2022-12-22 3:30:08 ¶ ●

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to what extent is gideon the main character of tlt. and if she’s not then like… who is

ok so first of all, harrowhark. like, without a doubt

second of all i’m gonna answer this in way more depth than anyone asked for. I feel like there are a couple of answers and in a way they’re all true (or at least have the potential to be, definitely possible AtN might shift these answers one way or another).

so I think gideon isn’t not the main character. she’s the narrator of the first (and arguably second) book, and so much of the story hinges on her existence and her purpose.

but realistically, when we look at the locked tomb as a whole, it’s true that it isn’t really her story. even though she is the apparent narrator of HtN, she’s effectively absent for the majority of the book. she’s absent again for most of Nona, and when she does appear, we are left without any context for how her side of the story has gone in the last six months. I think that if this was a series where gideon was really and truly the narrator, we would have come to understand those six months and the experience of kiriona gaia through a much different (and much more thorough) lens.

I think that the story revolves around a situation, and it’s a situation that’s been building for ten thousand years, and its end is drawing near. in that sense, I think it could even be most accurate to say that John is the main character. I think it’s a story about a man who wanted to save the world and failed, and what love means in the long-festering aftermath of that failure, and I think that the reason the POV switches around is in order to give the readers a very specific understanding of what it is trying to explore. if it were solely gideon’s story, I think we’d miss out on some of the most vital parts of that, so I think in that regard she can’t really be the main character.

at the end of the day, though, if we are to choose one main character of the locked tomb, I feel like it’s one hundred percent harrowhark. true that the series did not start with her as protagonist (quite the opposite at the beginning) but I think that was a necessary move in order to contextualize our understanding of her story. gideon needed to be the narrator of GtN in order for us to understand how harrowhark operates and to illustrate her relationship to lyctorhood (and therefore, her relationship to the overarching framework of the empire). nona needed to be the narrator of NtN in order to effectively demonstrate the stakes of the entire conflict; if love carries grief with it, then why is it necessary to love? what is the love worth? (a lot, actually). it sets us up to understand how Alecto functions both as a character and as a narrative device in the larger story, which I expect harrow is going to have to contend with in one way or another.

so yeah i think it’s been a neverending cycle of john’s story for a long long time, but i think that harrowhark shares so many parallels with him for a reason. there are arguments to be made for why gideon is the main character, and i think i’ve even seen people say that camilla is the true protagonist of tlt. but I think that in the end (for us AND for gideon), everything was always gonna come back to harrowhark