you ever think about how exceptional it is that Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth are SO stylistically different from Gideon the Ninth and from each other in every single aspect, despite GtN being a runaway success?? In this capitalist nightmare scape once you make one successful piece of art there is huge financial pressure to iterate on what was successful about it in order to maintain that audience. Success paradoxically instills risk-avoidance. This is especially potent when one of the big fan obsessions is a character or relationship, and Gideon and Griddlehark are both just fucking absolutely microengineered to appeal to the tumblr queers in that exact way.
Full series spoilers below the cut
But Tamsyn Muir was like fuck that, not only is Gideon dead at the start of the HtN, she has been COMPLETELY EXCISED FROM THE NARRATIVE until the very very end. Not counting internal dialogue she has like, 10 lines in the whole damn book. From a fandom-satisfying, commodified art perspective, this is an unhinged decision to make. But its also kind of genius. We savor every tiny sip of Gideon we are given like she is a $15,000 glass of wine. We become attuned to the negative space created by her absence which is, in a sense, a version of her presence, like the paper leftover after you cut out a shape.
AND THEN SHE DOES IT AGAIN IN NONA.
She excises Harrow completely from the book, and Gideon from all but the last few chapters. Even other characters who do remember them are mostly trying to not tell Nona about either of them for fear of "leading" her, as Palamedes puts it. But we see Harrow and Gideon in Nona in all kinds of little ways.
AND THEN SHE DOES IT AGAIN BY MAKING CAM AND PAL BECOME PAUL.
We get so much Cam and Pal in NtN and their ship and their dynamic and their angst is incredible. Any writer could dine out for the rest of their life on a ship like that if they wanted to exploit it to the maximum degree. Tamsyn Muir heard "kill your darlings" and was like cool, i will also kill everyone else's darlings too.
Maybe the reason this book so obsesses my mind and that of many other readers is that this sparing use of fan favorite characters and use of narrative "negative space" trains the reader to be an active participant in the story in a way that is intoxicating. Like the difference between being an audience member watching a play and being an actor saying their lines.
