#aka Earth is dying om nom nom

[senseoftheday]

Okay, so if you're a diehard Griddlehark shipper - which I am, as is most of the fandom - then it can be hard not to reduce Harrow's love for Alecto to being a barrier to Gideon & Harrow being endgame.

However, I just realized recently how narratively essential it is that Harrow loves Alecto. While Griddlehark's entanglement is one of the key threads of the story, I think Harrow's love for Alecto will influence the outcome more than anything.

Let's start by looking at Harrow. She was conceived and raised to be the perfect Reverend Daughter, but the challenge is that Harrow is the epitome of "following the rules BUT NOT LIKE THAT." Harrow became everything she was conceived and raised to be and then took it one step further. Supposed to wear facepaint? Great, she's never taking it off. Supposed to be a necromantic genius? Girl's gonna study all the dusty books and be the best necromancer the Ninth House has ever seen. Supposed to devote herself body and soul to the locked tomb? She's gonna break inside and become hopelessly enraptured with its inhabitant.

Then, we've got Alecto. Alecto is Earth. Looking back through the John chapters, Earth was abused, forgotten, ravaged, and designated for abandonment. Earth put all her hope in one weird scientist, and his expression of gratitude was to swallow her whole, spit her out in the body of a woman, and transform her into a weapon to fuel his power. Earth gave John love and trust, and he used her as the instrument of his revenge porn. And then all of his friends deemed her a monster and forced him to put her to sleep.

And then one ten-year-old necromantic prodigy - suicidal and lost, a caged animal and the product of genocide, unable to embody compassion because she wasn't raised with it - looks at her and loves her purely. Harrow doesn't want anything from her. Harrow looks at her and thinks, you're worth living for. Harrow's love for Alecto fuels her through being a pint-sized ruler of a planet and drives her devotion for the Ninth House. In Harrow's mind, she is the tomb, and to love her is to love its inhabitant.

There's enough discourse about Nona being the earth, and the importance of Nona as the earth being loved by Camilla and Palamedes and Pyrrha. Nona is inherently loveable, and Nona loves unabashedly and without fear. But before Nona was Nona, and before she was loved by Camilla and Palamedes and Pyrrha, she was Alecto, and she was loved by Harrow.

So now we've got two complicating factors: Gideon and John. Gideon doesn't know how to see Alecto as anything other than a romantic rival, and the language she uses - "hots for" and "bullshit dead girlfriend" - reinforces that perspective. We learn that Harrow loves the body before we have any idea who Alecto is.

For Harrow, loving Alecto is pure and straight-forward. Loving Gideon is complicated. Loving Gideon means being seen by her, means making herself vulnerable, means letting her guard down, means losing her. It requires letting herself be loved, and Harrow's self-hatred shoves a big, deep wedge between them for most of their time together.

Then, there's John. John doesn't know how to love anyone purely; he doesn't know how to love anyone as more than a tool. Harrow's love for Gideon prevents her from being useful to him, because she sacrificed full lyctorhood for the hope of keeping Gideon's soul intact, and so his expression of love is to try and "fix" her. He weaponizes his daughter into a perfect sword-hand at the expense of her bodily autonomy. He can't see Harrow and Gideon as any more than Alecto replacements, and his love for Alecto hinges on her function as his cavalier, as the source of his power, as the custodian for his soul.

And this is roughly where we are at the end of Nona the Ninth, and despite John's desperation to use all three women as tools, Harrow is truly the biggest threat to his power because she loves both Gideon and Alecto in a way that he never can. She loves Gideon beyond her role as a cavalier, loves her beyond her own possession of her. (Gideon's inability to recognize this is a whole other thing.) John's completely unable to love his daughter or cavalier like that. And she loves Alecto enough that when God disappoints her, Harrow abandons her devotion to him to transfer it purely to Alecto.

After all this, though, I don't see Harrow's love for Alecto as romantic or sexual - it's reverential. I think Harrow's love for Gideon terrifies her, because it's so unlike what she feels for Alecto. It's real and reciprocal and messy and inconvenient and vulnerable, and it requires Harrow to exist in her messy, malnourished human body. It requires her to be touched and cared for and to put her trust in someone else, to exist beyond the facade of everything she's meant to be. Loving Gideon - and being loved by her - has nothing to do with what she was created for. Gideon doesn't love the Reverend Daughter; she loves Harrow.

So Harrow, complicated little rule-follower that she is, takes this to the next level and basically lends her body to Gideon and then Alecto as a twisted little expression of love, but the irony is that Gideon and Alecto's biggest act of devotion is to get her the fuck back in her own body.

Anyway, this rambled a lot, but I think Harrow's love for Alecto is so pivotal to the series' trajectory so far, and I think it'll drive the plot of Alecto the Ninth. I don't think it's incompatible with her love for Gideon - and not even in a poly way! - but Harrow's love for Alecto needs to fulfill its purpose before she and Gideon can figure out how to exist in their messy, complicated love for each other in their messy, complicated bodies.

At the risk of sounding insensitive I think it's very funny how many tlt fans are like, viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of Harrow genuinely being in love with the Body/with Alecto. Like you see all the shit that happens in these books and you draw the line at "a girl falling in love with a hallucination of a dead body she saw when she was like ten." Weak-willed