this post from etherealacademia on Tumblr, who says, “It hurts to remember that Gideon’s last words were, ‘For the Ninth.’ … The faux bravery of her statement just reminds me of how young she is. Like, dying at 18 after longing to join the army (due to propaganda and poor living conditions) your whole life is so sad. To have your dying words be something that a patriotic soldier would say as they sacrificed themselves.... it really drives that point home.” And gideonisms responds in the tags, “She didn't really want to say the Ninth! She’s loyal to Harrow and she's been taken in by the whole necro/cav dynamic. She still kind of hates the Ninth! It's just what she has. She has to reframe her loyalty to Harrow through loyalty to the empire. And it’s also the childhood she has, and it’s her clinging to that because it is hers, it’s what she's got. It’s about clinging to things because they are yours long past the point at which it would be easier to let them go.” So to me, this really hits the nail on the head. The Ninth House is all she has, it’s what she can internalize as being the big reason for her sacrifice when, in reality, it’s just– the only thing that was ever really important to her that came out of the Ninth House is Harrow.

00:34:39 K: Mhm. Yeah, she literally has just tried to say to Harrow, right before this, that she doesn’t care about the Locked Tomb, and it’s about Harrow and it’s always been about Harrow. And Harrow so immediately, despite saying something wonderful to Gideon, reframes it as, “No, you are an amazing cavalier. You’re the best our House ever– our House should be so proud of you,” and she gives her that sense of belonging and that sense of the Ninth House being proud of her that Gideon never has experienced her whole life, and did want, and maybe enables Gideon to then take that step, to associate what she feels for Harrow with this feeling of, because Harrow is so tied to the Ninth House, well, so is she, now. She’s doing it for the Ninth House because Harrow has said, actually–

00:35:15 B: She has to do her duty. Yeah.

00:35:16 K: –“The Ninth House would be so proud of you. You’re the best thing we’ve ever produced.” That gives her something she’s never had before. She’s just left that only horrible home she’s ever known to come into this more horrible world where she watched all the new people she formed connections with die right in front of her, and all that she has left is the sense of the Ninth House, because everything else out there is so fucking horrible too, and it’s just–

00:35:36 B: Yeah. It’s like her only anchor-point. Yeah.

00:35:38 K: Yeah. And it’s so tragic. I think that element of it didn’t strike me as much on my first read.

00:35:43 B: Yeah, absolutely.

00:35:44 K: Because I was very taken in by the Gideon and Harrow relationship, and by her doing this as an act of desperation, devotion, yes, to Harrow, but also just this sort of impossible circumstance, and how else are they gonna get their way out of, and, “Holy shit, now Lyctorhood,” but this can’t be what we wanted for these characters, I think, is probably the most prevalent thought in my head. In the same way that when we first are presented with Lyctorhood, you’re like, “This can’t be it, because we can’t have that for Gideon and Harrow,” and then you get it, and you’re like, “But no. This can’t be what we’re gonna have, right?”

00:36:16 B: [laughs] I know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the second this chapter ended, I started thinking, “Oh fuck, how are they gonna undo that?” It’s like, wow, that’s the whole process of the books. But to what you were saying, I do want to point out that it’s not necessarily– Harrow doesn’t have any other framework by which to compliment Gideon, right? She’s also someone who’s been raised in this society where cavalierhood and being a necromancer have such stringently-defined societal rules, and have valor and good qualities associated with them, right? That’s the highest praise she has to give, because she exists within that framework. And it takes her all of Nona the Ninth to unpack it, right? At the very, very end of Nona is the first time we see her seeing, “Wait. God, you’re actually kind of fucked up, and maybe I should think outside this box a little.” [laughs]

00:37:04 K: Absolutely. Harrow is saying it to Gideon as the highest praise she can give to her, and to give her this sense of belonging that she knows Gideon hasn’t had her whole life. So from Harrow, I do think it’s coming from this place of devotion and how much she cares for Gideon, genuinely, as well, that she’s trying to give that to her. I think when we talked a little bit about, I think, again, in the Pal and Cam discussion, maybe, about the unevenness of the necro-cav relationship and how it’s a– we live in a society, sort of thing, you know? [laughs] Just because we’re criticizing the dynamics of those relationships doesn’t mean that we’re criticizing every single necromancer for failing to completely upend that. They are also acting the roles that they’ve been born into, and the ways that they have been told is the highest standard of relationship that you can have with another person. So I do think that there’s something really tragic about that, too, that Harrow is giving Gideon this role and embracing her in this way because she sees that as the highest form of relationship she can have with her. It’s really, obviously, ultimately tragic that then what is the consequence of that and what she is left with is that Gideon has thrown herself onto these iron spikes to save Harrow, and that’s the reality of that dynamic.

00:38:15 B: Well, that was Chapter Thirty-Six, everyone.

00:38:18 K: That was Chapter Thirty-Six. We’ll have one more discussion about Gideon the Ninth before we wrap it all up, but this was definitely the big one, and oh, I can’t believe we’ve done it. I feel horrible. [both laugh]

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

00:38:39 B: This week’s game is a continuation of our bracket of the best lines from Gideon the Ninth, which was re-seeded based on the vote results from our Twitter bracket, which you may have been following along with. This episode we are looking at the, quote, unquote, “Western Conference” of our first round of the bracket. We covered eight lines last episode, and this episode, we’re covering the remaining eight contenders. So, to recap our criteria, if you missed last episode, we are giving each line a numerical ranking, trying to use some math here. We’re gonna be talking about the memorability, the quotability, the quality of the prose, how much the line reflects the overall character arcs, and then the impact on the story. And we will finish up the first round this episode, and then next episode, we will move on to the quarter finals, all the way to the finals.

00:39:31 K: Woo!

00:39:32 B: Oh, iconic, iconic line for our first matchup, for matchup number five. We have Harrow in the same scene, in fact, directly after the line we were just talking about, where she says, “‘Death first to vultures and scavengers.’” Ooh, “in sepulchral tones!” [laughs]

00:39:47 K: I mean, it’s just incredible. Yeah. And that’s got a lot going for it because I’d say it’s very memorable, very quotable.

00:39:53 B: Yeah. Very memorable, very quotable.

00:39:54 K: It’s gotta be five out of five on both.

00:39:55 B: Prose is five.

00:39:56 K: I love the prose. Yeah.

00:39:57 B: Five out of five Harrow moment.

00:39:58 K: “‘Death first to vultures and scavengers’” is great.

00:39:59 B: Story, I think we have to ding it. Maybe a four?

00:40:02 K: Story, maybe a little bit less.

00:40:03 B: Three or four?

00:40:04 K: Maybe a– I think three, maybe, for story. Because I think there’s enough going on outside of it for the story, and that isn’t really doing as much for that as it is for Harrow specifically. But fives all across the board for everything else.

00:40:13 B: Oh, so good.

00:40:15 K: That’s a strong, strong win.

00:40:17 B: So good. That’s a twenty-three!

00:40:19 K: Twenty-three!

00:40:20 B: Okay. And now we have our number fifteen seed.

00:40:23 K: Okay. And this is from the narration in Chapter One, about Gideon leaving the Ninth House, where it says, “If she didn’t do something drastic, she was going to die here down in the dark. And the worst part was, that would only be the beginning.”

00:40:36 B: Oh. It’s pretty good! [laughs]

00:40:38 K: Oh, I actually hate that this is paired against “‘Death first to vultures and scavengers.’”

00:40:41 B: It’s a good line.

00:40:42 K: Because I love this line. I so distinctly remember this jumping out at me on my first read as sort of really digging in the horrible stakes and trying to get my head around that idea that she’s trapped in this place that she hates, it’s horrible, she’s so alone, all of this too, and then also the really creepy idea of imagining, you’re somewhere that you hate, and you could just die down there, and then your body and skeleton will continue to do this work in service of this thing that you hate. It was such a feeling of claustrophobic, being trapped in this life you don’t like, and it really stuck with me.

00:41:24 B: I think it’s also quite– I’m gonna give it a five out of five on story, because it’s our first– it really advances this idea of Gideon’s relationship to the Ninth House, and the horrors of necromancy.

00:41:38 K: Absolutely. Yeah, I think it does so much right there to really drive in the stakes and world-build without telling you things, or that sort of exposition. It’s just this really grim, horrible circumstance that she’s obviously worried about, and now we’re kind of facing the reality of. I think it’s a really good character moment for Gideon.

00:41:56 B: I think characters, though– I don’t know. I’m giving it a three. I don’t think it’s definitive about Gideon. It’s more worldbuilding about the Ninth House. You know what I mean?

