A Curse for True Love Second POV
Heads up, I think this is going to be long lol.
So we have confirmation now that Jacks is getting a few chapters in his POV.
I feel like these will be toward the end, since Stephanie only recently mentioned adding them, and she’s currently at the tail end of writing the first draft). STILL THEORISING ON WHAT KIND OF SCENES THEY COULD BE.
There’s still that main second POV we haven’t gotten confirmation on, though! I couldn’t find my screenshot of when Stephanie first announced it on her story, but I do know that EVERYONE’S first assumption was Apollo.
But shortly after, Stephanie posted another story saying that the second POV wasn’t as obvious as she thought it was, and that she hadn’t seen many people guessing it. I don’t know about you, but I think I saw EVERYBODY guessing Apollo.
I really don’t think an Apollo POV makes sense narratively.
1. Apollo’s POV would give too much away — we didn’t know he had the power to take memories before he did it, and I think his POV would tell us too quickly who he really is (though I have a theory).
AND about his past with Jacks.
Screenshot taken from @jackstheprinceofhearts because we didn’t have this edition in the UK :’).
I think this is something that would be more fun to discover, narratively, through Eva’s perspective, as she unravels the mystery of what really happened to her.
2. Apollo is our villain.
He’s keeping Evangeline and Jacks apart in this book. What’s the fun in knowing everything the villain will be scheming? I feel like a villain needs to stay unpredictable to surprise us (much like Jacks in the Caraval trilogy).
3. Our no.1 POV will be from Evangeline’s perspective...but she doesn’t REMEMBER the events of the last two books.
Presumably, she’ll be stuck in the palace with Apollo. It wouldn’t make sense for Apollo to be the second POV here either, because he has no real idea about what happened too (I mean, he was cursed in various ways the entire time). AND he’s in exactly the same place as her, offering us no fresh angle on the story. HE will see everything Evangeline will see, and there’d be no NEED for his POV when she can share everything that goes on in the palace.
What we need is an outside perspective of what’s happening, someone who has known Evangeline for the last two books, AND wants her to get her memories back.
It’s not Jacks. And from the blurb, we know Apollo wants to kill Jacks and keep them apart so Eva doesn’t find out what she lost. Jacks will probably be kept away from Evangeline for at least the first 1/4 of the book.
So, to me, that means the second POV has to be someone who can show us Jacks’ side of things, without it being Jacks himself. Most importantly, at the end of Ballad, Jacks was READY to give up Evangeline.
So we need to see the process that leads to him fighting for her again instead.
Without a second POV OUTSIDE of the palace (i.e., not Apollo), we probably wouldn’t be able to see Jacks at all for a good chunk of the book, and I doubt Stephanie wants that.
Mostly because she’s a good plot device. She’s on the opposite side to Apollo, she’s friends with Evangeline, will want her to get her memories back, AND (mostly importantly) she’s friends with Jacks.
Chaos seems like he’d take too much attention away from the main plot to me. We don’t really know much about him, so I think FINDING out things about him would distract too much from Jacks and Evangeline. He seems like the perfect candidate for his own series tbh. His role reminds me a lot of Jacks in Caraval (and he seems like the kind of LI Stephanie would love to write — she loves vampires, after all).
Jacks would also NOT go to Chaos if he was in trouble, especially as we know he’ll be harbouring a grudge after what Chaos did to Eva in the other timeline. And an even greater one, if the blood on the arch means Chaos attacked JACKS instead the second time.
But we know Jacks goes to LaLa when he’s in trouble.
This is when the after-effects of the vampire venom leave him nearly passing out in the street.
So he might ALSO go to her if he were injured by Chaos.
As well as this, LaLa already has a romance built into the plot, with her dragon shifter, Dane. Who would have been released from the arch at the end of Ballad.
So her side plot as a POV character could only be REUNITING with Dane. I don’t think that would take much away from Evangeline and Jacks, as this is a pre-established romance that needs no build up. As opposed to the attention Chaos would steal. In fact, if she turns human again, seeing as the only reason she became a Fate was because she wanted to stop loving Dane — that would only make her all the more motivated to see Jacks happy too. They were friends as humans, after all.
Don’t forget, Jacks also just gave up what he sees as his only chance at ‘happily ever after’ by using the stones to save Evangeline, instead of going back to Tella. He not only just watched her die, but he can’t even have her now he’s saved her, because he’s afraid HE’LL kill her. He will need someone to motivate him again.
I think LaLa will be the one to realise something is wrong with Evangeline and that she’s in danger, spurring Jacks to action.
Maybe LaLa will want to thank Evangeline for opening the arch and giving her back Dane. But will realise her friend doesn’t remember her at all.
This way, we’re not starting from ground 0 again, with only Evangeline’s POV, and the relationship development between her and Jacks completely erased. If we only had Evangeline and Apollo’s POV, not knowing ANY of the prior plot, the whole book could’ve turned into a stream of “who’s this”, “wait, what happened?”.
If we have LaLa, we can see Jacks suffer. We can see how he will REALLY react to learning she’s forgotten him. We can see how cocky he is to Evangeline’s face (his whole “you can’t stay away from me” shtick), with it then skipping to LaLa’s POV where Jacks is crying into his apple cores. Y’know. That sounds a lot more fun to me than an Apollo POV.
AND just because it’s dual POV doesn’t mean they’ll be equally weighted dual POVs. The fact Jacks also has a few chapters just reinforces this for me. I think Evangeline will take precedent, and the second POV could be more of a plot device to build up to an EvaJacks reunion, showing us the situation from both sides.
AND we know there will be more scenes in the Hollow.
So maybe Evangeline will realise there’s something wrong with Apollo and run away with Jacks to find a solution?? Maybe I should write my theories for the actual plot in another post because this is getting LONG, BUT —
I don’t think the second POV is Apollo!
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