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mostly surprised at people finding kiriona difficult to parse because on a sheerly metatextual level i don’t really see a more, idk, favourable direction that gideon’s character could have gone in without a) weakening the anti-imperialist throughline and specifically the angle from which the totality of imperialism’s reach + violence makes itself felt and b) weakening the connections between christ/christianity and imperialist violence specifically that muir tries to mobilise. like personally when i got to that part of the book i was pumping my fist like hell because it’s so stark and ruthless and so much clearer and less compromising than any capitulation to render gideon a ~hero of sorts might have been lol. it’s about the metatextual work babes!

i find this version of gideon where she idk defects to insurgent forces(?) with harrow(???) and Kills God or whatever unfulfilling both in that it just makes no sense with what we know of her motivations and in that it doesn’t provide a genuinely compelling account of the threads between imperialism / christianity / sexuality / sexual abuse / gender / death and necromancy and agency that the books have worked hard to thread together. like, this is hollow and boring. but kiriona? that actually mobilises something! that gets you somewhere good!