[ID: Digital art of Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Ianthe Tridentarius in Ianthe’s bed, both have the blanket pulled up to their faces. Harrow has her sword next to her and is scowling at Ianthe, who is smiling back at her smugly. end ID]
hey whats up everyone it’s John, thanks for tuning in. i’ve got Ulysses and Titania here and we have a great update for all of you, but first i’d like to thank this video’s sponsor: Nord VPN. Now if you’re a regular viewer of my channel, you know I can post some pretty controversial stuff on here. I’m pretty private about where our facility is located, and thanks to Nord VPN I can feel safe uploading these videos to the web without worrying about getting tracked or blocked by my ISP. with over 5000 servers in 50 countries worldwide, Nord VPN protects your data from prying eyes and lets you bypass browsing restrictions. check out the link in the description to use the code COWWALL for 20% off your first 6 months and thank you to Nord VPN for sponsoring this video.
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir / “Tam Lin”, trad. collected by Francis James Child
In the “Tam Lin” ballad, Janet’s love is taken by the Queen of Fairies and in order to get him back, she must hold onto him as he is turned into a variety of wild animals, a red-hot brand of iron, and a burning coal. It is only through her determination and her love of him, though he fights and hurts her at every transformation, that he is made human again.
John Gaius is so MUNDANELY UNSPEAKABLY evil. He has the Just Some Guy energy of a tenured professor, and he wears a laurel wreath made out of BABY FINGERS. Hi, yes, welcome, have tea and a bikkie while I show you how to kill a planet and every living thing on it. He is become death, destroyer of worlds, and he has a yogurt stain on his shirt.
the importance of pov and kiriona gaia as gideon nav’s imperialist aspect
others have already made some really smart posts about how kiriona is gideon when she’s lost everything and everyone that made her who she was, and how even in the first two books, gideon was this terrifically sad creature who was disguised by the fact that she was her own narrator.
but I want to expand on that last bit, because yes. kiriona is a gideon who has lost everything, who has had to make tough decisions to survive, who has had to adapt to being primarily around her father (a manipulative asshole) and ianthe (ianthe). but this is also the first time we’re getting to see gideon from a perspective other than her own.
we’ve always known that gideon is a beautifully unreliable narrator - see her complete understatement of the fight before harrow opened the tomb, where she neglects to tell us that she almost killed harrow with her bare hands - but I think that for a lot of us, the introduction of kiriona was when we first felt that.
now, nona is not an objective narrator either (lmao). and she does actively dislike gideon (which is fascinating, and which I could go on about for several posts). but she does offer an outside perspective on gideon that we have, up to this point, been lacking.
because… yeah. sometimes, like anyone, gideon’s kind of mean. we know she’s a good person - her goodness is in many ways one of the central drivers of the plot - but that doesn’t mean she’s nice all of the time. it’s just that when she’s being mean to crux, or ianthe, or even harrow we can say, well that person deserved that. but the truth is, gideon has lived through the kind of hell that very few people could survive with any kind of goodness and softness left intact. she didn’t live through it, in fact. she’s just kind of… existed through it.
I saw another post point this out, and I want to reiterate: gideon’s goal, her whole life, has been to join the cohort. when we first meet her, we’re like, ok, makes sense, that’s the only ‘out’ available to her. and we kind of forget, even as we learn more about the empire, that what gideon wants to join is this actively and horrifically violent imperialist force. when we get to nona, and we meet hot sauce and her gang and joli and the angel and even the edenites, we expect gideon to have kept up with us somehow, to reject the empire. we want her to be one of the “good guys” (goodness in the tlt universe is another longass post I want to write…).
but gideon doesn’t reject the empire. because, crucially, she IS the empire - she is its heir, never mind the fact that that doesn’t really mean anything when the current emperor is immortal.
what I am trying to say is this: kiriona is gideon when you take everything from her, and then replace it with her father and everything he represents, and then take a step back.
that step back is crucial. it is what allows us to remember how imperialism - and by extension, or by metaphor, cruelty - works. gideon becomes cruel because she is in proximity to cruel people, AND because she is not in proximity to us.
THAT is what Muir is saying with kiriona. even the most kind, good, earnest protagonist can become a tool of evil in the right circumstances: and those circumstances include perspective. gideon, like it or not, is currently actively choosing to be a tool of empire. and if we were in her head, we might be able to - or we might be tricked into - accept her justifications for why she’s doing it.
the perspective shift is what allows us to see gideon as she - currently - truly is. it is no accident that this is when we get the outside pov. Muir allows us nowhere to hide; we have to confront what gideon has become and by extension what she always has been.
gideon nav is a good person, and I fully believe that in alecto we will watch her reject her father; I fully believe she will get to be a hero. but in order for that to happen, she - and we - must first undergo radical change and growth in terms of her worldview and attitudes. kiriona is not gideon’s final form. but in the same way that john is described by harrow as having aspects, kiriona is the aspect or facet of gideon that embraces cruelty, that perpetuates empire.
Muir tells us: even the most beautiful-hearted, trod-on girl in the world can become a tool of empire. but I have no doubt that in alecto she will tell us: this is how that girl can destroy it.
OK GOING OFF MY TAGS ON MY PREVIOUS REBLOG I FEEL LIKE comparing teacher w kiriona as constructs of the empire also plays a crucial role in the panning out. teacher is a character you’re supposed to empathize with in gtn but he’s relatively removed, he’s not The Main Character, when the atrocity what was done to him is revealed you’re like hm!! that’s deeply fucked up!!! the way you might go abt a news event happening in a country other than your own. like we the audience can recognize what’s been done to him is horrible but because we haven’t been inside his brain, seen his life beforehand, the empathy we have for him is only ever removed and relatively shallow. it’s still there, just not Personal.
when kiriona is revealed, kiriona as the emperors construct, it fucking Gets You. it’s like a slap in the face. it feels!!! SO wrong!! i had a legit sense of dysphoria reading her first couple of chapters!!! and what’s happened to her is essentially the same type of thing as what happened to teacher, they’ve both had their bodies and souls violated and warped into things that benefit the empire, they’ve been dehumanized by its hands. BUT NOW because it’s happening to gideon, one of our main girls, WE fully experience it alongside with her. that empathetic link with the audience is there- we KNOW gideon, she was our introduction to this world, we have spent books enmeshed in her perspective and have come to care about her. we can recognize the distortion and corruption kiriona is of her. we experience the full blunt of how empire fucks you up and dehumanizes you, up close and personal, and oh boy, does it fucking hurt.
she’s a butch lesbian she’s the saddest girl in the universe she’s jesus she’s 19 she’s a ghost in her own corpse she’s wearing a friendship bracelet she’s a master swordsman she reads exclusively titty mags she’s a prince she’s probably missing a piece of her soul she doesn’t know what lettuce is she died for love she’s living again out of spite and most importantly. she’s the love of my life.
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