00:42:06 K: I guess it’s sort of, to me, crucial to her relationship with the Ninth House in terms of how much of a horror that is for her. And also the sense of the impetus of her wanting to do something, you know? If you look at the beginning of it, “If she didn’t do something drastic, she was gonna die down here in the dark,” I think it tells you a lot about, she’s someone who, when she’s in these horrible circumstances, she’s action-motivated, she’s going to take action, she’s going to do something drastic, rather than just accept her lot in life. So I think that tells you a lot right away about her.

00:42:35 B: Prose, I love it. I think it’s really well-written. I will say it’s not the most amazing representation of Tamsyn’s writing. I think maybe a four? Maybe even a three?

00:42:44 K: Yeah. I think a four is good. I think a four is good because it’s quite impactful. I think the “And the worst part was, that would only be the beginning,” says a lot in non-direct ways that I think is really, really well-done. But yeah, I agree. Tamsyn has other sections where the prose is maybe more in your face.

00:42:58 B: Yeah. And then in terms of memorable, I think memorable may be a four, but quotable may be more like a one or a two?

00:43:05 K: Yeah, I think it’s more memorable than quotable, for sure, because it’s more the impact or the idea of it that stays with you rather than the line itself, you’re not going around really quoting it.

00:43:13 B: Yeah.

00:43:14 K: That makes sense to me.

00:43:15 B: And it’s not a direct foreshadowing line, one of those ones that we do quote. Yeah.

00:43:21 K: Yeah, yeah.

00:43:22 B: Okay, so that is an eighteen. Eighteen out of twenty-five. Still respectable, but the number two seed still wins. Sad.

Matchup number six! Oh my god, this is one of my favorite lines ever. It didn’t– it’s the number seven seed. People on Twitter didn’t love it as much as I do, but this is what made me continue reading the book and what literally made me recommend the book to everyone I know. [laughs]

00:43:46 K: I remember. I remember you telling me that.

00:43:47 B: Oh yeah. [laughs] So this is Harrow at the very end of Chapter Three with her little stinger back to Gideon: “‘Because I completely fucking hate you. No offense.’” [laughs]

00:43:58 K: Iconic.

00:43:59 B: Iconic!

00:44:01 K: It’s such a good chapter ending.

00:44:04 B: Yes! And there are some banger chapter endings in this book, but that one is quite good. Okay, memorability, five out of five–

00:44:11 K: Yeah, and it’s quite good that it’s quite early on too. I think it really gives you that momentum shock to keep going with this book.

00:44:18 B: Yeah. Quotability–

00:44:19 K: I think it’s very quotable.

00:44:20 B: It’s very quotable. I’m giving it a four. It’s not as quotable as some of the other ones, but it’s still quite good.

00:44:24 K: Yeah. It’s more quotable within the context. You can say it, but it doesn’t maybe tell you as much about the books or whatever.

00:44:30 B: Yeah.

00:44:31 K: Prose…

00:44:31 B: Prose… Two? Two or three? Three?

00:44:32 K: I mean, it’s fun, but yeah, it’s not its strong suit, I would say.

00:44:35 B: Nothing special.

00:44:37 K: It’s just kind of good.

00:44:38 B: Characters, five out of five. It’s a five out of five story moment. I think story’s maybe a four out of five? Well, no, it’s a five. It’s Harrow’s big betrayal of Gideon. [laughs] Sorry, I–

00:44:50 K: Yeah, I think at that point, it’s not massively clear how Harrow feels. You’ve got their feud between them, but then that’s the knife twist, knife dig moment of Harrow being like, “This is why I’ve done this betrayal,” and all that. So yeah, I think it’s a five for story as well.

00:45:05 B: And it also sets up Gideon having to stay, becoming the cavalier in the end, not being able to escape.

00:45:11 K: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.

00:45:14 B: So that is, what, twenty-two, I think, out of twenty-five. Respectable. Respectable.

00:45:20 K: Very, very respectable.

00:45:22 B: And then we have the number ten seed. [laughs] This is during the winnowing trial, where Gideon looks at the big construct in the room and says, “‘The arms kind of look like swords. I want to fight it.’” This is fun. This is a fun one.

00:45:34 K: It’s fun. It’s a fun Gideon quote.

00:45:37 B: But it’s not top, top tier.

00:45:38 K: It’s not a frontrunner for me.

00:45:40 B: Yeah. I think memorability, maybe a–

00:45:41 K: No.

00:45:42 B: –two or a three? 2.5? [laughs] What do you think?

00:45:46 K: Yeah, do you think it’s more memorable or more quotable? Because I would say it’s probably a moment that people do kind of remember as a key Gideon-ism, a little bit, so I would say maybe three memorable, but maybe two quotable, because I don’t think many people are going around saying it. I mean, maybe I’m wrong. People will disagree with me. But it’s not.

00:45:58 B: [laughs] But I think you’re right. Prose, I mean, it’s a fun example of Gideon’s tone and voice as our protagonist, but I don’t think it’s doing anything amazing. Maybe like a three?

00:46:07 K: No, I think I would say a two or a three. I think I’m fine for that.

00:46:11 B: Ooh, okay, let’s go 2.5.

00:46:12 K: And then–

00:46:13 B: It’s a great Gideon moment, though. I’m giving this a five out of five.

00:46:16 K: It’s a great Gideon moment. Character, five out of five, a hundred percent. And story, I mean, they’re in the middle of this action-packed scene, trial. Maybe four out of five feels right to me.

00:46:26 B: Ah, 16.5? I may have done that wrong.

00:46:28 K: No, I think that’s right.

00:46:29 B: All right, so our winner is the “‘Because I completely fucking hate you. No offense.’” [laughs]

00:46:34 K: Yeah. That was always gonna be our winner, I think. That’s so good.

00:46:39 B: Okay, this is another toughie. To matchup number seven.

00:46:43 K: Yes, matchup number seven. So we have the three seed, which is very iconic. Pal in Chapter Twenty-Three: “‘Cam. Go loud.’”

00:46:54 B: Man, this duel scene has so many bangers. I mean, this is just so iconic.

00:46:58 K: It really is. It really is so much around the duel that has banger after banger.

00:47:02 B: Yeah.

00:47:03 K: But, I mean, for me, this hits like–

00:47:05 B: It seems like almost five out of five everything. The only thing I might ding it on is prose. Maybe a three or a four? It’s a four?

00:47:13 K: I would give it at least a four, because I also think it’s such a– you immediately get what he means by it, but it’s not an expression that– I mean, I think when we talked about it, you were saying that there’s sort of a video game thing that it calls back to. It’s not something that I’m familiar with, so it just sounds really fucking cool immediately. Not saying, “Go big,” or “Do something–”, but just “Go loud,” felt very cool immediately, to me. And you get what he means, but also because it’s not a direct thing that he’s saying, there’s the sort of ambiguity of, “What is that gonna look like? Cam going loud?” [Baily laughs] It’s so quick and succinct and exciting without even knowing what you’re excited for, and I love that about it. So, I think, yeah, definitely–

00:47:50 B: Yeah. Well, and it’s a five out of five character moment, too, right? We get this idea of– Cam’s asking Pal how to play it, and he’s like, “Yeah. You can fight her and win.” Which sort of implies that maybe she would’ve thrown the fight if he had just said, “Keep our cover,” or whatever. [laughs] So good.

00:48:08 K: Yeah. Just a certain sense of confidence, obviously, in the Sixth’s ability, even though everyone else is underestimating them. And then also a sense of, we’re learning that these characters have this ability. And also how in sync they are with each other, too, that he can say something like that and for her to understand it. I think it tells you a lot there. So that’s gotta be five out of five.

00:48:29 B: In terms of the overall story, I kind of want to give it a four. I don’t know. Are you thinking five here?

00:48:34 K: Yeah. I was thinking four or five. I think story is, if I had to not just be like, “Yeah, fives across the board,” to make it interesting, I think story is somewhere where I’d ding a little bit just because I think it’s more character than story. Obviously it’s more in the context of the fact– I would say Cam’s actual fight is maybe more crucial to story than Pal setting this up.

00:48:55 B: I agree. That gives us a twenty-three out of twenty-five. Oh gosh.

00:49:00 K: Very, very respectable.

00:49:01 B: And then, our fourteenth seed, which actually is one I was thinking about earlier. It’s a little bit of foreshadowing, where we have: it’s Harrow and Gideon’s conversation in Chapter Six as they’re leaving the Ninth House on the shuttle. Harrow says, “‘I want to watch you die.’ ‘Maybe, Nonagesimus, maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.’” [laughs]

00:49:21 K: Mm, horrible.

00:49:22 B: Oh, it’s so good!

00:49:23 K: Absolutely horrible.

00:49:25 B: So, I think this is quite memorable, because it’s one where you maybe pass over it on your first read, but on your second read, you’re like, “Oh my god!” But maybe we ding it for not coming out on first read? Like three?

