#security cuff

[exigencelost]

I know no one wants to hear it from me anymore but gideon and harrow do not count as hand in unloveable hand because Gideon is completely loveable and has done nothing wrong and only feels unloveable because people including Harrow have been actively abusive to her for decades. That is simply not it. It's about reciprocity. It's about mutually consenting dysfunction. Mercymorn and Augustine are hand in unloveable hand.

[exigencelost]

"Griddlehark is the epitome of enemies to lovers romance” ma’am Griddlehark is the epitome of a deeply uncomfortable power imbalance. Meanwhile, Pyrrha Dve is using the sleeping body of her own murderer to passionately make out with the revenant spirit of her greatest enemy occupying the cold corpse of one of her oldest friends in a memorial niche in the corridors of the deep-space palace of an evil God. Get your priorities figured out.

[exigencelost]

Not to start yelling "security cuff" in the public square again but i do feel one could choose to read something into the fact that when Harrow says "I need you to trust me" and Gideon says "I need you to be trustworthy" and Harrow asks Gideon what would earn her trust, Gideon says "8 hours of sleep." Which is obviously a flippant response etc and the point is that the distance between them is so great at this point that there is no simple achievable answer to Harrows question but also if you take it at face value the price of Gideon's trust is a basic physical need, which is notable in light of Harrows repeated deprivation and devaluation and abuse of Gideon's basic physical needs through their lives up to this point.

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I’ve discussed this with people but the thing about Griddlehark for me is like. Sure. Harrow’s behavior in the last third or so of Gideon9 and throughout all of Harrow9 is romantic and compelling, if you can get over the fact that she’s kind of the worst, as a person. But Harrow’s behavior for the seven years prior to that is despicable, and the fact that Harrow knows this and regrets it doesn’t do much for me, because Tamysn Muir declines to show the reader how Harrow got from Point A to Point B. We don’t see Harrow recognize that she needs to change her behavior and make the decision to do so. When we do finally get access to Harrow’s interior life, Harrow has moved from a position of violent power over Gideon to a position of severe powerlessness and vulnerability, and we’re expected to empathize with her as someone who feels powerless, which I do, but what was all of Harrow’s cruelty doing in the story, then? We don’t even get access to those memories, due to the brain surgery. The reader is never shown a way to empathize with Harrow’s choice to treat Gideon the way she did for years. We’re never taken through the steps of her decision to shift course.

Basically, if an author wants me to empathize with an asshole, I need them to say it with their chest. Show me full bastard Harrow from the inside. Otherwise, it feels like the story is just trying to brush the magnitude of her maltreatment of Gideon under the rug and hurry after the romance, and I’m not interested. Harrow is still the person who did those things. Make me like that person. Make me believe that that person is capable of acting right, which means making an effort to reconcile that person with the person Harrow is now, which means showing me how she got here, which means showing me where she used to be. Don’t flinch from the character you wrote. Harrow turned off the heat in a cell on Pluto to keep Gideon from escaping her. Gideon wore a security cuff. (I will never be over this and I hope it was intentional, because that’s a very institutional form of violence that mirrors very real current institutional violence and I really hope Muir is not planning to drop that plot point in the dust.) Show me why Harrow did those things, show me how she did those things—what did she do inside herself to allow herself to commit that level of violence— and convince me she will not do them again.  Otherwise the strongest emotion I have about this relationship is alarm.

Bold is for legibility, italics are for emphasis.

[exigencelost]

Fighting an urge to go off on a tangent based on just so very fucking little information except that we see Judith Deuteros exactly once in Harrow the Ninth and she’s being held captive by Coronabeth and Camilla; their relationship is very visibly and very intimately (they’re sharing a small shuttle) one of captive and captor, and so many people read that as romantic or choose to read romantic potential into it, which is not a condemnation of those people because literally do whatever you want based on that one paragraph of text it’s whatever, not the point, the point is that Gideon and Harrow also have a relationship that is very visibly and very intimately that of captive and captor, and that’s to some degree problematized and to a significant degree romanticized by the text and even more so by the readers, and like what is the plan. I just want to know what Tamsyn’s plan is. What is the point that is being made about the eroticism of captivity. What’s the plan with this fucking monster locked in a coffin who’s getting creepy soliloquies recited about her by God. Why is Harrow only capable of falling for girls who she’s been told it’s her job to keep chained.  I want to read Alecto and find out what the plan was. Tamsyn’s spoken at length about the fact that, basically, she knows her audience and she’s writing dyke characters who dyke readers will find hot. Presumably she knew what she was doing with that quick glimpse of Judith and Corona. But what is the pl

[exigencelost]

As far as your whole "security cuff" concerns go, I feel the same way and it was definitely reassuring to see Tamsyn Muir's interview where she described Gideon and Harrow's relationship thus far less as not really "romantic" but still explicitly homoerotic. She was also saying something along the lines of like the power imbalance in the first (and second?) books is so horrific and narratively speaking needs to be reversed in Alecto.

Idk I guess it's easy to get caught up in like. Shipping lense stuff on tumblr and it's nice to see an author deliberately laying on the nuance and showing respect and sensitivity for like. These pretty heavy topics she's writing about ya know?

