#sorry this is not coherent or good lolxd im just having a lot of thoughts about the cool butch lesbian with the funny sunglasses.

[shieldsurf]

HUGE fucking nona the ninth spoilers. dont read if u havent finished it yet heart emoji

i have been thinking a lot about gideon in nona the ninth and her total heel turn. gideon is my Favorite Favorite Favorite character in the locked tomb by a mile, i love her so much, so when she appeared and was basically a different person? that shit caught me off guard. i still adore her tho.

unfortunately gideon, or kiriona, got kinda glossed over in nona the ninth, which sucks, because she played a super important role (speaking of, nona is the first book in the series so far i have real, not-nitpicky criticisms of. i really enjoyed it, but it was not as good as gideon the ninth, and Definitely not as good as harrow the ninth). that, and i find her offscreen character arc to be insanely interesting. she's suddenly very much not the gideon we know and love, and obviously something's up. so what happened to her?

at first i wondered if she was an impostor, but only a chapter or so after her reappearance, i was convinced this wasn't the case. there were two reasons i initially expected gideon was actually a fake: the first was that her eye color was wrong. gold? shouldn't she have harrow's eyes? those are a smoky black, right? harrow has gideon's eyes, after all. the second that gideon was, as she herself described, "mega dead" -- and the fact that her body functions like a walking corpse is proof of that. however, this runs counterpoint to the mechanics of the universe of tlt that were not only officially established in but heavily featured in nona the ninth. if gideon's soul was placed in gideon's body, by god no less, shouldn't she be very alive? both of these, however, are explicitly explained very simply: gideon is not in her own body. she is in a super-strong vessel created by god slash john slash dear old dad. a perfect recreation. this is very, very strange. i thought that the houses had gideon's body? why would she not be allowed to return to it? remember this.

three extremely important motifs present in gideons arc are those of freedom, idealism, and belonging/acceptance, and all of these suggest what may have happened to gideon in her absence -- or rather, her time with john and the cohort. we see from the moment she is teased that since meeting john she has been elevated to extremely high status, both as crown prince of john's empire and within the cohort. to the gideon nav of the first book, this would've seemed like a fairy tale. rejected, ostracized, and permanently indebted to the ninth house since infancy, there is nothing more that gideon wanted than to be a cohort hotshot. the beginning of gideon the ninth is her attempting an escape: she'd been imprisoned on that horrifying little planet her whole life, wants nothing more to escape, but her attempts are foiled and the whole book throws her longing for freedom in her face. she finds herself connecting with the harrow she terrorized and was terrorized by her entire childhood, pledges herself to her, falls in love with her, and ultimately dies for her. harrow is the one she finds herself belonging to, and she decides that is worth more to her than any freedom she could obtain.

then gideon learns who she is. harrow is gone, but suddenly there is a reason for gideon to be loved and accepted -- not just by harrow but by everyone, and it's more likely than not that she grasped it like a lifeline. she is not some nobody orphan slave to a cult, she is a crown prince, a half-deity, an icon of the future to the houses. she suddenly likely finds herself facing more power and adoration she ever could've imagined. so what happens to her when she realizes it's a gilded cage?

gideon is not allowed to go and do as she pleases; there is no freedom. she acts as a figurehead and never gets to be the respected lady-killer soldier she dreamed of; her idealized view of the cohort and her potential role in it is squashed. but she belongs, right?

when gideon kills crux, she tells him of her status. that he was always wrong to be so cruel to her. that she is more worthy of a place in the house than he ever was. and he simply does not care. he spits and her face and tells her flat out that none of it matters. to him, all she did was make harrowhark's life worse, ultimately fail her, and in his eyes, she is the greatest disappointment she could've been. gideon explodes upon killing him. it didn't feel good, she says. why didn't it feel good?

in the end, gideon's titles, her sacrifice, the months she spent playing dress-up in some sick facsimile of her face, they do not matter. it's quite like trying to reach out to your shitty parents and being rejected anyways. you say their opinion doesn't matter to you, but it does, doesn't it?

gideon has been living a twisted perversion of her childhood dreams, and realizing they weren't what they were cut out to be. she is ultimately a pawn in a larger game and she seems to be unwilling to accept this, but she knows it. she can't even have her own body back.

why wouldn't that change her? nona sees that she is deeply, unmistakably sad. it is not hard to understand why.