tearing my hair out when will Gideon. learn she is valued not for what she can do or what job she can preform or what service her body may render but for just who she is. when will she be told she does not have to Preform A Duty in order to be loved. putting her body through the meatgrinder to make sure she qualified for cohort admission. offering her soul up for Harrow to slurp energy out of like a portable phone charger. dying on a spike. “always your sword, my umbral sovereign”. the emperor’s construct. anyway tearing my hair out someone help this girl thinks she is a border collie
maybe im overthinking but. parallels. Alecto didn’t know who Harrow was until she bit her. Alecto didn’t see Harrow, she recognized the Reverend Daughter, the continuation of Anastasia, the unbroken strand of the tombkeeper’s line and the death of the Ninth. the Rev. parents spent years figuring out the theorem, calculating out the exact number of organophosphates needed for such a precise massacre. waiting and waiting and waiting until enough kids were born, and then – 200 dead children and one fulfilled vow, confirmed with a kiss. this is how meat loves meat, Harrow’s whole life a blood debt that could never be worth the cost.
and Gideon – Kiriona Gaia, Bomb, the literal key to the locked tomb and how she is used, time and time again, to fulfill the agenda of someone else. a 10,000 year old door that was supposed to only ever have one key. one night planned down to the ground for 500 years, nine months of being hated and grown and sharpened like a sword. being recognized time and again not as herself but as an unwilling extension of John & Wake & the bitter Lyctors & all their various schemes. hair, eyes, blood.
two children conceived through terrible acts to be tools, recognized by others only because of their unwilling & bloody connection to grand plans they had no part in making. i am Unwell.
i WILL defend Kiriona being a total ass to everyone in NtN because Gideon spent her entire life just watching those damned skeletons and wishing that the bones would show her any kind of acknowledgement. and then Gideon went to Canaan House and she made her first friends ever, the first people ever to show her the kind of love and tenderness that she had needed her whole miserable life, and then she died.
and when Gideon came back, practically the first thing she learned is that her mother, who she had spent her whole life dreaming about, hated her. like, suprise!!! you weren’t just despised & hated after birth, but also before and during!! her mother thought of her as a parasite and a bomb. just a key to a lock that Gideon had never given a shit about.
and THEN!!! Gideon gets swept off in the River and she comes back as a corpse and the first time she sees her friends again, the first friends she ever had, all they can talk about is using her body – not even her as a person, just her meat and blood – for the same end as her mother wanted. just a key for the lock on that same damn door. like, yeah, Cam & Pal & crew thought she was gone and they wouldnt have any way to know that her soul was there. but also, their first words in her earshot were about using her and the first thing they did to her was try and violate her corpse. so basically. Kiriona deserves to have her villian era.
my headcanon is that Gideon has always been inatley poetic. that’s How She Is. she’s hanging out on the Ninth casually throwing out these beautiful one liners in every other sentence and the only reason Harrow is also so ridiculously portentous is bc she needed to assert verbal dominance over Gideon. Harrow in the library at 2am furiously flipping through a thesaurus after being subjected yet again to the buisness end of a Gideon Nav sick burn
deeply believe that raised-by-John!Gideon/Kiriona would be such a pompous asshole. a “wait until my father hears about this” type of confident shithead, a prizefighter, a decorated cohort hero, a master swordswoman who is adored by many but known by none. and inside? she’s just so fucking sad, secretly dying for a scrap of true affection & love, trying to prove herself constantly to a father who has never been capable nor willing to give her the kind of care that she needs & who refuses to look at her as more than just another thing that he owns. she has a heart but it’s buried, and maybe dead. she has a sword but it’s all empty valor, and for all her honors she’s never had anything approaching agency. saddest girl in the world, redux.
ALT