i cannot fucking get over the anarchists thinking nova betrayed them because of adrian and adrian alone. and not even in the nice way of "adrian is kind and charismatic", specifically in the way of "she was stupid enough to let herself be manipulated by a boy. she's a stupid teenager giving up her family for a boy." it's actually insane when you think about it.
it cannot compute in their brains that she turns on them because of her own ideology. why is that? maybe because they don't actually view her as a person with individual thoughts and feelings and instead, like ace, see her as a weapon to be wielded. she belongs to them; she doesn't have the authority to decide her own beliefs.
there's also something to be said about the anarchists considering themselves above others—like i think ace anarchy does at some point refer to another person as "mortal" in a derogatory way, implying he himself is not. so in their minds, nova is giving up "divine purpose" for mortal comforts/desires of the flesh.
i could go on and on about the anarchists' pseudo-religious doctrine and why they have the makings of a cult. even in the first book, where ace himself does not appear until the very end, there's a lot of religious influence on the mindset of his followers. i think I've already talked about how "rapture culture" influences far left spaces with the idea of a single violent revolution that leads to a new, perfect world—this is the crux of nova's motivation to kill captain chromium in the first place(yes her family plays a part but that's not even the main reason she does it). it's callum who first pokes holes in this idea for nova, with his speech about how all the anarchists did was destroy. even though for some reason it's not brought up on page, that speech is clearly a major influence behind nova asking ace and the anarchists to abandon gatlon.
then you get into honey literally kneeling before ace, and how viscerally uncomfortable it makes both nova and the reader. because neither of us are used to it. the anarchists have always held a reverence for him, but before the end of renegades the reader can easily mistake it as martyrdom, the idolization of a friend who died fighting for their cause. the renegades treat the memory of lady indomitable similarly, erecting statues of her and so on. when ace is revealed to be alive, however, it becomes much more unsettling as we see it up close. nova is obviously somewhat used to that kind of behavior, but even she balks at the heights it rises to when ace reclaims the helmet, especially after being so starkly confronted with ace's frailty and mortality while in cragmoor.
on a level, this is what saves her. she struggles to view ace as some christ-like figure because she's seen him at his lowest; despite her having a very limited perspective of him, she knows he is just a man. and ace hates it. even when she doesn't directly disobey him, he can't stand not being treated with that level of worship.
honestly i would've liked to see the anarchists make nova more important to their allies in the cathedral—ace does refer to her as his niece with pride, but he isn't really shown demanding respect for her because of that relation(probably in part because nova questions him in front of all their allies the second they get to the cathedral). i think it would have set in just how much ace views nova as an extension of himself, and on a level, something that belongs to him. i do like the imagery of ace as a divinity and nova as an idolic statue, a vessel people worship him through—that would've been interesting to see.
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