:

constantly thinking about gideon and like, the way all cytherea had to do was smile at her a bit and ask her nicely to do things. all magnus had to do was greet her politely and not treat her like an evil black anchorite. how even palamedes has to put in way less work to get her to trust him than he did with harrow.

like i don’t think she’s naive at all, i think she’s just so insanely lonely and deprived of love and kindness when she has such an obviously immense capacity for it. god!

even like, the way the closest thing she ever had to someone who didn’t treat her like she was a waste of oxygen was aiglamene, and even then, aiglamene “did not love her and would have laughed herself to her overdue death at the idea” (which is even worse when you remember that the book is close third person from gideon’s perspective - like, she feels that lack so much). like aiglamene trains her and tells her about the cohort since she was three etc etc etc but she also hits her “the way you’d hit a barking animal.” like it’s the closest gideon gets to being loved and it means so much, and we see that so clearly in how it’s narrated, but it’s also so much not enough and she is so wildly fucked up from it

like. harrow hating her meant more to her than anyone in this hot and stupid universe loving her because at least she’d had her full attention! gideon! god! she had so much love and she had to put it somewhere!

i’m so sad about her! i’m so sad about how obviously warm and tactile and loving she is, how she wears her heart on her sleeve so completely that cytherea could get right at the heart of her without even trying. i love her so much