Yay on ebook updates! I still do not have a legit copy of it myself. Which I'll get by way of just buying the fucking paperback at some point.
Wow I missed all of these but PLEASE keep sharing your thoughts i love hearing people's reactions, esp to HtN :D And yes, this whole series absolutely oozes golden-era-HS-fanfic energy, which is one of the reasons i just ate it up. i can't believe we have published fiction that reads like this, i feel so lucky! When i read the dedication page bit that says 'for pT' (referencing muir's perennial fic co-writer, paraTactician) i nearly cried.
got slightly distracted over the weekend but am back at it. it is truly incredible how much new pertinent information Muir is able to reveal while also somehow managing to leave you (or me at least) not one step closer to understanding what the fuck is going on. I think I'm finally starting to get the picture, though... however. "You never could have guessed that he had seen me." HUH?????
I have so many feelings about that line. For reasons I will share once you finish. They're quite funny ones.
I can't believe she made a whole military coffee shop au just for the sake of a barista pun this is getting SILLY but also I really hope someone's made that into an actual fic I believe I may finally understand what the fuck is going on
So the funny thing that I had thoughts about with that line earlier was this. You see. Literally within the first few pages I went "This is Gideon, isn't it. She's the narrator of the second person segments." But then I went "Wait, no. That's too easy. If Muir intended it to be this, she wouldn't make it something I can reasonably guess in the first fucking chapter. It must be something else. Clearly." And then I spent the entire rest of the book coming up with increasingly stupid theories about this and just where Gideon could be because I was just DEADSET on the idea that Muir would not make her main twist so fucking simple to figure out. But it was. And she stated that she was worried about people guessing it so early because to her it felt very obvious. AND IT DOESN'T EVEN MATTER IF THEY DO BECAUSE YOU GET PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO GO "HMMM TOO EASY. SEEMS SUS."
The "but how tho" and "why is Harrow not connecting these dots" aspects worked well for me for keeping a sense of mystery and suspense, enough that I was cackling triumphantly once Gideon entered the scene.
see it all flew right over my head, I was just like "2nd person :D homestuck :D yay :D" and didn't think too much of it lmao. later I thought it was a narrative device to highlight how the person in question was not quite the Harrowhark we knew and enhance the unsettled feeling we were supposed to be having. the narrator doesn't have a strong personal voice, and Gideon very much does, which threw me off. that "me" caught me completely off guard lol, I loved it for a bit I thought that Harrow had somehow managed to actually alter reality, though that would completely not mesh with the magic system we know of, because 1) how in character all the people in her memory were (now explained by them being actual revenants instead of memory figments), 2) the fact that the Emperor seemed to be accepting of what she thought reality was (specifically that he didn't question it when she said Ortus a couple times), and 3) that one time there was an offhand mention of a FTL travel method that did weird and bad things to space and time. but it never really seemed that plausible because. how in the fuck even. sidenote also I am SO PSYCHED about the appearance of Camilla and Sex Pal. I love them :D and I can't wait to learn more about the fearless resistance or whatever Blood of Eden turns out to be. and also John, I want to know everything about John
There are a couple very distinctly Gideon moments in the narration, though I took it to just be an attempt at narrative consistency? Like she was aiming for the same irreverent 'vibe' despite the change and that's why. Every mention of a pommel, especially- the narration gets increasingly annoyed with Harrow's inability to remember what it's called.
Yeah, I'll admit that for a good portion I didn't think it was potentially wholeass ghost Gideon, I thought it was lingering fragments of Gideon perspective narrating the parts Harrow just wasn't connecting to from some combination of disassociation and the way the two of them spent their lives twisted up with Awareness of each other. TFW grief and change have you just redact your memory but your memory is stubborn and also starts talking like her, kind of thing.
For me what got me thinking was the way Gideon's name was blanked out in the dramatis personae and how ORTUS is notably the only name written like that. It seemed too off. Too weird. And now we've got that plus a second person narrator only some of the time? And third person the rest of the time? And Harrow is hanging out with Ortus as her cav? well that's just off it's gotta be gideon who's the main narrator. that's too many clues!! YOU GAVE ME TOO MANY CLUES!!!
And then I was like "lol what kind of chump writer would spoil their twist on the fucking character list". LIKE A FOOL.
