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rainwatersparkChapter 14
Here we have a boring filler chapter. More descriptions of Celaena exercising…yawn.
Once they’d finished their run, they trained in a private room far from her competitors’ eyes. Until, that is, she collapsed to the ground and cried that she was about to die of hunger and fatigue.
…Our “tough” protagonist right here, ladies and gentlemen.
At lessons, the knives remained Celaena’s favorite, but the wooden staff became dear; naturally, it had to do with the fact that she could freely whack him and not chop off an arm.
A couple of things:
(1) Celaena (and presumably the other competitors) are having “lessons”? I thought the whole point of having the weapons was for them to warm up and show off their skills, not learn something new. How long have they been training? Combat takes a long time to learn and become good at; you can’t just pick up the skill.
What’s the point of training them anyways? I thought the whole point of having the competition was to decide who’s good enough to be the Champion? It’s like training an athlete in an event he/she usually doesn’t do while the Olympics are going on.
(2) This dueling setup is completely illogical. I didn’t point this out back in the ridiculous scene when Celaena was sparring with a rapier, but it applied then, too. People forget that swords are actually made for, you know, killing people. I’ll admit that I don’t know how people in the Middle Ages trained with swords (I assumed they used wooden practice swords, but I’ll have to confirm that), but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you’re using real metal swords in a sparring match, someone’s going to end up hurt, if not possibly dead.
Using knives is even more absurd, because it’s really hard to (a) block a knife and (b) spar against someone with a real knife without hurting them. Knives were great weapons for killing people back before modern medical knowledge, because stab wounds easily got infected and that was the end of that. (I’m assuming, for the sake of my sanity, that Chaol is using the same weapons against her as she’s using against him, even though I don’t know why a royal guard would be trained in knife fighting.)
Wooden staffs? Those are defensive weapons. If they’re heavy enough, you can still kill someone with them, but not in the same way as a sword or knife. Again, I have no idea why Celaena would ever have been trained in using a wooden staff. Also, she makes light of the fact that she can whack Chaol on the arm, but (a) if it’s heavy enough and she’s swinging with enough velocity, she could break his bones or crack his skull and then it wouldn’t be such a laughing matter, and (b) bruises hurt, they’re not going to be something Chaol can just shrug off.
I mean, it’s like giving two people pistols and setting them up in a room and telling them to use the other person as target practice, and expecting that they’re not going to seriously hurt each other. Weapons are dangerous (even the archaic ones that people love to romanticize), and I don’t understand why this isn’t more obvious.
Most of their training was just to make sure they could actually use weapons.
Why bother? This sounds like a huge time investment. Just throw them together in an arena and see who’s better.
Obviously Brullo likes Cain, because we need to establish that Celaena is the underdog so the reader will root for her, even though the book obviously hates Cain.
No one bothered to comment on her perfect her form was.
Now she just sounds like she’s throwing a temper tantrum. Apparently she’s forgotten all about her Chaol’s plan to make her not stand out.
Was this how the other assassins at the Assassins’ Keep had felt all those years she had spent hogging Arobynn Hamel’s attention?
Celaena constantly has these thoughts, as though to suggest she might be a somewhat decent person, but then shrugs them off and goes back to thinking she’s wonderful a paragraph later. It’s really aggravating.
We’re fourteen chapters in (maybe a hundred pages now?) and something FINALLY happens: one of the competitors, the cannibal, turns up dead. And not just dead, but mutilated.
Except Celaena is hearing this secondhand, so there’s barely any dramatic payoff. If she had stumbled across the body herself, that would’ve definitely ratcheted up the drama and the stakes, but right now it only seems vaguely ominous.
Celaena and Nox Owen, the “handsome” thief from before, practice throwing knives. Obviously Celaena is awesome at throwing knives and schools Nox in how it’s done.
It’s not egregious here, but the narrative does use “dagger” and “throwing knife” interchangeably, and I’d like to make clear that throwing knives are NOT regular knives; they’re a single piece of steel with a particular weight and are specifically designed for throwing.
Another competitor named Verin makes a misogynistic joke, and Celaena feels angry but doesn’t say anything back. Where’s your sass when you actually need it, Celaena?!
There’s some description about how to throw a knife. I’m not an expert in knife-throwing, but I suppose it sounds reasonable enough.
Nox threw another dagger, and it hit the bull’s-eye this time. “Because my gold’s on you winning this whole damn thing.”
Why the exceptionalism. Just why.
“And let’s hope neither of us winds up like the Eye Eater,” she added, and meant it.
Realism, what are you anymore?
Everybody’s rattled, but no one’s demanding answers. The most obvious explanation is that one of the competitors is trying to off the competition, and the fact that this happened in the royal palace—which is supposed to have tight security—should make everyone else feel more than a bit worried. Especially since the cannibalistic serial killer was murdered first, meaning that whoever is going around killing actually knows his/her stuff and is a threat. People shouldn’t just be sitting around praying it doesn’t happen to them—they should be panicking.
Celaena asks Chaol later whether he should be looking into the cannibal’s murder, but Chaol brushes her off. Again, no one seems legitimately worried here.
he said, a muscle in his jaw feathering.
What the hell does this mean? How can a muscle “feather”?
We get an infodump on Chaol’s background, which is mildly interesting because he’s one of about two characters in this book so far who actually has a brain. (Hint: the other one isn’t Celaena.) We also learn a bit more about Celaena and she purposely broke her right hand and left a scar during her training, in order to force herself to learn how to be ambidextrous.
