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Throne of Glass - summary
Nov. 28th, 2014 07:46 pma.k.a. "Everything Wrong With This Book's Plot: The TL;DR version"
1. Celaena shouldn't be an assassin. She doesn't think like an assassin. At all.
Also, no one actually treats Celaena like a dangerous criminal in this book. Which leads to the next problem.
2. Celaena's being an assassin, if it were handled properly, would actually destroy most of the plot.
Think about it: you've got this world-class hitwoman in the castle. If characters actually had working brains in this book, they would lock her up in a prison cell except for the moments when she has to come out to compete, in order to make sure she can't escape and murder the royal family. That would cut out 90% of the filler in this book that passes as "plot," including all the romantic drama, the ball scene, the wandering around secret passages, etc.
As much as I dislike the plot overall, there wouldn't be much left of it in its current state if all that padding is axed.
This could easily be solved by having Celaena be a soldier or mercenary instead. What's that? Being a mercenary isn't as "cool" as being an assassin? Too bad. Maybe then the author would actually have to spend some time developing Celaena's character, instead of the inconsistent mess we have in the book.
3. The "murder mystery" was a complete waste of dramatic potential, and no character reacted to it with anything approaching sanity.
4. The competition makes no sense. If the king wants a 100% loyal assassin, it does not make sense to hire a freelancer.
5. Pretending that this competition was a plausible way for the king to hire a personal assassin, it was designed terribly to do that.
Many of the tests (I refuse your arbitrary capitalizations, author) don't make sense. Like, an obstacle course? Really??
Javelin throwing on horseback? Since when would an assassin *ever* need to know how to do that???!?
Archery? Archery would probably not be the best way to assassinate people in a pseudo-medieval urban setting.
Poison? You don't need to hire an assassin to poison someone; just do it yourself. Alternatively, this test was horrible at actually testing ability to kill someone with poison, because it asked the champions to identify poisons rather than to actively poison someone. Which is the exact opposite of what an assassin would do.
Stealth? Stealth would probably be a very good thing to evaluate. Too bad the author couldn't be bothered to describe that test.
The final duel? HahahaHAHA.
Assassins should not be trained in sword dueling. Even if they were, it's going to be a situation that they'll be trying to avoid at all costs. Why? Because it's a TERRIBLY INEFFICIENT way to assassinate, and it's just going to expose the assassin to possible injury, possible infection (which, remember, if you don't have penicillin, translates to death), and possible death-by-injury.
As I said in an earlier post, the author of ToG thinks "assassin" = "awesome badass master of combat." In reality, assassins are going to be more boring than that. The easiest way to kill someone in a fantasy world that doesn't have guns is going to be to stab them in the heart/throat/artery.
That's it. It's efficient, effective, and relatively safe on the assassin's part to pull off.
Now, things could get more complicated if the assassin is specifically instructed to make the death look accidental. But in any case, the bulk of an assassin's time is going to be spent stalking the target for a while and figuring out the best way to kill them and then escape without a trace. The actual murdering part doesn't require any fancy work, just a basic knowledge of where arteries are at most. And the whole point of all this is for the assassin to assassinate the target with no resistance.
I can accept that assassins have some training in hand-to-hand combat and (for Rule of Cool purposes) rudimentary knowledge of swordfighting. But in their line of work they are almost never going to be in a situation where they have to outright duel someone, and if they do, that means something went horribly, horribly wrong with their murder plan.
So this competition was designed horribly if it was meant to actually identify people with assassin-relevant skills.
(There's probably not going to be a good way to design a competition to identify the best assassin, short of giving all contestants the task to murder a target. What makes an effective assassin is going to be intelligence, ability to get information, ability to create and carry out complex plans, ability to stalk someone without them noticing, creativity/ability to think outside the box, and most of all, lack of squeamishness/lack of problem with violence and killing.)
.
I think I've already gone into more than enough detail about my problems with this book's characterization (or lack thereof), worldbuilding, lack of any research whatsoever, gender issues, and writing (freaking POV).
I want to reiterate that this book was hardly feminist at all and also treated Celaena herself pretty poorly. For a "strong female protagonist," the book absolutely could not stop talking about her scars, her suffering at Endovier, and her sadness over her dead boyfriend, and it did her a huge disservice by pounding her into the ground during the climax.
