People acting like Kiriona Gaia was way too mean to be Gideon are so funny to me. GtN Gideon thought Ortus’ mom having a breakdown over the possibility of losing her only son was peak entertainment
Everyone wants to believe Gideon is nice because we like her. We want good things for her, and she is good fundamentally, and we believe in her and enjoy her character. But she isn’t nice. Kind, self sacrificing, moral, yes. But nice? Absolutely not. She is brash and mean as self defence without considering if everyone actually is on the offence because everyone always has been against her.
She’s traumatized, and has trusted too many bad people to risk being nice.
Gideon can be downright nasty, just because it’s funny from her/our perspective doesn’t mean she isn’t
But was she though?
Most of the nastiness we saw from her was toward Harrow and her other abusers on the Ninth. She had awful things to say about them, and they were justifiable.
I don’t know what Gideon you read was, but the one I read was brash, and mean, and snarky, AND nice. She entertained Jeannemary and Isaac. She thought Magnus was funny, and fell fast and hard for Corona and Dulcinea. She rushed to help Dulcinea the very moment they touched down in Canaan House. She was devastated at the thought of stealing Palamedes’ crush. She wept for everyone she couldn’t save. She forgave Harrow without a second thought. None of this was for self defense.
And no matter how she vented her frustrations about Harrow’s abuse, she was always loyal to her and loved her until the very end. Beyond the end.
Kiriona is different than Gideon. Maybe not a different person, but a different set of behavior. Would Gideon have been the type to play dead, to be inert, at any point, if she could help it? Would she have threatened to kill everyone in the room?
I feel like convincing everyone we’ve had a mass misremembering of Gideon from GtN and HtN really does a disservice to how Tamsyn Muir has chosen to reveal Kiriona to us. Kiriona is Gideon finally broken down, after 6 months of exposure to John “Gaslighter” Gaius, after losing every last scrap of autonomy she had. It’s supposed to be shocking, and it’s supposed to feel wrong.