#I think Harrow's lobotomy is even worse when you consider what Paul said to Ianthe

[harrowing-of-hell]

Didn't wanna reblog the post because it had a message in it that I thought was very important for people to hear and I didn't want to detract from that, but...

I'm very surprised some people think HTN ended with Harrow being vindicated for her lobotomy, or that the narrative is saying what she did is correct in any way. Especially when literally every character except Dulcinea, from Ianthe to Abigail to Magnus and even Alecto (when we only knew her as The Body), was telling Harrow to turn around and accept Gideon's death; from the very beginning of the book no less!!! Even then, unless I'm misremembering, Dulcinea didn't even tell Harrow what to do with the information she gave her! Dulcinea wasn't even sure it was Gideon, just that there was someone in Harrow's body moving it around.

But Harrow, being who she is, obviously was never going to listen to that advice. I made a post tangentially related to this, but Harrow's lobotomy before the beginning of HTN and then Harrow's soul going to sleep in the tomb at the end of HTN are actions that are pretty in-line with her character thus far. And this is why her being in the river-bubble-dream-thing with John in NTN is so important, because she's forced to directly confront what it means to be someone who's incapable of letting go.

After we saw what exactly became of Gideon in NTN, I was definitely of the opinion that things are unequivocally worse now because Harrow could not accept Gideon's sacrifice.

Harrow was trying to avoid consuming Gideon's soul, but as a consequence of her self-lobotomy Gideon is a revenant who's been stuffed into her own corpse, and her experiences during her short unlife have probably been worse than her actual life.

I do not read that as Harrow being rewarded for her suffering. And yeah sure, she may actually get Gideon back in the final book, but we know jack shit about what's actually going to happen in ATN. She may be resurrected, but I personally think it's just as likely that Gideon may stay dead. As it stands right now I think whether or not Harrow was "correct" to do the lobotomy is a heavily debatable question, and I'm heavily leaning towards the answer to that question being no.