Throne of Glass Spork: Part Five

[epistler]

The chapter opens with a big description of the throne room. Apparently it has a “red marble” floor and transparent glass walls. Again, who the hell thought this was a good idea? How are people not constantly walking into the walls? And what the hell is supporting all that glass?

There’s also a big scary looking fireplace with a fire going in it, and the fire is noted to be “greenish”, and has an odd effect on Cal.

Okay, I’m calling it now: the evil royals actually are secretly using magic. The whole damn glastle is magic and that’s why it hasn’t collapsed and also why it glows at night. I mean come on – author’s not exactly being subtle about it. Hell, maybe the king is secretly an evil “fae” who just wanted to get rid of the competition.

There’s a throne here, presumably with the king on it, and now Cal actually bothers to bow. The prince is there, and we get yet another chunk of description concerning his clothes and how OMG Handsome he is. We get it already. Sheesh!

But there’s no real description of the king himself, for some reason. Normally you’d expect him to be described as Cal approached the throne, but nope. The author didn’t even bother to note whether he was even in the room, and it’s only confirmed now when he starts talking and his voice gets described.

Needless to say he has an evil “raspy” voice which gives Cal the shivers, and we get some stuff about his chest and what he’s wearing (…but nothing about his face). Instead we learn that he has a sword decorated with the royal wyvern, and supposedly nobody ever went up against it and lived, and its name is Nothing. Uh, Nothung. I looked it up, and apparently that’s the name of Siegfried's sword from Wagner’s Ring Cycle – specifically the one he used to kill the dragon Fafnir. Rather hilariously, it’s also the name of a sword seen in Season One of Adventure Time. 

What precisely was the point of lifting a sword name out of a classic German opera? Is it a clue to the origins of the sword – was it once used to slay dragons? An in-joke of some sort? Will this sword even become important at any point? Or is it just a pointless reference the author threw in for the hell of it? And since when was this a Germanic setting anyway? None of the other names for anyone or anything are German, or Nordic either for that matter.

Anyway, the king tells Cal that she and her fellows have been brought here to serve their country, and Cal takes a look at the bystanders and instantly figures out which ones are the other champions, because all the nobles are old and nicely dressed, and each one of them is accompanied by a younger guy who’s obviously under guard.

Yup, all the other competitors are men. I spy some upcoming and not at all tiresome displays of Grrrrl Powah. “You can’t defeat me, you’re just a girl! ...Oh no! You, a girl, have just defeated me!”

and so on and so forth.

Come on, Ms Maas – there are more imaginative and original ways of doing feminism. Were you even trying?

Also, why are all the nobles old?

Oh, and this is rich. Cal checks out the competition, twenty three guys in all, and proceeds to judge every single one of them based on his looks (eww, scars! Eww, pockmarks!), concluding along the way that they’re all brainless morons because they don’t have shiny eyes (unlike her, of course). It only gets better as the king goes on to say that his Champion will be his “right-hand sword” and Cal gets all upset and ashamed because “What was a Champion but a dressed-up name for murderer? Could she actually stomach working for him?”

Um, moron?

YOU’RE AN ASSASSIN. YOU LOVE MURDERING PEOPLE. YOU’VE SPENT THE ENTIRE BOOK SO FAR FANTACISING ABOUT IT!

Where the hell did this sudden moralistic squeamishness come from? And don’t even think about trying to claim Cal’s one of those honourable assassins, because so far she’s done such things as imagine hanging the prince from the nearest trees with her own chains and throwing the captain over a cliff, and indulge in apparently enjoyable musings about seeing their blood all over the floor, all apparently just for the hell of it. Cal is not a chivalrous or noble person, and she’s been very firmly established as someone who enjoys killing and finds it amusing.

Shut the fuck up, you stupid self-righteous twat.

The king informs them that they’ll be competing for the next thirteen weeks, with training followed by a test each week. He adds that some of the competitors may die, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. Well, he might as well have said that.

…oh god, is this going to be the entire rest of the book?

It is, isn’t it? We’re going to spend the whole book watching Cal curb-stomp a bunch of disposable baddies before becoming Champion in a big fat foregone conclusion at the ‘climax’. And then we’ll be obliged to read the sequel before we get to see anything relevant happen.

Bet you anything I’m right.

