Ugh so I feel like I need to add an NZ voice to Locked Tomb Discourse again: Gideon was always angry. She was never a soft nice stupid good girl, she just expressed her anger in a profoundly Kiwi way and I think a lot of overseas readers are acting like it’s some massive betrayal of character rather than – as NtN does with a lot of characters and ideas across the board – pretty much just a naked representation of what’s going on beneath the surface.
How do Kiwis (and Aussies often) handle anger? Well, repression + humour. You push it down and push it down, and it comes out as little barbed jokes. Somebody takes everything from you and you’re powerless to do anything about it? Well, humour is an equalizer but a safe one, you cut them where you can and they don’t even realise they could’ve cut back. One of the worst things you can do in NZ culture is Make a Scene, you need plausible deniability, you need control, big displays of emotion are taboo, then what happens if you’ve got bigger emotions than you can handle? Jokes are a valve to release pressure safely, but there’s only so far they can get you. There was always something about the way she joked, the often deeply inappropriate times she chose to joke, she came off to my Kiwi heart like ominous beeping and series of little red flashes beneath the table. She’s not stupid, she’s not socially unaware, she’s lashing out in whatever tiny ways she can without Making a Scene, she is trying to upset people. Over the last three books it has built and built and built, Kiri is pissed, and she has no tools to deal with that anger, we’re not seeing some brand new woman, the bomb just went the fuck off.
She’s not directing it in healthy or productive ways, but these books have always clearly been about trauma and Gideon has always been traumatized. People lashing out in pain don’t always do the nice safe thing you want them to. A/NZ critics and writers have been saying this the whole time, even in GtN something was clearly wrong with her, she was pretty much 24/7 sending out signals that she wasn’t coping. I don’t wanna put Americans on blast too much but I’ve noticed a lot of you seem to think Kiwis are like … inherently cute? It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about it’s sweet/nice/twee, and the idea we might have negative thoughts and emotions that we express differently just never seems to occur to you.
Aussie author, but required reading on the same subject: The Uncanny Valley of Culture