A few reasons why Dory is an unorthodox heroine, too
Nothing re-read related, just a thought I had when I was supposed to be asleep last night. I think we’ve established, and KC says so too, that Cassie is a pretty unorthodox heroine in that she doesn’t start her journey as a professional badass with combat skills and perfect knowledge about her world and this calm, heroic attitude that doesn’t do screaming and crying and getting upset about broken nails because what a mundane thing to do. She sort of gets there and certainly grows with the obstacles she faces, but she’s still not the typical amazon you usually see when female protagonists fight their own battles. Dory on the other hand fits that trope a lot better, but if you leave aside the battle skills, she’s pretty unusual, too.
Normally when there’s a story about a fight between good and evil, with the whole world (in our case, worlds) at stake, the protagonists have something that sets them apart from everyone else, something that makes them the only people capable of turning things around and let the good side win against all odds after all. This key figure-trope, whether the character in question is female or male, represents itself either as the Chosen One by default, with something like a prophecy, a family relation or a superpower distinguishing them from everyone else; or they get into that key position by stumbling into it more or less unintentionally and then get elevated by the people around them. Cassie kinda fits both descriptions a bit: she has the family relation, therefore becomes eligible for the superpower, and things just happen after that (until she starts owning it, of course). And while Dory, through Mircea, has the family connection, too, it doesn’t really get her anywhere, besides not being murdered at a young age. It certainly doesn’t positively set her apart from everyone else and make her eligible for the position of the heroine.
From a purely human perspective, she obviously has some physical advantages like heightened senses and strength, but those only go so far as to level the playing field. They’re certainly nothing special in the supernatural world and don’t get her anywhere all by themselves, they just make sure that she has a fighting chance against other super-natural creatures. Plus she also doesn’t really have any resources from social connections to draw from since she mostly rejects her family and is rejected by everyone else herself. Everything she has, every capability, she’s worked for and earned with years of practice, which in turn makes it attainable for everyone (theoretically, if one has similar physical advantages). There’s no immanent reason for her to be the one who saves the day built into the story. From a narrative perspective, someone like Claire would be a much more obvious choice, with her marrying into the Fae court and being able to transform into a dragon and all that. That makes Dory an unusual hero/heroine just like Cassie, only in different ways.
This is getting longer than I expected, but I wanna elaborate a bit on the hero thing, so be warned that this could get a bit off topic. I’m a university student, and I’m an assistant to a professor who’s working on a project about heroes and the discourses that make them heroes. Of course that’s all very academic and in my opinion (don’t tell him that) only partially applicable to real life (I’m including fiction into that, by the way). But because of my work I’ve picked up a few theoretical aspects of what makes a hero which I think would be nice to test here, so I’m gonna use what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience and use what I learned there outside university. But as I’m not in university, I’ll take the liberty to stop gendering the word hero and simply use heroine for both genders, because why not.
So theory says that a heroine’s function is to connect the sacred and the mundane sphere. That sounds pretty abstract, but makes sense when you think about the ancient Greeks. Most heroic figures in Greek mythology are demigods, which makes them the connection between the sacred (the gods) and the mundane (humankind) in corporeal form. So according to theory, in order to be a heroine you need to incorporate both mundane and sacred aspects, not necessarily in your genes but in your skill set, your value system, your charisma, somewhere. And then you need to do something with what you’ve got in order for the sacred inside you to show, which in turn kicks off the discourse that makes sure you’re elevated to a superhuman position, and remembered after you died. This means that the heroine doesn’t need innate heroic features of some sort - she can also develop them on her journey - but she needs them to be noticed by someone and recognized as something special, which makes her more than human and therefore partly sacred. She can then serve as a role model for other people, but for her to be a heroine, she can’t have something that everybody else can achieve, too, with the right motivation and some time, because if her heroic quality was accessible to everyone, it would no longer be part of the sacred sphere. It would be mundane, and kinda boring, and in time this quality and with it the heroine would be forgotten.
See what I’m getting at? If you take this (very simplified and probably partly inaccurate) analysis as a foundation, Cassie is a much more typical heroine than Dory. Cassie has a skill that sets her apart from the vast majority of people in her world, and she’s the only one in her time who can wield her superpower to the extent she can. Yes, there’s the acolytes, but you’re not remembered for being the second best (and therefore not a heroine, because being remembered and recognized as such is a vital part of heroism), and yes, she had to work for it, but she had to hone her skills, not attain them in the first place. Other people who don’t have this sort of skill or parentage don’t even get the chance to try if they’re good at it. Which, coincidentally, are both of divine origin, which would make a researcher on heroism sob with joy because it fits the theory so well. Cassie is both literally and figuratively a link between the sacred and the mundane, and therefore in that respect a classic heroine.
You’ll notice that I’m not basing this on fighting skills but solely on extraordinary powers because they’re basically accessible to everybody. Pritkin for example can’t be considered a hero because he’s good at various combat techniques, but rather because of his extraordinary talent for magic, and maybe also because he tried on numerous occasions to sacrifice himself for Cassie, and one time succeeded, which is important. I’m saying maybe because an act of martyrdom as a qualification for heroism is controversial among researchers. Some say it requires extraordinary strength to do it and therefore partly sacralizes the heroine, while others contend that everybody can die, and depending on your mindset and circumstances it might not even be a hard decision to make, which makes it purely mundane and the martyr therefore not a heroine. My personal, unqualified opinion is that while it certainly requires admirable strength, especially in times of war dying for another person or being prepared to do so is not uncommon enough to qualify as heroic in the sense of sacred, so I’ll exclude acts of martyrdom as a qualification for being a typical heroine.
What’s left for Dory, then? She had her moment of attempted martyrdom, but it happens quite a lot in these books - we’d have to count in Cassie, Pritkin, Mircea, Marco, Rafe, Agnes and several guards, both vampires and mages, just to name a few, and one basic rule about heroism is that not everyone can be a heroine. Heroines must be rare for them to be extraordinary and part of the sacred world. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dory, but according to this theory she’s not a heroine because the only thing special about her are her combat skills, and those are not special enough to be considered heroic/of sacred origin. On top of this, she doesn’t even have the narrative pointing a sign at her that reads heroine, as I discussed way, way above. We’ll see how things evolve in the next Dory book when/if she learns how to integrate her two personas and use Dorina’s (much more extraordinary and therefore heroic) mental powers. But until then, if you look at our lead ladies from this perspective, Dory is at least as unorthodox a heroine as Cassie.
