#im incapable of being concise it seems. i will not stop.

[theriverbeyond]

thinking deeply about Kiriona Gaia being just... Gideon Nav laid bare. like yeah, there's probably some soul fragment fuckery going on but i am just so convinced now that she IS Gideon Nav it's just that we the readers are, for the first time, seeing Gideon with all her trauma and horrible coping stratagies and none of her evasive and unreliable narration to offset any of it. and not only has Gideon been through the absolute ringer over the last what, 18 months? she was just... always kind of a bitch, because she needed to be in order to survive.

like, Gideon has always been Made Of Knives. and it's totally understandable!! to be clear my girl can do nothing wrong, thank you very much. but the Ninth House eats its own. of course she wouldn't be well adjusted, and not just in the "poor baby" way. the first language she ever learned was cruelty: abuse from the Reverend Parents, abuse from Crux, Aiglamene's mismatched love, her and Harrow tearing into and over each other like plants fighting for one small patch of sunlight.

we just had the last 2 books from her perspective, and she is a deeply unreliable narrator especially with regards to herself, so it didn't really come through -- though it is definitely perceptible once you understand the amount of emotional deflection parkour she's doing.

something something trauma makes you worse. suffering is not beautiful and does not make you better. sometimes you get fucked up and you dont emerge on the other side a poor little baby. sometimes you emerge a monster, because what other option did you have.