Last time, so, Leck’s evil.

We learn that there’s two ways into Leck’s kingdom, by water or by mountain pass, and obviously they’re going mountain pass so why are we bothering with the other part? Just say that by land it’s only the mountain pass and move on.

Continuing things being about a day’s ride, his castle is about a day’s ride from the pass. Continuing things having fucking stupid names, it’s called Leck City. So everyone in all the kingdoms do this. Why the hell even have kingdoms when they’re all identical?

Katsa thinks about Metaleyes protecting her again, and the author remembers that Katsa has issues, so she remembers to not be quite okay with that.

But it wasn’t nothing for Katsa to rely on someone else’s protection. She’d never done such a thing in her life.
And besides, wouldn’t it be easier for her to kill Leck immediately, before he said a word or raised a finger? Or gag him, immobilize him, find some way to disempower him completely? Maintain control and ensure her own defense? Katsa didn’t need protection. There would be a solution; there would be a way for her to protect herself from Leck

Hm. Well, the shoot on sight thing does have much to recommend for itself on a practical level. The only problem is they don’t actually know he’s guilty.

I mean, Metaleyes noted that the people he talked to thought Leck was guilty and innocent, but what if the mind control was inserting the guilt? What if someone’s setting the groundwork for Leck to be overthrown?

The setup right now is that Leck’s somehow twisted things around so that he’s doing terrible things and everyone thinks he’s good. What if he actually was good, and someone’s trying to retcon in evil? He really does just have a shelter for rabbits that were mauled by eagles and such, he really did mourn the untimely death of the king and queen (maybe the reason for the suspicious timing was that the king and queen had become ill – we’re not told how old they were). So whoever it is, they start twisting what people say, until the new, suspicious version propagates itself, and then once everyone’s accepted the new set of facts, they’ll do the same sudden revelation thing as Metaleyes.

I mean, there’s no motive, but there’s no motive for Teaprince’s kidnapping either. And something like that would be a nicer reason for the fact this section is titled the Twisted King. Someone’s twisting their perceptions of him. Plus it’d mean the protagonists are wrong about stuff they figured out way too easily, and also, it’d explain why Metaleyes is having these sudden revelations – he supposedly knew the story about how Leck rose to power for a long time now, but never thought to follow up on it.

Maybe Metaleyes’ sort-of telepathy is speeding the process up, since every time he meets a contagious person he gets a bit of an extra push. Katsa, meanwhile, is practically oblivious, so she’s minimally infected by whatever it is, it can’t transmit to her properly. That’s why she was falling back on “but he’s nice”, because she’s still mostly remembering the original set of things.

See, that would be a cool plot. And it plays around with the characters’ personalities and strengths/weaknesses – Metaleyes is normally the perfect judge of character, but that means he’s now compromised. Meanwhile Katsa, because she’s terrible at emotions, is practically immune, but she’s not used to trusting her feelings and she usually delegates all the emotion business to someone she already trusts.

But back to the book I’m reading and not the one I want to read.

Katsa set to work building a fire. It wasn’t easy, with the world around her soaked right through. But the pine tree had protected some of the needles nestled closely to its trunk, and she uncovered some leaves and a stick or two that were not quite waterlogged. With the strike of her knife, a number of gentle breaths, and whatever protection her own open arms could give, a flame began to lick its way through the damp little tower of kindling.

Vaguely decent! Certainly miles better than Chosen of the Sun! Still totally inaccurate!

See, that strike of a knife? For one thing, she needs some flint to go with it – you strike the knife against that, you don’t just wave it around at the wood – and for another, that’s only going to produce sparks. Sparks go on tinder, not kindling. Kindling is what you light with the tinder.

This is very much like how I’d build a fire, but that’s because I use matches. With matches, you have something already burning, so you get some dryish pine needles and put the flame underneath. The match should heat it enough that the pine needles dry enough to light and then that flame can bake the water out of the twigs and so on. Do you see how every sentence this paragraph has used the word “matches”? That’s because you need matches to do this.

There’s ways to get around the problem, like carrying something slow-burning with you and using that to start a fire. Or just giving her matches. While matches didn’t show up in Europe until the late seventeen hundreds and had a ways to go from there, China, ever on the ball, apparently figured out sulfur matches by AD 577. She’s already eating chocolate cake, matches are far more reasonable than that.

Katsa also starts this fire without gathering proper wood, so she has to leave it and go get more, a good way to make your fire go out. It’s a particularly terrible idea in this case, because when you’re making a fire with wet wood, you need to plan further in advance so you can use the heat of the fire to cook the wood you’ll be feeding it next, you can’t just add it directly and expect it to catch. Plus, with her reference to protecting it with her arms, it seems she didn’t think to dig a pit or anything for it.

He unrolled their maps and held a soggy corner near the fire. He opened Raffin’s packet of medicines and inspected them, setting the labeled envelopes onto rocks to dry.

…they have, and are using paper for this kind of thing? Because I don’t think of vellum as really getting “soggy”. At the very least, the medicines should be in something waterproof, for obvious reasons.

Katsa feels really pleased with herself about the fire.

She fell asleep that night, in a blanket partly dried, secure in the certainty that she could survive anywhere, on her own.

And then she wakes up in the middle of the night worried Metaleyes is gone, but Metaleyes isn’t gone, and she’s relieved and she starts off on her next breakdown over the fact she’s concerned for another human being.

KATSA DIDN’T KNOW what was wrong with her when she woke the next morning. She couldn’t explain the fury she felt toward him.

