She s fascinating. The way I see her, for what's worth, is as someone with a life-long identity crisis—someone who's been asked to only ever be what others need to be, and who therefore views her own inner desires and needs as more dangerous and hard to grasp, as she's had to keep all that in the dark and hasn't had appropriate people with whom in interact in a healthy way that would help her define her own self-understanding. Her sense of self tremendously unstable unless she finds some social niche she can inhabit, or some role to play with someone.
(This is a trait often associated with BPD, which in this context unavoidably reminds me of that meme that goes “yes i have bpd. beautiful princess disorder.”)
She's aware of this! As Yet Unsent, while filtered through Judith (who is at least trying not to be “discursive”), contains some very interesting nuggets:
“Save me, Jody. Bind me to you, or who knows where I will go? What throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me down?”
There's a recurring idea she brings up—that she was meant to rule, and that she's afraid of “what throne” she will mount.
“She said she had groomed herself for something and all it had done was make her unfit for the purpose. What purpose?”
And then, closer to the end:
I said I was just an administrator; she was a princess. A king.
She said there was no king but the Emperor. I said her problem was a lack of job opportunities. She laughed a little and said, Too right.
She has been groomed for one thing, and that is leadership. She always seeks others that she can contrast with herself to develop as a person, but she is also incapable of not trying to get power over them, which surely leads to decreased stability?
At the same time, she's derided by both Judith and Ianthe for caring about other people and being easily moved by greater notions of ethics—she wants thinks to be better, and she wants to be in charge of that. She has a rich relationship with leading and following, and couples with cavalier standards she probably envisions herself as leading in a “servant to the people” way (whereas Ianthe just wants the boot, and she wouldn't have the charisma to pull off anything else).
Her main conflict is that she lacks the strength to pursue that path on her own so long as Ianthe is there, and she seems to be troubled by her own capability for evil.
I fully expected her arc to go somewhere like making her a big BoE leader tbh. After all, she's already risen in their ranks from hostage to double-agent and leader of Troia cell, which is a subsection of Ctesiphon wing, which after the events of NtN will be the faction of BoE that succesfully carried out Wake's plan to open the Tomb. BoE could do with another very impassioned, charismatic leader.
Given Ianthe has been telling us since GtN that she's been looking into the Resurrection, many of us believe her intention is to replace God. Ianthe presumably wanted to discover lyctorhood for the both of them—and then she spends HtN trying to figure out other ways to induce stasis and keep tissue immortal. In NtN, they're “closer to the goal than ever before” and Ianthe says “I fully intend for us to be us, together, now… but I have the framework for it.” And Ianthe has been looking at the use of planetary souls…
Tamsyn said she has one “magnificently shitty” thing left to do in Alecto:
“Ianthe will be awful. Ianthe will reach new heights of being absolutely goddamn dreadful. […] I was thinking about one specific magnificently shitty thing Ianthe does in Alecto, just, the dumbest and pettiest thing I am setting her up to do, and although she is still bad in Nona — spoiler: you do get to spend some time with Ianthe in Nona — I would say her badness, although grim, is within expected parameters of Ianthe.”
(Here's also a bunch of useful posts @lady-harrowhark collected about Ianthe probably being half-dead and how Corona staying alive might have been necessary for her to stay alive too?)
“I’m still fighting myself. Wait and see who wins.”
As though it were a duel.
Ultimately, I think the big question for Corona is—will she dare to abandon Ianthe? Cain betrayed Abel. Will Ianthe have devoted her entire life to their plan, and given up her own sense of self, only to be rejected at the finish line? Or will Coronabeth betray Blood of Eden and everyone in the universe to stay with Ianthe?
The one other person Coronabeth consistently cares about, too, is Judith. If Judith has survived her last brush with Varun and figures in Alecto, I suspect she might play an important role here. Between Ianthe, Blood of Eden, and Judith, who will Corona betray?
So many ways to be a monster.
germansingergirl
vaporwave
stormborns
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