00:49:37 K: Yeah, I think there’s something– it’s a different sort of memorable, I think, for a line to be immediately memorable when you read it, versus something to have a bit more meaning to you on a second read. So I think three for memorable sits right with me, because it’s less memorable than like, you discover it again, and you’re like, “Oh, wait, this was here and I didn’t notice it on the first time,” you know? “‘I want to watch you die’” is quite intense, but it’s more Gideon’s reply that has more meaning, obviously, on the second read.

00:50:05 B: Yeah.

00:50:06 K: I don’t know if I’d say it’s particularly quotable, either.

00:50:08 B: No. It’s like two.

00:50:09 K: It’s not one that you’re going around saying again or drawing back to. Yeah, it’s really more the foreshadowing that gives it any sort of impact.

00:50:20 B: I think prose, too, is maybe like a three. It’s representative of both of their voices.

00:50:25 K: It’s serviceable, it works, and obviously it’s got the foreshadowing baked in in a way that isn’t obvious at all on a first read. I think Tamsyn’s very skilled at doing that in a way that it’s not– it doesn’t seem like it’s suggesting anything. It seems like it’s just, we already know Harrow completely fucking hates her, that’s a normal thing for Harrow to say, that’s a normal thing for Gideon to reply, you know what I mean?

00:50:42 B: Yeah.

00:50:43 K: So I think it’s quite efficient in that way. Quite effective. But yeah, I think three out of five makes sense for me.

00:50:49 B: Characters–

00:50:50 K: Characters, I think, is a good one.

00:50:50 B: –is like a four.

00:50:51 K: Four.

00:50:52 B: Yeah. And then story–

00:50:53 K: Yeah, characters, we get that sort of animosity between the two of them, and then, obviously, the set-up.

00:50:58 B: Though story, it’s interesting, because on first read, it’s like a one. It’s like, whatever. But then on second read you’re like, “Oh my god.” It’s foreshadowing the whole end of the book. So maybe a three, split the difference?

00:51:06 K: Yeah. I think we’ve got to give it at least a three on story, just because of what’s kind of hidden in there.

00:51:12 B: So that’s a fifteen. So we have a clear winner here, which is “‘Go loud.’” Which, totally reasonable.

00:51:17 K: Yeah. That was always gonna be sailing into the second round.

00:51:21 B: [laughs] Oh, yeah. Alright, and our final matchup of the first round, yeah. We have– ohh! We have this sad, just tear-jerker line from Chapter Thirty-Six, where Harrow says, “‘Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House, you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.’” Ooh, so sad!

00:51:47 K: Ohhh. Oh, Harrow. Heart. Ache.

00:51:51 B: I think it’s pretty memorable. Like, “‘first flower of my House.’”

00:51:55 K: Absolutely, yeah. And Harrow just saying to Gideon, “‘You’re the greatest cavalier we’ve ever produced, it’s been a privilege.’” It’s such a key moment for them. I think it’s very memorable. “‘First flower of my house’” is pretty quotable. I would say four rather than five. It’s not doing quite as much there. Just because it’s a bit long as well, but it’s a good one. The prose I love.

00:52:14 B: I think that’s a five. It’s great.

00:52:15 K: I mean, it’s very classic Harrow.

00:52:17 B: Uh, characters, five! [laughs]

00:52:18 K: It’s very good. And then character and story, we also have to give it fives. It’s such a key moment for them in the story and what’s happening there.

00:52:24 B: I’m gonna give story four. Like, yes, it’s an important moment, but it’s not necessarily this moment that’s super pivotal. Harrow’s responding to Gideon–

00:52:32 K: True, true. It’s sort of happening at the same time as other things. Yeah, I agree.

00:52:37 B: That’s another twenty-three. That is a banger.

00:52:41 K: Love that.

00:52:43 B: And then– okay, so the eleventh seed was top for me, because I really like Pal’s whole monologue to Cytherea where he’s basically like, “Fuck you. I’m killing you because of everyone else.” But it’s like half a page long, so I pulled out the part that I thought was the best, but then it kind of robs it of context. So, I don’t know. I pulled out the part where he says, “‘You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad. I hope that pain is nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor.’”

00:53:10 K: I mean, that’s pretty good.

00:53:11 B: It’s pretty good. [laughs] But memorability is kind of a two or a three. And quotability, two or a three.

00:53:16 K: Yeah, I don’t think it’s particularly memorable or quotable, unfortunately. I think it’s one of those scenes where you remember more the overall happenings of the scene and consequences rather than what he said in that monologue there.

00:53:27 B: Exactly. Yep.

00:53:29 K: I do like the prose, though.

00:53:30 B: Prose is a four.

00:53:31 K: I like the use of “myriad” whenever Tamsyn can throw that in there. I like the threat of the end.

00:53:37 B: Characters, five. I mean–

00:53:38 K: Yeah, characters, five. It’s a huge moment for them.

00:53:40 B: We’re learning– Pal is basically revealing, “Oh, I’ve been trying to kill you the whole time we’ve been talking.” [laughs]

00:53:48 K: Absolutely, absolutely. And of course it’s also coming of him having the revelations about Cytherea and what happened to Dulcinea and all of this, and Pal’s relationship with her. I think it’s a very key– there’s been a lot of character build-up to that moment. So yeah, characters, five, story, five. A hundred percent.

00:54:02 B: I agree. That gives us a nineteen out of twenty-five.

00:54:07 K: Okay. So respectable, but not gonna be enough to beat out “‘Gideon, first flower of my House.’”

00:54:12 B: Yes. Good stuff! Okay, next episode we are going to pit our winners against each other again, in the quarter-finals, semifinals, and finals! So we will find our top line.

00:54:20 K: Ooh!

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

00:54:24 B: So, today’s discussion is gonna be a continuation of our discussion from last episode, where we tried to break down the timeline of events in the apocalypse and Resurrection. And in this episode, we’re going to move into what makes it significant that Tamsyn chose to write about a nuclear apocalypse starting in New Zealand. The choice to make the world end in a nuclear apocalypse was a very meaningful one from Tamsyn, given the context of New Zealand history with nuclear weapons, which I didn’t really know about much at all, and I think same for you, right?

00:55:00 K: Yeah, this is not something I was familiar with at all.

00:55:02 B: So my first introduction to this idea of New Zealand’s opposition to nuclear armament was when I visited New Zealand in 2022. I had to leave Australia temporarily to get my Australian work visa, but I was already in Australia, so I was like, “Okay, where can I go?” [laughs] So I briefly went to New Zealand. I spent some time in Auckland. I went to the Auckland Museum, and there was this great exhibit about Auckland called “Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland,” which featured the sculpture Mururoa by the Pacific Sisters, which are an art and activist collective from Tāmaki Makaurau, which is the Māori name for Auckland. And so the Pacific Sisters, their self-description is, “Known for their multidisciplinary arts practice and fashion activism, the mana wahine (women of strength) who comprise the Pacific Sisters collective have embraced Māori, Pacific and queer identities to weave cultural practices into contemporary art.” Really recommend looking them up. All their art is super cool.

This is a super arresting, moving piece. I just started reading everything I could about it. We’ll link the description in the show notes. I know it’s horrible to be describing a piece of art in an audio format. But yeah, we’ll link the full description, you can click “Read more” and actually see what we’re talking about. But basically this sculpture is a figure, a human-sized figure, that’s wearing a mask that looks like a gas mask, a grey and orange suit, and a grass skirt made of plastic that sort of echoes Polynesian cultural clothing, but also like a hazmat suit. And it just reminded me so much of Wake and her character and what she wears and what she stands for. And this piece– I’ll read the description. It says, “Mururoa protests the environmental destruction caused by French nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll between 1966 to 1996. The post-apocalyptic figure is a troubled protector of a world devastated by their own actions. The challenge: to stop the desecration of motu (lands), moana (oceans), and ultimately tagata (people).” So the mask is a welding helmet, it’s got the radiation symbol on it. They say in the description, “Job’s-tears seeds are a material symbolising mourning. The blackened cowrie shell disk prevents its wearer from seeing. They are blinded by the destruction and devastation of the environment and its people.” They also mention that plastic raffia is the skirt material used by people of the Moana “when resources become scarce or when they move into cities or industrial areas.” And the arms and legs are bandaged in a type of fabric that “has been used as emergency bandages to help hold melting skin. The stockings are used to give the impression of radioactive flesh.” So I saw this figure, this sculpture, and I started doing some research and reading, because I knew very vaguely about the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific, but I didn’t exactly learn about it in school, you know what I mean?

