the moment when harrow saves gideon prime from the incinerator was kind of jarring to me when i first read it but now it’s one of my favorite harrow character moments… i think from the reveal of her 200 dead kids backstory harrow has been shown to be someone who, even in fucked up situations she has no control over, is compelled to take responsibility for others.
like, she had absolutely no agency in 200 children being murdered so she could be born, but she still feels guilt for it and the responsibility to live her life to honor them. and clearly she is deeply motivated by her feelings of having to do her best by the ninth, up to yk, the whole parent-corpse-puppetting, running-a-dying-society thing starting at age 10. which must have been deeply difficult and draining work and i get very emo reading the section where she talks about getting really good at deathbed services and trying to give advice she was in no way prepared to give.
anyway, then there’s her time on the mithraeum which is wholly marked with like, an ethos of deep moral rot. everyone’s deeply unconcerned with everyone else’s well-being, least of all harrow’s. see: gideon prime’s repeated violent and traumatic attempts on her life, which just become an accepted part of routine and end up having been facilitated by god himself.. mercy mistaking harrow’s hesitation in planet-murder for impatience instead of sorrow, all the lyctors and god sitting around a dinner table talking about whose dead murdered cavalier was the hottest, nobody believing each other about cytherea’s body and just letting that happen, etc. (relatedly: isn’t it fucked up that god was like “oh i wanted my new lyctors to have free choice to pick that path for themselves” but also placed them on a planet where murder was allowed?)
(and there’s also ianthe’s clear trauma over her new arm, which any of the older lyctors or god could have easily fixed for her. it seems stupid that she’s left trying to hack it off with her rapier when she’s on a ship with the three most powerful necromancers in the universe, and god. but guess who actually makes her a new arm she can accept? right, harrow.)
i’ve joked about gideon’s hit list for people who’ve hurt harrow upon waking being like literally everyone on the mithraeum but i think there was a real sense in which her fury over the violence done to harrow gave me a little surprised jolt, when harm to others had come to be sort of an accepted background element. but in the middle of all that, when harrow was faced with the choice, she couldn’t kill gideon elder in cold blood–when she was terrified of him, when he’d been making her life a bloody misery for months. she couldn’t even stand by and leave him to die, when augustine, who had supposedly been friends with him for 10,000 years could plan his murder. it’s such an illogical choice, but at the same time one that makes perfect sense for harrow specifically, who all her life has been handed the shittiest possible cards and responded with feeling responsibility for others’ well-being… even her rejection of gideon’s sacrifice falls under this in some ways i think.
