I Mean The Soul Permeability Explanation Makes Sense And It’s Funny, However I Would Like To Present

i mean the soul permeability explanation makes sense and it’s funny, however i would like to present some other alternatives:

John definitely read, and maybe wrote fanfic prior to the whole god thing, and I wouldn’t put it past him to incorporate fanfic tropes as part of the mythos/scripture around himself

gideons porn mags probably used similar tropes as like setup material for the sexy scenes, and there is a nonzero chance harrow has read some of them

my personal favorite - the noniad is essentially like a several hundred thousand word fanfic imo, and we know from htn that harrow has read enough to quote long sections from memory, so maybe she got her fanfic trope knowledge from ortus

So I like kind of mentioned this in a previous post but like. It’s weird?? Right?? That when Harrow re-constructs the bubble over and over again at the start of HtN Act V she does 1) role-reversal AU 2) Arranged marriage AU 3) Coffee shop AU. Because those are FANFIC TROPES. (The arranged marriage AU being especially unhinged to me because she doesn’t even know John is Gideon’s dad at that point!! Her brain had to come up with “what if Gideon were royalty omg??” ON ITS OWN.) And like the fanfic-ness always was insane bc of course yeah that makes sense from a Doylist perspective, ie, Taz Muir’s an author notable for her inclusion of internet humor and culture, and she has personal experience with fanfic. But it didn’t make sense on a Watsonian level because sure, Harrow’s clearly a Romantic, but this isn’t a genre language that I think Harrow naturally speaks. Harrow doesn’t read smutty romance novels!!! She’s a repressed little nunlet obsessed with bones, her only options of sexual interest in her adolescence being 1) GIDEON 2) a corpse she views as holy and sacred— no really safe options for exploratory crushes or sexual experimentation here. So how is she thinking in fic/romance tropes? Either A) Harrow is significantly less repressed than everything I’ve ever read about her would lead me to understand, B) fic tropes are so transcendental that the agonized, wounded, thrice-haunted mind of Harrowhark Nonagesimus could, in its death throes, find itself in this specific genre of text she has no personal reference for, or C) according to the Sex Pal Theory of Permeability, Harrow has gained an understanding of romance tropes via soul osmosis, from Gideon/Alecto/Wake/Palamedes during the bubble visit???, and that explains why she dreams in fanfiction. I’m going with option C. Thank you Unwanted Guest for solving this little mystery for me 🙏🙏🙏