…Okay, this is overkill. All she needed was a few broken fingers, which would prevent her from gripping a sword handle correctly. If she slammed her hand hard enough to “split it open” (which is a gross image), she would’ve been in danger of permanently crippling herself, which defeats the purpose entirely. It wouldn’t just give her a fashionable scar for possible love interests to comment on.
The realism in this book so far has been little to nonexistent. Human beings are fragile creatures and don’t just rebound from severe injuries without possible long-term consequences.
Chapter 15
Fifteen chapters and over a hundred pages into the book, we finally start the goddamned competition.
She glanced sidelong at Nox. Chaol tensed next to her, and she could feel him watching the thief closely, no doubt wondering if she and Nox were formulating some escape plan that would include the deaths of every member of the royal family.
This is stupid.
If you’re trying to escape, you won’t waste your time assassinating the royal family, because that’s more time for you to be caught and restrained. Yes, Nox learned how to use weapons during training—which makes the whole idea to train them even more idiotic; you shouldn’t put weapons in the hands of people who might have a reason to want to kill the royal family, and you sure as hell shouldn’t teach them how to use the weapons with any sort of competency. Heck, why are they all marauders and criminals anyway? Is the kingdom short of legitimate law-abiding soldiers for this competition?
Anyway, Nox is still a thief by training, and while he probably knows some self-defense, killing is not his forte nor his first instinct. Celaena is more of a threat here, but even she’s outnumbered.
We learn that the first test…is an archery contest.
I’m a bit tired of questioning the logic behind the book at this point, so sure, let’s roll with that.
It was an enormous leap of faith to give them arrows, even if the tips were blunted. A dull head wouldn’t stop it from going through Perrington’s throat—or Dorian’s, if she wanted.
Finally, the author seems to have adopted some common sense, although this is just blatantly obvious. Anything that’s going at a high enough speed is going to cause injuries. My sister once told me about how one of her classmates made a longbow for a physics project and was demonstrating how it worked (with blunt arrows). He didn’t pull the arrow back all the way, and the entire length of the arrow punched through a metal trashcan and out the other end. I hate to think anyone in the royal palace is stupid enough to actually believe they’re making the archery contest safer by blunting the arrows.
Archery was one of the first skills Arobynn had taught her—a staple of any assassin’s training.
Oh, really.
Look, an assassin can’t just walk around a city carrying a bow and arrow, that’s got to be illegal considering the setting. (It might work in some sort of frontier setting, like in colonial America or something, but not here.) That’s like saying that a modern-day assassin can totally walk around New York carrying a fully-assembled sniper rifle. Unlike sniper rifles, though, longbows can’t be dismantled and stored in an innocuous-looking case.
Also, an assassin with a bow and arrow would need an absolutely clear shot, and while arrows can travel pretty far, you’d have to factor in wind, and any sort of obstacle would send the arrow off-course. So an assassin would have to be pretty close to the target. Crossbows would fare better in this respect, but they’re also highly conspicuous. Either way, you’d probably only get one shot, because it’s easy to tell where an arrow came from—not like with a sniper rifle, where an assassin can set up far away and use a scope to aim precisely. Might as well use a knife instead in an isolated setting to make sure the job is actually done.
Nox does well on the archery test, but why would a thief know archery? Why??
Perhaps she should consider him for an ally.
Ally? This is a free-for-all competition, and it does Celaena no good to ally with her competition unless it’s to take out the biggest threats first.
Obviously, Celaena disregards Chaol’s advice and fires straight into the bull’s-eye to make the men stop laughing.
I suppose this is to make her come off as a victor, only it comes off as her trying to gratify her ego. She hates the fact that there are people who think she’s incompetent, despite the fact that people generally try to eliminate their biggest threats in a competition.
Chapter 16
Another boring filler chapter.
We get another dull scene of Celaena running next to Chaol, only this time it’s made worse by the fact that Chaol asks about the scars she got from Endovier.
Like I said, this book often reads like really bad fanfic, and this is one of the prime examples why. Plenty of authors out there have scar fetishes, and while I can forgive that if the writing is good, here it just comes off as voyeurism and needing to establish Celaena’s “vulnerability” and “broken” past so the reader and Chaol can pity her. Because God knows we don’t have enough Broken Birds out there.
This chapter mentions rape, which I didn’t think the book would actually do, but it makes the book’s refusal to discuss prostitution all the more bizarre. It also makes Celaena’s character all the more infuriating; as a woman in a position of power, she observes misogynistic actions but never does anything about them.
Also, predictably, Celaena herself didn’t get raped, because the book didn’t quite want to go there (although it was willing to dwell in loving detail on her physical torture and how many whip scars she got). I wonder whether Celaena has so much as slept with anyone before, because while she’s pretty flirtatious and obsessed with guys, the book never drops any sort of hint in that regard.
A day later, one of the champions makes a run for it and is killed. Celaena rambles about how it’s a display of defiance, which I suppose passes for this book’s attempts at being deep and profound.
Why is the competitor killed? What’s the point? It’s not like they’ve been told some top-secret information or anything. I suppose it’s just to show that they can and to make it seem like Celaena actually has something to lose if she tries to make a run for it, but logically I see no reason why they wouldn’t let the guy go.
