She wished the barrier had taken her hands. She wished
she had thrust herself into it—become that big seething mass of flesh and meat and tendrils—ruined her body, just melted it; come back messed up, so that nobody could want her body but her, so that it would be hers and nobody else’s.This was a horrible thing to think. Nona hated herself immediately and fervently.
god!
caught by how, 1. this is a response to an entropy field, which we last saw in gtn in a key moment where gideon was coerced by cytherea into allowing harrow to use her as a battery, 2. that such a submission was eroticised; specifically that harrow was functioning more as a vector for an eroticism between gideon and cytherea, or more precisely that cytherea was a repository for a displaced eroticism between gideon and harrow; that the ideas around the coercive erotics of consumption / consumption as a violence one of whose forms manifests through eroticism and sexuality that get off the ground in gideon are coming together and consolidating in nona; 3. that the language here is clearly codifying a sexual violation, as is everything we receive of john and alecto inasmuch as the books seek to overlap these discourses of sexual violation and consumption and instrumentalisation and effacement.
going off topic but i think it’s fair to say we can understand gideon/harrow/alecto as three different yet significantly overlapping consolidated sites of Discourse around grooming and daughterhood and all that; as characters who are all at some point figured as john’s daughter, who are all at some point denied bodily autonomy to a severe degree, and who are all reconstituted in john’s image as befits the service of empire (alecto as an idealised whiteness, gideon/kiriona as a weapon of empire, harrow i’m less clear on but i think she’s taking up the christofascist dimension). anyway - if what muir wants us to read into her character paralleling is that what happens to alecto and what happens to gideon are two prongs of the same fork that converge at the site of empire then that’s incredibly effective on its own, but i’m caught by how cytherea starts exerting a very subtle presence here - where the thing being drawn to the surface in this scene isn’t gideon/kiriona’s function as a weapon but her having been groomed and coerced and seduced by cytherea. it’s not ‘alecto and gideon/kiriona are the same because their ostensibly different processes of grooming discursively converge,’ but the far more straightforward fact of both of them having been groomed in the first place. that we can’t get a full picture of how kiriona came to be kiriona without remembering what cytherea did to her & understanding that sexual coercion as setting off the chain of events that made her later coercion into a living weapon possible in the first place, and that kiriona herself can’t name that violence (in harrow, she accidentally called cytherea 'dulcinea’ - she’s not even close to processing that relationship for what it was and i doubt she ever will be) so the far more immediate point of commonality between gideon and alecto gets gestured towards here instead. god.
i realise i’m just going a little wild now but i’m trying to land a thought around, like … john and alecto, cytherea and gideon. john and cytherea as disempowered in crucial ways but also as holding access to significant capital within empire, and seeking power as disempowered people at the sites where they are able to get it; alecto, gideon. the logic of cavalierhood (which is the logic of gender under empire) being the means by which cytherea’s seduction of gideon becomes possible. john as an indigenous man aspiring to whiteness through empire & through alecto, and cytherea as a white woman inculcating an indigenous girl into empire. john and cytherea as people who at some point in their motives probably, genuinely, wanted to do the right thing, or imagined themselves to be doing something altruistic, but reconstituted the very violences that they were trying to disarm. sorry to eternally be the “here’s how cytherea can still be important to the narrative” guy but i’m unable to lose sight of how immediate and heavyhanded those alecto/gideon parallels are.
anyway! alecto and gideon/kiriona, am i right!