Oh, and apparently this fantasy land has Christmas! Or as they call it here, “Yulemas”. Wow, that is so imaginative. That’s when the final duel between the four remaining candidates will happen.

Cal accidentally looks the king in the eye at this point, which makes her have a heart palpitation going on how it’s written, and then she has the gall to dump even more self-righteous moralising on us as she thinks about how the king is a “murderer” who’s killed a lot more people than she has, all of them “undeserving and defenseless”. So what, none of Cal’s victims were defenseless? And if she’d gone and shanked the captain and the prince just for the hell of it, the way she clearly wanted to, that would have been totally okay?

So now she’s a self-serving hypocrite on top of everything else. She was unlikeable enough to begin with, but this is pretty much the nadir of hateful characterisation because there are few things more insufferable than self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

Next, we’re going to be treated to watching her mercilessly slaughter all her opponents and be patted on the head for doing so. Or at least that’s what I’m absolutely and with plenty of justification expecting.

Anyway, having said his piece the king demands that they all thank him for the privilege, and then announces that he’s leaving town until Yulemas (come on), but he’ll still be able to have any of them executed if he finds out they’ve tried to cheat.

The prince butts in to say he’s got to get going, and once he’s left the king dismisses everyone. Outside the captain makes a patronising comment about how Cal managed to keep her mouth shut for once, and the prince joins them to make a further quip about what a good job she did of “nodding and bowing”. Ugh, these guys can officially fuck off as well. I’m surprised Cal doesn’t fly off the handle over this, but her trait of having a nasty violent temper seems to have fallen by the wayside.

So not only is she a crap character, but she’s not even consistently characterised.

The prince invites her to dinner, and in amongst the tiresome banter that ensues Cal thinks about how she and the prince have something in common, namely strict overbearing fathers (or in her case a foster father). The prince makes a remark about how he’s finally managed to get her to smile, and yet again I note that he and the captain are talking about her like she’s not there, or as if she’s deaf or some kind of non-sentient animal. They’ve been doing it for the whole book and it’s incredibly annoying and patronising. Yes, I hate Cal, but that doesn’t mean these two aren’t insufferable jerks.

The prince reminds her that she needs to keep her true identity a secret, and gives her a cover story: from now on her name is Lillian, an heiress and jewel thief. Cal decides to make an issue of it, because of course she does, and then makes sour comments about the castle which gets her praised for her “swagger”. Don’t ask me why swaggering is something one should find charming in another person, but the prince pretty obviously wants to get in those pants, so…

After this they bump into Snow White, aka the lady Cal tried to murder with a flower pot for fun, who I guessed might be the princess. Instead the prince addresses her as “Lady Kaltain”, and doesn’t seem happy to see her. Guess I was wrong about the princess thing.

She tells the prince his mother wants to see him, before he interrupts to introduce Cal under her false name. Lady Kalwhatever immediately flips over into Highschool Cheerleader Mode, complete with passive aggressive comments about Cal’s appearance. Cal snipes back at her – what’s next, are they going to start ineffectually slapping each other? – and the prince breaks it up by saying he’d better get going. He kisses Cal on the hand, which gets her all hot and bothered, and leaves. Cal and Lady Kalthrop exchange some more witless barbs before the latter goes on her way, and the moment she’s gone Cal starts making nasty judgemental remarks about how awful she is. To whit:

“I hate women like that. They’re so desperate for the attention of men that they’d willingly betray and harm members of their own sex. And we claim men cannot think with their brains!”

Wow, you seem to know an awful lot about this woman given that’s the first time you actually talked to her, Cal. And what, because she personally dislikes you that means she’s evil and stupid and a traitor to the sisterhood? Eff off.

But of course the Sue’s perception is right, because the captain just joins in with the nasty remarks. Oh no, she has a rich daddy and came here in a litter. What a bitch.

Your petty resentment over stupid shit that happened to you in highschool is showing, author. I mean really – could it possibly be any more obvious that this woman is based on a real person? As such I’m fully expecting her to suffer some sort of ironically appropriate punishment for her “sins”.

Also, putting other women down for having different goals in life than you is also not how you do feminism, and nor is resorting to using strawman non-characters who only exist to be ridiculed and punished. This is the height of childishness and bad writing.

