#and the stuff with judith was like. the most boring way to handle that imo. did she have to be unconscious the whole book

[gideonisms]

I think the thing about ntn is, it's like making a friend who you broadly agree with on the most important things but who you HARD disagree with on some of the details

#ntn spoilers #i'm at the point where i can have actual opinions now i think. #paul. paul. #i loved the campal tragic moment i loved everything with pyrrha and nona's reluctance to remember the ways she'd been hurt the #compartmentalizing of identity the acknowledgement that sometimes we just are going to become someone vastly different #the question of whether love can overcome that or why love matters if everything's just going to change and end and restart again #and the conclusion that it did matter because it mattered in the moment #love as this huge imperfect force of acceptance for others vs love as a determination to cling to them the way you think they should be #all of that was so good #even the stuff with gideon kind of. felt like it belonged in a different book but i agree with the broad character strokes of like #the horror of what's been done to gideon the way she is trying to become a different person making her own terrible decisions etc #but still trapped in this awful framework for her life & death where she only matters as a symbol for others #and her reckoning with that is messy and awful bc of course it is! #but it did feel like it needed more space than the brief chapters we got & hopefully it will come to the forefront in the next book #like all of the elements didn't necessarily mesh well and i think the humor she was trying to go for with the silly name didn't really work #and the stuff with judith was like. the most boring way to handle that imo. did she have to be unconscious the whole book #she's got so much potential as a character #and! my top pet peeve when harrow lobotomy girl nonagesimus is like i'm going to find the real god you suck #iconic yes but it reveals #she's had the agency to walk away from john the whole book and has sat there listening and now is going to find alecto when? #like?? #the point of the lobotomy was that she is rejecting the framework for her previous life bc she's decided she cares more about the human cost #like??????? #if she was just sort of drifting in the river having alecto's dreams that's one thing but i refuse to believe #she wouldn't be trying to figure out where gideon was the whole time #maybe if she hadn't done the lobotomy i would buy it but she did do the lobotomy!!!!! she literally did do the lobotomy #you have to do a lot of work to get harrow from only caring about gideon's life and i guess religion kind of to just hitting pause on #thinking about gideon for an entire book! #this is not even my shipper brain it makes sense gideon has other priorities is in mourning for her previous self the things she's lost etc #but harrow literally did the lobotomy if u needed to get her to the 9th for plot reasons there were better ways to explain it!!