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rainwatersparkChapter 21
Finally, the goddamned competition continues.
…It’s some weird version of capture the flag by scaling the palace walls to reach the roof. I still have no idea what the point of these tests is.
I haven’t spent much time critically examining the central premise of the book, since there were so many other problematic aspects to talk about, and quite frankly my memory gets really foggy and I’ve forgotten any explanation the other characters might have given for it.
But what is the point of obtaining Adarlan’s Champion? I’m assuming it’s not to find a bodyguard for the king, because he can hire as many of those as he wants, but then what other reason is there? Why does this Champion have to be good at archery, now wall-climbing, and who knows what else?
Sure enough, Cain was in the lead, and had taken the easiest path toward the flag, Grave and Verin on his trail, Nox close behind
Speaking of failures in common sense.
I need to find a better word for this, but for now I’m going to call it Enforced Underdog Syndrome. All of the “good” characters are decent enough not to be failing badly, but not enough to be excelling, while the “bad” characters excel just to raise the stakes. Underdog Syndrome is not bad by itself, because everyone loves rooting for the underdog, but it is problematic when logically speaking it doesn’t make sense, so it seems like the “good” characters have been intentionally hobbled.
Cain was described as big and muscled. The people who are good at climbing walls aren’t the bulky, heavy soldiers; they’re the small, nimble guys. So really, unless he’s intentionally holding back (because he’s smarter than Celaena and doesn’t want to attract too much attention), Nox should be in the lead. Moreover, has the author ever tried to climb walls before? It’s damned difficult and extremely dangerous, and anyone who’s never done it before is going to be befuddled for a while. The soldiers and serial killers should be far behind, if they manage to get up on the wall at all. The thieves should have the advantage here, because if there’s anyone who needs to learn wall-climbing for their profession, thieves would be the ones (and even so, I’d imagine scaling up a wall and being more than ten feet off the ground is their last resort, because it requires a lot of arm strength and again, they could fall off and die). I’ll accept that assassins might learn how to climb walls as well, but that’s it.
They’d each been given the opportunity to select one object to aid them in their ascent—rope, spikes, special boots—and sure enough, Cain had gone right for the rope.
So were these objects limited to one of each kind as well? I mean, assuming the rope is sturdy enough not to break with someone hanging off it, all the person with the rope has to do is make a loop and get it around something sticking out, and they can just walk right up to the top. Granted, if there wasn’t anything like that around, the person wouldn’t have so much of an advantage. Spikes would also be helpful, “special boots”…not so much. Assuming the wall is mostly smooth stone with few natural hand/footholds, you’re better off using your bare feet.
So Celaena took the difficult path because she didn’t want to fight off all the other competitors, which makes sense, because if there’s a bottleneck on the wall it’s going to be difficult to break out of it.
She wouldn’t put it past Grave or Verin to shove her off the wall.
That’s allowed? This competition has just become horribly one-sided. If there is no disincentive to killing your competition, anyone who doesn’t have the moral qualms to do it would do so. Especially since there are no safety measures, so anyone who loses their balance just a little bit is going to fall and break a few bones at best (throwing them out of the competition) or lose their lives at worst.
Her hands suctioned onto the stone
Celaena took some tar to cover her hands and feet with, which makes sense, but it isn’t going to “suction” her hands to the wall. At best, it’s only going to make her hands and feet a little better able to grip handholds. (If you want to get technical, suctioning requires the formation of a vacuum, which is really not going to happen with tar.)
A competitor falls off and dies, Ned Clement, and it’s getting really convenient that a lot of the really evil and threatening competitors (save for Cain) are dying off the bat.
Celaena goes up a drainpipe. I think drainpipes are pretty modern additions to homes, and I’m not sure if it could hold her weight since it usually seems to be made of light metal and unlike climbing a rope, you can’t wrap your arms and legs properly around a downspout because it’s attached to the wall, but whatever.
Cain hooked his long rope around a leering gargoyle’s neck and swung across an expanse of flat wall
So what I said earlier is correct, meaning whoever has the rope wins. This makes no sense, because the rope has now become a game-breaker, and Cain doesn’t even need to climb the wall, making this test somewhat invalid.
