Vi is possibly the most tragic character to me, if only in the sense that she always has the best intentions, and she always tries to do what she thinks is right, except for those few moments where she is clouded by grief.
She’s on the bridge with Powder, trying to keep her safe from this large man whose intentions they do not know, and then she sees her mother, and she just breaks down.
She tries to turn herself in, to right the wrongs that she has made, and then Benzo’s dead and Ekko is in her arms and she just grabs her siblings and goes after Vander without thinking it through, telling Powder you’re not ready because she’s just trying to hold onto the last good thing she has.
She’s standing over Vander’s corpse and she hears her little sister and she thinks you weren’t ready you weren’t ready you’re a jinx jinx jinx and then she looks down at her bleeding knuckles and she can’t do this she can’t be here so she walks away, and then she turns and she tries to go back. She tries to do the right thing and she’s taken away before she can take any action.
She tries to go back, to be the sisters they once were, she tries to keep things good between Powder and Caitlyn except too much has changed, she doesn’t know what’s going on, there’s people fighting them, and she just looks and she sees sweet innocent Powder mowing people down like it’s fun.
She’s tied to that chair with Silco’s body across from her and she’s grieving she’s mourning the loss of the little sister she knew and she’s trying to fix things with the little sister she has and all she can do is plead with Jinx that they can be ok, they can still fix this.
But Caitlyn is unconscious on the floor, and a rocket is fired across a blood red sky.
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“She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”
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oh gideon nav is the lesbian of ALL TIME. she’ll explain how hot every woman she meets is and how their eyes seem to pin her down and how a blush runs up to her cheeks whenever they look at her and she can’t say no to them
and then at the end of the paragraph she’ll be like “oh and some sort of man was also present. he was a little bitch.”
"The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee," said Gideon. (GtN 438)
plus this:
"If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten," her mouth was saying. "Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee."
And, unsteadily: "Griddle." (HtN 360)
plus this:
It didn't even matter when Kiriona said, "Sure, Cam. Marry a moron, then die. I get the urge." (NtN 372)
equals Gideon and Harrow are married! crying face emoji!
i'm not disparaging that interpretation, i think it's valid and has some basis in the text, and even if it wasn't/didn't, i think fans should have all the fun they want. but for me, it doesn't fully capture the complexity of what Gideon and Harrow are to each other, and i want to explore a slightly less straightforward reading.
Catholic weddings, vows, and Ruth under the cut ;)
Gideon and Ninth House traditions
let's start with Gideon quoting Ruth. i've seen folks repeating the idea that this is a wedding vow. it's more accurate to say that this is a verse often used as a wedding vow, in other denominations of Christianity, and secularly as well. but in a (traditional) Catholic wedding, the couple can't write or choose their own vows--the Celebration of Matrimony has specific text, with one or two variations, that is always used.
now, we haven't seen a Ninth House marriage ceremony. if we do see such a thing in AtN and discover that Ruth 1:17 is part of that tradition, i will cry a million happy queer tears about it. but i think it's somewhat likely that Gideon has never even seen a Ninth House wedding, given how small and trending elderly the population is, and that we know no couples in her lifetime have had kids other than the Reverend Parents.
what i'm getting at here is that this quotation from Ruth doesn't seem, to me, to represent something that's religiously or traditionally binding in Ninth House culture. it uses some similar language to Catholic marriage vows, "until death do us part" etc, but i don't think these are words that make them married in the eyes of the Ninth or the Houses at large, i think these are words Gideon has chosen as a specific expression of her devotion. and where does she get them from, if not some Ninth House ceremony or scripture?
well, this is a slightly longer stretch, but at the point in the story when Gideon says this, she's already dead. Harrow has begun to absorb her--and thanks to "The Unwanted Guest," we know that souls are porous, permeable, and rub off on each other when they're in contact. Gideon's soul is at this moment being integrated into Harrow's; Harrow has certainly read all kinds of books on the Ninth ranging from usual to totally heretical, some of them probably extremely old, and it's not unreasonable to think writings from before the Resurrection might have been copied and recopied into something Harrow could access. And speaking of soul permeability, Harrow's had Alecto's soul clinging onto hers for seven years, and Alecto's soul is in intimate contact with John's soul--there are so many ways for this bit of scripture to make its way into Gideon's non-corporeal mouth. the STI (Soulfully Transmitted Infection) of biblical knowledge.
Ruth in context
now let's talk a little about Ruth, the book of the Bible and also the character of the Bible, and Naomi, who she is swearing her devotion to. tl;dr, Naomi and her husband and two grown sons are Israelites who immigrate to Moab, a "pagan" nation, to escape famine. Naomi's two sons marry Moabite women; then the sons both die, as does Naomi's husband. Naomi, having lost everything, decides to return home where she'll be penniless and have a bad life but at least she'll be among her people; she tells her two daughters-in-law to go back to their families. One of them goes.
The other, Ruth, refuses, and swears beautiful devotion to Naomi, as we've heard Gideon quote: "She answered: Be not against me, to desire that I should leave thee and depart: for whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee."
in a biblical context, this has nothing to do with a wedding vow. Ruth is promising to leave the comfort of her own people, religion, and homeland to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi, even though the connection they had (Naomi's son, Ruth's husband) is gone, and all they have to look forward to is a terrible life of grief and bitterness. this is frequently interpreted as a parallel to Jesus, who (in the religious perspective) made the sacrifice of leaving his place with God and becoming human out of devotion to humanity, in order to live and suffer and redeem us. woof, this is giving me flashbacks to CCD.
of course, many Christians resist interpreting what passes between Ruth and Naomi as resembling a wedding vow for homophobic reasons too--making it about Jesus is a way to make it less queer--but i think the point still stands that this is a more complicated, and less marriage-related, expression of love than it seems taken on its own.