00:57:42 K: Yeah, no, absolutely. I also– I was just gonna add as well, before we go into that more, I think just the visual as well, too, and what you’re saying with the orange suit and the gas mask, it really is so arresting, and it does really make me wonder how much of that is clearly drawing on similar influences that maybe did go into what Tamsyn did with Wake, or even if this is something that Tamsyn is familiar or has seen something similar, I’d be really curious about those paths to arriving at this. Because I think, especially as we’re gonna get into this discussion, it’s really interesting how much her character in specific really stands for a lot of the same things. Yeah, definitely not something that I would’ve taken in from the book as well, or even thought about the nuclear implications as much as what we’re gonna get into here, because I definitely didn’t learn much about it in school either. Or outside school, you know, in my own life. [laughs]

00:58:33 B: There’s that line in Harrow the Ninth where John says, “No,” to Wake, “You wouldn’t have used nukes,” he’s super confident, and Wake’s like, “Yeah, you know a hell of a lot about me.” [laughs] Sort of implying that she would never, so there is definitely that undercurrent in her actual character.

00:58:51 K: Which is then interesting, how much that’s been preserved and passed down, obviously, ten thousand years, that it comes not only as this direct response to what John did in the nuclear– but also, just as a culture, that that’s something that was very strongly felt and then, obviously–

00:59:08 B: Passed down?

00:59:09 K: –strengthened by what happened, you know?

00:59:11 B: Yeah.

So, to talk about Mururoa specifically, and then we’ll move into nuclear testing more broadly, this piece of art – specifically the reading that I was doing about it – refers to an atoll in the southern Pacific Ocean in French Polynesia. And Mururoa and its sister atoll Fangataufa were the site of nuclear testing by France between 1966 and 1996, and were also the site of international protests against nuclear bombs. “Despite objections from the Polynesian Territorial Assembly,” – this is from Wikipedia – “the first nuclear test was conducted by France on July 2nd, 1966, when a plutonium fission bomb was exploded in the lagoon. According to onlookers, the explosion sucked all the water from the lagoon, ‘raining dead fish and mollusks down on the atoll,’ and that it spread contamination across the Pacific as far as Peru and New Zealand.” Wild to me that there were onlookers close enough to see the lagoon. I feel like the people should not have been there.

01:00:09 K: That feels probably way too close, yeah. I don’t know if it’s worth clarifying here, as well, that what we’re talking about, an atoll, is a coral island, essentially, and this is what’s happening. I feel like that’s a word I know a lot from the New York Times crossword. It comes up a lot there. [laughs] But it’s one of those words that I’m like, “Is that a casual word that most people are going to get?”

01:00:28 B: Good point. Yeah. Oh my god. So much crossword-ese that is now so familiar to me but obviously complete nonsense to the average person. Ely Cathedral, “ern[e],” the sea eagle. [laughs] Anyway.

01:00:39 K: Mhm. Yen! Yen comes up so much. [Baily laughs] Never knew that one before.

01:00:43 B: Yep. So, during this period of nuclear testing by France, there was intense international pressure, particularly from Greenpeace International and from New Zealand, to stop “atmospheric” nuclear testing, where they were dropping the bombs from the air. “The New Zealand Labor Government of the time, which sent two frigates” – two warships – “ in July 1973 called HMNZS Canterbury and Otago, to Mururoa in protest for a nuclear-free Pacific.” And there was a New Zealand cabinet minister and journalist aboard as, quote, “silent witnesses with the power to bring alive the conscience of the world.” There were also private yacht flotillas that went to Mururoa. I think one was organized by Greenpeace New Zealand. I don’t know about the whole timeline, but the yacht Vega was sailed there by David McTaggart in 1972 and 1973, and McTaggart was severely beaten by French commandos in 1973. The Fri, another yacht, was boarded and seized by the French navy in 1974. So France was really reacting negatively to these protests. But they were successful. In 1974, France abandoned atmospheric testing and they moved to underground testing. So they did not stop testing entirely. They drilled these shafts eight-hundred meters deep into the volcanic rock under these atolls where they would explode the bombs. And this was really controversial because the atolls started cracking and people noticed, and they were like, “Um, the radioactive material here from these explosions could escape.”

01:02:24 K: Seems bad.

01:02:24 B: There was one–

01:02:25 K: Seems like a bad thing to be witnessing going on.

01:02:28 B: Yep. There was one blast that was accidentally conducted at half the usual depth, and it caused a two-kilometer long and forty-centimeter wide crack. So yeah, also not great. Then there was another series of protests in 1995 because Jacques Chirac, the President of France, decided to run another series of nuclear tests just one year before the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was to be signed, an international treaty. This caused worldwide protests. There was an embargo on French wine. There were riots across Polynesia. The South Pacific Forum threatened to suspend France. And the last nuclear test on Mururoa occurred on December 27th, 1995, as part of this last series. France’s very last nuclear test entirely took place in January on Fangataufa, the neighboring atoll. And in total between a hundred and seventy-five to a hundred and eighty-one explosions took place at Mururoa. There’s numbers reported differently in different places. And obviously this is just one example of nuclear testing in the Pacific, but I think it’s one that New Zealand is most famous for being involved in, involved with, in terms of anti-nuclear activism.

The health consequences for French Polynesia were also kept really secret by the French government. A French journalist named Luis Gonzales-Mata in 1976 reported that “large numbers of Polynesians had been secretly sent on military flights to Paris for treatment for cancer.” And a Tahitian activist named Charlie Ching “told a nuclear-free Pacific hui” – a Māori gathering – “in 1983 that more than 200 Tahitians” – Tahiti is another island in French Polynesia – “had died from radiation-linked illnesses over 5 years.” You still can’t go to Mururoa. It’s still really radioactive, and it’s guarded by the French army.

01:04:23 K: I think what jumps out to me with all of this is what we were saying of how little this is something that we were familiar with, and not being from the region, and how much this context of anti-nuclear sentiment being very close to New Zealand and a key part of their history is something that I think not a lot of readers outside of New Zealand would be aware of when they’re reading these books and understanding, “Okay, yeah, Tamsyn, New Zealand, sure,” some of these characters, maybe slang, sure, maybe some of them are supposed to be from New Zealand. But then also, I think it’s very easy to view the idea of this nuclear future disaster as any sort of apocalypse– you know, pick an apocalyptic situation, sort of thing, for your future novel set after Earth has exploded ten thousand years from now, or whatever. I think that it can very much be seen as a sort of generic world-ending plot, and I think actually, it really, really changes the context to understand this relationship between New Zealand and nuclear war specifically. And then the fact that John went ahead and did this–

01:05:27 B: It was clearly a very intentional choice.

01:05:29 K: Yeah, exactly. I think this was really interesting for me, learning all of this, absolutely. And there were a few Tumblr posts that we wanted to refer to as well that really get into this a lot more from people who are more versed in this as well. And we’re gonna sum up some of the things they said, but we’ll definitely put them in the show notes as well, so definitely encourage going and reading them more thoroughly. Because we were like, “We can’t spend twenty minutes reading to you guys, but also, these are really, really good.” [Baily laughs] You should definitely go read everything that they had to say.

But the first one that we wanted to dig into and highlight is from sixth-light on Tumblr. They say here, “The core fact that you gotta know if you want to talk about New Zealand and nuclear weapons is that campaigning for nuclear disarmament and maintaining a legal nuclear-free zone in our territorial waters has been the core of our independent foreign policy as a country for nearly forty years, since the mid-1980s. This developed over the 60s and 70s from a popular groundswell of anti-nuclear sentiment focused around continued atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific by France” – so that’s what we were just talking about there with Mururoa – “as well as visits from nuclear-powered (and potentially nuclear-armed) American warships. It evolved into government action; left-wing governments took France to court to demand an end to testing and sent naval frigates to the nuclear test area to protest with Government ministers on board.”

01:06:39 B: Yeah, so I think that’s a reference to the 1974 protests with the Canterbury and Otago frigates, but then they also mention that in 1985, there was another Greenpeace protest involving a ship called the Rainbow Warrior which went to Mururoa and the French government actually bombed this ship. It was French spies who caused this bombing, and a photographer was killed. And this created this long prolonged diplomatic rift between New Zealand and France because France ended up actually giving these spies military decorations instead of putting them in jail, as they had promised New Zealand. And the population of New Zealand really strongly supported nuclear-free legislation, which was passed in 1987, which prohibits nuclear-powered or armed ships from going into New Zealand waters. And that actually led to New Zealand being suspended from the ANZUS, the Australia, New Zealand, and United States military alliance. And the ban is still so widely supported that even right-wing governments won’t consider overturning it. Sixth-light continues, “I am, however, excruciatingly aware that while our nuclear-free stance is viewed internally by New Zealanders as central to our national identity … nobody else remembers.” I feel kind of bad about this too, because I didn’t know. [laughs] I’m sorry, New Zealanders. We are learning and sharing.

