You Know, It Was A Very Interesting Perspective Change To See Gideon From The Outside. This Was Literally

You know, it was a very interesting perspective change to see Gideon from the outside. This was literally the first time we’ve ever had scenes with Gideon where we’re not hearing her internal thoughts, and it really changes her character.

Like, I know Muir consistently described Gideon as a “dirt bag” in tumblr posts and interviews when the first book came out.

And this is someone who kicked Harrow when she fainted rather than catching her; this is someone who, when carrying an unconscious Harrow intentionally bumped her into walls and doorways in the hopes that she’d wake up with mysterious bruises on her head or maybe even a concussion. But, you know, we heard her internal narrative at that time, we heard about how she was holding back from doing worse, but also about how she’d been so consistently abused that maybe this was all justice anyway.

But we saw her grow and change, we saw her be kind to Harrow at the end (…and then not), we saw her stop hating on the teens and actually care when they died. Corona liked her (Corona pretty much never heard her speak), Magnus liked her (Magnus literally never heard her speak), Jeannemary liked her (Jeannemary was a teen looking for a role model and would have latched on to her no matter what her personality). So when she came back and never had a good thing to say to anyone at the end of the second book, we were all rooting for her anyway–she was awesome and they all deserved her wrath and her snark, because we’d been in her head for two books.

And now we have… she’s rude to Nona, because Nona is possessing Harrow’s body, and because Nona kissed her based on her body-language reaction to thinking she was seeing Harrow. If it were Gideon’s narrative still, we’d be told how well and truly justified she is, how sketchy and even villainous Nona is; but it’s Nona’s narrative so instead we hear about how rude Gideon is in her body language, not even her conscious choice of words.

We have, she’s about to give Paul her jacket but gets awkward and doesn’t. Nona sees her fail to help; in Gideon’s narrative her instinct was to help but she just felt too awkward.

We have, she says the same rude jokes to everyone that she did in the first two books, but even though Pal and Cam are still putting up with that, even though Ianthe still thinks she’s funny, we’re getting it from Nona’s perspective and Nona doesn’t like her and so doesn’t like her rude jokes.

Ianthe actually does like her, and it’s not clear whether that’s a point in her favor or not.

It’s the same Gideon through and through, she even gets mad at Alecto usurping her place in service to Harrow. But what a difference an uncharitable reading makes.

Something about Pratchett villains.

There's a lot of Pratchett villains who share one common thread: they're unromantic. They rip the charm and soul out of things.

Reach's service sends messages 'as warm and human as a thrown knife'. He himself 'kills people by numbers'.

Teatime is literally trying to kill Santa.

The Magpyrs turn the Gothic-vampire-novel style of the Old Count into industrial blood-harvesting.

Similarly, Wolfgang exchanges the traditional Game for just straight up killing people, and seeks to implement a werefascist regime to boot.

The Auditors are, by definition, made of unromantic. They are objectively unromantic.

And I think the idea of ripping apart the whimsy of things ties back to the idea of believing the little lies to believe the big ones. If you can't see charm and warmth, the dreams and imagination, you'll fall into what STP says is the biggest sin of all: treating people like objects.

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affliction-of-beauty

3 years ago

scientists in media: we have engineered a brand-new sentient lifeform in our lab but we treat it like an object with cold detachment and refer to as Specimen 1-A and subject it to horrible tests without remorse

scientists in reality: we built two robots that will leave Earth and never return and their names are Percy and Ginny and we gave Percy a family portrait of all our other Mars robots to take along with it and when the anniversary of its landing comes around we’re working on teaching it to sing itself “happy birthday” like we did for the other robot and–

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affliction-of-beauty

1 year ago

Random fact: They did a study on courtship and mating behavior of American alligators at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in the early 1980's. This study revealed that, among other things, the majority of alligator sex is gay