And just to be clear: I'm not defining a well-written female character as one that never experiences vulnerability or sadness. That's a fallacy that many people seem to fall into. But I have a particular aversion to female Broken Bird characters, and it's hardly a disputable fact that most female characters in fiction are, on average, subjected to more violence and suffering than male characters and to more severe and prolonged emotional suffering than male characters, and this is not a good trend considering that in real life, women are also disproportionately subjected to domestic violence and intimate partner violence. I'm not saying there's any sort of causal relationship between fiction and reality, but I think the fact that fiction mirrors real life/vice-versa has to mean something.
I also really, REALLY hate the pervasive stereotype that women/female characters are more emotionally fragile than men/male characters, which is kind of perpetuated when you have female characters experience more emotional suffering than male characters do. (It seems to me that when characters are put through trauma/torture in fiction, male characters usually endure it with stoicism and recover fairly quickly without really any psychological effects, while female characters are more likely to cry a lot during and after and end up psychologically traumatized [often so that they can find comfort in the arms of their male Designated Love Interest later].) This does a disservice to both women and men. And again, this is kind of a complicated issue because it's not that female characters shouldn't be allowed to be vulnerable/react to trauma/etc. Ideally, the way to fix this would be to also write male characters with more emotional depth (and if you want to argue with me that Men Aren't Emotional I will end you), but I don't think it would be a bad thing to scale back on some of the trauma regularly heaped on female characters, for the reasons I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
.
I also want to reiterate that while I disapprove of the choice to give Celaena a traumatic background (slavery at Endovier), the traumatic background itself was handled extremely poorly. I'm not saying that kind of situation would leave her permanently broken, but it should have some effect on her other than a reason to brood/have nightmares/be pitied by Dorian and Chaol.
.
In general, Celaena has next to no agency in this book. The only choices she makes that are actually choices are: (a) her decision to save Nox during the wall-climbing test, and (b) her decision to go to the ball (which is basically pointless except to advance the Romance Plot). Everything else she's either forced into doing (the whole competition) or other characters directed her to do (everything related to Elena). This is pretty bad.
.
And finally, I have to say this one more time: do not write about an assassin protagonist if you don't want to get into the fact that this character kills innocent people for a living. Doing so trivializes murder and it trivializes what it means to be a professional murderer.
1. Celaena shouldn't be an assassin. She doesn't think like an assassin. At all.
Also, no one actually treats Celaena like a dangerous criminal in this book. Which leads to the next problem.
2. Celaena's being an assassin, if it were handled properly, would actually destroy most of the plot.
Think about it: you've got this world-class hitwoman in the castle. If characters actually had working brains in this book, they would lock her up in a prison cell except for the moments when she has to come out to compete, in order to make sure she can't escape and murder the royal family. That would cut out 90% of the filler in this book that passes as "plot," including all the romantic drama, the ball scene, the wandering around secret passages, etc.
As much as I dislike the plot overall, there wouldn't be much left of it in its current state if all that padding is axed.
This could easily be solved by having Celaena be a soldier or mercenary instead. What's that? Being a mercenary isn't as "cool" as being an assassin? Too bad. Maybe then the author would actually have to spend some time developing Celaena's character, instead of the inconsistent mess we have in the book.
3. The "murder mystery" was a complete waste of dramatic potential, and no character reacted to it with anything approaching sanity.
4. The competition makes no sense. If the king wants a 100% loyal assassin, it does not make sense to hire a freelancer.
5. Pretending that this competition was a plausible way for the king to hire a personal assassin, it was designed terribly to do that.
Many of the tests (I refuse your arbitrary capitalizations, author) don't make sense. Like, an obstacle course? Really??
Javelin throwing on horseback? Since when would an assassin *ever* need to know how to do that???!?
Archery? Archery would probably not be the best way to assassinate people in a pseudo-medieval urban setting.
Poison? You don't need to hire an assassin to poison someone; just do it yourself. Alternatively, this test was horrible at actually testing ability to kill someone with poison, because it asked the champions to identify poisons rather than to actively poison someone. Which is the exact opposite of what an assassin would do.
Stealth? Stealth would probably be a very good thing to evaluate. Too bad the author couldn't be bothered to describe that test.
The final duel? HahahaHAHA.