01:08:06 K: But yeah, so, sixth-light asks then, “What does this mean for the Locked Tomb books … if anti-nuclear protesting has been a site not only of national identity formation but specifically Indigenous protest in the Pacific? It is Pasifika peoples who have borne the brunt of nuclear testing and much of the early anti-nuclear movement in Aotearoa was led by Māori and Pasifika.” So, “In Nona the Ninth, it becomes clear that John (a Māori man) and G–,” – this is Gideon the First–

01:08:29 B: Presumably, yeah. Presumably Māori. It’s not clear.

01:08:32 K: –“as well as their friends blackmailed the US government for a suitcase nuke and eventually used it to bomb Melbourne, with John then causing nuclear armageddon around the world.” And so sixth-light continues, “This is, uh, not the same thing as, quote, unquote, ‘Twitch streamers nuking New Zealand,’ as chill as I generally am with the eliding of detail for joke posts. This is a Māori man from and in New Zealand nuking first Australia and then the rest of the world.” And I do think this is a really good example of highlighting how– it’s kind of interesting the way that people talk about John and co. in general sometimes as a millennial polycule, lol, sort of thing. I think there are jokes to be made, but also, when you’re talking about a context which is very overlooked and crucial to the book, and also a context which is outside of, I think, what we assume as the default context, so often, when it comes to assuming Western or American settings is how it works and American political conflict is the default political spectrum that all future dystopias must be projected on. [Baily laughs] I do think this is actually something that is very interesting and different in this book, is that it is coming from a New Zealand context, and this is one of the ways in which what they do and the fact that they decide to nuke Australia first, that is very different than a concept of the US dropping bombs and the world blowing up, sort of thing.

01:09:51 B: Yeah. Yeah, imagine New Zealand dropping a nuclear bomb on someone. That would never, ever happen, especially not given the context that we now know and have learned. But you think, “Oh, okay, the US could accidentally start a war with Russia and end the world.” That’s much more familiar to our Canadian minds. [laughs] But it’s not at all what happened.

01:10:16 K: No. And so sixth-light describes this context a little bit more and the fact that it was John who did this, saying, “This is, obviously, if you’re coming from the historical context, hugely transgressive in a way I can only describe as a…horror of agency? The horror of saying, what if we were willing to do the thing that we identify ourselves as a nation as being against under all circumstances? What if instead of standing nobly against nuclear weapons, for reasons of moral indefensibility, we were the ones to pull the trigger? What if our culture and our people survived the apocalypse because one of us started it, instead of us surviving by virtue of being so small, so on the edge of the world, so carelessly left off world maps?” Which I think is also really interesting, because I think, then, when people do put it into context sometimes, it’s almost in this random sort of way, as, “Lol, Tamsyn’s writing a book about what if there was an apocalypse and New Zealand survives,” sort of thing. And it’s like, well, it’s not really– it’s not an accident either. It’s not just because she’s from New Zealand. It’s specifically interrogating what it would look like for that to be the case, and for it to be someone from New Zealand who started this all, what is the significance there. So I think that really puts that into more context too. There’s a lot more meaning to so much of the context and a lot more specific decision-making. I mean, that’s such a generic thing you can say across these books as a whole, that whenever something is there, there’s probably a reason for it. Tamsyn’s a very deliberate writer and world-builder and all of these things, and I think that you can get a very surface-level reading and go away with it as, “Okay, John started an apocalypse,” but there’s a lot more going on culturally and politically that I think is really interesting, and that I wouldn’t have been able to understand without getting a bit more of that context.

01:11:49 B: Exactly. Yeah. Sixth-light goes on to mention that Melbourne being the first to be nuked was probably a really intentional choice as well. They say, “New Zealand has a complicated relationship with Australia that’s hard to directly parallel to anywhere else (it’s sort of like Canada and the US but also not like Canada and the US in any way that Canadians or Americans ever interpret that statement in my experience).” [laughs] Which is kind of making both of us laugh right now. I’m sure that’s correct. I think we’ve paralleled the New Zealand-Australia relationship to the US and Canada before, but obviously it is a completely different political context that we don’t know too much about. [laughs]

01:12:21 K: Yeah, I think people parallel it so much from our perspectives, being like, “Oh, it’s like having the next door neighbor that’s much bigger that everyone always pays more attention to,” or people hear you talk and assume you’re from there instead of where you are. The idea of Canada and New Zealand having this underdog culture going for them compared to Australia and the US. But yeah, there’s clearly a lot more to the relationship between them that doesn’t directly apply to the Canada-US relationship whatsoever.

01:12:44 B: They specifically point out two things that there’s a lot of anxiety in Australia about New Zealand as a source of non-white and specifically Māori and Pasifika immigration to Australia. Australian immigration policy has become a lot more restrictive, but also a lot of New Zealanders live in Australia, and they do have a friendly relationship. And Melbourne, specifically, is a cool city. [laughs] But they say, “But it’s also a very white kind of cool. The kind enjoyed by rich Pākehā who can afford to go on weekend shopping holiday there.” [laughs] I wasn’t able to make it to Melbourne when I was in Australia, but it does very much have that cool city reputation. The working tram service, you know. They conclude, “ John and G– and the crew nuke Melbourne and it’s a nexus of all these tensions old and new, of who we think we are as people and as a nation, of how we relate to Australia which is our friend and nearest neighbour and our rival and our scapegoat (because they’re the really racist ones, aren’t they? If we say that loud enough, does it drown out the sounds of our own sins?).” Which of course I can’t speak to, but I think that is a pretty good parallel for the US and Canada relationship as well.

01:13:49 K: Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the number one thing that I run into so much being outside of Canada and talking to people about– like, mentioning that I’m Canadian, the one thing that I find so frustrating is how often people default to assume, “Oh, I’m so sorry for assuming you’re American, because they’re really horrible, and you guys are the really nice, polite ones,” too, and I’m just like, “No. Canada has so many problems. Canada has a lot of the same bad politics.” If you don’t think that– again, it’s a border. We’re neighbors. A lot of the things that happen there are also happening in Canada, or all of that drifts right in in the same ways. But I do think there’s such an assumption of that, too. And I do think it’s– I mean, I’m talking about the fact from an external perspective, but obviously I think a lot of Canadians have really internalized that too, of like, “We can point to the US, and be like, they’re the–”

01:14:34 B: “At least we’re better!” [laughs]

01:14:35 K: “–ones with bad politics and guns, and so therefore we’re doing fine,” you know? And it does kind of let yourself off the hook quite a lot to not interrogate things happening within your own country if you can point at someone else and be like, “Well, no, they’re the bad ones!”

01:14:48 B: Yeah, I mean, obviously, we don’t want to get too far into Canadian politics here, but Canada’s a fake, illegal country built on indigenous land in much the same way that New Zealand and Australia both are. I would say that New Zealand has a much more positive relationship with the Māori people, the indigenous people, compared to Australia. You know, in Tasmania, there are no living aboriginal Tasmanians. They were all killed. There was an awful, complete genocide. Compared to New Zealand, where Māori people have a decent amount of political power. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge amount. Obviously actual New Zealanders know way more about this than I do, but it’s– man, I don’t know what I’m getting at here. Things are pretty much bad everywhere. You can’t really point at the bigger neighbor as the source of all ills.

They conclude the post by saying, “It’s a fantasy of power and a horror of it at the same time. … But it deserves to be framed as what it is, as a response from a Kiwi author to our own history and identity. It deserves to be understood in context.” Yeah. I agree.

01:15:51 K: Yeah, I think that’s very fair, very true. And it changes– it adds so much to it to understand that context more, and I think it really puts it into a really interesting perspective that isn’t there if you don’t have that familiarity with New Zealand.

01:16:06 B: Yeah. And I think I wanted to wrap up this discussion by quoting from another great post by babylyctor which we will link in the show notes, which goes into the broader parallels and the themes woven into The Locked Tomb surrounding nuclear energy, nuclear waste, and how that’s linked to imperialism. They don’t really go into the New Zealand context quite so much, but I think they draw some really interesting and probably intentional parallels that Tamsyn has put into the series. So they begin by saying that The Locked Tomb has a lot of themes in common with nuclear waste management. Quote: “Both deal with the question of how to manage a devastating force that can’t be eliminated, only contained, and how to do so for incomprehensible amounts of time.” They point to the “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which will hold the waste from the research and production of United States nuclear weapons, and was developed with a ‘10,000 year period of regulatory concern.’” [laughs] Very familiar time span. And then there’s also a Finnish spent nuclear fuel repository, which is hoped to last for ten thousand years. So dealing with the storage and management of nuclear waste is something which occurs on the same time scale as the Locked Tomb timeline. They also point out a couple of other parallels. First, “entombment,” which is the term for a common method of nuclear waste disposal, where they– for a decommissioned nuclear reactor, which is the center of a nuclear power plant, or something, they could use entombment, which is essentially burying it underground. [both laugh] But there’s also another thing involved that they point out: there’s also salt, which is an important component in the nuclear entombment process to act as a physical and chemical barrier. And they point out that this is also a recurring motif in The Locked Tomb where it acts as this protective barrier to protect secrets. There’s Harrow revealing secrets in saltwater as a Ninth House tradition, there’s the saltwater around the tomb on the Ninth House, the salty sea of Canaan House, and all of John’s poetic references, saltwater creatures, the brackish water of the River. They also point out the term “entombment” really resonates with the fact that the series centers around this locked tomb which has this– the “enemy” of John who’s, quote, “older than time. The cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord,” according to Harrow in Gideon the Ninth. So we know that’s Alecto, but imagine if it were a nuclear bomb. That was the cost of the Resurrection in some senses.

