rainwaterspark | Throne of Glass - Deconstruction

Because I can, and because I was promised a “teen version of Game of Thrones” with a “strong female protagonist.” As usual, the book falls far short of the hype. Also, this book is imminently sporkable for gender issues and fantasy worldbuilding (whereas Shadow and Bone after a while was just a mountain of bleh).

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

Chapter One

We’re introduced to our resident badass protagonist, Celaena Sardothien. Some reviewers have mentioned being put off by Celaena’s attitude; I personally don’t have an issue with cocky protagonists. In fact, I quite like them.

It was true that she had been attractive once, beautiful even, but—well, it didn’t matter now, did it?

This is a really awkward way to work in character description. Yes, of course, if I were being escorted by guards to an unknown destination, I would totally be thinking about how attractive I used to be.

she studied the stranger’s finely crafted sword. Its shimmering pommel was shaped like an eagle midflight.

Wait.

A pommel shaped like an eagle?

I realize that most people these days don’t know a lot about swords, and it’s not specified what type of sword this is; however, going by the apparent time period this world is based off of and fantasy convention, I’ll assume it’s a longsword.

The pommel is the part at the end of the hilt (handle) of the sword. It can be decorative, though it goes without saying that the more stylized the pommel is, the more likely it belonged to a wealthy person (and the more likely the sword itself was not actually used in battle).

For longsword combat, particularly German longsword (disclaimer: I’ve only studied the Lichtenhauer tradition), the pommel frequently came into play during a duel. You could use the pommel to bash an opponent’s skull if your opponent was too close, and you also frequently rotated your grip on the hilt and pommel to execute certain moves. An eagle-shaped pommel makes that very difficult, if not impossible, to do. (You’d probably cut yourself on the pommel every time your grip shifted, which makes it rather stupid.)

We're getting into the research failure early, I see.

Oh, it’d be nice to see his blood spill across the marble. She’d lost her temper once before—once, when her first overseer chose the wrong day to push her too hard. She still remembered the feeling of embedding the pickax into his gut, and the stickiness of his blood on her hands and face.

This is interesting. It’s rare to see an openly sociopathic female protagonist in YA fiction these days. However, I have a strong feeling that the implications of this line of thought are not going to be explored, and possibly won’t even be brought up again in the novel. There’s a tendency to romanticize death/murder in order to prove how badass the protagonist is, but that doesn’t (or shouldn't) negate the fact that murder is terrible.

They keep walking, and we get a bit of infodumping about the current state of world politics, the rebels, and slavery.

And then we meet the crown prince, and the chapter ends. That was…fast.

Chapter Two

Last time on Throne of Glass, we were introduced to our cocky, murderous assassin, Celaena Sardothien.

So the captain of the guard takes off his hood, and Celaena ogles him for a minute. She’s manhandled by a duke.

If she could move her right arm just a few inches, she could throw him off balance and grab his sword

Erm…I don’t think people are usually allowed to wear weapons in front of a monarch or prince, unless it’s a guard. Too much safety liability for members of the royal family otherwise.

Also, I’m starting to get a little uncomfortable with the way Celaena’s been portrayed so far. She’s supposed to be the most badass of badass assassins…but when we meet her, she’s been worn down by enslavement and had her face shoved into the ground. This does not bode well for “strong female protagonist.”

The assassin hissed, baring her teeth

Come on…seriously?

Don’t ever refer to your main characters by an epithet (unless their name is being withheld for some reason or another).

I see this all over the internet and in bad fanfiction, or in other words, in amateur writing. It happens when authors think that using a character’s name too many times will get repetitive, but in reality, it’s not a problem and readers never notice.

Then Celaena whines about how it’s not fair that the prince is handsome.

…Really, Celaena? Really?

And then we go into an infodump about Celaena’s appearance.

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. But it was her golden hair that caught the attention of most, hair that still maintained a glimmer of its glory. 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.

But now, standing before Dorian Havilliard as little more than a gutter rat!

…I have a lot of problems with this passage.

First, this is really obvious POV switching. We were in Celaena’s head up till now, and then suddenly we’re in omniscient third person just so we get a description of Celaena’s appearance. I know it can be hard to work in the protagonist’s physical description with third-person limited POV, but there are ways to do it without resorting to an omniscient POV.

Secondly, attack of the Special Technicolor Eyes! And Rapunzel Hair! (If she’s been working in the mines, though, her hair probably should’ve been cut off, because it would’ve gotten in the way.)

Thirdly, once again we’re told how Beautiful and Special Celaena is. Why? She’s an assassin. She’s supposed to be awesome because she has awesome fighting and murdering skills, not because she’s pretty. Beauty doesn’t make someone a good assassin. Moreover, I’m pretty sure assassins try their best to blend in to the crowd, not stand out, and beauty makes one stand out.

Fourthly, cosmetics? Seriously? Cosmetics are something that rich people can afford to spend money on, and assassins aren’t rich. If they were, they’d probably quit their job so they can enjoy a longer lifespan, and if they earned a bit of money, I’m sure they’d sooner spend it on better/more weapons than freakin cosmetics. The only exception I can think of is if Celaena usually kills people by seducing them first, but given her badass boasts so far, that doesn’t seem like her usual modus operandi.

