#go enjoy thinking about your little masc Lyctor fusion and leave me alone to not rot when I’m supposed to

[n1ghtwr1ter]

At the end of my latest TLT reread and it’s been physically painful attempting to read the last 40+ pages of Nona. Like, the short shrift that Gideon/Kiriona gets given by the people in the story…the theoretical good guys who honestly only see her as a thing, as a means to an end with an inconvenient dead soul attached to it… It makes me want to rip my own heart out of my chest.

Nobody has cared about Gideon her whole life. Most people, in fact, if they remembered about her at all, went out of their way to tell her how much they wished she didn’t exist. In the final chapters of Gideon, she finally gets the thing she’s been desperate for her whole life: somebody telling her that they need her, they care that she exists, and they badly want her to go on doing it. This allows her to make peace with the prospect that at the ripe old age of 18, she needs to die so that that person can go on living and living and living, using the castrated remnants of her soul as fuel to do so. Not a great way to go, but at least Gideon would get to be useful to somebody, would get to be remembered for something.

And then she wakes up in the wrong body, and finds out that her sacrifice - her attempt to be useful in the most selfless way possible, in that her self will no longer exist - has been rejected. And not only that, but the person she tried to give herself to - the one who was supposed to care about her - went to extreme lengths to make completely sure that she no longer remembered about Gideon.

She literally cut Gideon out of her brain.

And now, drifting along in the worst sort of half life where she’s inhabiting her body but it’s no longer really hers, in very obvious fashion - there’s holes in it, her heart is missing, and it’s got her shitty father’s handprints all over it (not even touching how much of a violation that is), indelibly - she finally meets back up with the small group of people who could theoretically be relied upon to be glad to see her again.

But then the one who was supposed to care about her most tries to kiss her (massively OOC for Harrow), and turns out to not even be there - it’s some weird baby inhabiting her body, and doing a really shit job of it too. The rest of them won’t stop talking about how they need her to break into the Tomb - as if she was just another key, same as the ones they worked together to acquire in Canaan House, just bigger and more inconvenient - and/or how they both fucked and killed her mom, who also (surprise, surprise) wished that Gideon had never existed, but saw her as a thing that needed to be done for the good of the mission.

Ultimately, they all make it abundantly clear - Palamedes, Camilla, Pyrrha, and especially Nona, all these people who are supposed to be kind and good and right - that they would prefer she wasn’t there. That it just be her body, with no Gideon attached - at least not Gideon the way she is now, broken and rejected and miserable. They would all far have preferred that she not have her own inconvenient thoughts and feelings and desires and impulses - that she just be inanimate and let the important people, the grown ups, get things done.

They wish she didn’t exist. Same as everybody else in her life, save one, and now she’s left wondering whether Harrow really meant it at all. Because if she did, she wouldn’t have left Gideon to Kiriona’s fate.

And honestly? Really, truly? I know everybody in the fandom loves Pal and Cam and Nona and Pyrrha, but in the end I couldn’t give less of a shit about them. They are fucking side characters, and as intriguing as Nona has been from a worldbuilding standpoint, I ultimately resent having been forced to read 400+ pages of filler bullshit about fucking side characters. I am a butch, and I’m here for my sarcastic, loving, angry, vulnerable, forgiving, and yes, inconvenient sword butch. I’m here for Gideon. But Gideon has been fridged for the last two books of the series in which she is supposed to be a, if not the, main character.

And it feels like almost nobody else in the fandom feels the same way, which, fine. I’m used to that. I’m also used to being told I’m projecting; and I’m used to being told that I’m inconvenient too, in my thoughts and my opinions and the mere fact of my existence. I spent the first eighteen years of my life being told I was inconvenient. Yet another point of overidentification with Gideon.

But in case anybody still thinks that Nona proves that Gideon was an asshole all along, think about all of the above. Think about how it would make you feel to come back from not just death but from the erasure of your existence, something you chose in order to save the life of someone you loved, and be told that you’re inconvenient. Think about how you’d feel if you’d been told all your life that it would be better for everyone if you didn’t exist. And then tell me that Kiriona isn’t in the right and that I should give a rat’s ass what happens to literally anybody else.

It’s Kiriona Hours up in this House, butches. We’ve spent long enough caring about people who would prefer we weren’t around. For once in our entire lives we were told we were important; we were told we mattered; we were told we were the main character. We were going to, if not get the girl and save the world, at least get to do something real, something important, something like being the hero.

But that’s over now; we’re back to being wrong and bad and inconvenient thanks to the simple fact of our existence. So it’s time to embrace it. Let’s be a little shit. Let’s be kind of a dick. Let’s have our own agenda, let’s play our cards close to our heartless chest, let’s allow our circle of empathy to contract to ourselves and maybe one more person. That’s where I’m at right now. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.