01:18:48 K: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s really fascinating, that comparison between this idea of trying to bury or entomb nuclear detonators, nuclear waste disposal and that sort of thing, and how that parallels with the ten thousand years that have passed in Locked Tomb. And just the idea of something that has been– something that caused all of this devastation in the origin of the Resurrection and that then being– the idea of something being preserved, and there still being some danger that this ten thousand years is essentially still the fallout of that, and how interesting it is to actually then look forward that far in time and what it would look like is a really interesting parallel to me.

01:19:27 B: Yeah, that’s a really good point.

01:19:28 K: Yeah, and then they continue: babylyctor says in the post, “I think the most interesting aspect of nuclear entombment is the question of how to ensure the knowledge of the buried danger is transmitted into the far future – for example a myriad from now – to civilizations we really can’t imagine.” So Tamsyn obviously is imagining this civilization and this idea of what kind of knowledge would be still kept ten thousand years from now versus what is completely lost before. And I think that’s something that, you know, we were just saying, it’s really hard to grapple with long amounts of time. It’s really hard to imagine ten thousand years, even, in terms of what that actually looks like, and it is so interesting that the snippets of things that clearly have been preserved, whether the context is lost or not, versus this sense of if there was some sort of danger that needed to be buried. Well, we have the verse about the Locked Tomb and the stone never being rolled away, and what is the significance of that as a way of preserving people from this danger ten thousand years later when they’re not gonna have context or memory.

01:20:26 B: No, I think that was a great encapsulation. So, babylyctor continues, “This presents an almost impossible challenge for us, the Nine Houses … have somehow kept their continuity as a civilization, and there’s a whole cult devoted to reminding everyone of the importance of keeping the Tomb Locked.” And they point out that “the creation of a, quote, ‘nuclear priesthood’ was one of the solutions proposed by the Human Interference Task Force” – related to nuclear waste disposal – “in a paper titled ‘Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia.’” [laughs]

01:20:57 K: That’s amazing. We should have a nuclear priesthood. That’s so cool. [Baily laughs] I want so much more about this immediately.

01:21:04 B: The nuclear priesthood plan did not come to fruition, but they do talk about two actual plans and things that have been implemented to approach this problem. So, there are two examples that they point that sort of mirror the situation of the Ninth House and then also the First House. So, this first example that potentially mirrors the Ninth House: “the team charged with developing the WIPP” – so, again, that is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico where the US has done a lot of nuclear testing – “came up with the long-term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages, a warning system meant to last a myriad and remain comprehensible to future civilizations. The messages are a mix of hostile architecture and written warnings, and as a whole they’re ominous as fuck and they could go toe to toe with anything they do on the Ninth.” So this is probably familiar to people who have seen it online or whatnot, but I’ll read the warning system messages that they’ve thought of and implemented. [laughs]

01:21:54 K: So good.

01:21:55 B: “This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center…”. And I think in the diagrams there’s spikes and stuff coming out of the ground to indicate this danger. “The center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.” Also booty shorts. [both laugh] But also it’s a very, very disturbing set of messages that you imagine is really important to communicate to future cultures, but really disturbing. [laughs] Sorry, I can’t think about anything else.

01:23:00 K: Really disturbing, and really disturbing to imagine in a future culture, coming across and trying to interpret or understand and getting this ominous as fuck message, being like, “What the fuck happened here? And what the fuck am I being warned about?” That is crazy to actually think about it. It doesn’t feel like a real thing.

01:23:18 B: But then, that was literally implemented on the Ninth House in The Locked Tomb series. I don’t know if that was Tamsyn’s direct inspiration or anything like that, but there’s this prayer which is the traditional prayer of the Ninth House, which presumably people have been saying since Anastasia died in the Tomb. Harrowhark prays when she gets to Canaan House: “‘I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain,’” et cetera, et cetera.

01:23:49 K: Yeah. Very, very similar vibes.

01:23:50 B: I mean, those similarities are eerie!

01:23:52 K: Mhm. Exactly. And I think it’s interesting because it’s been– similar to how you were saying there was a proposal of the nuclear priesthood, but it’s been taken, this idea of a warning, and transmitting it into prayer, which I think is inherently a bit more vague or ambiguous. And it maybe doesn’t come across as a danger warning in the same way, because it’s not telling you, “There is something dangerous here. Fuck off.” There’s this sense of something which we are supposed– we have this duty, this duty is important, it is part of our tradition to maintain that this should not be rolled away, and we’ve given this religious importance to it, which is a very different direction to take. But the central sense of warning or forbiddenness is still there.

01:24:36 B: Yeah. Well, and, to the extent that Harrow’s parents commit suicide when they hear that Harrow opened the Tomb. It has that gravity in their culture.

01:24:47 K: Absolutely.

01:24:48 B: The other example is the Finnish Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, which is this opposite approach of, find a safe place, bury the nuclear waste, and forget about it. So, in the paper describing this 2009, they say, “The facility is to be sealed off and never opened again. Or so we hope, but can we ensure that? And how is it possible to warn our descendants of the deadly waste we left behind?” And the information surrounding this continues, they decided not to put, essentially, signs saying “Don’t dig here!” because people in ten thousand years probably wouldn’t be able to understand that. They just made it as inconspicuous as possible to avoid anything that would invite people to look and see what’s down there. And babylyctor says that that’s very reminiscent of what happened with the First House, which was purposefully abandoned and left undisturbed for thousands of years. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s “inconspicuous” because it’s sort of a central point of reverence in the Locked Tomb– in the Nine Houses’ religion. But nobody goes there, they’re not allowed to go there. And nobody knows anything about it.

01:25:53 K: And there’s no sense given there that there is anything in particular important that was left there or is still there or that should be avoided. Yeah, and so, they continue that “as cristabel-oct pointed out, this question of how we keep and transmit knowledge is also very present in The Locked Tomb series. In a way, the whole first book is about trying to understand the messages the Lyctors left a myriad ago.” As we were just saying, it’s not really fairly indicated in Canaan House. And says, “This question makes me think of ancient Aboriginal Australian stories, and how they recall events from tens of thousands of years ago, preserved through elaborated storytelling practices. It makes me think of Wake’s full name and how she called it a ‘human chain reaching back ten thousand years.’” Yeah, I think that’s–

01:26:33 B: There’s so much to dig into here, but we can’t do it in this episode. [laughs]

01:26:36 K: There’s so much to dig into. We can’t get into all the name stuff. We have talked about it and we will talk about it more, but I think that touches on what we were saying too, how do you properly have a sense of what a culture is going to be like in ten thousand years to try to communicate anything to them, and how as a culture can you possibly have any concept of what was the context ten thousand years ago. And the ways that they have managed to communicate information over such a long period of time really is interesting, and it does obviously highlight that surely some of those things that have lasted that must have an importance to them, for that to be something that people tried to hold onto as a culture.

01:27:10 B: Yeah. Well, and, in Harrow the Ninth, when Wake said that her name is a “human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” we didn’t know what she meant. But we now know that Aim is part of that human chain message, which, hopefully we find out more about that in Nona. There’s so much to speculate.

01:27:24 K: Yes please.

01:27:25 B: So babylyctor continues, “By the end of Gideon the Ninth, the existence of some sort of energy source below Canaan House is an important question that never gets resolved. Palamedes was vindicated in his megatheorem hypothesis, but Harrow never gets to learn if she was right.” So Harrow says in the book that “‘these experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.’” So then babylyctor goes into this Alecto-is-entombed-on-Earth theory, which we now know, sadly, is not true. But I don’t think Harrow’s necessarily wrong. There may or may not be something there. Maybe something to do with the Antioch demons, which are similar to what we saw kill Colum. There’s something going on there. I think that the First House is– it’s probably not nuclear waste explicitly, but I think that the way that the First House was abandoned is relevant in the same way that the Tomb is locked.