Celaena notes a ruckus; apparently everyone else also has a rope except for her, but they’ve been effectively bottlenecked because they can’t all swing across at once. You know, I think this is the first part in the book that Celaena actually displays her intelligence.
Now some drama, finally. Grave (still hate that name) pushes Nox off. Nox survives because his rope was attached to something and wrapped around his middle. But then Grave has a dagger with him and tries to saw through Nox’s rope.
Remember what I said about killing off the competition? Yeah.
Celaena decides to save Nox, which is about the first heroic thing she’s done in the novel.
She slid down the drainpipe, the flesh of her feet and hands tearing open as the metal cut into her skin
Pretty sure this isn’t possible, unless the drainpipe is rusted and has a rough surface. Otherwise, she might get some sort of friction burn, but not cuts.
So Celaena steals another competitor’s rope and jumps off to save Nox.
This chapter was actually pretty decent, and if the rest of the book had been written this way, it would’ve been a lot more fun to read. (I did say that the competitions were the best part of the novel so far, even though they make up less than a third of the narrative.) Celaena’s characterization is again pretty inconsistent, because previously she’s been shown to be somewhat sociopathic and thinks to herself self-righteously about injustice, but never does anything. Still, I guess it works because she’s been shown to care about Nox, who’s basically the only decent competitor (besides a young, weak assassin named Pelor, who I didn’t comment on because he’s been unremarkable so far).
Chapter 22
Celaena saves Nox.
Nox grabbed the rope, but even that wasn’t enough to lighten the blinding impact on her torso as the rope went taut.
This must be some rope of steel to hold both of their weight and not snap. Also, depending on how fast she was falling, the sudden stop might be enough to seriously injure her or even snap her spine; I’m not an expert in this, but I know this was the explanation given for a character’s death in a comic series. Still, I’ll let it slide because we know Celaena can’t die, and rest of the heroic rescue scene works.
Cain gets the flag, which was obvious.
Chaol told her to stay in the middle, anyway. And her path had been far more impressive and demonstrative of her skills. Cain just had to jump and swing—amateur scaling.
Are they actually being judged for their skill, or just for the result? Also, it seems counterproductive to “stay in the middle” but then show off even more skills than anyone else.
Apparently they’re still expected to finish the test, and I have to assume they didn’t fall that far down, because otherwise at least one of them will end up last.
Foolish. It’d been so foolish to save him. What had she been thinking?
Oh, Celaena. You had been doing so well. And here we’re back to the inconsistent characterization. It takes strong will and iron morals to risk your life to save someone else’s, so either Celaena has strong morals and should be proud of what she did, or she’s a ruthless competitor and shouldn’t have gone out of her way to save Nox. It would’ve been interesting if the latter were the case—the book certainly would’ve been much darker, and Celaena would’ve been a more realistically flawed, if unlikeable, character. But really, the author should’ve stuck to Celaena being happy about it, because this is the most exciting scene in the book so far and one in which Celaena is most sympathetic without resorting to Broken Bird pity.
We skip to after the competition, even though it would’ve been interesting to see how Celaena and Nox finished up.
“Cheer up,” Chaol said, drinking from his glass of water. “Eighteenth place is fine.
I’m having horrible flashbacks to The Hunger Games here.
The point of this competition is not to get first place all the time and win a gold star. It’s not quite as brutal as the Hunger Games, but it’s still an elimination contest, and as the last chapter showed, there’s a very real element of danger. Celaena should be happy to survive and still be in the running. Her overinflated ego does nothing to make her likeable or even intelligent, heroic rescue and all.
Celaena spends a while thinking about how long it took to wash off the tar and clean her wounds; suck it up, “Queen of the Underworld.”
She’s also pretty shaken up by Ned Clement’s death, which again is out of character for her. She’s a goddamned assassin; needless death can still bother her, but it shouldn’t be to the point where she’s shaking, because she’s killed people in cold blood before. Of course, the book likes to pretend that she only killed people “who deserved it,” but still, she’s had a very hard life, this kind of thing wouldn’t impact her the way it would impact someone like Dorian, say.
Grave hadn’t even been scolded. There had been no rules against playing dirty.
