Throne of Glass - Deconstruction - Ch24

[rainwaterspark]

Last time on Throne of Glass, torturous flashbacks and bad romance.

Chapter 24

Celaena apparently has some sort of chronic insomnia, because she’s thinking deep thoughts about nighttime and watching a tapestry and—oh wait, there’s a hidden door there!!

Wow, that was convenient as hell.

Why was the wind going inward? Especially when it had blown the tapestry out?

Good question, Book. Are you actually going to answer this?

Anyway, Celaena decides to explore, but takes a few provisions first. At least that makes sense.

one of her makeshift knives

What the hell is a “makeshift knife”? A sharpened piece of metal—which is by definition a knife? How would she have gotten a hold of this, and does anyone care anymore that she’s a “dangerous” assassin??

The secret passage is dusty and boring. Then Celaena goes through a door, and it becomes damper and more fungus-encrusted.

Her red velvet shoes felt flimsy and thin against the wetness of the chamber.

…Who the hell wears something like RED VELVET SHOES when exploring a secret passage?! And seriously, what is up with this author’s fetish for red shoes???

She hears the sound of running water, and finds out…it’s the sewer.

In real life, sewer systems weren’t implemented in European cities until beginning in the 19^th century. I mean, why else do you think major European cities like London were so prone to diseases like cholera? I suppose you could argue that Adarlan is following the technological developments of a Europe in which the Middle Ages never happened and Roman technology didn’t become lost.

Celaena sees some boats, and she guesses it’s an escape route for the king. There’s a gate there, and she realizes she can just escape…but she doesn’t. Because she’s a moron.

She knew that she could easily escape, and that it would be foolish to do so. The king would find her, somehow. And Chaol would be disgraced and relieved of his position. And Princess Nehemia would be left alone with moronic company, and, well…

This reads like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking down to a T. Unless the king is an idiot or he bears an extreme grudge toward her, he’s not going to waste time looking for her if she disappears into a different part of the continent; he’s too busy conquering other countries, remember? Plus, she mentioned earlier that few people know what “Celaena Sardothien” looks like, so it’d be easy for her to adopt a different identity and retire from assassination, if she so wanted. It’s nice that she cares about Chaol’s reputation, but this passage makes him out to be some sort of butt monkey. As the book already established, he has lots of other duties and he can’t be around Celaena 24/7; he’s apparently talented at what he does and firing him would be stupid; and if they cared so much about her not running away they should put her in a jail cell, not a luxury suite with a convenient secret passage. None of this is remotely Chaol’s fault.

Celaena straightened, her chin rising. She would not run from them as a common criminal. She would face them—face the king—and earn her freedom the honorable way.

I think this is supposed to make her seem noble, but it doesn’t work considering she supposedly hates the king’s guts. Nobility and sticking to your principles is one thing; prostrating yourself in front of your sworn enemy is another. Also, she’s a freaking assassin; she’s supposed to be a pragmatist, not some honorable soldier.

And why not take advantage of the free food and training for a while longer?

Okay, this makes more sense, and now the palace people are the ones looking like the idiots.

She goes back and follows a different tunnel, and now she’s led to a grate where she can spy on the Great Hall, where the feast is going on. To her utter shock, Chaol is laughing. Whatever.

Nox, who had now become her sparring and training partner, danced as well, perhaps a bit more elegantly than the others

Why would a thief know how to dance. Just why.

Celaena realizes the other Champions were invited except for her, which appropriately sparks a RAGE response from her.

She spotted the Crown Prince, dancing and laughing with some blond idiot.

Oh please, Celaena, you’re blond too.

She wanted to hate him for refusing to invite her; she was his Champion, after all! But…she had difficulty not staring at him. She had no desire to talk to him, but rather just to look at him, to see that unusual grace, and the kindness in his eyes that had made her tell him about Sam. While he might be a Havilliard, he was… Well, she still very much wanted to kiss him.