01:28:20 K: Yeah, I definitely have a sense that there is still likely something more at the First House, present there, something more going on than what we know at this point about it. And I think that this parallel to this idea of hiding something dangerous or having to stay away from it for a really long time highlights that as well, and could be key to it. So I’m very curious what more might be happening there.

01:28:44 B: And then babylyctor brings everything back to this idea of imperialism and nuclear testing in our time. They say, “I don’t think we can talk about nuclear energy and radioactive waste without talking about how they’re unavoidably linked to colonialism and imperialism, especially not in this story. Although The Locked Tomb happens in the distant future and much of it is set in space,” they point out that basically, it’s a Polynesian society. Just like we pointed out earlier, everybody seems to be Polynesian, everyone is Kiwi. Babylyctor continues, “Although this is a story about an intergalactic society ten thousand years in the future, Muir doesn’t seem to have a problem rooting it in present day Aotearoa, and Polynesia at large, as others have also noticed. Which makes the link between nuclear energy and imperialism extremely relevant.” And they say that after the atomic age officially began with the detonation of the first nuclear weapon in New Mexico, nuclear testing was moved to the Pacific, which imperialist countries, including the US, France, and Britain, used as testing grounds. My own perspective here is that from– you can imagine the leaders in the 1950s literally thinking, “Oh, no one important lives there. Let’s just nuke all these islands, and we’ll be safe in our own countries,” you know? Which of course is such a bad attitude.

01:30:04 K: Yeah. The important thing is that we have to test out this technology, and we have to pick somewhere where there’s gonna be the, quote, unquote, “least damage to us,” and it’s on the other side of the world, and isn’t that convenient?

01:30:14 B: Yeah. Like, who cares about the people who actually live there? Yeah, so between 1946 and 1958, babylyctor notes, “the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear bombs on, in, and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its lagoons, and exiling hundreds of people from their homes. The people of the Pacific Islands are still plagued by the consequences of these atrocities today as they were decades ago. Many are still displaced from their homes, like the people of Bikini Atoll, and their land, their means of subsistence, and their health are under permanent threat of radioactive poisoning, a situation only made worse by climate change.” So the Marshall Islands, they were a US territory. I believe now they are an independent country, and their flag is rad as fuck. Oh my god, that is such a cool flag. Sorry, live reaction to the Marshall Islands. [laughs]

01:31:03 K: Marshall Islands flag. No, this is– oh wow, that’s a great flag.

01:31:05 B: Kabriya, please keep this going. I’m spiraling. [laughs]

01:31:07 K: We’re not gonna describe visuals again on this audio format podcast. [Baily laughs] But I do recommend that you look up the Marshall Islands flag. It’s very cool. More people should do cool things with their flag.

01:31:17 B: Yeah. Yes, they are part of Polynesia. I think my favorite flag ever is the flag of Seychelles, which everybody should also look up. It’s kind of similar to this flag and very cool.

01:31:26 K: Yeah, I think Baily just likes diagonal lines on flags, maybe, but. [laughs]

01:31:31 B: Alright, okay. [laughs]

01:31:33 K: You don’t get a lot of it. You don’t realize until you see it, how rare it is. People could get a bit more creative.

01:31:37 B: Yeah!

01:31:38 K: So babylyctor continues and says that Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day is a holiday now “to remember that the arrogant colonial mindset which allowed and encouraged this horror does continue today – the Pacific remains neither nuclear free nor independent.” And to make it worse, they say, “There was no real attempt to ‘manage’ the radioactive leftovers of the explosions,” so it’s not just that this thing happened at a certain point, but it’s also these ongoing effects that currently people are still dealing with. It says, “One example, at Enewetak Atoll, after scrapping the radioactive topsoil and debris from six of the islands, the US moved it all to Runit Island and stored it in the nuclear blast crater of the Cactus test. It was entombed in concrete to create a nuclear waste repository on the island known as the Runit Dome or, locally, The Tomb.” Interesting.

01:32:24 B: So this tomb is this half-meter thick concrete slab which covers these tens of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste from the Enewetak Atoll tests and other tests, including plutonium radioactive waste that sits directly on top of permeable soil. So this dome built in 1958, maybe not the best thought-through. There are cracks in it, there are cracks in this dome. Radioactive waste, according to a US report in 2013, has already started to leach out of this crater. And babylyctor points out that “rising sea levels and more extreme atmospheric conditions only worsen the danger this radioactive waste poses for the people of the Pacific, and everyone else too.” And they conclude, “Here I see a parallel between what imperialist western states did to the Pacific Islands through the use of nuclear energy – carelessly and cruelly testing a dangerous type of power with the objective to use it to ensure western hegemony – and how the Empire in The Locked Tomb uses thanergy to slowly kill foreign planets, turning them into literal dead zones, so they can use them as energy sources, ensuring further expansion.” And they continue in another reblog of this post, “Necromancy could be a sort of metaphor for nuclear energy, but with the death it brings made explicit and impossible to ignore. And all of it – the energy source, whether nuclear or thanergetic – a sort of shorthand to make explicit how colonialism and imperialism is fueled by death. Death of people, of cultures, languages, religions, and ecosystems.” Which I think is very true and also probably a very intentional choice by Tamsyn.

01:33:52 K: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the more reading into this and learning about this that we’ve done in this episode, the more impossible it becomes to imagine that there’s not something very deliberate that’s happening here. And I think that so much of what Tamsyn’s is doing is deliberate.

01:34:08 B: Well, and, I think we’ve discussed previously potential parallels with fossil fuels and necromancy that were probably intentional, and I think the nuclear energy, necromancy parallel is also quite– it seems very clear to me.

01:34:22 K: Yeah, and I think it’s just really interesting to get into the specificity of it, because like I was saying earlier, I think it’s really easy to assume a really general idea of nuclear apocalypse, end-of-world sort of situation, and I think it adds so much more to the characters and who they are even ten thousand years later to understand this cultural context that they’re coming from, and how much of that is in what Tamsyn’s doing herself. And I think it’s something that is so overlooked in this series, a little bit, when you get– you know, it’s got so many fun, buzzy things that you can point to when you talk about it. You’ve got your lesbian necromancers, haunted gothic castles in space, woo. Lots of things, and people talk about how nothing really makes sense, and this and that, but so much of what I enjoy about these books and this series is the picking apart of these half-truths that characters share at these– you know, John telling one story slightly different, and then telling it again in Nona the Ninth, to try to understand what actually happened, not just because there’s that sense of puzzle-reward, like, “I want to learn more about the history, and I like getting a reveal,” and that sort of thing, which I think is always kind of present, but also because I think the worldbuilding that Tamsyn has constructed here is really interesting and so much more specific and so much more expansive in terms of the history of the Resurrection than anything that I necessarily expected going into it or would expect from this sort of series this far into the future. And just the scale of the story is what continually manages to impress me over and over, of what story she is telling here that is not just about Gideon and Harrow, and characters that we love and the protagonists of these stories, but also this ten-thousand-year story of this hugely tragic thing that happened, and why it happened, and how the world as we know it of humanity is reeling and affected by it ten thousand years later, and this one man at the middle of it. And I think that all of that is such a fascinating bigger story than what often gets focused on so much, and so I think it was really nice to take a step back and dig into that this episode.

01:36:36 B: Yeah, and I mean, this is probably a full dissertation level of information and everything. We couldn’t possibly have talked about the whole history of nuclear testing in the Pacific and all of its ramifications, but I think overall, learning about this and discussing this has just reemphasized to me that The Locked Tomb is a series that will reward the reader who’s willing to work for it. None of this stuff is on the surface. You have to dig, you have to pull at threads. And I think that’s what really frustrates and annoys some readers who bounce off the books, or even some readers who are into the books but are only really reading it for the characters, which is completely fair, but you get so much more out of the books if you do this kind of digging and this level of thinking about it. And I don’t want to bash any other particular authors, but we recently read a book for book club – I say recently, it was like a year ago – that was explicitly about a historical atrocity that I think did a really poor job of building an interesting story around it. It really, to my mind, should have just been historical fiction centered on that event. But I think The Locked Tomb takes these historical events, takes all this historical context, and weaves it into a really interesting narrative where these things have resonance and really strongly affect the course of the story, while still being completely buried under the surface.

01:37:51 K: Yeah, it’s clearly there as an influence for the story and an inciting thing to look ten thousand years in the future and to imagine what would have had to happen for a story that is spanning an entire culture and an entire depth of the Earth, all of these things, but it’s never in any way didactic. It’s not like Tamsyn is trying to hit us over the head with a metaphor to be like, “Hey guys, nuclear weapons: bad! Have you considered?” That’s not the point. It’s not one of those stories, and that’s not the point, where it’s trying to be a political allegory in that in-you-face kind of way, but it’s the fact that there’s a context that she’s writing from that is obviously informing the way that she has built the world, the way that she imagined the end of the world. And understanding that, and doing the work to piece together the story that John is telling and what he means with offhand things that he says makes that context so much richer. But it is all in service of this story that she’s trying to tell, which is ultimately this science fiction, fantasy, necromancy, future story that is really also based in these really fascinating characters and drama and interpersonal relationships, and I think that is still very much the key of it. It just has this very interesting, specific background that she’s coming from.