So we’re halfway through the book and only now does Katsa actually show that temper she keeps saying is such a problem. What we’re given here is a very legitimate flaw for her, and it makes sense that she’d funnel all her emotions into anger because it’s the only one she can handle. It’s not entirely out of the blue – there’s signs of this in her wanting to go shoot arrows when she’s upset and how her anger at Pandaman was overflowing into everything else she did – but the thing is, the other two examples are well within normal behavior, while this is clearly messed up.

It was that she hadn’t asked for a person whom she trusted, whom she would do so much for, whom she would give herself over to. She hadn’t asked for a person whose absence, if she woke in the middle of the night, would distress her-not because of the protection he would then fail to give, but simply because she wished his company. She hadn’t asked for a person whose company she wished.

See? Emotionally broken. This isn’t far off from Katniss’ own weirdness.

When they stop to eat Metaleyes gives her an update on his ever-increasing powers.

“This pond is full of fish,” he said, “and frogs. Catfish, hundreds of them. Don’t you think it’s funny I should know that with such clarity?”
She would hit him, for his calmness, and his latest ability to count frogs and catfish he couldn’t see.

What the hell is the point here? His grace is turning into more of a sue grabbag by the minute.

Instead of punching him, she runs off and jumps in a freezing pool. She does have the presence of mind to take her clothes off this time, though.

Katsa comes back to find Metaleyes emoing quietly, and when he looks up at her she suddenly realizes he’s hot.

His eyes were beautiful. His face was beautiful to her in every way, and his shoulders and hands. And his arms that hung over his knees, and his chest that was not moving, because he held his breath as he watched her. And the heart in his chest. This friend. How had she not seen this before?

You totally did see it before, that’s why you were blurting stuff out about how you noticed his shirt wasn’t open today or unable to look at him directly because his arms were bare. I mean, okay, you didn’t seem to realize that’s what was going on, but this is just so, so badly conveyed. She’s not suddenly realizing he’s crush-worthy, it’s been obvious the whole book she had a crush on him.

Anyway, this brings her right back to her previous I DIDN’T SAY I WANTED THAT freakout.

Metaleyes says that it’s not like he meant to either.

“You… you have a way of upending my plans,” he said, and she cried out and sank to her knees, then heaved herself up furiously before he could come to her, and help her, and touch her.

This is ridiculous.

So she says shut up and ride, and he lets her lead, so I guess their horses are going to die now because we established that even under good circumstances Katsa drives horses to their limit and also that when she’s stressed she wants to go extra fast. She spends her time on the apparently zombie horse thinking nothing but that she doesn’t want a husband.

Metaleyes manages to get her to let him talk when they make camp that night.

“I know you don’t want this, Katsa. But I can’t help myself. The moment you came barreling into my life I was lost. I’m afraid to tell you what I wish for, for fear you’ll… oh, I don’t know, throw me into the fire. Or more likely, refuse me. Or worst of all, despise me,” he said

I think this means that he was aware he had a crush on her for a while, and just wasn’t saying so because he knew she wouldn’t take it well. I can’t tell, though, because he’s getting written as so perfect that I’m not sure the author could write him as indirectly lying by not mentioning it despite agreeing to say everything he thought.

Katsa starts crying when he says he loves her and decides she needs to go. Metaleyes asks her not to, and she promises she’ll come back. So she gets some distance and then sobs for a while.

She couldn’t have him, and there was no mistaking it. She could never be his wife. She could not steal herself back from Randa only to give herself away again-belong to another person, be answerable to another person, build her very being around another person. No matter how she loved him.
Katsa sat in the darkness of the Sunderan forest and understood three truths. She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone’s but her own.

The Katniss comparisons just get thicker. Marriage is apparently accomplished by handing the other person your soul. Also, creepy incest vibe from her drawing a comparison between marrying Metaleyes and working for Pandaman.

She finally goes back and Metaleyes is still awake.

“You know I’d never expect you to change who you are, if you were my wife,” he finally said.
“It would change me to be your wife,” she said.
He watched her eyes. “Yes. I understand you.”

That would require there to be anything in there to understand, unless you just mean “I understand you’re crazy and the fact none of this makes sense just goes without saying”.

Anyway, Metaleyes points out that he’s also okay with unmarried sex. Huh, says Katsa. Hadn’t thought of that. She ponders if fucking someone will have the same personality-obliterating powers she thinks marriage causes and tells Metaleyes to give her time to consider it.

This sort of thing is why feminist stuff gets criticized for not thinking about anyone other than rich white women. You can make plenty of arguments about why sex outside of marriage is fine, but this particular version seems completely oblivious of the fact that it’s women and not men who need the social contract of marriage. Men want women not to have sex with other men. Women want men to support the resulting babies. Remove marriage, and you don’t get a feminist utopia, you get boyfriends still being just as jealous and potentially dangerous while losing support for mothers. Sure, it’s good to be able to leave more easily if you want to, but that goes both ways and men can leave more easily. Even if you have abortion plants so that women aren’t going to end up with unwanted children, it still means the burden of raising wanted children is going to be almost all on them.

Unless you’re someone in Katsa’s position – independently wealthy, physically more powerful than everyone else, capable of living just by wandering around hunting animals, and with no interest in ever needing help caring for a kid – marriage has a purpose. And while Katsa might be able to reject it as unnecessary for her, and while many other people might choose not to marry for various reasons, that’s not what’s happening here. The book is presenting marriage not as something that should be optional, but as unbreakable slavery that destroys the woman involved.

This is related to the children issue. There’s many reasons why Katsa could not want children, and it’s good to write a story saying that should be respected, and there’s reasons she might not want to be married and it’s good to write a story showing that’s an acceptable decision as well. But instead, the book just has her say both are the most horrible things ever.