I read this book months ago so if the details are off forgive me.
The problem with this whole book I think comes from The Secret History. I'll admit I am a bit of a fan of TSH, but I will say that it is definitely not as amazing as people in the Dark Academia fandom make it to be. The thing about this book, that I'm glad most people over the age of 15 see, is that Tartt doesn't really like these chcarcters and we're not supposed to either. But, if you've fully bought into the aesthetic and image Tartt is satirising it becomes really hard to dislike these students. On a surface level Rio understands this principle but I think she’s tied her characters and identified them so heavily on the aesthetics of TSH.
People get very defensive when you say that IWWV was inspired by TSH but let's be honest here... I won't sit here a list every similarity but anyone whose read both has to admit the inspiration. Inspiration is not plagiarism and no one is accusing Rio of being a thief.
Rio buys so hard in to these characters that she literally cannot paint them (except Richard) as being anything but interesting, beautiful and charismatic. That's where the whole book falls apart, Rio cannot bring herself to make these characters unlikable, so the entire novel feels like she's revealing the bad things they've done followed immediately with an excuse about why it's not their fault. The only characters that doesn't get this treatment is the one that Rio wants us to see as the villain. How do you write a murder mystery and forget to add the bit about murder?
Fillipa was the most annoyingly useless character I've read in a long while. I think if you could remove a character completely and have no issues with the plot there's a problem, and this is an issue she shares with the other female characters. The egregious thing about this character is that she is the only female of colour (I think she was some type of South East Asian). I think a lot of people on the internet falsely attribute authors portraying racism in their work as them endorsing it. It's not racist to have a character who is asian be the one person in the group who doesn't get a sexy Shakespearean archetype, because that is unfortunately the reality for a lot of woc. The problem is when you don't correct or address that reality in any meaningful way. In the real world, Fillipa would have been assigned a spare role because she's asian, and in the real world that would have been painfully obvious for the other characters. In the real world, Alexander would have been assigned the villain because he was latino.
The novel started on a scene where the main character, Oliver was sitting around with the other students and mentally assigning them with their on stage archetypes. When he outlined how these roles are so heavily cemented in their group and how they tend to influence their relationships with one another, I was sure the central conflict would have come about after they were cast in unusual archetypes. That did happen to an extent in the halloween scene, but this shuffling didn't involve Fillipa or Alexander at all.
So you're telling me that this asian girl who never gets the desirable female role, and is often cast to play men, never gets her chance to be the main girl? None of the other characters see the discrimination and but justify it with her personality and appearance?
Again with the archetypes because it seems all the issues with this books comes from this, Rio refuses to betray them. She doesn't feel the need to twist them in interesting ways or use them to tell us a convincing story. It’s not bad that I guessed that Jason was the murderer since he’s the archetypal hero, but it’s bad that the real twist was that no murder even took place.