Assassins should not be trained in sword dueling. Even if they were, it's going to be a situation that they'll be trying to avoid at all costs. Why? Because it's a TERRIBLY INEFFICIENT way to assassinate, and it's just going to expose the assassin to possible injury, possible infection (which, remember, if you don't have penicillin, translates to death), and possible death-by-injury.
As I said in an earlier post, the author of ToG thinks "assassin" = "awesome badass master of combat." In reality, assassins are going to be more boring than that. The easiest way to kill someone in a fantasy world that doesn't have guns is going to be to stab them in the heart/throat/artery.
That's it. It's efficient, effective, and relatively safe on the assassin's part to pull off.
Now, things could get more complicated if the assassin is specifically instructed to make the death look accidental. But in any case, the bulk of an assassin's time is going to be spent stalking the target for a while and figuring out the best way to kill them and then escape without a trace. The actual murdering part doesn't require any fancy work, just a basic knowledge of where arteries are at most. And the whole point of all this is for the assassin to assassinate the target with no resistance.
I can accept that assassins have some training in hand-to-hand combat and (for Rule of Cool purposes) rudimentary knowledge of swordfighting. But in their line of work they are almost never going to be in a situation where they have to outright duel someone, and if they do, that means something went horribly, horribly wrong with their murder plan.
So this competition was designed horribly if it was meant to actually identify people with assassin-relevant skills.
(There's probably not going to be a good way to design a competition to identify the best assassin, short of giving all contestants the task to murder a target. What makes an effective assassin is going to be intelligence, ability to get information, ability to create and carry out complex plans, ability to stalk someone without them noticing, creativity/ability to think outside the box, and most of all, lack of squeamishness/lack of problem with violence and killing.)
.
I think I've already gone into more than enough detail about my problems with this book's characterization (or lack thereof), worldbuilding, lack of any research whatsoever, gender issues, and writing (freaking POV).
I want to reiterate that this book was hardly feminist at all and also treated Celaena herself pretty poorly. For a "strong female protagonist," the book absolutely could not stop talking about her scars, her suffering at Endovier, and her sadness over her dead boyfriend, and it did her a huge disservice by pounding her into the ground during the climax.
And just to be clear: I'm not defining a well-written female character as one that never experiences vulnerability or sadness. That's a fallacy that many people seem to fall into. But I have a particular aversion to female Broken Bird characters, and it's hardly a disputable fact that most female characters in fiction are, on average, subjected to more violence and suffering than male characters and to more severe and prolonged emotional suffering than male characters, and this is not a good trend considering that in real life, women are also disproportionately subjected to domestic violence and intimate partner violence. I'm not saying there's any sort of causal relationship between fiction and reality, but I think the fact that fiction mirrors real life/vice-versa has to mean something.
I also really, REALLY hate the pervasive stereotype that women/female characters are more emotionally fragile than men/male characters, which is kind of perpetuated when you have female characters experience more emotional suffering than male characters do. (It seems to me that when characters are put through trauma/torture in fiction, male characters usually endure it with stoicism and recover fairly quickly without really any psychological effects, while female characters are more likely to cry a lot during and after and end up psychologically traumatized [often so that they can find comfort in the arms of their male Designated Love Interest later].) This does a disservice to both women and men. And again, this is kind of a complicated issue because it's not that female characters shouldn't be allowed to be vulnerable/react to trauma/etc. Ideally, the way to fix this would be to also write male characters with more emotional depth (and if you want to argue with me that Men Aren't Emotional I will end you), but I don't think it would be a bad thing to scale back on some of the trauma regularly heaped on female characters, for the reasons I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
.
I also want to reiterate that while I disapprove of the choice to give Celaena a traumatic background (slavery at Endovier), the traumatic background itself was handled extremely poorly. I'm not saying that kind of situation would leave her permanently broken, but it should have some effect on her other than a reason to brood/have nightmares/be pitied by Dorian and Chaol.
.
In general, Celaena has next to no agency in this book. The only choices she makes that are actually choices are: (a) her decision to save Nox during the wall-climbing test, and (b) her decision to go to the ball (which is basically pointless except to advance the Romance Plot). Everything else she's either forced into doing (the whole competition) or other characters directed her to do (everything related to Elena). This is pretty bad.
.
And finally, I have to say this one more time: do not write about an assassin protagonist if you don't want to get into the fact that this character kills innocent people for a living. Doing so trivializes murder and it trivializes what it means to be a professional murderer.
