Gideon The Ninth - Blog Posts
Doodles from when I was reading GtN. _(:3」∠)_
First post here in some time!
I'm celebrating the spooky season drawing the Ninth because the books are amazing and I'm obsessed ✨
I'm trying to figure out the designs still, so i have just some concept art for now
Wake me up— WAKE ME UP INSIDE
(I can’t Wake up— WAKE ME UP INSIDE
if Gideon ever wants to talk about her mom, would John be like 'ah yeah, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' or 'do you wanna talk about Wake Me Up When September Ends?'
Preorders are now open for The Locked Tomb Fashion Zine!
Preorders will run from 7/3/24 to 8/1/24. This is a charity zine with all profit benefiting the National Center for Transgender Equality.
There are four bundles for purchasing on our gumroad:
PDF Only
PDF and Hardcopy Zine
PDF, Hardcopy Zine, and Merch
Merch Only
If you are in the UK please use our Etsy store because of VATs, thank you!
Gideon is about to break couple bones
close ups:
Character, book, and author names under the cut
Gideon Nav- The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
Andrew Minyard- All for the Game by Nora Sakavic
experts weigh in?
explain if you wish
griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice
A Gideon (Kiriona) sketch ive been working on forever and am unsure if I'll finish🫠
nerd lesbians playing rainbow road..... fork found in kitchen
Just wanna take a moment of appreciation for what I saw at my local Barnes & Noble today
i've been neglecting drawing gid with curly hair... righting my wrongs
This has taken hours of work comparing different, yet similar fonts and the book cover titles.
All completely hand drawn. I present my own version of the locked tomb font.
For your own use:
It’s currently only letters right now.
I will update as I work through numbers and symbols.
Reread time! I take annotating very seriously 👆
Gideeeonn (I’ve been reading the first book!!)
cam, my favourite jerd (jock nerd)
used vinesh phogat as a reference for her, as suggested by @threesday here :)
Omg this is the best thing ever!!
IT'S HERE!! MY GIDEON THE NINTH (UNOFFICIAL) ANIME OPENING
i will sell my soul to have (or work on) an animated tlt adaptation. in the meantime.. fan opening >:)
made with sweat, tears, bones and a lot of love <3
i NEED nona from gideon/kirionas point of view. i know the second she was resurrected she was trying to figure out where harrow is. the first thing she even ASKS nona is where harrow is. "listen, she can be in hell for all i care, i wont get mad. she can be at the bottom of the sea or at the bottom of space. i just need to know– where." i know she was going insane for MONTHS
griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice
The Fifth for the next sketchpage?
One Magnus and one Abigail, coming right up!
i love how as you read more into tlt, the ninth house seems more and more normal. Like if i'm at an immoral evil government competition, and i use human fat as soap and animate skeletons to do menial labor, i'm gonna LOSE if my competition is the third house, represented by ianthe "who HASN'T eaten human flesh and fucked a corpse" tridentarius. My weird skeleton thing seems normal, suddenly. Well-adjusted, even. It's recycling. They're using resources in a sustainable way. Normal and regular and productive for a post-climate change apocalypse universe.
People go on and on about how Muir drops you into gtn hearing from the person who knows the least about whats happening, and does not hand hold the reader through the crazy shit that occurs, and that's all true. It truly is a crazy writing decision to make your first pov character come from the universe's equivalent of amish fundamentalists. But the reader is actually done a huge favor being dropped into the ninth house first, because we already understand that space is cold and what catholic nuns are, and what goths look like, and what lesbians are. Very little time is wasted in the first chunk of gtn ripping hair out of your head wondering what the fuck is going on, because for all of its strangeness, the ninth house is already the most familiar thing we're gonna get.
Because THEN we learn that this whole universe's medieval chivalry system is designed to groom people from CHILDREN to not only be exploited and used as human batteries for necromancers, but to LIKE it. to wax poetic about it. to confuse it for love, to write fucking academic papers about it! Then we learn about planet flipping, an act so horrific and violent it turns the planet's soul into a massive vengeful monster capable of killing GOD. Like what do you MEAN the animals "change"? Is this why noodle has six legs? I would MUCH prefer to wear skeleton makeup and repent forever if the alternative was to witness my family dog grow TWO EXTRA LIMBS because the planet he lived on fucking died. Suddenly, living in the asscrack of a planet where no light gets in seems like a sweet deal when the whole solar system is lit by a sun that MAKES YOU GO CRAZY. The ninth house's WORST sin, killing 200 babies to make Harrow, a waste of resources and an act so terrible it haunts Harrow for the entire span of her life, is like a BLIP compared to the death count Jod's empire. God even hears about it and he's like, no big deal! The cohort probably kills that amount of people in a DAY.
And its ALSO tragic because you realize that all of this trauma and abuse that Gideon goes through is not really because of the ninth house at all. It's really just an individual skill issue that she wasn't treated with compassion. Nobody hated her because she's jesus or a bomb, nobody even KNOWS she's a bomb. It's just Priamhark and Pelleamena being deeply guilty and scared people that motivates her treatment, and absolutely nothing else.
They did something bad, and they know it, and Gideon survived it, and they can't kill her to cover it up, and that's IT. They killed themselves for pride, because they were afraid of the consequences of their actions (both the baby killing and Harrow opening the tomb) coming back to bite them. You can argue this is the catholicism of it all, and I wouldn't say you're wrong, but compared to the cavalier system, where exploitation is in the very lining of the house's institutions, the ninth house is really removed from the space empire's blood factory. This is compared to the fourth house where they have tons of children to be CANNON FODDER to join the cohort at fucking 14, compared to the eight house uncle nephew fuckery, even the fifth house which actually does seems nice to live on but also seems to have the fourth house in some sort of fucked up political bear hug??? (maybe the fourth house has so many kids in order to fight the fifth's battles? which is EXACTLY what jod's whole empire is about; politely stirring your tea and acting nice while you destroy everything) compared to ALL OF THAT, the cruelty that Gideon faces is really more a bug of the ninth's system than a feature.
There's nothing baked into the culture and everyday life of the ninth house that necessitated that cruelty; in fact, for such a pragmatic and resource-scarce place, it's WEIRD that a strong able-bodied young person was treated like a waste of space and resources. It could just have easily not happened, if Harrow's parents had been different people. Maybe they were products of their environment, but so was Harrow, and she values Gideon's life SO MUCH that she'd literally rather carve out parts of her own brain than exploit her. Gideon grows up knowing really NOTHING about cavaliers, so remote from the horrors of the empire that she develops an idea of what the cohort is from porn magazines. And in a lot of ways, that upbringing was desolate and terrible, and in a lot of other ways it literally DID NOT HAVE TO BE.
Gideon's MAIN THING is that she wants to be useful, to be needed, to be loved and it SUCKS that she couldn't even get it in the one place where she was actually an invaluable resource, where the death empire had the weakest reach. Gideon can't even blame her lack of love on the fucked up chivalry system like everyone else can because it JUST WASNT REALLY RELEVENT!?!?! This is like if i rolled up to the trauma competition and everyone else was raised in a nuclear warzone by wolves or something and i grew up in like, the suburbs and was raised by teachers and i somehow STILL WON. truly what the fuck guys.
Oh, you're soooo gonna go insane about the next book
finally reading gideon the ninth after procrastinating for years and. oh my god i need to be locked in a cage, why would you reccomend these, harrowhark nonagesimus is rotating in my mind like in a microwave. 80% through the audiobook and i need a lobotomy and i think that feeling is not going to get better
You’re not the only one getting a lobotomy <3
Have fun with the second book
mama a Body behind you 😰 // pt1/pt2/pt3