ARGH. THIS ROMANCE. IT’S TOO MUCH FOR ME.

Celaena hurries back to her room, because she sees Chaol leave and thinks he might be trying to check up on her.

After hours of enjoying himself at the feast, Dorian entered Celaena’s rooms, not sure what, exactly, he was doing in the chambers of an assassin at two in the morning. His head spun from the wine

The implications here are really questionable.

Some assassin. She hadn’t even bothered to stir.

Yeeeaah. Wait a second, her rooms are just unlocked like that? And they keep worrying that she’ll try to escape or murder the royal family? What kind of logic is this??? (I suppose the same could’ve been said earlier, considering Chaol seems to be able to enter and leave her room as he pleases, but it didn’t occur to me until now.)

And I thought she specifically replaced the hinges on her door to make them squeak if someone opened them. Book, what is consistency anymore?

He knew her somehow. And he knew she wouldn’t harm him. It made little sense. When they talked, as sharp as her words usually were, he felt at ease, as if he could say anything. And she must have felt the same

I’m glad you recognize that it makes little sense, author, because it makes no sense at all.

She flirted with him, but was it real?

GAH.

Look, I have nothing against romance novels; they’re not to my personal taste, but I fully respect people who read and like them. But the thing is, I don’t pick up a book marketed as fantasy and expect to see little more than a romance that takes place in a different world. While I can enjoy a well-done romance, I’m generally quite picky when it comes to reading about romantic relationships (and by “picky,” I mean “Can the romantic leads fall in love with each other for some reason other than their mutual hotness or Bad Boy Syndrome?”), which is why I try to avoid novels with excessive romance.

As it is, this book is making me headdesk hard right now. If the romance completely takes over the book, I’m not sure if I can even finish this thing.

Chaol stumbles across them and tells Dorian he’s an idiot for visiting an assassin. Yes, Chaol, I approve.

…Until the next passage from Chaol’s POV implies that Chaol is only jealous. WTF, Book? WTF? UGH. This love triangle is rapidly killing off Chaol’s brain cells.

He was fairly certain she was a virgin

WHY????

Every time I think I’ve become desensitized to the sexism in this book, it manages to baffle me yet again.

Why the hell would Celaena be a virgin? She’s extremely flirty with guys in general and she had a freaking lover. Whom she was very seriously in love with, going by her general thoughts on him.

And why the freaking hell does it matter if she’s a virgin???

The only explanation I have for this is that this is YA fic, girls who sleep around are automatically sluts. But this just reinforces the Madonna/Whore divide, and in a genre riddled with gender issues, it’s extremely frustrating.

She was still in her clothes, and while she looked beautiful, that did nothing to mask the killing potential that lay beneath. It was present in her strong jaw, in the slope of her eyebrows, in the perfect stillness of her form. She was a honed blade made by the King of Assassins for his own profit. She was a sleeping animal—a mountain cat or a dragon—and her markings of power were everywhere.

This is Chaol’s equivalent of Dorian’s “her golden hair and curves were so hot dur hur hur,” and while it’s purple prose-y and melodramatic, it’s much more tolerable to read.

Chaol gives her a ring and wow this symbolism isn’t subtle at all.

.

I'd like to talk a little more about amateur writing. Having scenes for no other purpose than for characters to "randomly," "conveniently" discover things, and having scenes where characters literally walk into each other, is really amateurish. And I say this as someone who's done this before in my own writing. It's lazy because you can clearly tell that the author *needs* this to happen for plot purposes, but can't figure out (or can't bother to figure out) how to work these scenes into the narrative as a whole.

Reading Throne of Glass has been an exercise in frustration in many ways, but one of them is that I honestly feel like this is something I might have written as a sixteen-year-old. The writing, the purple prose, the Mary Sueishness, the leaps in believability and the torture fetish...hell, I could go back to something I wrote as a thirteen-year-old that ticks all these boxes. In no way does this book seem like it's been worked on for ten years, and that's the part that I find most depressing.