Need a break after Act II? Us too. While Han embarks on a research trip, enjoy this peek behind the curtain, featuring outtakes, tangents, personal lore, extended cuts, canon confusion, and other deleted scenes from our season so far. Next week we'll be back with Gideon the Ninth, Act III.

This episode features Claire (she/they), Han (any pronouns), and guests Caro (she/they), Geddy (she/her), and Night (he/him).

Our cover art for this episode features Han and its wife as Gideon and Harrow.

Content Warning: unintentional weight loss, death, sex, abuse

Further Reading:

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990) Good Omens

Note: We encourage you to source one in a way that doesn't give Neil Gaiman money, like borrowing a copy or picking a used copy at bookshop.org You can also make a donation to Our Voice in honor of his victims using the name "Calliope." Read more about that here.

Thomas Wharton (2004) The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books

Kaitlyn Vogt (2015) Being Nice is Lethal: Disciplining and Subverting Southern Femininity in Contemporary Southern Popular Culture

Alexander M. Maley and Jack L. Arbiser (2015) Gentian Violet: A 19th Century Drug Re-Emerges in the 21st Century

Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss (2009) Why Women Have Sex

Han Koehle (ongoing) The Locked Tomb: Unauthorized Annotated Edition

T. X. Watson and Astrid Lundberg (2025) Academic and Ergodic Literature

Resting Glitch Face

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire (she/they) and Han (any pronouns) reread Gideon the Ninth Act II, Chapter 16. Gideon and Harrow enjoy their first major victory on the path to lyctorhood. Then, everything changes.

Content Warnings: death, child abuse, emetophobia, humiliation, mild cannibalism

Further Reading:

Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer (2022) Kinship

James Ashworth (2022). Neanderthal Extinction May Have Been Caused by Sex, Not Fighting.

Victor Hugo (1831) The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire (she/they) and Han (any pronouns) welcome Hannah (she/her) to re-read Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 15. The Ninth receive an invitation. All the Houses get together. Gideon gets to eat a dessert.

Our cover is guest Hannah. You can find her wonderful cosplay and commentary on TikTok and and Tumblr.

Content Warning: eating your cav, murder, infertility, slavery

Further Reading:

Catechism regarding priests acting in persona Christi Capitis

Aubrey Smalls (2025) Did You Know About Court Dwarfs?

Samin Nosrat (2013) Jeweled Rice

T. H. White (1958) The Once and Future King

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Note from Han: Sorry this is late! I have three major grad school deadlines coming up and I totally forgot, like, what day it was and that this podcast exists. My bad.

Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) re-read Chapter 14 of Gideon the Ninth. Gideon and Harrow face an interesting challenge and take their relationship to an awkward new level. Harrow takes a nap. Gideon lays down some boundaries.

Today’s cover art is by Han.

Content Warning: blood, pain, injury, eugenics

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) dive into Gideon the Ninth Act II Chapter 13. Gideon and Harrow negotiate. Han questions Harrow's understanding of the rules. Claire highlights other necro/cav models. Conversation gets unusually dark there in the middle.

Today’s cover art was provided by Claire.

Content Warning: Blood, genitals, sex, emetophobia, kink, slavery, use of human remains, genocide, Nazis, eugenics

Further Reading:

Arendse I Lund (2016) The People Who Became Book Bindings

Jim Crow Museum (2013) Human Leather

Alexandra Minna Stern (2015) Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America

Ghada Sasa (2022) Oppressive Pines: Uprooting Israeli Green Colonialism and Implanting Palestinian A'wna

John Pollack (2011) The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) welcome guest Geddy (she/her) to dig into Gideon the Ninth Chapter 12. Harrow does some crafting. Gideon is full of shit. Some people are not where Gideon expects them to be, and Gideon is in some unexpected places herself.

Today’s cover art features our lovely guest Geddy (and friend of the show Kristen), photographed by Han.

Content Warning: death, blood, murder probably?

Further Reading:

Britannica (n.d.) Memento mori

Asaf Weisman et al. (2019) Congenital Insensitivity to Pain: A Misnomer.

SnooFloofs3374 (2024) I'm unable to feel pain, AMA

Keith Houston (2015) The mysterious origins of punctuation

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire (she/they) and Han (any pronouns) dig into Gideon the Ninth chapter 11, contrasting the duals between Gideon and the cavaliers of the Fifth and Third and exploring the relationship between Magnus and Jeannemary. Claire has a spectacular cosplay idea. There's quite a lot of sword fighting discussion in this one.

Content Warning: fatphobia, violence, child soldiers

Further Reading:

Roy Ward Baker (1981) The Monster Club

Susanna Ives (2023) How to Victorian Maid Servant

Joseph Brassey (2017) Skyfarer

Olivier Girard et al (2023) "Living High - Training Low" for Olympic Medal Performance

Annotated List of Historical [Swordfighting] Manuals

United Nations (n.d.) Child Recruitment and Use

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) welcome Caro (she/they) to discuss Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 10. We dig into the seventh's claim that she never lied and what that means about the text. Speculations are made about possible animal agriculture (cannibalism??) in the Empire. Late in the episode we promise to share a link to this artist. We talk about in-world taboos and address which ships make us personally the most uncomfortable as readers.

Content Warning: death, calorie mention, cannibalism, necrophilia, war crimes, self-harm, addiction, ableism, murder, incest

Further Reading:

Volker H.W. Rudolf & Janis Antonovics (2007) Disease Transmission by Cannibalism: Rare Event or Common Occurrence?

Nicholas Fabiano (2024) Is Exercise a Form of Self Harm?

Susan Schweik (2010) The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public

[Jack] Halberstam (1998) Female Masculinity

Carolyn A. Day (2017) Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease

Harry M. Benshoff (1997) The Monster and the Homosexual, from Monsters In the Closet

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Gideon the Ninth Act II Chapter 9. Gideon encounters two trios as she explores Canaan House.

Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) are joined by (first ever!) guest Night (he/him).

Today’s cover art features our lovely guest Night as Ortus, photographed by Han.

Content Warning: death, mild abuse

Further Reading:

Daniella Mestyanek Young (2022) Uncultured

Jennifer Brubaker (2017) Antibiotic Resistance, Soap, and False Advertising

Yotam Rozin (2020). The Sociotechnical Imaginary of the Human Soap

Kimberly Twiner (2025) What is Bouffon?

Victoria & Albert Museum (2012) "That's the way to do it!" A history of Punch & Judy

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!

Gideon the Ninth Act I Chapter 8. Teacher welcomes the scions and their cavaliers to Canaan House and lays down the ground rules. Claire Beans (she/they) and Han Koehle (any pronouns) discuss the weird vibes in the atrium, the very unusual sleeping arrangements, and Teacher's whole deal.

This week's cover art is a gorgeous illustration of the Canaan House atrium by Lorin Wendell. You can find more of their work here and follow them on Instagram. Lorin did an amazing job of capturing the colors and textures and lush emptiness of the space and we're really excited to share this image.

Content Warning: death, suicide, murder, genocide

Further Reading:

Samuel Moyn (2021) Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

Ian G. R. Shaw & Marv Waterstone (2021). A Planet of Surplus Life: Building Worlds Beyond Capitalism

Douglas Adams (1981) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Brian Fagan & Nadia Durrani (2019). What We Did In Bed: A Horizontal History

Nun Pod With Left Grief is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International License. Find us at NunPod.com and get our attention with #NunPod.

If you’d like to support our show with your voice, share NunPod with a friend or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’d like to use money to support us, we encourage you to think of the amount you’d like to send us on Patreon each month and then instead send it here. Let us know that you did!