Fifthly, literally only a few paragraphs before, she said “She wouldn’t be humiliated by anything, least of all being dirty.” Then why are you already feeling humiliated, Celaena??!

Her eyes turned cold and hard.

POV fail, again. If it’s from Celaena’s perspective, we can’t have a description of her eyes, because she can’t see her own eyes.

Celaena explains that she tried to escape, mowing down a bunch of mooks in the process, and then she was finally knocked down rather than killed because the king wanted her alive so she could suffer more. Talk about sadism. And then Celaena says she intended for them to shoot her, rather than for her to escape. She hates the fact that the prince is pitying her…in which case, why did she tell him this story in the first place?

(Also, if she was seriously thinking of committing suicide…she had a mining pick. She didn’t have to stage a drastic pseudo-escape to end her own life.)

The prince sees some of Celaena’s scars, and this strikes me as creepily voyeuristic, not to mention the whole Good Scars Evil Scars trope being invoked.

And how angry you are!”

…No one talks like this. Seriously.

Celaena finally gets them to stop beating around the bush, and the chapter ends.

Chapter Three

Last time on Throne of Glass, we heard about how pretty Celaena was.

The prince’s eyes shone with amusement at her brashness but lingered a bit too long on her body. Celaena could have raked her nails down his face for staring at her like that, yet the fact that he’d even bother to look when she was in such a filthy state…A slow smile spread across her face.

Here’s another problematic passage. So she’s angry that he’s ogling her, and she should be, but at the same time she’s happy that he values her looks beneath the dirt? Ugh.

Celaena learns that the prince proposes for her to enter into a competition to become the King’s Champion…which, of course, infuriates her somewhat.

She learns that everybody thinks “Celaena Sardothien” is an older assassin, which she didn’t realize even though she’d “hidden her identity” all this time. This doesn’t make any sense. If she’s been hiding her identity, how could she fail to realize that people probably didn’t have a good idea of who she was?

After some bickering and bargaining, she finally accepts, because of course she wants her freedom. Now, the thing is, it would have been more interesting if she agreed but secretly planned to hightail it out of there as soon as she won. Assuming Ardalan doesn’t control the entire continent, she could escape to a different country. I just don’t think if the king ruined her life, she would have any inclination to work for him in any capacity.

Chapter Four

Last time on Throne of Glass, Celaena sells out to the royal family in exchange for her freedom.

She gets cleaned and fed, and she comments on how skinny she became thanks to her enslavement. Good job, Celaena, you’ve now won the Captain Obvious award. I don’t understand why she’s acting like this is such a big deal, because she’s spent a year being starved; she should have known already that she’d lost a lot of weight.

She’d wasted away to nothing. Beneath her nightgown, her ribs reached out from inside of her, showing bones where flesh and meat should have been. And her breasts! Once well-formed, they were now no larger than they’d been in the midst of puberty.

What.

No, seriously, what.

Assassins don’t need “well-formed” breasts; in fact, for a fighter, wouldn’t smaller be better? Smaller means less getting in the way, easier to fit into tight spaces, easier to run. This makes no sense whatsoever. Celaena is acting like a spoiled upper class girl rather than an assassin who’s had to fight for her life.

When Chaol came to fetch her the next morning, he found her sleeping on the floor, wrapped in the blanket.

We’ve just hopped perspectives again. This is starting to get on my nerves.

and her mood improved when the servants coiled her braided hair onto the back of her head and dressed her in a surprisingly fine riding habit that concealed her miserably thin form.

Celaena, please shut up about your attractiveness/lack thereof.

She loved clothes—loved the feeling of silk, of velvet, of satin, of suede and chiffon—and was fascinated by the grace of seams, the intricate perfection of an embossed surface. And when she won this ridiculous competition, when she was free…she could buy all the clothes she wanted.

You know, I’ll buy this. If she spent her childhood first as a dirt-poor orphan, and then as an assassin, it’s very conceivable that she’d be fascinated by high-class things like pretty clothes. On the other hand, after a year spent starving and enduring heavy labor, it's hard to imagine she'd be more interested in clothes than, say, food.

Celaena sees the other slaves going to work, and feels bad, but tries not to think about it. This…sort of makes sense, if she’s been in the habit of looking out only for herself ever since she was young, but at the same time this doesn’t exactly scream social justice.

However, the unbearable urge to splatter someone across a wall lessened when they brought her a piebald mare to ride.

…This is weird. We’re meant to feel sorry for Celaena because of her suffering in the mines, we’re meant to admire her for her wit, and yet at the same time she’s clearly a sociopath who was practically born to be an assassin, judging by her bloodthirsty-ness.

By midmorning they were within Oakwald Forest, the wood that surrounded Endovier and served as a continental divide between the “civilized” contries of the East and the uncharted lands of the West.

Wikipedia: “A continental divide is a drainage divide on a continent such that the drainage basin on one side of the divide feeds into one ocean or sea, and the basin on the other side either feeds into a different ocean or sea, or else is endorheic, not connected to the open sea.”

In other words, whoops, a continental divide is an actual phrase that doesn’t mean what the author thinks it means.

Celaena tries to engage Chaol in a conversation, without much success.

To be continued...