#probably my favorite relationship / interaction in NtN

[noctilia]

reference by photo.destruction

[harrowing-of-hell]

it is 4am and i have consumed alcohol and i'm having tlt thoughts but they will probably not be coherent and this will be a very stream of consciousness post you have been warned

ok so to be very honest i was baffled that people read griddlehark as like, explicitly romantic whenever i first was browsing the tlt tag

like they were very obvs homoerotic and like i will directly quote tazmuir here and say there were "elements of a love story there" but i was not getting the same vibes that apparently everyone else was??

and maybe this is the difference between reading GTN in 2019 and then having to wait a year for HTN, because to me that allows a lot of time for your mind to sit and think on things and speculate

meanwhile i read GTN and HTN back to back. from my notes i finished GTN sept 14, 2022 (and i started reading it like, at MOST a week before that) and then i started HTN on sept 22 and finished it four days later (rip to people who say HTN was hard to read couldn't have been me. saw that it was in second person and nutted on the spot literally my favorite POV. guess im just built different. anyways)

so like, very obviously little down time between reading those 2 books so not a lot of time to really sit and think on it given that this is TLT we're talking about

but even now having read NTN and it now being a full year later since starting the series i still... don't get it

rather, i do not get it trying to read their relationship from the way that most people in the fandom seem to be reading it.

the pool scene and like, the drastic shift that it caused in harrow and gideon's relationship made very little sense to me and seemed kinda out of nowhere until i started thinking about it in this way; harrow and gideon do not love each other for who the other person is but rather what that person might mean for them.

to me gideon is vrry obviously someone who craves purpose after being treated like shit and generally just viewed as someone as disposable. so it makes sense to me that her goal was to escape the ninth and go join the cohort (so she can go be disposable but With Purpose).

but when they got to Canaan house....

bro cytherea groomed her SO FUCKING HARD. it's actually kinda fucking funny in a fucked up way because cytherea was like "noo gideon don't let anyone treat u like this" while gideon was getting her life force succed out of her but LITERALLY every one of cytherea's interactions with gideon just... reinforced and instilled the idea of cavalierhood in gideon

so much so that by the end of GTN gideon was like "no harrow YOU'RE the one who doesn't understand what a necro and cav are supposed to mean to each other." brainwashed. absolutely brainwashed.

ofc being surrounded by other necro/cav pairs who were Properly fulfilling their social roles influenced her as well, but cytherea had such a big part to play in it.

so naturally gideon's Search For Purpose shifts from being disposable-but-with-purpose in the cohort to being disposable-but-with-purpose as a cavalier.

so for gideon a relationship with harrow as her cavalier might mean a chance at having a Purpose, and this is why gideon loves her

meanwhile for harrow... the girl is 200 dead children and has been suicidal about that shit from day one. so here is one of the children that was supposed to die for her, but didn't, and fought her every single day of their lives, and it's this child that's offering her forgiveness???? like bro ofc she's gonna take that it's literally the salvation she's been looking for that even God, as we learn in HTN, can't offer her.

so naturally when the answer to lyctorhood is "ok now kill her and vore her soul <3" harrow would be like FUCK no. harrow has only now really beginning to think of gideon as a person and not a slave, as someone who is OF the Ninth house and not just beholden to it. so whyy would she ever kill her at this point.

and we KNOW this means so much to harrow because, thinking she's on the brink of death, she just straight up asks gideon if she's really forgiven her.

this is why i think they love each other and also i think this adds up with where they are now in the series. their reasons for loving the other person are completely at odds!!! so even with their now "Repaired" relationship it is still hopelessly fractured!!!

and tbh i do think griddlehark at this point is more, but not at all completely, one-sided than most people think because like, i think (or at least i hope??) harrowhark is slowly snapping out of this line of thinking and is realizing that's Not a healthy way to view gideon (idk i may be wrong) while gideon is DOUBLING DOWN SO HARD on being a cavalier. like that is her Purpose now it is her Identity!!! she needs to be someone's cavalier, and if she can't be harrow's then she'll try to be her father's.

not a fucking word out of her mouth when alecto kisses harrow but when alecto pledges herself to harrow?? she called the soul of the earth A SLUT!! absolutely insane.

anyways that's it that's all i had to say. i hope harrow and alecto fuck nasty in ATN <3

im not tagging this as anything tlt related but this will prob still some how show up in tags anyways because tumblr is stupid and broken