Throne of Glass Chapter 2
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Note: I think tumblr is taking issue with how long this post is, so I'm splitting the chapter in half. This one's the first half.
...
We open back in the same opulent room as before.
"Your Highness," said the Captain of the Guard. He straightened from a low bow and removed his hood, revealing close-cropped chestnut hair. The hood had definitely been meant to intimidate her into submission during their walk. As if that sort of trick could work on her. Despite her irritation, she blinked at the sight of his face. He was so young!
I'm not sure why him removing his hood means it was meant to intimidate her. Unless the idea was that he thought she wouldn't take him seriously if she could see how young he was? In which case -- there's a better way to communicate that.
Captain Westfall was not excessively handsome, but she couldn't help finding the ruggedness of his face and the clarity of his golden-brown eyes rather appealing.
This was the part that made me reconsider whether the Prince was the love interest -- the captain being close to her in years means he's a candidate too.
Somehow I'd forgotten about 2010s YA's penchant for love triangles.
They both wait for Celaena to bow to the prince, she has some defiant thoughts about how she's not going to grovel to him in her last moments, and then
Thundering steps issued from behind her, and someone grabbed her by the neck. Celaena only glimpsed crimson cheeks and a sandy mustache before being thrown to the icy marble floor. Pain slammed through her face, light splintering her vision. Her arms ached as her bound hands kept her joints from properly aligning. Though she tried to stop them, tears of pain welled.
Okay, so... we spent the entire last chapter being told she was deadly, she was badass, she needed six guards to protect everyone else from her, and now... some dude just sneaks up on her and shoves her onto her face?
I realize that some readers might have thought I was being sarcastic when I made my last post. So, to clarify, when I said teenage girls dreamed about being deadly assassins or fearsome mercenaries, that was sincere. And, honestly, that's an extremely valid power fantasy. Good for them.
It's just... this is supposed to appeal to those folks, and yet...
One of my friends called this the Gamora Effect: In the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, we get told over and over how incredibly deadly and badass and whatnot Gamora is, but then we actually watch the movie, and she somehow fails to win a single fight. She has a three-way fight with Quill and Rocket and Groot, where she gets captured by them in slapstick fashion; she has to get 'rescued' from Drax by Quill, with the implication being that no way she could possibly win a fight against him, because look big guy with buff muscles, even though we were literally told she was trained to kill from birth. She gets rescued by Quill again when she's launched into space without a breathing mask, and then she gets sidelined from the main battle into a girl-on-girl sparring match with her sister, where, somehow, neither of them win, because collateral damage from one of the other fights takes them both out. We don't actually get to see her have a single physically badass moment in that first film. But we're told over and over how deadly and dangerous she is, so I guess we have to believe it, despite the lack of onscreen evidence.
It hasn't been long enough for me to claim that the same thing is happening here, but I'm going to start keeping track of Celaena's actual on-page showing in physical situations, rather than what the narration says about her. So far, we've seen her
get dragged into a room she didn't want to go in by guards, even though she genuinely thought they wanted to kill her and was presumably fighting for her life
get shoved to the floor by a red-faced mustached man - one whom she apparently didn't even notice while she was describing the chandeliers and the stained glass.
Anyway, the guy lectures her on showing respect for the Crown Prince:
"That is the proper way to greet your future king," a red-faced man snapped at Celaena.
What, faceplanting in front of him?
Anyone who's ever tripped in front of their crush, please rejoice. That is, in fact, the proper way to greet your YA love interest. Ruddy-faced man is portrayed as fat and balding, dressed in orange that matches his hair, so we're clearly meant to dislike him (again, 2010s YA; Disney attractiveness logic is in play). I'm guessing he looks something like this:
If she could move her right arm just a few inches, she could throw him off balance and grab his sword...The shackles dug into her stomach, and fizzing, boiling rage turned her face scarlet.
The ellipses aren't skipping over anything; that was present in the text. But this is another hallmark of Maas's that was present in ACoTaR, too: She doesn't fully finish her thoughts. They kind of imply something, but you're left to actually draw the conclusion yourself. Here, Celaena is pissed at this orange man, and she wants to kill him. But... presumably the shackles stop her? Except we don't actually see her try to take any kind of action; she just feels the shackles digging in, which... she would have done anyway, since getting thrown on her face with her wrists in shackles in front of her would have made the shackles... You get it.
