thinkingb… about the evolution in the power dynamics in harrow’s dream bubble AUs and what it tells us. we go from first completely replicating the original power imbalance between her and gideon except in reverse in the cav/necro switch one. this one is devastating to me because it feels so… stuck, like harrow can’t even conceptualize a world yet where their individual existences would not somehow be at the expense of the other. it has the same cast as their actual childhoods, and the characters play themselves out like they did in real life even with their roles reversed, and with the same logic.
but THEN in the one where they’re at the party and gideon is the emperor’s daughter/the ~*princess*~ something starts to happen! we bring in ‘new’ characters in a mirror of coming to canaan house in the real world, with only aiglamene left representing the ninth with her. gideon is still above her in status/power in this one, but in a setting where the possibility of being raised to her level – BY MARRIAGE! by gideon’s choice alone, should she want to make it!!! – is literally baked into the entire point of the structure of the event she’s conjured up, societally and emotionally. it’s expressed in terms of politics by way of romance novel structure. (also makes me wonder how harrow actually thinks inter-house politics function fdshkfjas she’s just been out there on a cold rock on the outskirts of the solar system, her understanding of what a party is seems wholly academic.) that power imbalance subconsciously still involves giving up(/enforcing, yay codependency) all your agency and emotional wellbeing to someone else, just like harrow is doing in the pool scene in a way –
“I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
but it’s getting there. in any real structural sense harrow has always, always had the power in their imbalanced dynamic and I think that’s part of what she’s trying to process here by putting herself on gideon’s side of it, but on the interpersonal/internal scale it’s been much more complicated and entwined than that and it echoes that too.
it’s the guilty, repressed thrill of ’…but what if griddle would still choose me if she had every freedom and all other options before her. what if she’d choose me and stay with me even if I didn’t forcibly keep her from going?’ (which is like… what a lot of their dynamic in the first part of GtN is partially about, when you go back to it with HtN in mind. gideon feels more threatened by the idea of harrow’s indifference than by her cruelty and possessiveness, because harrow hating her always meant more than anyone else loving her, and harrow keeps saying ‘please don’t leave me’ in the most violent and toxic of ways. because gideon only exists via harrow, and vice versa, and they’ve been stuck like that so long. oh boy.) so like. in the same type of situation where harrow decided ‘I must no longer accept being a stranger to you’ in the real world (having left the ninth house for the larger world of all the houses) she has made them actual strangers in the dream, but with hope that they might not continue to be? idk it feels like there’s a lot going on here.
and then in the coffee shop AU they meet as equals, as two people completely outside the dark dreary confines of the ninth and the power imbalance that raised them, and that’s where we finally get to actually see gideon in harrow’s mind’s eye – and see feelings about gideon harrow normally doesn’t let herself look at directly (it involves strong arms ~*dewy with sweat*~ and a lovingly enraptured description of her crooked smile haha. harrow is not good at handling romantic or sexual feelings normally but it rises so sweetly and uncomplicatedly in this one, like it doesn’t anywhere else in either of the books to my memory. her attraction to The Body is more like reverent despair, and her attraction to ianthe is……. deeply emotionally ambivalent let’s say lol, but this one time it’s a description more like the normal belly butterflies you’d get from being in love without quite so much dread or disgust getting twined into it). I think this one is the closest to what harrow actually desperately wants for them as her wildest fantasy – not that she wants to join the cohort or anything, but to be able to meet as whole, individuated people who have a fighting chance not to break each other.
like… harrow the war crime who feels like she has to live her life in debt to the 200 souls that ensured her existence, harrow who’s a lyctor and servant of god and has been in love with a dead woman since she was ten… and the dream inside her that’s so strong it almost pulls dead souls back from the river is just to meet gideon somewhere they haven’t hurt each other yet, where neither of them has to hurt each other anymore. (or hurt themselves for the other, or use the other as a means to hurt themselves, which is its own endless ouroboros because of their enmeshed state – everything they do to each other hurts them both as the gideon-harrowhark harrowhark-gideon unit they’ve been attachment-wise for so long even before lyctorhood made it literal. it’s all gideon thinks she is good for, an idea harrow finds so utterly horrifying and repellent that she *waves at entirety of HtN* did THAT essentially to disprove it.) which is still a huge step away from managing to process, accept and live with the ways they HAVE hurt each other and that they might still find a way to touch without doing so again. tellingly this fantasy is still within the power structures of the empire, even if it’s no longer claustrophobically contained to the ninth house and their past in it. God knows they’ve got so, SO far to go before they even theoretically could get there but like… again, I really do believe that is harrow’s dream. give the poor kid a break and let her have this coffee shop AU for now, she’s literally dying and holy shit has she Been Through It fjskdafsda