so, old news obvious news blah blah, but i keep seeing people not getting this about my girl gideon nav so have to say:
i think at first blush, people get the impression that Harrow’s got all the convolutions and layers and hidden vulnerability whereas gideon wears her heart on her sleeve and is just brazenly herself (a loveable rowdy himbo) & that’s the contrast.
and yes, that’s there, but that’s not all. that dynamic itself is a part of their mutual (codependent) front, and like everything else in this book, it gets peeled back.
i think the real contrast is that they’ve both got masks, and those masks are complimentary. they’re both kids who never got a childhood. they grew up tortured in the same place from very different angles with no one but each other to butt heads against. they both had to play-act grown up versions of themselves with few models for what a well-adjusted adult even looked like. so it’s cartoonish. gideon is the plucky hero of her own adventure story that will totally have a happy ending some day, far far away from her nemesis whom she’s totally not in love with. harrow meanwhile (to grossly oversimplify) has to imagine herself as someone cruel and cold enough to cope with being alive at the price of 200 other people. these two things fit very well together. gideon can play the hero to harrow’s villain, and harrow can enact cruelty toward gideon to make herself feel strong and mean (and generally just to vent anguish). the way they hate one another is a kind of mutual protection - it re-enforces the self-image that each of them needs to get through the day. but that’s the coping mechanism. harrow the ruthless bones overlord. gideon the hapless swords idiot, who thinks of nothing but tiddies & sweet sweet vengence (harrow’s corpse in various states of disgrace ) all day. and behind that they’re both tearing apart at the seems beneath caricatures of themselves that are deeply unsustainable and neither of them feels safe letting on the extent to which that’s the case. their hearts are a goddamned mess. neither of them is wearing that shit on their sleeve.
so yeah, there’s a lot more to gideon than being a swords himbo but that’s not the wild thing. the wild thing is she’s so convincing that she somehow manages to sell people on her no braincells act while being the pov character of entire first novel.
she still didn’t understand she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.
some kind of tlt modern au. u cant convince me that harrowhark nonagesimus wouldnt be some kind of little goth mall freak who survives on monster energy alone
also gideon deserves a mullet. i dont care
[i.d: a digital drawing of gideon and harrow from the locked tomb series dressed in modern day goth outfits. gideon is wearing sunglasses, a bunch of little gold hoop earrings, a black tank top, and a belt with a skull buckle. she has a mullet haircut and is grinning. harrow has heavy eyeshadow and several facial piercings, a studded collar and a chain necklace, a my chemical romance tshirt, blue highlights in her hair, and several tattoos including knuckle tats reading “bone grrl”. she is holding a monster energy drink and looking grumpy. /end i.d.]
hey so about your marshal. yeah your nursemaid. um we needed some fresh thanergy to open the tomb. and i insisted i be the one to kill him. yeah no it didn’t even feel good. no i don’t know why it didn’t feel good. yeah he could’ve lived for you but he didn’t know how. sorry.
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