Oh. Break My Heart.

Oh. Break my Heart.

thinking about the iconic Gideon-line "I'd died knowing you'd hate me for dying" and how at the same time Harrow is screaming "she died because I let her, you don't understand" Harrow doesn't hate Gideon for dying; she hates herself for letting Gideon die

This is so wonderful! I love Harrow's face so much!

John is an unreliable narrator, and we can never be quite sure how much of what he says is real. My current interpretation is that in NtN, John probably imagines that he’s telling the truth, and he’s mostly telling most of the truth about most events. He’s not lying, not lying-lying, he just gets really vague and really short on details whenever there’s a chance he might look bad or incompetent, which is almost all of the time. Nobody, not even Alecto is there to corroborate key parts of John’s story, which means that we only have his word for it, and worse, he only has his own word for it. The story he tells us is a story he has been telling himself for millenia, and thus it is bound to be full of shit.

The biggest, most obvious problem with the story is John’s motivation. John opposes the FTL project from day one and claims that there’s something wrong with it, and then it turns out he’s probably right, the FTL plan will betray humanity and only rescue a select few. But John didn’t know that on day one, didn’t know that when he started fighting! All he knew is that the cryo plan, his own plan, was shut down, and the money went to the FTL plan, which investors considered more feasible. At the beginning, John wasn’t acting on a certainty that FTL won’t work, he was acting on personal resentment that someone else got the funding, that someone else would get to save the Earth. He calls the inventor of feasible FTL travel ‘some poor dipshit geek,’ which is beyond rude, and reeks of petty professional jealousy. He consistently calls the leaders of the FTL project ‘the trillionaires’, handily reducing them to this nameless faceless cabal of evil. To simplify things, he conveniently pretends that the group he opposes is composed solely of investors, even though a huge number of his fellow scientists and other professionals must have been involved in a project that size.

Before the resurrection, John had a lot of personal incentives to think that there’s something wrong with the FTL project, that it’s corrupt or that it’s not going to work. After all, it destroyed and replaced his own project, his life’s work. And after the resurrection, John has even more incentives, all the incentives in the world, to believe that the FTL project betrayed humanity, that they were never going to build more ships, that they were never going to come back for the rest of the people. Because if the project was legit, he killed humanity for no reason.

I choose to mostly believe the broad strokes of John’s narrative until proven otherwise. After all, it’s utterly plausible that a small group of rich people would be willing to sell out the rest of humanity just to save themselves. And yet, the man telling us how it happened is a proven liar whose entire sense of self (and also his ten-thousand-year space empire) hinges on him having been right in a situation where he had clearly been wrong.

I don't think so. Aiglamene is mentioned in Harrow Nova - she praises Harrow for standing "like a monument" while criticizing Ortus. Harrow's father sounds like the worst bully - Gideon has to intervene to stop him whipping her.

Think about Harrow's AU Bubbles

Thinking about Harrow's AU bubbles, not as fanfic references, but as expressions of her subconscious fears and desires, is so fascinating.

The Harrow Nova one is pretty obvious. Harrow's parents were obsessed with her being a necromancer, were willing to kill for it. It's only natural she'd wonder, "What if I hadn't been?"

And the answer Harrow gives herself is: Your parents and everyone would reject you (except, wildly, for Crux). Also they'd be alive cuz you'd never opened the tomb, and you'd be an unpopular orphan they'd abuse (Just Like Gideon). And you'd still be just as devoted to serving the Ninth with a blade. There's a lot there. But the other really telling bit is her relationship with Gideon. Harrow Nova professes to hate the reverend daughter even as she seeks to (re) create the necro-cav bond with her. But that hatred doesn't seem to be mutual. And the bit about the daughter intervening when Harrow was whipped…

That's Harrow's subconscious saying if their roles had been reversed, "Gideon would have treated me better than I treated her. Gideon would have protected me."

The Ball AU also seems like a reasonable extension of Gideon's childhood query: "What if my other parent is the most important guy in the universe?" Answer: Emperor Dad would throw a big party.

But also… it's a bride-finding ball! That's so very telling. It could have been anything, but Harrow invents another scenario where she's fighting, competing to get to Gideon, to be awarded the role of her sworn partner (first cav, now bride), while outwardly claiming not to want it.

Now The BARI Star AU often gets described as a "coffee shop" one, but it's actually set in a cohort cafeteria. And normally I wouldn't split hairs over that, but I think the cohort setting is actually really significant. The Cohort was Gideon's dream, and also Harrow's rival for Gideon's attention. It's what she kept trying to leave Harrow for.

So now Harrow dreams that she's left Drearburh to join the cohort and will meet Gideon there. Not fight or compete for a role where they're bound to each other, but just meet her there. That feels like yielding. Like compromise. It makes me think Harrow's subconscious has matured past trying to keep Gideon with her always and is instead looking for ways that SHE can be with Gideon. Meet Gideon where she is.

(Also this may be a stretch, but I always find it low-key funny that Harrow imagines Gideon in the cafeteria… I like to think her brain is skimming lists of hypothetical military jobs like... what sees the least action... ah, coffee-adept, she'll be perfectly safe there...)

I will literally melt like putty in your hands.

it’s in the small gestures (keeping her things like a lover)