(Okay my response to this has been in my drafts forever. I started typing, got distracted, saved the draft, and then forgot about it completely. Here is what I initially wrote, slightly edited.)

Yeah. I have two problems with the Gideon/Harrow situation. 

Problem 1 is the idea that this is romantic and positive or affirming in any way. I agree that that’s partly, if not primarily, a reader interpretation problem, rather than Muir’s thesis statement, although I maintain that she went in too hard on how bad it was in early chapters and didn’t like, deal with that sufficiently. I’m gonna try not to repeat myself too much here about what I mean by “deal with that.”

Problem 2 is that I genuinely think Harrow and Gideon both do a 180 way too fast and the reader isn’t shown how that transition happens on either end and it feels kinda like each of them feels whatever is the most Dramatic thing for them to feel in each moment, rather than the thing that makes sense. 

I don’t get how Gideon can be aware enough of Harrow’s deal to understand that her death will be the worst thing that’s ever happened to Harrow, and also be...stupid enough, frankly, to believe that Harrow’s lobotomy was an expression of her not “wanting” Gideon. Like it just doesn’t add up to me. And there’s a bunch of those moments that don’t add up. 

I can’t reconcile the Gideon who was ready to leave Harrow alone in the Ninth House—was ready to leave her alone in the dark with the corpses of her parents and a dying House, was willing to beat Harrow up in front of her stewards to do it, all because she knew she had a right to a different life than this and she knew that she didn’t owe Harrow anything and that above all she did not owe Harrow her life—with the character who says “the entire point of me is you.” 

They do not feel like the same person to me. And I never really saw the process where one turned into the other, or even got peeled back to reveal the other.

And this would just be a craft complaint, and I would say it once and then shut up about it, because I do think that authors aren’t obligated to be fantastic at every part of their job all the time, except that it ties into Problem 1 in a way that really presses one of my buttons. 

There’s a big trope in romance, admittedly usually straight romance, where the storyline starts with a woman saying “no,” and we’re all supposed to accept that that’s the opening line of a cat-and-mouse game where she’ll get talked around eventually.

I don’t accept that! Not automatically! I hear a woman say “die in a fire, Nonagesimus” and I take her at her goddamn word, until I’m shown really compelling evidence that she has changed her mind. And that she’s changed her mind for a reason that’s born out of her needs and motivations, and goes beyond “we’ve reached the mutual confession scene in the mechanical progression of this book’s plot.” 

Why did she say no the first time and why’s she changing her answer now. What changed. I want real answers to those questions. And I realize this is super subjective but I don’t feel like Gideon the Ninth gave them to me! 

The pool scene was not enough for me. It was enough to earn Harrow some sympathy, but not enough to strike at the basic facts of their relationship that made Gideon shoot Harrow down in the first place. Which are not that Harrow is fundamentally evil or that she doesn’t care about Gideon: they’re that Harrow abuses her power over Gideon and it’s wrecking Gideon’s life. That hasn’t changed. 

In the first chapter Gideon says “this is her obsession, this is her sick need to keep me here.” She says “your lady would light the Locked Tomb on fire if it meant I’d never see another sky.” She repeatedly describes Harrows fixation on her as a fucked-up act of violence against Gideon, which it is. She describes Harrows heart as her prison, and says she’s not cowed enough to walk back into it. I take her at her word! 

It’s clear from the beginning that she loves Harrow but it’s also clear she is deliberately, and very courageously, turning the relationship down because it’s harmful to her. In the early chapters Harrow begs Gideon to be her cavalier and Gideon repeatedly says no—says no in the face of being offered everything she has known her whole life that she wants (freedom, a chance to leave the Ninth, military rank, glory) and everything she later admits to having secretly wanted (Harrow’s full attention)—in the face of all of that Gideon still says no, over and over again, to any plan that involves relying on intimacy or trust or partnership with Harrow,  because she thinks that saying yes will trap her under Harrow’s thumb and eventually kill her and she does not want to belong to Harrow and she does not want to die. She keeps saying no until she really gets convinced that she’s out of other options, because Harrow has stolen them from her. I take that seriously! 

I don’t like that the emotional landing power of the ending seems to rely on me not having taken Gideon at her at her word when she said no in Act One. I don’t like that the no is treated like a prelude to a yes. I don’t like that the story doesn’t bother to dive into the transition between no and yes, because then the implication is that we’re supposed to always just assume no is a prelude to yes. 

[exigencelost]

I think what I want from Alecto is for Gideon to make a choice that deprioritizes Harrow in favor of other things that are going on and for that to incredibly unpleasant consequences for Harrow that she has to deal with and that Gideon doesn’t apologize for. I’m not optimistic I’m just stating my desires.

[exigencelost]

Griddlehark is intrinsically unsexy because neither party has ever committed an act of “love” that the other person consented to. Pyrrha Dve on the other hand is on record as consenting to be murdered by her lovers at least three separate times (it didn’t take) and has killed at least one of them back in a clearly welcome romantic gesture, and I think she deserves more attention for this.