I'm not saying we need every move or every thought spelled out or anything. Just... here, specifically, having Celaena try to act but having the shackles surprise her by getting in the way and ruining her attack? That would make what's happening on the page actually explicit to the reader, instead of halfway-implied; and it would solve the Gamora Effect problem -- sure, she's deadly, but she's restrained, and the restraints are working.
The Prince is like, you don't have to do that, and he's super bored. We're told that Tangerine Man is named Duke Perrington, which makes it all the weirder that he somehow managed to sneak up on a trained assassin, and also decided to... attack her? After she killed an overseer and needs all these guards around to prevent her from killing anyone? Whatever, though. Perrington leaves and she gets up.
As she rose, she frowned at the imprint of grit she left behind... But she'd been trained to be an assassin since the age of eight, since the day the King of the Assassins found her half-dead on the banks of a frozen river and brought her to his keep. She wouldn't be humiliated by anything, least of all being dirty.
Does assassin training somehow include not-being-ashamed-of-being-dirty classes? Why are these sentences relevant to the possible humiliation? This is like if I went, "I have been eating cookies since the tender age of three, when I was first left with a box unsupervised. I won't be embarrassed by getting caught with spinach in my teeth during an interview!"
Dorian Havilliard smiled at her. It was a polished smile, and reeked of court-trained charm.
I mean, if I'm describing a love interest's charming smile for the first time, I don't think "reeked" is the verb I'd use, but you do you.
Sprawled across the throne, he had his chin propped by a hand,
Is it just me, or is this kind of weird phrasing? Like, I know he doesn't literally have a severed hand propping up his chin, but... what was the point of wording it like that?
...Yet there was something in his eyes, strikingly blue--the color of the waters of the southern countries--and the way they contrasted with his raven-black hair that made her pause. He was achingly handsome, and couldn't have been older than twenty. Princes are not supposed to be handsome! They're sniveling, stupid, repulsive creatures! This one ... this ... How unfair of him to be royal and beautiful.
You know what, that's actually fair. I'll give Celaena that.
"I thought I asked you to clean her," he said to Captain Westfall, who stepped forward. She'd forgotten there was anyone else in the room.
How romantic. He talks about her like she's a dusty used car, and she's like, wow, the entire world just narrowed down to you and me.
She looked at her rags and stained skin, and she couldn't suppress the twinge of shame. What a miserable state for a girl of former beauty!
We JUST WENT THROUGH your whole career and how that meant you wouldn't be ashamed of anything!!!! It took ONE SENTENCE from a cute boy for you to--
Actually, you know what, that is kind of realistic. I take that back.
At a passing glance, one might think her eyes blue or gray, perhaps even green, depending on the color of her clothing. Up close, though, these warring hues were offset by the brilliant ring of gold around her pupils.
This is pretty and all, but I'm going to skim through the rest of the description because it just doesn't justify that much wordcount.
In short, Celaena Sardothien was blessed with a handful of attractive features that compensated for the majority of average ones; and, by early adolescence, she'd discovered that with the help of cosmetics, these average features could easily match the extraordinary assets.
Honestly? I actually like this. I remember there being a lot of not-like-other-girls YA fiction in the '10s involving being effortlessly attractive without makeup, so it's nice to see a protagonist who doesn't do that. It's also a welcome change from how Feyre apparently didn't like makeup or dresses, but those pesky servants were always forcing it on her, so she had to go around being all pretty and girly.
"And you're Celaena Sardothien, Adarlan's greatest assassin. Perhaps the greatest assassin in all of Erilea."
Did Maas just keyboardsmash to get these names? "Erilea" is just. Terrible.
He rested his elbows on his thighs. "I've heard some rather fascinating stories about you. How do you find Endovier after living in such excess in Rifthold?"
"such excess" you are a LITERAL PRINCE. And are you seriously asking her "how" she "finds" a slave mine???
Oh. Oh, I get it.
This is one of those stories where the love interest starts out spoiled and ignorant, and eventually finds out what atrocities his family perpetuated, and this actually matters to him because the protagonist was one of the victims and she turns out to be really hot, so then he does the bare minimum in rehabilitating his country and the protag forgives him and they bang.
Great.
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