I can’t guarantee I won’t catch shippy feelings later, but I was a bit surprised (given what I’d osmosed from the fandom) by how not-classically-romantic the Gideon/Harrow bond was. They’re both explicitly besotted with other people, Gideon’s descriptions of Harrow totally lacked the sexual charge she felt towards basically every other woman she laid eyes on, and their bond really seemed to come more from “only two children of our generation” + something almost metaphysical about the necro/cav connection. It was so intense and powerful but in a veeery different way.

My copy of HtN finally arrived! I’m still okay with the memes but I’m actually finding them a bit more jarring in this book, maybe because Gideon is actually convincingly the kind of person who would communicate in slightly stale memes whereas Harrow is much too self-serious for that shit.