This doesn’t sound like a good way to run the competition. I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll say it again: if you just want to see who’s the strongest/lasts the longest, throw everyone into an arena and see who emerges. If you want to evaluate their skills (for some reason I still don’t understand), you should enforce fair play, because otherwise it just becomes a competition for who’s the most cunning and can get rid of their opponents the easy way.
She glared at him. “Well, I still lost.”
No, you won, Celaena. In an elimination contest, losing means getting kicked out, and staying in the competition means you won. I don’t get why this is hard for you to understand.
Chaol is understandably worried that her daring rescue attracted unwanted attention when she was supposed to “stay in the middle.”
“Arobynn told me that second place was just a nice title for the first loser.”
Assassins have competitions now?
Yes, if there are assassins being trained, they’d be trained not to make mistakes. But that’s only because in that line of work, mistakes can be deadly. Fail to fulfill your contract and kill your target, and you won’t be paid. Even getting injured will hinder your escape, give you more opportunities to get caught and killed or imprisoned, and require time to recuperate. And that’s not even getting into the fact that in the era before modern medicine, even the slightest stab wound could get infected, crippling or killing you. Assassins shouldn’t care about things like rank or score; it’s all about staying alive and earning money.
“He trained me himself, and then brought in tutors from all over Erilea.
What.
Combined with the piano-playing, this doesn’t sound like assassin training so much as Celaena being the daughter of a nobleman who decided to be a bit unconventional with his daughter’s education. Before trains were invented, transportation was costly and time-consuming, meaning Arobynn would’ve had to pay for these “tutors” to come, even if he knows them personally and they owe him a favor. And where the hell is he getting all this money from? Why is he spending it all on her?
No price was too high for him.
WHERE IS THIS MONEY COMING FROM???
“He didn’t bother to tell me until I was fourteen that I was expected to pay him back for all of it.”
Okay, this makes marginally more sense, but still, he spent an absolute fortune on her, which is insane. Training an assassin is not a good investment, because no matter how good they are, life expectancies should be around thirty years old (real world medieval Britain), or forty at a maximum (early modern Britain), and probably even shorter for assassins. She’s not going to have enough time to pay him back, and every time she undertakes a contract to kill someone is another opportunity for her to die.
Celaena mentions the same thing happens to courtesans. Hey, first time this book explicitly talks about prostitution, and this is actually pretty realistic. (For courtesans, but not for assassins.)
Celaena says she paid Arobynn back, which is completely illogical but whatever.
And then he went out and spent all of it. Over five hundred thousand gold coins. Gone in three hours.
Realism has fled to another planet again. Like I said, no one becomes rich through assassinating, and if he wants/expects an opulent lifestyle, he’s better off being a crime lord instead.
Celaena is clearly resentful about what happened, but she still seems to act like Arobynn is a treasured mentor.
Celaena and Chaol argue a bit about their previous argument (about Celaena teaching Nehemia swordplay), but it’s not serious and supposed to be a bonding moment. This love triangle is already terrible.
They then learn that another competitor had been murdered, and though Celaena keeps “looking over her shoulder,” still no one is legitimately worried. Chaol wants to treat them as isolated incidents and seriously, does anyone have a brain in this novel anymore? Like I said earlier, the most logical conclusion is that one of the champions is trying to jump the competition, which I’m pretty sure is a breach of the rules; if not, the alternative explanation is that there’s a severe breach of security in the royal palace and there’s a serial killer running loose, but no one thinks that the royal family itself is in any danger.
The narrative glosses over the next two tests, which are apparently about “stealth” and “tracking.” Book, I am disappoint. The tests are the best parts of the novel so far and make everything else almost bearable to read; now it just feels like I’m being cheated. (Also, stealth is amazing, stealthy scenes are great for dramatic tension and all; I’m not exactly sure what the point of tracking is, since I assume none of the competitors hunt game.)
So the narrative says Celaena’s getting more fit by the day, etc. etc., but the chapter ends with Celaena having a crisis of confidence and not being sure if she’ll make it to the final duel. Blargh. What happened to your badass boasts, Celaena? And your motivation to make it to the end? Who wrote these sentences within a few paragraphs of each other and thought this made sense???