The captain takes Cal back to her room where there’s a meal waiting, saying the contest begins tomorrow, which for some reason puts her in a good mood. End another chapter which barely accomplished a damn thing, unless you count “introducing the world’s most obvious Scary Sue”, which I don’t. God, these characters are such pathetic cardboard cutouts.

Chapter Eleven (yes, we’re eleven chapters in and we really have gotten this little in the way of actual content) opens with Cal being rudely awakened by the captain. His name is Chaol, by the way, but he’s such a nonentity I just keep thinking of him as “the captain”.

Since Cal is a highly trained master assassin, she reacts to being prodded awake by instantly flipping into combat mode, leaping out of bed and seizing the nearest weapon almost before her eyes have even opened.

Oh wait, instead she reacts like a sulky teenager who doesn’t want to get up and go to school. Seriously; she pulls the blankets over her head and whines about how she hasn’t had enough sleep, and keeps on complaining when the captain rips the covers off and throws them on the floor exactly like a dad who’s just run out of patience. Cal keeps bitching and moaning, so he takes the pillows as well. C’mon, Cal, if you miss the bus you’ll be late for your Chemistry finals!

Cal finally gets up, continuing to bitch and moan as she demands her “slippers”, and then lumbers off to eat breakfast, which includes “pomegranate juice”. Pomegranate is a fruit found in the Mediterranean, so don’t ask me what the hell it’s doing here in what’s clearly a European style temperate zone.

Do some frogging research, authors! It’s not that bloody difficult – hell, these days you don’t even have to go to a library! You have access to the entire world’s knowledge in the form of the phone sitting in your pocket! Oh ffs – there’s even a “napkin” provided. What’s next, a bedside cl-

“Why, might I ask, as you so tired?”

“I was up until four reading.”

 …

How the hell does she know it was 4am?

For that matter, what the hell was she thinking sitting up all night when she’s supposed to be competing in a life or death trial the next morning?? It’s been repeatedly shown in controlled tests that being overtired in combat situations is just as bad as being drunk. It fucks with your reflexes and attentiveness, and makes you far, far more likely to make stupid mistakes like shooting the wrong guy.

And yet Cal, the “famous assassin” is so hopelessly stupid it didn’t occur to her to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for this.

Instead she just exchanges more unfunny barbs with the captain, who she has the gall to accuse of not treating her with “courtesy”, and then mentally bitches about how the porridge needs more “brown sugar”.

They didn’t have sugar in the middle ages, author, brown or refined. People sweetened their food with honey. I’m not asking for historical fiction here or anything, but at least try to pretend you’re writing a story set in the distant past and not modern day middle class America. 

Finally she moves on to wondering if the competitions will “actually be worthy opponents?” This sort of complacent arrogance generally warrants a swift and painful lesson in humility, but because this is a Sue we’re dealing with that’s probably not going to happen. Sadly.

After this little root canal of a scene the captain calls in a “servant girl” and tells her to dress our heroine in “pants and a shirt”, and “bring a cloak”. Because apparently our big tough heroine is not capable of dressing herself. And what the hell is the cloak for? A fashion accessory? Either way you really do not want to fight while wearing anything long and flowing which opponents can grab or step on.

Predictably, Cal the tough master assassin who can kill you with a credit card because she’s so tough… proceeds to whine about the clothes. Wah wah “these pants are absurd” wah wah, “this shirt is awful”.

It was at about this point that I started fantacising about stabbing the little brat in the face with a railroad spike.

Finally she’s hustled into a big fancy room which is rather elaborately described. Everyone’s there training with weapons. Cal checks out a handy rack of weapons and makes yet another snide remark before… well, remember how Bella Swan checked out her list of assigned texts for English class, and airily informed us that she’s already read them all because she’s just so amazingly literate?

That’s pretty much what we get here. The rack apparently has “Swords, sword-breakers, axes, bows, pikes, hunting daggers, maces, spears, throwing knives, wooden staves… While she generally preferred the stealth of a dagger, she was familiar with every weapon here.” Because of course she is.

She’s eighteen, remember.