(Upbeat, driving electronic music)

01:39:11 B: It’s time for Bone of the Week! And in this episode, I get to pick a bone for Kabriya to guess its location and then rank its sexiness. Kabriya, are you ready?

01:39:23 K: Yay, Bone of the Week! I’m so ready. I can’t wait to decide how sexy this random new bone is gonna be. I hope it’s sexy. You never know.

01:39:32 B: So, this week’s bone is the tibia. Where do you think it’s located?

01:39:38 K: Okay, I do know this bone.

01:39:40 B: [gasps] She knows!

01:39:41 K: But I always say that and then I immediately start doubting myself and I’m like, “Maybe I’ve never heard of any bone in the human body ever.” [Baily laughs] What’s a rib? I simply don’t know. The tibia’s in your leg, right?

01:39:52 B: It is in your leg!

01:39:53 K: I would say… is it high in your leg? Like, in the thigh? No, it’s lower in the leg. The main thigh bone is the femur, I know that. Baily’s making lots of faces at me that are making me doubt myself even more.

01:40:06 B: Doing hot and cold faces.

01:40:07 K: I’ve never heard of a single bone in my life. I’m pretty sure the tibia…

01:40:12 B: So if it’s not in the top of the leg…

01:40:14 K: Okay, the bottom of the leg.

01:40:15 B: Yeah! [laughs]

01:40:16 K: What one might call the calf, or shin, or–

01:40:21 B: Yeah.

01:40:22 K: I don’t know what else you call the lower half of your leg.

01:40:25 B: So, the tibia is also known as the shin bone. It is the larger and stronger of the two bones in the leg below the knee. So there are two. The other one’s called the fibula, it’s smaller, it’s behind. And yeah, the tibia connects the knee to the ankle. It is actually – interesting fact that I did not know – named for the flute tibia, which is the Latin name for an ancient double flute, which to my very vague understanding is kind of like playing two oboes at once. I don’t know, classics enjoyers, chime in.

01:40:54 K: Oh, god. I struggled enough with the single flute. That’s more traumatic than sexy to me, but okay. [Baily laughs] Theoretically, music’s sexy.

01:41:01 B: And it’s the second-largest bone in the human body after the femur. And this is actually a bone that was in Chapter Thirty-Six. It’s part of the bone construct. Gideon runs away from, quote, “the nightmare of splintering fibulae and tibiae.”

01:41:19 K: Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare. How sexy do I think the tibia is?

01:41:23 B: How sexy?

01:41:24 K: Interesting. I do think, pretty sexy. Because I think legs are sexy, your calves are sexy. You can flash a bit of calf. It’s a very exposed part of your leg if you’re wearing not even that short a–

01:41:38 B: Yeah, the only time I ever think about my tibia is when I fuckin’ hit it on something really hard. [laughs] It hurts a lot! So it’s doubly exposed.

01:41:47 K: Yeah, but I’m picturing looking at someone’s calves, you know? That can be a very sensual part of the human body.

01:41:54 B: But that’s the fibula! The tibia’s the one in front.

01:41:57 K: Yeah, but the front bone can be sexy too.

01:42:00 B: Alright.

01:42:01 K: What do you mean only the back is sexy?

01:42:02 B: I don’t know! I thought that’s what you meant. [laughs]

01:42:03 K: I’m thinking of the whole calf.

01:42:05 B: Okay. [laughs]

01:42:06 K: I’m admiring of all sides of the human calf, including the front. I actually– no, I really don’t like when I feel on my tibia sometimes, you can kind of feel– not under, but if you feel the side of it where it starts to go in–

01:42:22 B: I’m doing it right now. [laughs]

01:42:23 K: Sometimes I do that and I’m just like, “Ooh, I don’t like that there’s an underside of the bone.” That’s actually a really uncanny, uncomfortable feeling. So I would not describe that feeling as particularly sexy, pressing into the underside of my own tibia. But generally the concept of the tibia, the calf, I think pretty sexy. I’m gonna give this–

01:42:41 B: And we gave the femur a high rating because it’s so big and strong. This is the second-biggest and strongest.

01:42:47 K: Yeah, but I think the femur also had the danger associated with it that made it really sexy.

01:42:49 B: Mm, yes.

01:42:50 K: You know, a bone that’s really dangerous to break.

01:42:51 B: You don’t think bumping your shin poses a danger? [laughs]

01:42:54 K: I think bumping your shin is more annoying than sexy. I don’t know how dangerous it is to break a tibia. I feel like you don’t hear about it happening as often, but it would be pretty bad. I’m gonna give this a comfortable seven. Like, it’s sexy, but it’s in–

01:43:07 B: That’s high!

01:43:10 K: I think it’s very sexy, but it’s very obvious-sexy, to me. It’s very mainstream sexy. Really, again, I’m just picturing flashing a bit of calf muscle, and it’s like, that’s not an interesting sexy, you know? You don’t have to work for it.

01:43:25 B: Yeah, except those calf raises. Yeah, okay, I see what you mean. I think you gave the femur a seven, though. Is it sexier than the femur?

01:43:30 K: Well, I don’t remember what I did three hours ago, Baily. [Baily laughs] So there is no consistency to these ratings.

01:43:37 B: I was just putting together a list on our website of all the Bones of the Week, so I recall. You’re still thinking seven?

01:43:43 K: I think part of the sexiness of Bone of the Week is that you never know what mood you’re gonna find me in, you know?

01:43:48 B: So true. It’s a capricious segment.

01:43:52 K: And I’m okay for tibia and femur equality.

01:43:55 B: Yeah, alright. Yeah.

01:43:57 K: I can be okay with that.

01:43:58 B: Seven out of ten. Sounds good.

01:44:00 K: Seven out of ten. Get your tibias out.

01:44:03 B: The sequel to brat summer. [laughs]

01:44:07 K: Brat summer is not over yet. I don’t know when this episode will be released. Actually, brat summer probably will be over by the time this episode is released. [both laugh] That’s really sad to think about. But it’s very important to me. I have a personal crusade, which is just that people say summer is over too early. And at the point of recording this episode, in my humble opinion, summer, and therefore brat summer, are not over yet. So, tibias are sexy.

01:44:30 B: And it’s just starting in the southern hemisphere, you know?

01:44:32 K: Brat summer never dies. That’s true. We’re all about New Zealand, baby. They’re just thriving in brat summer right now.

01:44:39 B: Yep, exactly.

01:44:40 K: And that’s a sexy note to end on.

(Slow, groovy rock music)

01:44:48 K: Thanks for joining us for the end of our Chapter Thirty-Six recap this episode. We finally got there. We finally did it. We are just oh-so close to finishing Gideon the Ninth, and we can’t wait to get there with you. If you want let us know how you feel about the really tragic events we covered in this episode, or your thoughts on the iconic bone lines, our opinions, whether you agree with us, whether you disagree with us, any thoughts on the nuclear apocalypse and Resurrection, because we certainly have lots of those, you can always get in touch with us online @onefleshonepod on Twitter, TikTok, or Tumblr, or send us an email at onefleshonepod@gmail.com. You can also support us on Patreon if you’re not already. Patreon.com/onefleshonepod. We have a Discord set up for our Patreon sponsors as well where we get to chat about all things Locked Tomb, and whichever method of communication you choose to reach out to us, we really do love hearing your thoughts on these books and the topics that we’re discussing in these episodes. So we will be back in our next episode covering Chapter Thirty-Seven, and, dare I say it, finishing our recap of Gideon the Ninth. [Baily gasps] The moment is almost here.

B: We’ll see you next time on One Flesh, One End.

(Slow, groovy rock music continues)

01:46:18 B: Thank you so much to all of our supporters on Patreon, and especially to Adrian J, Alex, Amber, Anne D., Spookybean, Duck, Bridget Lowery, Camille, Chel, Eli Swihart, Erin M., Esther Wright, George, Gina, Grace, Heather Cartwright, Jack, JJ, Turtle on Mars, Jess, Keisha, Ludwinas,

01:46:53 K: Liam, Maria, Aaron Storm, Dudley, Persephone, Hammy, Quill, Apple, Relmin, Rose, Rosemory Of The Sea, Sara H., Simon H., Sonya, Taj, Timothy Bennett, Trans Rights are Human Rights, Truth in Advertising, Virginia, Vulcan Charm, Waloose, Will Matchett, and Zach.