Harrow's lamentation
when Harrow later echoes it back, she conflates it with a different biblical quotation: "On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs. And they that carried us away, said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the songs of Sion. How shall we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy."
it's a lament, an expression of mourning, a longing for home from someone who has been forcibly removed from it. when combined with the Ruth quotation, in which Ruth is giving up her home in her devotion, this really reads to me as both Harrow's grief, immediate and overpowering, and a realization that Gideon is her home, and failing to acknowledge that is as disabling as the loss of a hand or of the power of speech. Gideon is the beginning of her joy, and Harrow is, in this moment, putting Gideon above the Ninth House in her devotion. above Alecto. above everything.
and again, i'm not saying all of that can't be about marriage, but it's about a relationship much more complicated than marriage can encompass in the context House cultural norms.
Kiriona Gaia, saddest girl
this brings me to Kiriona, and "marry a moron, then die." consider the context of this, and the tone. Kiriona's deeply, deeply hurt. the saddest girl in the universe. she died for Harrow, avowed her devotion to Harrow, and then (from her perspective) was rejected; buried; excised from Harrow's brain and then from her body. Kiriona, as she did when she was Gideon, covers her emotions with humor and sarcasm. i suspect she's even less able to handle being vulnerable as Kiriona than she ever was before. she's making light of Canaan House and what happened there, and it's only in sarcastically downplaying what she's been through that she recounts her relationship to Harrow as a marriage--something she has almost no positive examples of, something that is in her experience frequently political and joyless. also notably, she frames it as a marriage that occurred before she died.
Their actual vow
what Gideon (and Kiriona) really wants--she tells us over and over again--is to be a true cavalier.
and what does Gideon's ghost repeat right before she devastates us with Ruth 1:17?
"One flesh, one end," said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing.
Harrow said, "Don't leave me." (GtN 438)
it's taken me a dozen paragraphs just to propose that this is their vow. "One flesh, one end" are the actual words that need to be spoken, in Gideon and Harrow's cultural context, to bring them into an official union with each other; a union that is arguably more fundamental in the Houses, and certainly more complicated, than a marriage. a union Gideon specifically wants, and has seen in action.
in the pool, they vow to each other as cavalier and necromancer. in the moments before Gideon's death, she forgives Harrow again, and exposes her heart: "'You know I only care about you,' she said in a brokenhearted rush" (GtN 430). then she repeats their oath again, acknowledges the pain she's about to cause for Harrow, and rededicates herself to the Ninth--a place she never really belonged, Harrow's home and people more than her own, as Ruth dedicated herself to Naomi's home and people. Gideon "married" her moron in the pool, and now she dies to fulfill that vow.
and as we saw above, after Gideon's death, she reminds Harrow again of their union--of its importance, of how she's fulfilling what she has interpreted to be her whole purpose as a cavalier--and it's in response to Harrow's "don't leave me" that Gideon offers a final reassurance of her devotion. in her mind, this sacrifice is its ultimate expression, the most inextricable and undeniable union two people can achieve.
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so we all agree that harrows letter to camilla in htn explained the lobotomy right. or at least explained that she removed all memory of gideon to preserve her soul. do you think camilla thought ‘yeah sounds like a solid plan’ or was she a hypocrite who thought, ‘this bitch is crazy. i, camilla hect, on the other hand am responding to my necromancer’s death in a way that is correct and normal’.
i'm sorry i just can't picture gideon being some suave womanizing casanova, even when she isn't raised in a hole in a ground with .5 women in it, even with opportunity, access to and experience with interested potential partners. i think beneath a lot of glib dryness and horndog enthusiasm she is too inherently 1) shy 2) invested in concealing the fact that she is shy 3) too soft-hearted and romo to not get attached in a casual situation/be able to move on quickly a la pyrrha dve. crass humor is a defense mechanism she uses it to unsettle or put others off or break tension but that does nottttt translate to game
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Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate the Gideon-slamming-Harrow-into-walls agenda, but I feel like we as a fandom have been overlooking the scene where Harrow literally backs Gideon into a pillar and threatens her homoerotically.
People see how butch Gideon is and their brain immediately turns off. Is there anything about Harrow that seems even a little bit submissive? Harrowhark has never even conceived of the idea of bottoming. During the totally-not-sex she had with Ianthe, Harrow was the active party the entire time. Quite literally held Ianthe at her mercy during the whole event. When she tries to tell ianthe she can thank her at some point, ianthe says "you loved that"
Gideon herself has been quoted saying "all I ever wanted you to do was eat me". Like. Come on, guys.
harrow obviously is a prickly standoffish black cat that acts that way because it is very scared. spends a lot of time hiding, will bite you if you try to pet it.
nona is a super friendly little cat who greets everyone and purrs and loves being petted.
pal and cam are a bonded pair; pal is a tabby and cam is little grey cat. pal-cat has a professorial air about him and can often be found standing contemplatively on windows or climbing on bookshelves, but he's got a silly side too. cam is compact and an excellent hunter.
gideon is a rare female orange tabby. she's always lounging luxuriously and she's totally too cool for school except she secretly loves being petted