Naturally she thinks about how it was foolish of them to let her have access to weapons (if she’s so tough and deadly, why has she spent this long waiting to get her hands on a weapon instead of just improvising? You can strangle someone with a strip of cloth if you’re determined enough, y’know) and is told not to try any funny business. At this point she’s interrupted by the arrival of a guy she spotted yesterday, a fellow champion named Cain. We know he’s evil because he’s ugly and also because his name is Cain. No fictitous character named “Cain” (or “Caine”, or “Kaine”, or any of its other spellings) is ever a good guy. It’s about the most unsubtle “evil” name this side of “Sahtan B Eveldour”.

Anyway, Cain says good morning and then teases her by saying he would have expected her to have run off by now. Because Cal now suddenly has a hair-trigger temper again, she instantly flies into a violent rage and wants to kill him. Because of one pretty mild taunt from a guy who isn’t attractive. She even hisses about how she’s going to do it, as if the dude just murdered her family.

So now we can add “ridiculously petty and thin-skinned” to her growing list of hateful and obnoxious traits. She even snarls at the captain for not stepping in. The two of them bicker like idiots for a while until he tells her to pick a weapon and get on with it. Cal vows to “shut Cain up in an unmarked grave for all eternity” – again, because he teased her a bit – and decides to show up the captain first.

This oughta be good – a “cool” combat scene written by someone who can’t be bothered to do any research about even the most basic shit. But please don’t laugh – this book contains no intentional humour.

She picks a sword and the two of them exchange some more annoying banter (you can’t have a battle of wits when both combatants are unarmed, a fact not every author has grasped). Cal brags about killing a guy with a pickaxe back in the mine while smiling in a “feral” way, because the author probably thinks that makes her sound cool instead of like an annoying psycho.

They start fighting at last, and… well, you can tell the author got this straight out of a movie. The fight is compared to a “dance”, because of course it is, and basically all they do is hit the swords together (where’s the big showers of sparks, then?). Needless to say there’s a bunch of stuff about how fast and graceful Cal is (is anyone surprised?), and the annoying banter continues even while they’re fighting.

Like I said; it’s straight out of a movie. Get a load of this painfully clichéd exchange:

‘Something to remember when fighting me, Sardothien,’ he panted. The sun caught in his golden-brown eyes.

‘Hmm?’ she grunted, lunging to deflect his newest attack.

‘I don’t lose.’

Great, now I want to murder him too.

He trips her up and wins the match. Yup, our heroine is just that amazing, boys and girls. Defeated by the oldest trick in the book and incapable of using her peripheral vision. Cal throws a sulk about losing, and gets a lecture from the captain. To wit “You have the skills, but some of your moves are still undisciplined”, whatever the hell that means. Great, so now we’re going to have to sit through a bunch of training montages. My favourite.

Cal continues to throw a tantrum and threatens to kill him in graphic detail, this time out loud, but as usual he doesn’t take this seriously, and again why would you expect him to? Cal grabs a couple of “hunting knives” and gets an evil grin before the chapter ends. Oh look, she’s going to try and do something stupid again.

And it would seem I’ve been had. I assumed Cal would be the awesomest fighter ever because she’s a Sue. Instead, it turns out all that talk about how deadly she is was just that: talk. In reality she’s just another ineffectual twit who like most narcissists is all boasting with nothing to back it up.  Because heaven forfend we miss out on the mandatory training scenes.

I’m annoyed.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Part of the problem I think is the author used assassin as a short hand to say that Cal is a bad ass fighter. You often see that in various forms of media. However, Cal seems to turn her nose up at stealth, concealing her presence, and poisons. Prefers direct, honorable combat...not assassin like behavior if you ask me. The author seems to want to have Cal as a bad ass, yet a prim and proper lady, that just happens to murder people...in a better written book I can see the prim lady as being a disguise and she uses it to collect the information on the mark before shanking them in a secluded hallway with a poisoned stiletto.

I wonder how interesting the story could have been if Maas went with Cal using her legendary assassin talents to escape and then pursued by the other contestants to be the King's Assassin...ah well.

[epistler]

Cal could easily have worked as the female equivalent of the Gentleman Assassin - elegant, refined, well-mannered, and applies the same principles to her murders by always killing people in a manner she considers polite and not too messy.
What we have instead is a vain, bratty kid with horrible manners and a bizarre obsession with violence and gore. She doesn't come off as anything like what an assassin should be, let alone remotely "badass". Brattiness and arrogance with nothing to back it up are not badass - they're just really really irritating.