Kiriona Gaia Isn’t Gideon Nav
That’s an extreme claim, I know. And we’ve clearly seen a lot in common between the two. However, the differences are stark enough that I don’t believe that it can be explained purely as off-screen character growth over the course of several months.
Let’s review what we’ve seen of Kiriona in Nona the Ninth. She’s extremely possessive of and in love with Harrow still (“Get in line, thou big slut”); she’s besties with Ianthe (friendship bracelets, secret handshake); and she’s deeply loyal to the Emperor, her father (going on secret missions that even the other Lyctor Prince doesn’t know about).
The first one makes sense. When John brought Gideon back and bound her soul to her corpse, it was still her soul, only a little worse for wear for being killed twice already. The only way John seems to be able to create new souls is the old fashioned way (which tbf is how he created Gideon the first time). However, he clearly put his own spin on the body. The titanium bones, unbreakable skin, and leaving the hole through her chest are his mark of Cain upon Kiriona.
Kiriona’s friendship with Ianthe feels like a major stretch for Gideon. We know she can be temporarily swayed with puns (“gall on gall” -> “let’s get married”), but it’s a far cry from merely cooperating with someone you don’t like to becoming best friends with them. While I can see Gideon continuing to work with Ianthe like at the end of Harrow the Ninth for a significant period time, I find it impossible to believe they could actually become friends given how diametrically opposed they are. (I don’t think Ianthe can have friends at all, but this isn’t about her.)
I think the hardest part to swallow is her loyalty to John. Gideon wasn’t loyal to the Ninth House or the Houses as a whole a day in her life; her only loyalty was to Harrow personally, and even that was self-serving. Gideon was definitely a schemer; she wasn’t book smart (although even she picked up enough skeletal knowledge on the Ninth), but she spent a lot of time making intricate plans for escape, and they got pretty good. If Gideon knew that Harrow’s body was walking around on New Rho, it’s reasonable to think that she maneuvered things to get planetside to rescue her.
But she didn’t. Kiriona was a Lyctor Prince for a good deal before the New Rho operation, and I’m not sure how much she knew about Harrow’s body’s presence when the planning for that began. Instead, it turns out the whole thing was actually John’s plan to get Alecto back to the Tomb. The same John who’s only prior interaction with Gideon was ordering the death of her girlfriend necromancer. And even without the personal slight, Gideon hates authority figures. John is Crux turned to 10,000, and Kiriona took great pleasure in finally finishing him off.
Except, she didn’t. And while her response could be read as “revenge is hollow because it doesn’t get you back what you lost,” Kiriona seems to react as though she can tell her empty response doesn’t feel legitimate. This is my central thesis: John fucked with her mind when he rebuilt Gideon. He didn’t want a loose cannon teenage daughter, he needed a new Lyctor who would actually remain loyal after everyone else had turned on him. And so he ensured that Kiriona would be a better soldier than the ones he had just lost.
The biggest piece of evidence is actually the simplest: her name is Kiriona now. One of the major revelations in Nona the Ninth is how he built the crew that would later become the Lyctors post-Resurrection. Those sixteen people who were largely his friends and colleagues before the end of the world were not quite the same people that became the Lyctors and cavaliers afterwards. When he first animated Ulysses and Titania, he gave them new names to signify that they were new people. When he killed his friends and resurrected them, he gave them new names too. Their personalities were generally the same (Alfred was still the peacekeeper; Cristabel was still a martyr; Augustine and Mercymorn were still kismesises), but they explicitly didn’t remember who they were before. The same is true of Kiriona: she still had the same general personality as Gideon, but now her ideals are John’s ideals. She was resurrected with the same loss of agency that the rest of John’s people suffered.
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